What I Taught Myself Thirteen Years Later

Of all the amazing moments in the fascinating and weighty American Beauty, it’s Lester Burnham’s last words that I recall most often: “Man, oh man.  Man, oh man, oh man, oh man.”  He’s looking at a photo of his family that seems untouched by the psychosis and pain that’s haunted them throughout the film.  They are young, happy, united.  His words are at once a meditation on the depraved and surprising nature of humanity, and a simple inability to express one’s feelings about said nature.  In this state of transcendent meditation, his life is cut short, and the movie effectively ends.  This is its thesis statement.

I feel something similar when I look at my own life, or at least at the period about which I wrote so much in those letters I republished last month.  It’s hard to read them, in part, because I see so many failings in them. Failure to see things as they really were: I was foolishly optimistic about the situation there for far too long. Failure to see almost anything beyond myself: I wanted to leave the letters untouched, but couldn’t bring myself not to edit out the most navel-gazingly offensive passages.  Failure, above all, to see that what mattered most was very far from what I spent most of my time trying to do.

Above all, I was surprised to learn that although I had always believed these letters were the start of my writing career, the writing itself wasn’t that great.  At times there was a glimmer of something real, but in the main it was simply what it sounded like: me telling stories about my life, which although amusing at times, was pretty ordinary.  That fact was both shocking and freeing.  God knows I need to be reminded more often about how ordinary I am.

Two things inspired me about this experience.  The first was the similarity of my seventeen-year-old self with my only-very-slightly-younger students of today.  As the age gap between us grows (I am now roughly twice their age) I find it harder and harder to relate to them, and I can be especially unforgiving of shallow self-centeredness. But reading my own entries from that time has reminded me that this is how teenagers are, and I was like that too. So if I don’t rush too quickly to judgment, my own students may follow a similar path to a greater understanding of the world.

The other was the space between my letters.  A weekly missive may seem extreme for a college student, but in fact it was barely enough; I remember keeping lists in my head and on paper in preparation for Sunday, when I’d include the thoughts and anecdotes in my pre-blog entry.  Having time to think before I wrote — imagine! — is probably what I miss most about that style of writing, and there’s no reason I can’t institute that here.

So my posts will probably be less frequent, at least for awhile.  Thanks to everyone who has checked up on me, but honestly, I’m fine.  I just want to wait until I have something to write that’s worth the space.

The End of an Era

Yesterday morning, a stack of ungraded essays in front of me, I finished watching “Frost / Nixon,” a fascinating account of the television interviews that planted the disgraced president firmly in the camp of the forgotten. As the credits started to roll, I punched the eject button and slid the DVD into a plastic sleeve, then into the signature red envelope, and padded downstairs and outside to plunk it in the mailbox.

This is a scenario I’ve repeated hundreds of times since we joined Netflix in 2003, soon after we were married. I convinced Rob that it was a more economical solution than paying for cable; plus, I argued, we would be able to watch movies of greater diversity and intellectual caliber than the drivel on HBO. And although my first pick was, ironically, Top Gun, we did watch many more unusual gems over the years.  Nearly half of my rated films (which number 1954) were watched via Netflix, and we were happy and loyal customers.

And now they’re screwing it all up.  First, by raising their prices an inordinate amount (our service went from $10 per month to $16.)  Second, by backtracking to explain that they are really splitting the company in half to capture both the DVD-by-mail and the instant-watch markets.  Third, by choosing the name Qwikster for their new DVD service: it’s trite, juvenile and comes with its own set of problems.

Like everyone else, I’ve grumbled about having to choose between two services, both of which are useful (on principle, I refuse to accept a 60% price hike.)  We’ve rented 503 discs from Netflix over the last 8 years, but we’ve watched 490 on-demand movies, and in all likelihood that number would rise much faster if we’d kept both.  (As an example, the last two discs I had to return yesterday shipped in mid-July and late August, and I only just got around to watching them both; meanwhile, we watched dozens of movies and TV shows on the website.)  But part of me feels like canceling the membership altogether, simply out of protest.

So I’m taking the coward’s way out — that is to say, I’m postponing my decision.  We’ve placed our account on hold for three months.  The semester is usually too busy to watch many movies anyway, and in the meantime we’re holding out hope that a better option will present itself.  (Blockbuster has proven itself incompetent during two trial periods, but I’m hearing good things about Hulu Plus.)

I don’t mean to romanticize a business merger, but truthfully, I am a little sad that they’re changing.  This was a company that was really, really good at one thing: you could get almost any DVD from or to their warehouse in one day, so that you could almost watch a different movie every night.  Customer service was streamlined and simple (no questions asked if a DVD never arrived or wouldn’t play correctly — they simply shipped another one.)  I can’t imagine they’ll be as successful doing what everyone else is already doing — putting free or low-cost content on the Internet for all the world to see.  But, for old time’s sake, I wish them luck.

Modern Love

So a couple of nights ago, instead of grading papers or cleaning the kitchen, I went to the movies.  Ever since I read in The Week that the *average* rating of Drive was four stars, I had wanted to see it — even though I enjoy cars less than probably anyone else I know.

It was just as fantastic as everyone says it is: gripping and understated at the same time.  I don’t want to go into a lot of detail (I’m certainly not a qualified film critic) but I think what got under my skin the most, and has stayed with me in the days since, was the depiction of the two main characters, who fall in love during the course of the film.

(Possible spoilers ahead, depending on your pickiness; continue at your own risk.)

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Beware the Grammar Nazi

Actual sign on a door at school today:

Culinary Club Meeting

Wednesday, May 4

We will be cooking and electing new officers!

I decided to stay away, as I didn't want to be elected and / or cooked, but I did call in the Grammar Nazi . . .

Fiction

They are done with poetry, they say, and in spite of myself I have to agree: as usual, the villanelles were deeply compelling but the epics lacked, well, a certain epicity.  We read in earnest, and I made them laugh and grimace with plot summaries and gory details from the sections we had to skip for reasons of time and sensitivity.  Someday, someday, I will be able to open their eyes to the desperate beauty of Homer the way a professor once did for me.  For now, I revel in the small steps forward: the student who wrote with surprising conviction and gravity about an epic match between football teams, and the fact that most of them can at least differentiate between Achilles and Agamemnon.

Today we begin something new: a new set of texts I will painstakingly select read and reread, agonize about how to introduce and discuss them.  I will have to talk them down from the ledges of convoluted plot and melodrama, convince them that characters with slowly-developed depth are the only ones we can mentally invest in.  I will scour my shelves for new and fresh excerpts, authors they will not have read, premises they will find absurd and inspiring.

But not just yet.  First we will all take a much-deserved break.

We pray, of course: for friends and family who are suffering, fading, departed, and for college decisions, and for the requests they can't bring to leave their lips, which die unspoken in their mouths.

Then they write while I set up the projector amid furious speculation (Is it a movie?  Will we watch it for the whole class?  I hope it's funny.  I hope it snows tonight!)  And I end it by saying that yes, we're going to spend the next two classes watching and discussing one of my favorite movies about writing, creating and justice.  It's sweet, sad and funny.  Oh, and by the way, I made popcorn.

It is this last statement that causes them to erupt into cheers as I open the bag and pass out cups.  But I like to pretend it's partly for the other stuff, too.