Desublimation

I got teary on the 5th floor of the MoMA in New York City. I felt like I was learning how to see again and that child-like feeling made me misty. I had my headphones in, my music going, and I wandered from Impressionist painting to Impressionist painting, many of which I remembered studying in my basement Art History class at Seattle U in the winter quarter of freshmen year when I was all engagement and curiosity and energy, a human glow incubating my sublime soul, when words like juxtaposition and chiaroscuro gave me a mental and emotional boner. Here in the museum, I examined Van Gogh's hayfields, Derain's docks, Monet's pond: each one wasn't just beautiful, but the swaths of colors, the wind-like motion of the strokes, the elevated paint like the mountain ridges of a topographical globe were resonant. To stand close to the painting and see no possibility of this splotch turning into anything but then slowly backing away and seeing that splotch bleed into its surroundings like water into a napkin, it reminded me of how buildings, the body, memory, ideas are not connected by fact, but perception, reminded me how as a I grew up, I linked the objects and ideas around me in my own way to create my own understanding which in turn in created my own identity.

Reality is a personal amalgam.

I recently came across the word desublimation, a horribly horribly philosophical jargony term, but the word nonetheless resonates with me just as the Impressionists do. The word has 2 meanings: 1) to divert the energy (a sexual or other biological impulse) from its immediate goal to a more social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use; 2) to take away the grandeur or veneration of a person, place, or thing. As I walked through the 5th floor of MoMA, the art felt sublime, a reminder of how creative and powerful man can be. This art came not from man, but from gods.

Yet my contemporary perceptions, culture and country, are desublimated. In the 21st century, it seems nothing is all that special, nothing demands veneration, nothing possesses grandeur. There are no heroes or ideals. To venerate or idolize is a pastime, anachronistic in today's reality. There is no expectation that we use our base human instincts (sex, violence, conflict) for anything but sex, violence, conflict.

Look, some may counter, we're being pragmatic, strategic, so we can get the most out of life. This is how the world works. I want the best job so I can get the best TV and and computer and car and internet so I can surround my existence with goods that give me pleasure.

We don't talk about love now, we talk about banging and tolerability. We don't talk about athleticism, we talk about salary. We don't talk about sympathy and forgiveness, we talk about those bitchy Kardashians. We don't talk about joy, we talk about purchases we've made. Somethings we just don't talk about at all, even in code: poverty, inequality, -isms, violence, our own choices that negatively impact our fellow man. (http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/127351/wonder-showzen-burn-wall-street-burn.jhtml#id=1539536) But in all that we talk about or don't talk about, we become ourselves. In the words of Muhammed Ali, you are what you're thinking, and what is to become of us if all we think about is base desires and things?

That said, I am not a cynic. I am trying to fall in love again with everything. I want to see the world everyday like the Impressionists did in their paintings. I want to see colors and patterns and existential joy. I will not concede that my point is childish and we are adults, so... No, it is the adult who must have ideals, who must venerate, who must mentally prevent humans from being solely a means in his pursuit of happiness. It should be adults who awe at 150 million year old dinosaur bones, who dream of the light caress of a hand, who derive joy from pressing the accelerator, who look at art and can feel lifted still, who can understand each well-crafted thing or experience (furniture, film, love) is a message:. Don't permit your world to be taken off its pedestal, don't accept your reality to be unworthed. We are grand. We are human.

Sick Days

Sick days take us back to childhood. Home alone with the sniffles and coughs, in a Tylenol daze, the sights, sounds, and smells of being a kid return. In bed, you hear (for the first time in years, maybe) the gurgling of the refrigerator, the cackle of the crows, and the air hiss through the vents. You inhale through your stuffed nose and the air that passes through smells of the Cold, the same Cold you smelled when you were seven; there's comfort in that. Your mouth doesn't just gather gustatory phenomena, but tactile: you can taste and feel the grime of sickness along your teeth and tongue. While your lungs expand your chest, you listen to the air go in hollowly, and you're reminded of the machinery of self propping up the corpse that holds your soul, to paraphrase Aurelius. As you get up, you see each thing in a way you no longer thought you could: you examine the toothpaste roll and think about all the blue gel in its chamber, waiting. Sitting on your couch, you wonder at all the black wires in the air outside (you count 17), and wonder if they're all electric, and why is it again that birds can stand on them?

Dazed, you analyze your environment instead of glossing it over, and the daily world around you becomes like a word you look at so deeply, you finally see its combination, its uniqueness, its specialty and weirdness. On non-sick days, we have work to do and all the objects around us are scenery to that work. But on sick-days, the idea becomes inverted, and clearly we, the doers, are the scenery to all of it. We entertain the birds and the trees.

As a sick child, I marveled at the world that existed during the school day outside of school. There's the mailman who brings us the mail; that's when the neighbors leave for work; these are the birds who eat the birdseed. How wonderful this cereal tastes for lunch instead of the plastic-cheesed nachos!

Still in education (I got so accustomed as a child to the values and routines of School I couldn't leave) I think about students and teachers at my school in real time. "Oh, it's 9:50, 3rd period must just be getting started. They must be walking in the door right now, feeling out the temperment of the sub." I smile and rejoin the characters of the book I'm reading in bed, while listening to the crows cackle and the vents hiss.

I think of the philosopher Berkeley and his belief that the only reality we have is what we sense, and today I'm separated from my habitual reality. I'm sitting here now, 1:45 in the afternoon, looking at leafless tree branches explode silently from its trunk like frozen fireworks, and downtown's buildings, I can see, are about to be shrouded in rain clouds coming in over the bay.

