success

I've dredged up a lot of interesting things while organizing my dad's house; some of my mother's things, photos, grandparents' documents. I found two copies of the same quote entitled "Success," maybe typed by my mother for a church event, maybe given to her...who knows.

But I do know to be careful with quotes. With all the Einstein quotes out there in the ether, things Einstein never uttered, I decided to do my due diligence before romanticizing "Success" as the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Transcendentalist writer. So, naturally, I turned to Google.

I came across an Emerson Society website from Texas A&M that describes the misattribution of this quote. Apparently it's more likely the work of a woman (go figure...) named Bessie Anderson Stanley. Other non-academic websites also agree that the quote is not necessarily Emerson's. In fact, there are completely different words, depending on who you ask.

Here are the words I found:

To laugh often and much;

to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;

to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;

to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.

That is to have succeeded. 

Emerson or not, it's something to hold on to, for us underemployed and unemployed. For those of us who just aren't satisfied by doing whatever it takes to make a buck, but want that buck to have a meaning.

Just imagine what Emerson might think of this quote. Imagine what his colleague Henry David Thoreau might think of our society at large...

I shudder at the thought.

An Idealist Proposal

Over thirty years have passed since the Supreme Court handed down its decision concerning Roe v. Wade, and yet, lawmakers across this nation continue to draft and vote on and pass legislation defining viability, laying down all sorts of hoops for a woman to jump through, and flat out maneuvering to make the 1973 case nothing more than a bad memory. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are still out of work, parents struggle to make ends meet, and local governments flounder. Hell, Detroit wants to file for bankruptcy!

So, in tough economic times, why are lawmakers talking about abortion at all? Why exactly did Ohio Republicans think it made sense to tack on abortion legislation to the budget, of all things?

Of all the problems we need to fix, of all the problems lawmakers should fix, why this one?

Ideological idiocy. Some twisted derivation of trickle-down theory, in which a society that homogeneously embraces a certain world view will magically become Mayberry. Good-bye unemployment, so long terrorism...all because the government of Ohio can require you to have a transvaginal ultrasound. Hallelujah.

I hear pro-life advocates such as Lila Rose speak very passionately about their cause on Fox News, and I see protesters holding up their abhorrent posters on the capitol steps; my gut reaction is to counter their points. Seriously...I wrote six pages worth. However, when I analyze the whole situation, I can’t help but believe that the pro-life movement is more pro-legislation than anything else. And isn’t that odd, considering some of these same people believe and have loudly interjected that the government cannot fix everything? (Gun violence, healthcare, you name it...)

Instead of fixing problems that actually affect most Americans, these lobbyists (to be fair, on both sides of the debate) throw millions of dollars into their campaigns, and lawmakers spend our tax dollars “debating” legislation. Just imagine what everyone could accomplish if they adopted a different strategy:

1. Stop the hyperbole. There might be another reason that pro-life representatives refer to people like me as pro-abortion besides the obvious giddiness that comes from childishly defaming your opponent. Perhaps the phrase “pro-choice” is just too damn reasonable and realistic.
2. Choice is important here. Bill O’Reilly quipped on his show last week that a woman might say “Oh, I sprained my wrist” and get an abortion. Wha??? Spend some of that money on research into why women make the choices they make. Understand the people whom you would otherwise legislate into oblivion.
3. Reach out to real women and girls facing that choice. If you truly believe that you can stop abortions and save babies, why not get out there and do it, instead of hanging around lawmakers?
4. And to those lawmakers...seriously. Have you looked at your approval rating lately? More ideology is not the answer, and some of you have elections coming up. I’m looking at you, Governor Kasich.

Let’s talk about the sort of person who is pro-choice. Not the boogeyman of the religious right: the über liberal feminist who wants to kill babies! Pro-choice people are women and men, young and old. Some are even Christian! And I can happily assert that I did not come to my pro-choice-ness by reading Planned Parenthood publications.

A wise woman once said, “Kids are going to have sex. So make sure they do so safely.” That woman was my mother. She used slightly different and more profane words, owing to the fact that anti-contraceptive politicians got her blood boiling. She was a nurse and a Christian, and it is her pragmatic take on these issues that emboldens my own idealist view.

Why is all this still a controversy? Contraception, premarital sex, abortion...it all seems already sorted to me. Always has. Sex education at my school might have been a bit of a joke; I surely didn’t change my mind about anything or learn anything beyond the obvious. Yet there are kids out there who don’t have their minds made up about it. Kids who don’t have sufficient parental guidance to navigate those issues. So they make uneducated choices, the worst kind of choice.

Whose responsibility is it? I say it’s the parents’ responsibility. I look forward to the day when gym teachers don’t have to double as sex education instructors. I’m sure they dream of that day, too. The problem with this dream of ours is that not all parents can or will take up that burden.

