The Secret, Part 2

As previously addressed, I have always been behind the learning curve. Let me give you a for instance. At the tender young age of 19 months, I was still crawling around on all fours. My mother was deeply concerned and got on the phone with my pediatrician's office to find out what the hell was wrong with her baby.

I was fully cognizant of what was going on, being practically ready for college by that age. While she was busy bursting into histrionics on the phone, I crawled over to her desk, looked her right in the eyeballs, hauled myself up, and walked off. Never fell down once.

That's what I've been like my whole life. I don't like attempting things unless I know I will be a blazing success at them and that nothing will go wrong.

It's taken me a long time to learn how to be brave, and I would be remiss if I didn't point out that this has been an incomplete process. Instead, I limp along until an Unexpected & Life-Altering Event forces me to jump off a cliff into the (relative) unknown.

After watching Braveheart as a youngster, for example, I spent years wanting to visit Scotland. But I never actually WENT because it was an international trip and I didn't have anyone to go with me and my dad was constantly referencing the movie Taken. But then I broke up with the guy I was supposed to marry and BAM!!! I got on a plane and flew to Scotland.

And that's what happened with my job, too. I was miserable teaching in my old school district. In a period of 6 years, my building had 11 principals and 3 superintendents. But I just kept trucking along. And then we got a 28-year-old principal with 2 years of teaching experience. He made me submit all my tests to him so that he could check that I was reporting my data accurately. He made me alphabetize them before I submitted them. Then he sent them back without even looking at them and told me he wanted them in numerical order instead. And I just snapped. I called in the teacher's union and I went BONKERS.

That's when I packed up all my stuff and said I wasn't coming back, come hell or high water. I spent my solo vacation in Turks & Caicos job searching by the beach. It was not my best vacation, but I found a new job and got the hell outta' Dodge.

It strikes me that this is what has happened with my housing situation, as well. I have finally found a tiny house! I guess I probably could have done this before now, but it took the Unexpected & Life-Altering Event of my landlady jacking up my rent while leaving the other tenants' at the same rate to ignite my sense of injustice and propel me into action.

I was all, I'LL SHOW YOU!!! I'LL JUST OWN A TINY HOUSE INSTEAD OF RENT FROM YOUR SCANDALOUS ASS!!!!!!!!!!!!

And now I am thousands and thousands of dollars poorer and probably won't be able to go to England and France this summer, but hey, I finally achieved the milestone of homeownership, which I'd been attempting off and on for 9 years.

The Secret?

Perhaps. I asked Ma if marriage and small black children could materialize in the same vein of finding a new job and a tiny house, but she said probably not because they would involve someone else's will and not just my own.

It is pretty difficult to envision an Unexpected and Life-Altering Event big enough to propel me into adopting a child on my own, but I guess that's what would make it unexpected. Never say never, amiright?

Apple TV and the Best Worst Date Ever

I've always been really behind the learning curve on things. For example, right now my Apple TV is broadcasting pictures of all the following things simultaneously: the Delmar Divide, a 5-paragraph essay, the Ferguson protest riots, my cat licking my face, and some plagiarized student projects. I don't particularly want these pictures on a constant scroll-through in my living room -- particularly in this amalgamation -- but I don't know how to fix it. This is because I do not know how to use my Apple TV, despite the fact that this product was introduced 3 years ago.

The rest of my existence is in similar disarray. Despite the fact that I have a vibrant life in many ways -- ie, I enjoy working with disenfranchised men in north city, I enjoy founding after school programs for my students and learning how to play the drums, I like hanging out with friends and pretending I'm adept at smoking cigars, etc, etc -- I am woefully behind in others.

Case in point: I am living in a one-bedroom apartment with a cat about a decade after this ceased to be socially acceptable. I do not own a home. I am not married. I have no children or golden retrievers. I spend Friday nights drinking whiskey and watching Sherlock. I am simultaneously Behind In Life and also way too far ahead -- surely it's only a matter of time before I move up to a garret and start writing poetry that I hide under my floorboards for future generations to find.

Sometimes I find myself thinking, "If the average person starts dating at 16, and I didn't start until 24, that means I'm 8 years behind everyone else. That means if the average person buys a home at 33, I won't own my own home till I'm 45. That's depressing." I have those thoughts a lot. I try to speed the process up at times, like making my realtor/Dad show me five million homes in one month, or going out on dozens of dates in a short time span. But that doesn't really work either. Observe...

At our last Cigar & Scotch Night, I had just come from a first date. It ranks right up there amongst my most memorable dates. The guy had red hair and freckles, which I'm not going to lie, is kind of enticing to me. Anyway, as I told my C&SN friends, this guy asked me to have a beer, and I checked with Stratski, who, as you may recall is my Dating Mentor (although the effectiveness of this working relationship has been questioned many times). Stratski said sure, why not. It's broad daylight, what could go wrong?

Oh, Stratski. We teach irony for a living. Have you learned nothing?