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It has just turned 2:05, the time my school lets out, and here at my desk in my home, there are no stacking of chairs or kids noisily loading onto buses or cavorting in the courtyard. A car with an unknown driver turns the corner toward 23rd, and that's my 2:05 today; the tree is still frozen in explosion, and that my 2:05. As a child, you don't get it, but as an adult, it's a quiet reminder not every 2:05 has to be the same, that you could spend a 2:05 in the Sahara or making love or begging for change, that only a small group of people actually experience 2:05 like you do (your way of life isn't obligatory), and if you really wanted, you could experience 2:05 in another way, or if you like your 2:05s, well then, appreciate them a little more.

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On sick days, your mind does not ponder the large ideas (death, purpose, love, justice), it ponders the things around you, like bird-feeders and toothpaste and the day's changing light. Because this is not routine, you are unable to routinely hop into your internal discourses and circular worries while sitting on the bus or eating lunch silently with colleagues. Like a traveler in a new land, you just observe.

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I'm reminded of traveling with Erica in Nevada. We sat in a car with her nephews and their dad, driving through a small town an hour north of Las Vegas. We were a few blocks from their home, and their dad suddenly turned a corner and another and suddenly we didn't know where we were in the small town. Suddenly, though, we were right back at their home. Erica said, "I didn't know you could get to your home this way." One of the little boys, a 4-year old, turned around in his seat smiling and told us, "Dad likes to mix it up every once in a while." I could see their dad smile, too, in the reflection of the rear view mirror.

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Being sick is a way of mixing it up, at least for those who are healthy the majority of the time. (Though I know many live this way, I cannot imagine being healthy as the way to mix up a primarily ill life.) Regarding this, Susan Sontag wrote

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

My passport from "the other place" expires in a day or two ("after pushing the liquids and getting lots of rest," the message passed onto my parents on sick days just like this one) and soon I'll return to the land of the healthy, where I'll play tennis and drink a glass of wine and get in my car to get on the freeway and go to work and will soon forget about my firework-like tree. Right now, though, I am sick. Not deathly sick, thankfully, but sick enough to mix up my routines, to once again see objects freshly and with wonder.

When you stop thinking, for a short while, about ideas and you ponder just about things in front of you, reality becomes tighter. Human experience becomes delightfully more limited. You can't think about the "void" of death; you can't think about "Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?" When I sense my world like I do today--a feeling I can get on a bicycle or when traveling in a countryside or lying down in a park--I lose any anxiety I have because I sense, palpably, what I sensed as a child: that this life, that this is perfection, this is my reality, perceived with these eyes and nerves, and there's nothing more and nothing less than that, and that's how it will be for me for as long as I live.

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Since quickly he's becoming my hero, I'll end with a quote by Montaigne:

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only our own rump.

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Enjoy the texture of your sheets. Enjoy the machinery of your self, propping up your soul. Good night.

Books, Part I

For Michel Montaigne, reading erased gaps in time. He wrote that it doesn't matter whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or ten. "Both are equally remote; both are equally close." For Montaigne, sitting down to read Plutarch in his tower above the vineyards was nothing short of meeting a person from across the centuries, as if time was just a room, and Montaigne brought Plutarch--that shy wallflower--across the room to his comfy chairs all to chat this evening. Through his writing, Montaigne knew Plutarch so well, he wrote, "I think I know him even into his soul." Montaigne was not like Machiavelli who once described his reading couture: "I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workaday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress, I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them." Montaigne was a flipper of pages. He wandered from one chapter to another, one book to another, generally, and along the way wasn't afraid to make fun of the "ancients." He claimed, for example, that Virgil could have tried harder. If a book was boring, he did not "gnaw his nails over them." He left them there. His father had raised him with a philosophy of life that informed his philosophy of reading, and his philosophy of living: "gentleness and freedom, without rigor and constraint."

I imagine Montaigne--retired at the age of 37 from working at city hall--atop his tower, alone, with dozens of candles. It's summer time so the window is open and owls hoo-hoo atop the shed that hold the barrels of maturing wine; the owls are the only sound as he sits in his reading chair. There is no email or texting or Facebook to update. There is no fridge to go to, no watch to check, no phone to dial, no music to clean to. There is Plutarch in his hands and wine on the table, and that's the moment, well-defined, crisp.

But Montaigne isn't really in that room. Sure, his small body is there, but his mind is not. His mind is in the book. Montaigne is in that meditation, eyes skirting over the words, each word anchoring him down into the ethereal sea of Imagination. He is not in his tower outside of Bordeaux. He is, in fact, sitting at Plutarch's stone table now, in Chaeronea, 20 miles east of Delphi. They sip wine from ceramic cups on the patio, munching on olives. It's a summer evening and Plutarch speaks of metaphors, using mothers-in-law, flies on mirrors, and seeds, all vehicles to examine How to Live. When it's dark, Montaigne closes the book and leaves ancient Greece. He goes to his bedroom and curls up with his wife, Francoise. Before he closes his eyes, he looks at the curtains in the moonlight silently waft in the breeze, like jellyfish in the current. Then he looks at the moon. Then he sleeps.

Plutarch, too, goes to bed, back in his century, a little drunk, his breath familiarly smelling of garlic and feta and wine. He, too, looks at the moon, before falling asleep.

This is what seems to happen when one closes a book at night: everyone in the history of ever goes to sleep.

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Reading is epitomized for me in the moment I close a book and sigh. A closing of the book plus a sigh is my equivalent of saying ole to a matador. It's the reason I studied literature for four years: that moment. My sighing has not been a sign of maturity. (As I've gotten older--which is to say, as technology has seeped in around me more and more--I have become a worse reader.) I've always done it. I can still palpably feel the sheets of my childhood beds, my pelvis against the mattress, my elbows propping me up, the book settled on the pillow. A nightstand light (I can still see its switch) illuminates the dark room, and silently and in this position, I read for hours. A school night, a summertime night, a dark Seattle October afternoon: this was how I read. When I closed that book--Matilda, The Little Prince, Ralph S. Mouse, Hatchet, Let's Go to Tunisia, Fade, The Catcher in the Rye, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, The Sun Also Rises--I sighed. I flipped the switch before I flipped on my back. Then I looked at the galaxy of darkness above me. I projected upon it the faces of protagonists, the ache of their conflicts, the beauty of their settings. I sighed, and warm with the lessons and thoughts of my ancients, I slept.