Call it oversimplification, but if you want your child to wait until marriage, etc., etc., shouldn’t you make the case for it? Shouldn’t you help steer your child toward that choice? Not the school. Not the government. Not the media.

Yet people blame movies for glorifying sex, blame schools for enabling it, and blame the government for taking God out of the equation. You’re the parents. If you want God to be part of your child’s decision, go for it. That’s your choice. If you want to enroll your child in a private school that better fits your morals, go for it. That’s your choice. If you want to filter what your child watches, go for it. That’s your choice.

There’s that pesky word...choice. And I propose, modestly, that both sides work toward affecting choices outside the halls of government. Educate parents. Empower girls and boys to talk openly. That’s where this abortion issue really starts. Not in the ob-gyn exam room, but in the Victorian awkwardness and avoidance of how babies are really made. They aren’t made with the blessing of the Church or Congress, but as a result of the choices two people make. 

One might look to the Church, like Sarah Palin did when she discovered her son Trig would have special needs. While her faith was a big part of it, she had the right to choose. Wendy Davis also made a choice to keep her baby at 19 years of age. Yet she would not then turn around and deprive other women from that same freedom of choice. Would you like more women to choose your way? Explain to them why. Support them. Do not demonize them or subject them to scrutiny that is medically unnecessary.

Sadly, for both Lila Rose and Planned Parenthood, my proposal will not result in any groundbreaking law or court decision. There will be no balloons, no posters, and maybe even no television appearances. There will simply be a generation of men and women who have been equipped with the knowledge, faith, and understanding (or some combination thereof) to make the choice that is best for them and their families if the time comes. And lawmakers can shove it.

We are a nation that likes its big events: mostly the scandalous and controversial with the occasional utter catastrophe. So, perhaps it is far too idealistic to take the choice of having or not having babies out of government hands, out of the public sphere completely, but you conservatives are always so enthusiastic about limited government...

What's that John Lennon line about life?...

I was about to settle in for the night and begin to reread The Black Swan, when all of a sudden I thought it would be both relevant and fruitful to write about the weekend’s main accomplishment: reorganizing the boxes of my possessions currently stashed in the walk-in closet of my dad’s basement. Yes, this is another episode in the chronicle of being a boomerang child (with a hopefully more lighthearted feel).

Now, the rereading was itself a distraction from reading the new book, Age of Insight, so it only seems fair to be distracted from the distraction. I’ll write about whichever book wins the battle for my erratic attention span later.

While charging in to that basement closet, swiping away cobwebs and pulling out obstacles like an old mini-vacuum cleaner and suitcases, I began to reacquaint myself with my own stuff. Stuff I haven’t been using...so I had every intention of putting at least half in a Good-Will pile.

I did not end up with a Good-Will pile.

This is in part due to genetics; both my mother and my father passed along the predilection for holding on to everything. But it was also due to the fact that this great stuff, my prized possessions, was and is meant for my future/hypothetical/imaginary home. The home that is mine. And perhaps shared with a special someone. But primarily mine.

• I have throw pillows with pretty prints, still wrapped, from Target
• Three boxes of kitchen implements, including a great 50s-60s era dish set from my grandparents’ house (which my sister Rachel couldn’t wait to part with...crazy)
• Three more boxes of Christmas ornaments, baskets, vases, and such collected from both grandparents and mom’s own stash, just waiting to be my heirlooms someday
• Posters that will probably prove to be too “college” once I unroll them
• And most importantly, my desk.

Add my books and everything upstairs, and I have all the fixings for a home crammed into someone else’s house. Yet I haven’t allowed myself to feel at home here. I’m waiting for, pining for that future/hypothetical/imaginary home.

In the past, I would focus on how I’m never going to get that home. How my career and education choices have soundly beaten that goal into dust. Not so, this evening.

I’ve always been waiting, with the expectation that things will finally start to “happen” once a certain mark is passed. First it was graduating high school, then finding employment during college and moving off campus, then working full-time, then moving to New York...you get the picture. While I was living those days and weeks and months, I did not let myself feel like I was living. I was always working toward something else, and saving things for the next future magical period of time when I would start to feel like I joined the living. The real people. Not the students, not the interns, and certainly not the unemployed.

That's totally photoshopped...

The boxes in the closet are a symptom of this waiting: a toaster that isn’t toasting, a flute that isn’t being played, a desk I’m not typing these rambling words on. We all do this, to an extent. Heck, storage companies in Manhattan base their business models on our inability to part with our stuff from/for another life.

While I have the inkling to live more minimally, whether by squirreling my stuff away or donating it, I can choose to see my boxes in the closet as symptoms of hope, as well. Like the picture of a car my mother carried with her until the day she bought the car.

And while I carry the picture of the future/hypothetical/imaginary home, I’ll try to let myself feel like I’m living because of my stuff, not in spite of it.

Through the wormhole with trepidation...