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All this said, being "warm with the lessons and thoughts of ancients" is rarely a "fun" act. Even when reading the essays of Woody Allen or the antics of Yossarian in Catch-22, reading is rarely fun. Tennis is fun; playing Angry Birds is fun; bullshiting at a bar with friends is fun. But reading is generally not fun.

By nature, it's a lonely. Even when reading with others around--which I'm not convinced can be done very well--you quickly become alone. The voices of kids playing on the beach, a lover's arm over your stomach, clanking of coffee cups in a cafe--all this fades in a concentrated moment of reading. It's gone; you're alone.

Additionally, reading isn't entertaining, at least not in the 21st-century meaning of the word. There are no lights or sounds; you are not passively taking images in; there is no rapid clicking transporting from one picture-worth-a-thousand-words to another in less than a second. Your brain is churning, cog-like through the words, and you can't get to the next page until you do the work on this page. I think reading feels very unmodern. It's not just that reading happens on paper--I'll get to Kindles in a second. It's that it's so slooooowwwwww. My students--so many of whom come from homes with few books--often complain (some sincerely, some for silly effect) how booorrrring reading is. I can't completely disagree. I often find myself playing some silly game on my iPhone before going to bed, instead of reading, and it's a conscious choice of "This game will be more fun than that New Yorker." Of course, I verbally do disagree with them, telling them truths that they can't understand until they experience them. "Reading brings enlightenment. Reading slows you down, and that's good. Reading transports you to other places. Reading lets you think about things at the pace you choose. Reading helps you find yourself, and because we look for ourselves our entire lives, reading can, if you let it, satisfy you from now until the day you die."

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That said, I don't get as much satisfaction from books as I used to. That has nothing to do with the books I'm reading and everything to do with my environment. What I need to read well is the following: very little electronics around me. No iPhone, no television, no stereo. In a recent trip to Mexico with Erica, for one week I read. I read deeply, with concentration. I read articles in Harper's I'd normally skip over; I read Thoreau. Why? Because there was basically nothing else to do! A few months back, I went with friends to Leavenworth, Washington, and I got sick. They all went out into town; I stayed back in the cabin and read for hours. I read Freedom by Franzen. When I lived in my home Chile--where there was no TV, no nothing--I read single books in nights. I scourged shitty bookstores for anything moderately decent, and I read books I would have nver read otherwise. In the evenings, on the couch, I read and read and read, and when tired, I didn't hazily plug through another unmemorable night of SportsCenter or Seinfeld. I went to sleep.

These intense times of reading give those memories depth and weight, and interestingly, not just the intense reading stand out, the all the experiences during these times (dancing, eating, playing games, lovemaking) are also more vivid.

The juxtaposition of intense reading, intense aloneness with socializing make both pop out in Memory, I think.

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It comes down to the lessons of our grandparents, which are the same as the Stoics': delayed gratification, deep work, grinding through pain, slowness: these all are central to living a complete and satisfied human life. These things were in service of Montaigne's trinity of happiness: Thriving, Enjoying the Moment, and Being a Good Person. For Montaigne, the way to enjoy life was to experience, to some degree, grief and boredom and hard work. In order to enjoy anything, he needed contrast.

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For us, the Committed, life is generally good and easy. We have so much to be thankful for; we benefit from so much. Our medicine works, our cars work, our injuries heal, our currency is accepted, our supermarkets are full, our parks clean, our government legit. Life is easy, but still we are anxiety-ridden, still we find errors, still we complain. I think we'd agree that we don't appreciate what we have. Maybe it's human nature, but I think it's Us. Maybe we have it too easy. Maybe we need a recession. Maybe we need global warming. Maybe we need the Viaduct to collapse. Maybe we need that lay-off to happen, that argument to erupt.

Perhaps we know that the only way for us to better enjoy our easy lives is to make them harder, and that requires Accident or Choice, and we've no desire (or courage) to choose pain.

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In sum, I guess it's all the heavy traits of books--lonely, slow, silent, dense--that make them so damn important to living well.

Seattle, Part III

Each street in Seattle is like the spine of a novel in my bookshelf. I'm glad it's there, I have a vague recollection of what's within it (having spent hours there), but more than anything, it's mine. That damn book, that damn street is mine.

So many streets in Seattle are mine. I cannot relate, really, to people who come here and begin the process of ascribing memories to landmarks. I cannot relate to people who call Capitol Hill "Cap Hill"; I still can't call "South Lake Union" "South Lake Union." My Seattle is a topography of youth, and I'm grateful for it, and it's no accident that most of my best friends are friends who feel the same memories in their blood as I do when standing on the Counterbalance or when getting a hamburger at Dick's on Wallingford.

31st and Kenyon is a novel about friendship, about skateboarding, about one endless summer afternoon, so endless as to be cliche, but it's not cliche: it's the epitome of Summertime.

Madison Park is a story of Mother and Son, of genetics passing down from body to body, a story of hard-earned love scented with Myers rum and feta cheese and eucalyptus.

23rd and Spokane (one block from where I live now) is a trilogy: One book is just about falling in love with girls spinning on bars, eternally in memory. One book is just about the bass tubes in the Hondas of technologically prescient friends. One books is about board games and tikka masala and birdwatching and lovely Erica and the activities one does during the process of making conclusions about life a.k.a. one's 30's

Oh, sweet Alki, sweet Armour St., sweet Broadway, and the Viaduct.

I remember as a child, late at night, going through the Battery St. tunnel, Dad at the wheel of the '78 Corrola, Bessie, the bright yellow lights skimming across the flesh of my eyelids like X-Ray, going from my grandparents' home to my dad's. I remember shooting from the Battery St. tunnel and curving to the left, and up, space-shuttle-ish. If I opened my eyes, I would see Elliot Bay to my right and maybe a ferry and my patria, sillouhetted, West Seattle on the other side, and the cu-chunk cu-chunk, metronomically under us. Going home. Going home. Cu-chunk, cu-chunk.

Those who advocate for the tear-down of the Viaduct have no sense of sentimentality. Safety, yes. Aesthetics, yes. But no sentimentality. I know it's a death-trap; if not removed, it will fall and people will die. Yes, it's loud. But, the Viaduct is also a symbol of the birth of Seattle as we know it. It's a symbol of mid-century America, of our parents, of functional ugliness, of grit. I fucking love grit. I know in my soul that when it's torn down and a tunnel is built, what will be atop of the spread and forgotten ashes (as all ashes are) of the viaduct will be complete shit. There will be a soulless park a la the Scultpure Park that could be in St. Louis or San Francisco or St. Paul or any other saintless-now city. There will be a Subway, an Applebees, and tax revenue will flow into City Hall like a healthy Duwamish and yes yes, we will be on our way to being a world-class city, but it will be a city without a memory, just as concrete flattened out the memory of the people before, and we will link ourselves to the American consciousness of constant now-ness.

To foreigners a city is layered in exotic images, to natives, it's all layered in memory. All the talk about improvement--while extremely rational--so often ignores the memory of Citizens. Maybe that is the process of living: to see what you know go away, to see old factories become condos, to see old cafes board up, to see vacant lots get occupied. Cities: living, breathing, cu-chunking along.

I wish it didn't all change. I guess that's my thesis tonight. I wish things stayed the same for longer periods of time and that we all lived forever. In America we say, "Let's go." In Mexico, "Viva." That is, "Long live." Long live the viaduct. Long live the Battery St. tunnel. Long live my mom and dad. Long live 31st and Kenyon. Long live all of it. Tonight I want all of it to last forever.

Tennis, Part I

It's impossible for me to believe that some day I'll be like the old people playing tennis on the court next to me. I cannot imagine running slower or hitting slower or running within a smaller circumference. That drop shot over the net: I want to get it, desperately. This serve I toss into the air, I want to slam it, viciously. That shot you put into the corner, on the line: I will retrieve it, easily. I cannot imagine that this ligament, this tendon, this bone will ever fail me. I am the Honda of man.

My soul has carried this body--these knees, this chest, these eyes, these fingers--for thirty years to this baseline in this fall sunlight on this hill in my city, and like the conductor of a symphony, it's using them all in concert, mechanically and fluidly. The melody that resonates out of my body is not music but pleasure of my own physicality, not harmony but the animal joy of paying singular attention to the moment, the moment symbolized in a 2-ounce neon ball, and that moment is glinting over the net now, towards me, and I must react because if I don't, then I'm not playing game. If I don't react, what am I even doing here?

Living Room Diplomacy, Part I (For Paul)

Before the school year started in September, I called the homes of the incoming 9th-graders who would be in my Advisory Class, and I scheduled times with the students and their families when we could sit down and talk, human to human, in their homes. On an educational level, I did this because I will work with the kids in my Advisory class for the next four years. I will see them get caught doing drugs on campus, get 4.0s and 1.0s, experience heartbreak and cause it, love teachers and hate them, fail a test, flee to the bathroom to nurse a popped bleeding zit, act unintentionally revealingly cocky, be bashful, write startling beautiful, cry, rage, and learn. I want to make sure that I can communicate with these students and their families, in any situation, in a way that feels real, empathetic, sincere, and caring, traits I feel lacking in most American conversations, or at least most of the American conversations I'm part of.

But it wasn't just from an educational vantage that I did this. I did this also because I knew that until I saw the lives of my students--lives as seen through their living rooms--I wouldn't understand them as I should. By not understanding where they came from, how they live everyday, I couldn't truly love them, and they could never love me. I knew that once I could visualize and hear and smell their origins, I could understand their behaviors in the class. I would understand their mouthing off, their teasing, their modesty, their playfulness, their confusions, rage, quittings, and I could reach out to them patiently and compassionately, as a Teacher should, and help.

So, in late August, I visited the homes of my students in SeaTac, the poorest city in King County. I learned quickly, from the vantage of my Honda, that half my advisory class lives within eight blocks of each other in a kingdom of shoddy apartment complexes along an avenue that just sounds faraway from anything: 216th, pronounced by the students as two-sixteenth. Though the neighborhood doesn't have the menace of poor neighborhoods in the 80s, it still reeks of 80s-esque inequity and forgottenness, of immigration and hard luck, and when I walk in a neighborhood like this one, I think it's no coincidence that our current economic disparity started in 1979, the year of a different kind of Cultural Revolution, the year we began to defend the Rich more than the Poor. Those with money live in the 21st-century now. Those without money are still, to an astonishing extent, frozen in the 20th.

The streets around 2-16th are lined with shoddy cars, as if the Cash for Clunkers program simply turned around and dropped off the vehicles here. Many of the cars have had piecemeal pimping done to them. An '85 Cavalier will have tinted windows; a '91 CRX will have rims that were cool seven years ago. Litter doesn't exactly tumbleweed down the sidewalks, but there is a grittiness, an unkemptness to the streets, as if a street sweeper has never ventured down this way (no tax revenue!), as if this is neighborhood where no one sticks around long enough to care too much about it anyway.