As much as I adore Morgan Freeman and his show on the Science channel, last week’s episode burst my grammar-elitist bubble. The episode focuses on what alien life might be like: how they feel, how they think, how they communicate, and, essentially, what constitutes life. It was the segment on language that got me.

“Rebel linguist” Simon Kirby demonstrated his research into language evolution using a simple game of telephone. Or, as he called it, “broken telephone.” It worked much as you might expect, with his initial message being garbled by the end. But he didn’t consider that a matter of miscommunication; rather, he saw his phrase evolve as it was passed from person to person. And the manner of this evolution? The phrase became shorter and simpler. Sure, it made no sense, but how many idiomatic phrases do we have these days that make just as little sense?

So language’s evolution is simplification, or becoming easier to learn. Here’s my issue:

Are language purists going against evolution? I’m not just thinking about myself, correcting with my pens the awkward phrasing of my students, but also of “higher” powers that have sought to preserve languages like English and French. I think back to my French teacher, Mrs. Klein, describing the horrors of le parking and le weekend. I think of my own recent insistence on wheel barrow as opposed to “wheel barrel,” as a silly facebook meme put it.

Kirby continued to shoot holes in my elitism, asserting that every mistake makes the language easier to learn for the next generation. Oh no, will the OED some day accept "wheel barrel"?! Sure, make those mistakes for the good of your children! Professors just get in the way of change!

So, do I put my pens down?

I so badly want to hear Kirby speak about any implications for academia: how will we (the academics) change in order to go with the flow of evolution? Or are we already part of it? Is there any such thing as correct grammar, spelling, syntax, vocabulary...so long as the idea is put across successfully? And how do we define “successfully,” in light of these evolutionarily necessary mistakes?

Kirby imagines that we will become “more and more stupid biologically, and more and more smart culturally” (my emphasis). I can get on board with that. I have always reveled in the knowledge that humankind’s first cultural endeavors were images, not words. Images that do the work of thousands of words, whether we as historians know the “correct” text or not. Perhaps, if we meet a far more linguistically and culturally advanced civilization, they will communicate in shorter, simpler forms while expressing bigger, more complex ideas as so many artists have striven to do.

Midnight in Ohio

After watching Midnight in Paris, I’m a little too listless to sleep. The film offers a lot of eye candy: shots of Paris, of course, Versailles, and Giverny. I absolutely adored the endless cameos by the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Dalí. And I must say, Kathy Bates makes a wonderful Gertrude Stein.

All of that brought back my yearning to see more of the world. Not just Paris, but...everything. All places, all times. I suppose that’s what drew me to studying the history of art, and not art itself. I often wish I could have lived in a different time; in fact, my mother did say I was born 25 years too late. I even remember discussing it with an old friend who was horrified that I’d like to have lived in Victorian London. Historical geekdom aside, it’s Paris that has me unwilling to sleep right now.

In the film, Gil finds himself in his Golden Age: Paris in the Twenties. Yet, the woman he meets, Adrianna, has a Golden Age of her own: La Belle Epoque of the late nineteenth century. And Degas and company? They yearn for the Renaissance. The present, to Gil and famous artists alike, is dull and dreary compared to the past.

I just might be in a predicament similar to Gil, though in terms of place instead of time.

The grass is always greener, they say, in someone else’s field. I definitely believe that. My recent trip to New York, not to mention living in New York, is evidence of my desire and willingness to be anywhere but Ohio. Yet I found myself a little tired of New York as well. If things were different for me right now...oh, if only...I’d probably be on to the next wondrous place. Paris? London? And I’d have to ask myself: to visit or to stay?

Is there some fatal romantic flaw, like the Golden Age syndrome, that keeps one dissatisfied not with their present time, but with their present place? If no one else has named it yet, I shall call it Greener Pasture syndrome. Perhaps it is GP syndrome that makes me feel like a stranger in my hometown. And in my college town. And in my graduate school town. Will I never feel at home?

Whatever you call them, both “flaws” seem to be part of the larger battle for self-acceptance, which I hear is a good thing to strive for. That, and slapping Michael Sheen’s pedantic character upside the head.

Mother's Thoughts II

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 29

Mother’s Day has just passed, and with it, bittersweet memories heightened by the well-wishes of friends to their mothers and all mothers. Now the memories are at the “usual” level. But I find it fitting to turn back to my mother’s thoughts at a moment, late at night, when I am in conflict with my own. Her meticulous handwriting brings comfort, and the sensation of holding a book and paper that she once held helps to shake off some ritual negative thoughts.

I have a library book at my bedside—a quite intriguing book entitled The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain. While Eric Kandel’s work comes recommended both by an national review and by a faculty member in my department, I am truly frustrated that—in between the paragraphs of the preface—my thoughts drift from art and science to the one-liner I saw today in an email from LinkedIn, of all things.