And that is part of it.

These are the homes of American wanderers. These are the homes of refugees, of those trying yet another fresh start, homes of the undocumented, the disenchanted, the addicted, the hard working, the Americans that I think no political party truly thinks about because these are the homes whose living rooms few visit. You either move up and out of this neighborhood, or you move to another. But you don't stick around too long. This neighborhood is the dark side of American individualism, of picking one's self up by the bootstraps, of kicking government out of our lives. No one loves this place; no one really wants to be here. This neighborhood is one of consequences of our national myth of meritocracy.

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And yet...

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The first home I visited belonged to the Ahmed's. I stomped up a decrepit outdoor stairwell of an apartment building whose landlord was clearly derelict, knocked on the door, and when it opened, was astonished at the Shangri-la that existed like a healthy heart in the body of a leper. My soon-to-be-student, Amino, stood in the doorway, smiling, and as I stepped in (the first step I'd ever taken into the home of a Muslim family) I awed at the beautiful purple rugs that lined the walls and ceiling. Long brown rugs cushioned the floor and most definitely covered nastily historic carpets. A long couch lined one wall, and there sat, barefoot and legs curled under, in a lovely, flowy, violet hijaab, Amino's mother, a woman who gave off an instant energy of wisdom, patience, and love of family. The home smelled of patchouli. This apartment--which felt more inviting and comfortable than homes I've entered in Madison Park or Queen Anne--reminded me of my mom. My mom has an aesthetic of Coziness. She is a great lover of Aromas, ch'i, pretty sheets draped down, candlelight and shells, and barefeet. I love this aesthetic about my mom--no stranger to poverty, either--and I loved entering this home. Quite suddenly and powerfully, in a matter of maybe 120 seconds, the Ahmed's were no longer "Other" to me; they were a human family. They were like my family.

I sat down. We talked about the upcoming school year, Amino translating, her mother never meeting my eyes, as custom, I learned. We talked about what Amino could expect in terms of her schedule and homework, and her mother's concerns and questions were the concerns and questions of all mothers. What supplies would she need? How could she get a hold of me if she needed to? Amino wasn't sure where she'd catch her school bus. I told her I'd get that information. I reminded them to turn in the Free & Reduced Lunch form. Did they understand how to fill it out? No? Then let's do it together.

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From there I went to the home of Rodolfo, a 15-year-old boy who lives with his 28-year-old brother. I sat in the living room talking to his brother who makes money from maintaining middle America, and while he spoke in a Spanish unedited for me, Rodolfo sat smiling (a gringo teacher in my home!), and saying yes to everything his brother and I said. (Yes, I will make sure to get a Spanish-English dictionary. Yes, I will use an organizer to keep track of what I need to do. Yes, I will be on time.) Several little kids (sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, neighbor kids) ran through the living room, falling, tickling, singing, squirming. Rodolfo's brother, stepping over the horde on his way to the kitchen, asked if I wanted a Sunkist, and I said yes please. While it was just me and Rodolfo, I mentally noted how clean the home was. Both of the homes I'd visited were much cleaner than my place. I asked Rodolfo why he came to the United States. He said to learn English, to learn more. I thought to myself how strange it would be to live without a parent at the age of 15. He added in Spanish, "I guess that's why I'm here." He smiled and looked at the mass of little kids on the carpet wistfully. I sensed it then and confirmed it later: Rodolfo is a teenage boy and, de facto, a goofball, and he really really misses his mom.

Students in my Advisory class recently wrote letters to themselves to be opened in June. I saw that Rodolfo wrote to himself, "It's been a year since you saw Mama but maybe you will see her this summer and then you will be okay."

Rodolfo's brother returned with a Sunkist, and his other brother's (who also lives in the house) wife. "I present to you Magdalena." Standing up, I said, "I'm Sean." She said, "And you now know Rodolfo." We all looked down at Rodolfo. He smiled at us and then looked down at his clasped hands and watched them wriggle like newborn puppies.

---

Since then, I've sat in the living rooms of many students. I've seen mattresses on the ground in living rooms. I've seen standless early-90s televisions, flat on the carpet. I've drunk several soda from the seats of hard sofas. I've handed out Free & Reduced Lunch forms. I've asked myself many times, "What is this parent like to this child when I'm not here?" I've seen students cry finally and necessarily, in the security of their own homes. I've looked in the eyes of grandmas and said I will always do the best I can.

It's so easy to forget the humanity of someone, to forget their goofiness, their turmoil, their struggle. In our individualism--provided my cellphones, televisions, cars, social networks, headphones, comfort--we can forget about the lives of others. Worse, we can become indifferent. Elie Wiesel writes,

Indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

But once we go into someone's home, indifference and prejudice and pejoratives start to evaporate, and we the Comfortable regain our own humanity. For me, to go into the living room of a fellow human, I form a bond, and I can't possibly be indifferent. I instantly start to care. It's not about work. It's not about finding an answer to all their child's challenges. It's about trying. It's about beginning another relationship and journey with a fellow of the continent of mankind, this vast, pained, miraculous experience. It's about progressing, together. Existing, together. Caring, together. There's nothing more to this existence than earth and its inhabitants. We serve nothing more and nothing less than that.

Ultimately, it's--and by "it," I mean work, I mean action, relationships, life--it's what we've known since we were children: this whole damn thing is, in fact, about Love.

Zihuatanejo, Part I (An Ode)

Though I love the murals of Diego Rivera, I think Rubens would best capture the sweetness and tragedy and humanity of this beach at this moment.

I watch the beach from a beer-company-labeled plastic chair under a the shade of sombrilla. I see rich, fit men from Mexico City play a heated match of volleyball. A dark brown vendor make braids (trencitas) in the hair of a white girl whose eyes go wide with each tug on her scalp. Books by the vacation canonized authors (Cussler, Grisham, Collins) are devoured by roasted red, wrinkly Canadians who bring their own beer sleeves down to this beach and who do this everyday for four months and who, in the evenings, sing along smokily with others like them to the anthems of Jimmy Buffet and Wings. I see so so many little brown kids in skivvies, sitting in holes they made with their families, holes that are refreshed now and again with an extended wave, and also in the hole is a sandy abuelita and she watches her loved ones and she watches the ocean. The motorboats drags parasailers along the canvas of the blue-yellow sky. Amongst all the squeals of all the beach children and dogs, I can hear the vendors sell the products with poetic diction: pulseras, raspados, collares, cacahuates, mangos. I hear the rancheras of the wandering musicians. I put in my earphones and listen to a playlist I've made called LAST DAY - ZIHUA- 2010, a playlist with Debussy and Brian Eno and Soleas. Gentle, misty, sadly loving music.

To my soundtrack, I look at all of this.

The 4:45 December sun yellowing the hills that hug the bay. The old begging man with cataract eyes and hands as gnarled as a chewed bone. The father smearing his daughter in 50 SPF sunscreen before releasing her back to the sea. All the sleeping bodies on beach towels. The waiter who used to pick raspberries in Bellingham, kicking up sand as he walks back to the palapa to get Erica and I Coronas. The kite made of shredded plastic bags floating above us. The Pacific Ocean as vast as our love and sorrows. All of this is a beauty that feels ancient and universal, but still it's a beauty that hurts, and my eyes burn with tears.

Erica taps me on the hand. I remove my headphones. "Wanna play Cribbage?" she asks. I do, and we play, and when we finish the game, the sun is lower in the sky. We pack up our things, pay our bill, and painfully jest about the weather in Seattle we'll get the next day. (I do my best to not think of the freeways, the silent streets, the dark, the material conversations.) We stand up, hold hands, look at it all one more time, and walk slowly over the sand in our barefeet, on our way out.

Bad Workers

One of the problems of there not being many jobs right now is that those who currently have jobs have to do them well. I mean that earnestly. I miss Bad Workers.

--

During the fat years in the 90s and early 2000s, I recall one could practically choose any job they wanted off the tree of Economy. Those with law degrees couldn't wait to graduate so they could see what kind of offers they'd get! Those at the lower tier of American life could, if nothing else, abandon their crappy job for another, if for no other purpose then to provide some sense of variety in the mechanistic life of Working Poverty.

Loyalty to a company was anachronistic, and we the Committed, felt free in our disloyalty to any one job. We--our spirits, our goals, our psyches--felt more important than employment.

This mentality, the innocent dew that insulated and nurtured us for years has evaporated. Now we "make due." We "take what we can get." We wait to make our next correction "when--if--the economy gets better."

--

Looking back at my own life/work history, the early phase of it seems so easy, so liberal, so spontaneous. I bounced around like a pixie. I had the liberty to quit Starbucks again and again and return to it again and again. They never even got angry with me, or even remembered! With my charm and hard work and skills, I easily got that clerical job at the law firm and the bagel-slicing job at the bagel shop and the teaching job in the Chilean Navy. I quit all these jobs at will, confident something new and ascending was out there waiting just for me. More than the job choices, it was the lifestyle itself that was spectacular. I never had to stay anywhere long enough to begin looking at myself and asking, "Is this me?" I was a Migrant Worker. In fact, true agricultural migrant workers were, in this era, likely more permanent than me, than so many of us. And more useful. We were the modern day Huck Finns, constantly constantly looking for new Territory we could wear out quickly, unhesitatingly, before moving on again to the next territorial search for Happiness, before it, too, proved to be vapid, or before we burned it up of all its caloric joy.

--

Now in 2010, law students get no exciting offers. They apply for jobs, anywhere, hoping to land a spot in the economic beehive that is America. The poor can't quit their jobs at Maids Emporium or Subway and hope to easily find another. They slog on. Those with jobs won't quit them because they're health is still good and they need to save as much as they possibly can before... well, before the mysterious, anonymous events of the Future come, which is likely a very expensive, hospital-ridden passage to the next world.

There are too many of us and not enough tasks. (If only there were more tasks!) We have a pile-up of college degrees and flesh. We don't admire our wealth of human power; we hate that each soul represents a hairball in the economic pipe that we must burst through to get the other side. What's there on that other side? Tasks! Work! From my fellow employed creatures I hear again and again and again what would make Marx chuckle: "We should consider ourselves lucky: at least we have jobs."

--

I really miss the time when there were Bad Workers, a time when people could at least embody the idea that "this job sucks, so screw it. I don't give a damn." I miss the time when people work passionately at what they love. I like Bad Workers because they represent something I see less and less: Beatnicky, Romantic, Pretentious, Frustrated, Artistic, Contrarian, Pulled-into-this-crap-with-nails-clawing-the-ground Indifference. With said indifference, they are grumpy, inefficient, conversational, funny, combative, ineffective. They are human. (What feeling is more human than not giving a damn!)

Recently--refreshingly--two employees at local businesses took me back in time to an era when employees were not efficient.

1) At QFC on Capitol Hill, there was a female checker with very short hair and very oily skin who was trying to help a crazy man purchase his things. On a scale of 1-10, he was probably a 5 on Craziness. He seemed mildly aware of how to use his EBT card in combination with his debit card, but he did mess up the order of using them and he was extremely picky about how the teen bagger bagged his three items and he did second-guess the checker and it got to the point where the checker, after gruffly waiting for him to figure all this out, hastily and huffily turned the card-slider around and with his cards in her hands did it all herself. And while waiting for all the information to go through, she looked at the crazy man and the teenage bagger to her left and shook her head and swore that if another damn person talked back to her today or wasted her time...