Why You Shouldn’t Go to Grad School.

Seriously? I know the Universe might be a little miffed at me. Lately, I have been reading my Hitchhiker’s Guide, in which the Universe comes across as rather absurd, but to keep tossing this in my face? Really.

I have two main sorrows, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms: the absence of my mother and the loss at a major gamble I call Columbia. So let’s try to figure out the connection between my sorrows and my joy. Because, according to Gibran, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

My rehearsed reaction to the my-MA-is-worthless thought spiral is that I wouldn’t be teaching without it. I wouldn’t be able to call myself professor and associate myself with a renowned university. I also wouldn’t have the extra cares such a vocation brings, like wondering why students toss their papers in the trash. I do find joy there, though. I talk and write about art. What could be better? I read about it, think about it in new ways, learn to explain it differently than it was explained to me. Could I do that without the MA and all the (shameful) sorrow?

My mind counters with this: I just saw a post from a former classmate showing her all classy, fashionable, and curatorial. What did I do today? Well, I toted geraniums and verbena in the back of my car for my grandmother and got mad at myself for not being the perfect trim- and window-painter. Provincial, small-potatoes. No need for the MA there.

I do not need anyone to put me in my place. Now, that is something I obtained in graduate school. My delusions of grandeur are safe within my mind, never to be acted upon.

It’s far too soon to come to any worthwhile conclusions about this particular topic. That won’t stop me from trying, but I’m pretty sure I’d have to give it a few more decades and look back on this period in time. The period I interchangeably refer to as rural exile, underemployment, and, perhaps, spiritual grounding.

Where is the delight? I believe I’ve found some in rediscovering a relationship, something impossible without my return to Ohio. I may not be a jet-setting curator, and probably shouldn’t be, but I have begun (tenuously) to imagine a simpler though just as fulfilling future. And despite the conservative talking points, it has been a joy to forge a stronger bond with my father. That is one big use of the word “despite,” though. On that note, I hope I am a better political thinker than the other stereotypical liberals in their ivory towers. I can operate in a conservative, rural world because I was born here, and, at the moment, I have to operate here.

I’m interested in determining which period of time taught me more: the fabulous days of Columbia or the rural exile. And I have successfully exited the thought spiral for tonight.

Elegy for a term paper tossed in the trash

You weren't that bad...worth a B-, for Pete's sake! Yet, it might be that one capital letter that the student glanced at before tossing you aside, as if to say "good enough, no need to improve." Not even a pat on the back for you, term paper, for being satisfactorily organized and formatted. Not a second wasted on how your argument might have been strengthened with well-chosen citations.

You were tossed in that trash can far too soon. You had a whole life ahead of you. A life of study and reflection on essay structure and grammar. A life worthy of academic praise.

I'm sorry, term paper, that your creator doesn't give a damn about you.

I suspect many term papers are thus abused and cast away. But what about the students, these creators-turned-destroyers? What is the motive, the thought process behind such a callous attitude toward the written word? And why do I care?

As I picked up a random person's large McDonald's pop to place in the trash, I noticed a term paper with familiar green comments written (rather politely and stylishly, if I may be so bold), in the margins. It was the term paper of one of my students who had finished an exam earlier that day and picked up his term paper on the way out. And, also on the way out, he deposited that paper in the trash. There is, say, a 20-foot walk between my table and the trash can, so I highly doubt the student absorbed any helpful tidbits between picking up and pitching.

To which I say, "Thank you. I'll lose no sleep over your bad grade tonight."

That trashed term paper is a symptom and symbol of the larger ills of academia and the Millennial generation (or at least how Millennials are viewed in society).

This student grew up in the same region I did. I don't know his family background, his social status, or any of that, and I shouldn't know. But I can tell he is at least ten years younger than I am, so he's a Millennial whereas I identify myself (defiantly!) as Generation Y. We are different, yet the same.

We are different, because no one taught him to value his work. Or at least to include writing in what he considered "work." That attitude is far too prevalent these days. Too many people (*cough*Business majors*cough*) think writing is not a worthwhile skill, not something to be practiced and perfected. Writing is simply the act of expressing your ideas, which I should think is useful in any profession. My parents might have stopped reading my writing around 10th grade, once it got more and more esoteric, but they never allowed me to think of it as worthless. Writing made it possible for me to succeed in college, then graduate school.

Further success is pending. And I suppose that's why I have difficulty finding fault only in the student. It's a tough world out there. Yet that's why parents foster a sense of pride in a job well done. Whatever that job may be. That's why teachers give stickers, smiley faces, and praise...at least, they used to before all the standardized testing. The apathy of our students is of our own making. And once they're apathetic, there doesn't seem to be a way of reversing the process. Not that I've found...

I end with this question: how can we expect Millennials to value earning their way through work, when we don't teach them to value what work they do in school?