God, it was lovely. First, it was entertaining. The grocery lines in Seattle and across the country are now so boring that I will take anger any day over efficiency. Second, Good for you, Lady! I don't need you to love your job. I don't want you to have to fake it. I know that etiquette goes along away, but so does sincerity. She sincerely was frust with this crazy man and she wasn't afraid to admit it. (It seemed like he had been her bane many-a time because he did say at the beginning of the now Epic transaction, "Let's do this like we did it yesterday".) I commend her. I hereby pledge: Anyone working for a corportation at under $10 an hour, I don't care if you're polite or not. I would prefer you not be so I know you haven't been so worn down as to have lost entertainment value.

2) Today at a coffeeshop a very tatted man with earrings that pulled his ears down low and elephant-like admitted to me he had just started his 4-hour part-time shift and he was just kinda getting going so give him so time. Which I did. So, instead of making my coffee, he upped the volume on his acid jazz that filled the cafe loudly and then he talked to me about how they had moved around the furniture in the cafe and regulars were bumping into them, and then there was a lot of clattering of dishes, followed by silence, and then eventually he got to my drink. The coffee was not memorable; it was fine. I drank it looking out to rainy, dark Greenwood Ave. thinking about what I'm writing now. He was human and humane, strengths and flaws as apparent as his tatted forearms. He was what I think all of us want to be, what we want much more than being known as a Good Worker: he was memorable.

--

I realize a theme throughout many of my posts is this: that what we are told is bad is in fact not bad. Inefficiency, dislike of work, frustration, slowness: these things are in a very real sense, not bad. These things break monotony, robotics, and inspire. Inversely, much of what we've been told is good--efficiency, work, happiness, speed, missions--are often not good for us. They lead to automation, soullessness, delusion, and the plague of us, the Committed, what'snext?ness, that burning perennial internal hum that never, ever, ever lets us just Rest and Be.

--

Bad Workers blessedly require each of us to hold onto our Self-Reliance. Bad Teachers, Bad Bankers, Bad Sandwich-makers, Bad Waiters, Bad Architects, Bad Presidents, Bad Checkers, Bad Anything healthily remind us that 1) as all Christians in theory know, humans are deeply, tragically, and gorgeously flawed and that's why we're all in this together and 2) no one system or one person can be fully relied on. Therefore, do not get so compliant, You, so lazy, so robotic as to forget the Power of Your Own Damn Self.

--

As a teacher, I have written bad lessons. I have seen halfway through that I'm not getting through to the kids. They're not learning anything. I've been, at moments, a bad teacher. I stop silent at these points and the quiet almost shocks them. I've abandoned the plan and I'm not going to be the person who continues to go through the motions of something that clearly isn't working. I'm done with that shit. I sit down. I look around at them and it seems for the first time in hours, days, maybe weeks, I'm really seeing them again. They're coming into focus. They are not HSPE scores or learning outcomes or grades or behaviors. They're the continent of Man, the lineage of Humankind, end-knotted here in this room. Perhaps I'm becoming clearer, too, though they won't remember it. The present rarely lasts to become memory with teenagers. I will remember this moment; they'll remember its essence, which is purer anyway.

Something happens in the abandonment of a plan. For one, we stop acting. Plans make us feel like someone else is in control and when someone else is control, well, who cares? But it's clear now: there's no longer a plan and it's just us and in a not-a-bad sense, no one is in control. It's absolutely just us. We start to talk. We wonder, hypothesize, amaze, parody, crack wit. We talk about Whatever, which is to say, we talk as humans, and all human talk rotates around the central Shakespearean themes of the human condition: Love, Fear, Identity, Justice, Society, and so on.

For the next 20-minutes, without objectives, rudderless, inefficiently, we talk, and in our talk we create Experience.

Stories I Could Write (For Jorge Luis Borges)

Just like in tennis, cycling, and education, one of my predominant talents in writing is just having Energy to keep going. I have two ideas for stories I will write about teenagers. (I'm more thankful each day to work with teenagers. To see their histrionics, their unedited honesty and misconceptions, their delight in silly word play, their innocence which seems impossible is Tonic to a world that grinds one down.) The stories will be, of course, Energetic, and they will be infused with one my most exact tones: Youthful Whimsy with a sprinkle of Melancholy.

One story is about a teenage boy, a white kid, who falls in love with an undocumented Latina. The story will begin with the boy at her home, picking her up to go to the beach. He will smell the sopes and stumble around the 10 little kids sprinting around the apartment and the Cross will be on three walls and the telenovela will blare. The girl will appear, disarmingly sweetly charming. Because I'm a Seattleite, and to my own detriment, a dedicated regionalist, they will go to Alki beach and it will drip vignetteish with innocent young love. Two kids talking near-philosophically about love, about dreams, and speaking with the Diction of Youth. Ferries out in the Sound, seagulls cawing, dogs fetching sandy sticks. (Do I project my own ideal?! Very well then, I project my own ideal!) But then a few weeks later (no!) I.C.E. nabs her and her family and deports them back to Michoacan, Mexcio and it happens so suddenly the young boy--we'll call him Joe--isn't even able to say good-bye to say, Rosenda. Resourcing the help of his Spanish-speaking friend--Poncho, a chubby, Sancho Panza-esque, Spanish speaking kid--Joe and Poncho make the epic journey first to the border and then, more interestingly, through Mexico. (In the story's one moment of societal critique, the boys will have the inverse adventure of illegally crossing into Mexico.) Mysteriously absent from Facebook, they hear nothing from the girl (though they see the emails and worries from their own families) and on their journey with an uncertain ending they meet Hippie White Artists, Low-tier workers of drug cartels, Mexicans who work in the US Army, and a wise curandera/tortilla-maker. Joe and Poncho will have an argument that nearly separates them, but they'll realize so clearly that this mission isn't just about them, it's about something else, some idea. They'll understand their adventure is a metaphor.

We will see the whales in the Sea of Cortes, the desolation of the Sonora desert, the fluorescent lights of divey restaurants. We'll see child-dominated city squares and we'll see donkeys.

Joe and Poncho, haggard, will arrive to Angangangueo, Michoacan, Mexico--her hometown--and there they will be told she is working at the Butterfly Reserve. They will hike their way up a verdant hill. At the summit, Poncho will tell Joe to take the rest of his journey on his own, and Joe will do so after a their eyes meet knowingly, and Joe will get to a place where the trees are orange with butterflies and the sun will appear and the butterflies will lift and dabble in the light of the sun, all millions of them, and suddenly Joe will see her and, delayed, she will see him, too, and they will kiss with butterflies around them, and their love will be Immortalized in that image.

That's one story.

The next is simply about a boy who tires of School, Family, Technology, and the Future, and he hops on his bicycle to travel across the country into new Territory. He would meet interesting folks along the way. Clearly, the plot is weak--it's never been my strength--and clearly the boy is Me--another weakness of mine--but the story would be another addition to the classic American canon of stories about young men trying to escape their realities which aren't as bad--in fact, they're pretty damn good--as they perceive them to be. When I think of this story, I see the poetry of dirty kid humming along Route 66 in the 21st century, self-reliant, smarmy, and in search of something adults inevitably, tragically give up on.

Oh, sweet freeing imagination.

The Allegory of the Campfire

Two months ago, three teachers and I chaperoned a group of 30 students on a weekend-trip to Camp Cispus. Located on the northern foothills of Mt. St. Helens, Camp Cispus consists of barracks, ropes courses, rivers, volleyball nets, evergreen needle-covered basketball courts, and thousands of trees. There's no cellphone reception.

I was the supervisor of the boys' barrack. I did my best to read and sleep while the 15 boys passed the night hours dousing themselves in Axe, gathering round a laptop to watch slasher movies, whispering fabricated stories about their successes in basketball and with girls, telling really stupid jokes, being incredibly stinky in all ways, and waking up far too early, so excited they were to run around in the forest. They farted a lot and I slept little.

We all ate meals together. In the hours between meals, the outdoors experts lead them in team-building activities in order to develop trust and collaboration. While they did that, I read in the appreciatedly empty and silent barracks and I ran in the foothills certain I was going to turn a corner and be devoured by a bear.

After their first day of activities, we all walked to the river and threw rocks and waded in the cold water while the sun set. It was lovely to watch kids who live near an airport delight at all the trees and bring the river's water up to their sticky faces.

At night we had a campfire. We sat by the fire and roasted marshmallows. The talkative kids chattered on. The silent kids watched the fire. The fire and the darkness inspired memories. One student, Jagdeep*, told me the fire, woods, and night reminded him of his life in Nepal. It was in the night, he said, that he and his family would go into the woods to gather wood they'd use to heat their homes. They did it at night to avoid being fined by the police. Being out here made him feel the old feeling of nervousness of being a little boy running around in the dark, hoping the police wouldn't catch him.

I moved around to converse with other students. I talked to Halima*. She told me in rural Ethiopia you never stray from the fire at night. Beyond the fire, she said, were hyenas and you can hear them laughing. The hyenas took her goat, she told me with a sad smile. It was a smile that anticipated how silly it would sound to someone like me--it's just a goat!--but her smile faded and I suddenly felt the import and dreariness of losing your goat to a hyena. She told me her goat's name, smiling again, because it was a silly name, a name a child would give. (I have since forgotten it.) She concluded by saying whoever imitates the laugh of a hyena eventually is killed by a hyena, and I laughed at that, and she shook her finger at me.

I looked back at the darkness around our campfire. I remembered for a moment how scary nighttime could be, how frightful it is to not know what is around you, to not have a base, to understand how a dead flashlight or extinguished fire could leave you rudderless and vulnerable. More than the reality, I saw the metaphor in the darkness, and I could palpably remember the fear I had--all kids have--of the dark, of emptiness, of loneliness and mystery.

I asked Halima if she had ever eaten s'mores. She said no and asked me to repeat the word several times. "S'mores. S'mores." She tried to repeat, but gave it up. She said, "I don't know what are they." I said it is made of chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers, but she didn't know what marshmallows or graham crackers were so I said, "Well you just have to try one." Though it felt a little strange, I added quite surely, "It's an American tradition."

Halima and I went to the grocery bags with all the goods. We removed two marshmallows and a student lent her his stick. She roasted her marshmallows. Her marshmallows caught on fire and instinctively she brought them back, blew them out, and pulled them off. She put together the rest of the S'more, modeling it on my own. She went back to her seat and ate it while her friend watched her, collecting all the information she'd need to do this herself. From across the fire, I could see the melted marshmallow remains on Halima's fingertips and the melted chocolate on her lips. I looked across our ring and the 30 kids were talking and grubbing, laughing and gazing. I'm sure I sighed, and I know I felt then how I feel now recalling all this: wistfully humane, bittersweetly in love with humanity, and utterly, ineffably connected to the continent of mankind.

Over the top of the fire, I gave Halima a thumbs-up and mouthed, "Good?" With the yellow light illuminating her eyes, she gave a thumbs-up back and smiled. The light shone on the parts of her teeth not covered in s'more. I sat back down with the rest group, ate my own s'more, and there we all were: faces to the fire, backs to the dark, together.