In the space of an hour or so, this guy, whom we'll call Jerry, boggled my mind. Over a couple of pumpkin ales, he burst into tears and told me his dad had shot himself when he was in 7th grade. I didn't know what to say to that. What do you say when someone drops that bomb on you on a first date? Especially while crying??

Then he told me he thought he might be bi-polar. I was like, "Man... that's intense. You maybe should get that checked out."

"No, I don't want to know. I'd rather just not know."

"Dude, you're a surgeon. Don't you think it's irresponsible to just live in denial if you have a real medical problem?"

It went on like this, with him saying that he'd just started some really good medication that he knew would start working in about month. I made a mental note to check on him in a month. But then Jerry happened to mention that his mental condition was probably biological, and his dad is really volatile.

"Hold up. I thought you said your dad committed suicide when you were 13?"

"Oh, no, he shot himself, but he lived."

DUDE, WTF!?!?!?! You don't start crying in your beer on a first date when your dad is still freaking ALIVE!!!

The date went on and on like that. I finally told him he seemed like a great guy but like he had some  things he needed to work on personally before becoming involved with someone else.

At Cigar & Scotch Night, J-Mo said, "E-train, you CANNOT go out with this guy again. You CANnot! He is a TRAINWRECK!!"

"But he has red hair," I counter-argued.

"Are you insane," J-Mo reasonably asked.

But a month later, true to form, I texted Jerry to make sure he was okay: "Hey, Jerry. I just wanted to check in on you and make sure you are doing all right."

Jerry's response was brilliant: Who is this? Oh!! Is this the most mature 19-year-old ever!?!?!

Me: No never mind

Only after many more wheedling texts during which time it became apparent that I had opened a Pandora's Box, did I say: This is Elle. You asked me to have a beer with you, but then you started crying, called me a bitch, told me you were afraid you were bi-polar, and then burst into tears again. I just wanted to make sure that you are okay because you told me you'd started medicine but it would take about a month to kick in, that is all.

Now, a normal, red-blooded American male would have been affronted by that text (I think). Not Jerry. He called me. He informed me that he DID start taking that medicine, but that it inhibited orgasms in him so he had quit it. I eschewed hearing about the 19-year-old and got off the phone quickly after ascertaining he was alive and had taken up woodworking.

Now maybe normally, people are supposed to know to avoid this kind of train wreck when they are, like, 25. But I'm behind the curve, you see, and it affected me. Seeing someone cry and talk about the meaninglessness and loneliness of their life got to me.

And that is why I may never own a house...

the SECRET.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to be some kind of aesthetician or cosmetologist or hair wizard, but then I remember that I have no patience so I throw that idea out the window pretty quickly. I do believe the people in these professions have a distinct advantage over the common man in some areas, though: for instance, they are kind of like therapists who get paid to do your hair.

I don't really like small talk so sometimes I just pretend to fall asleep in the chair while someone is doing my hair. But a lot of times, I feel really badly that someone has to spend an hour and a half on my hair because that must be a very boring task, so I endeavor to make small talk...which inevitably comes out like, "Hey my grandpa just died yesterday and also I'm pretty sure I have malaria, do you like to cook?"

So usually it's just better when I can find a stylist who is a chatty person because then she can do all the talking and I can just insert words here and there. Sometimes, the hair wizard even leaves me thinking deep thoughts, and that was the case with a woman we'll call Carla.

Carla's the one who told me about the book The Secret. Have you ever read that? I have not. It's one of those books that I always see at Goodwill, but I know if I bought it, I would give it away without having read beyond page 1. However, I was very intrigued by Carla's explanation of The Secret. She said it's all about putting truths out into the universe and then living in hopeful expectation of those things being fulfilled.

She could have been totally been pulling my leg. For all I know, The Secret is an Italian cookbook, but I was taken by the whole premise, whether it was actually from that book or just part of the whole Joel Osteen (or whatever his name is) prosperity preaching bunk. Anyway, Carla told me about all this several years ago and it was always just in the back of my mind. I didn't really see it in action until last spring. That was when I reached my breaking point at work.

For some reason, we kept losing power that year and the whole building was repeatedly plunged into darkness. At one point, I remember standing in the hallway and listening to the kids' screams reverberating throughout the dark and thinking, "This is like being on the Titanic. I am sinking here."

That spring, I went to Schnucks and got a million apple crates and hauled them all into my classroom. I packed up my massive library and labeled all the boxes "Books purchased by district" and "Books purchased by ME." I lined them all up against the wall...23 boxes. Then I went through all my cabinets... I threw away everything! Every copy of every handout that I had amassed in the last several years of teaching there. The custodian yelled at me for throwing away so much crap that she hurt her back hauling it all away.

When all was said and done, I had 1 box left of lesson plan copies. Other teachers who stopped into my classroom looked at my wall of boxes in wonderment. I explained to them that I was not returning -- this, despite all evidence to the contrary (that is, that I had already signed a contract to return).

And, long story short, I didn't return. At the eleventh hour, a job opened up at a different district, I paid the ridiculous fine to break my contract, and I left. THE SECRET.

So thinking back on this experience makes me wonder if The Secret has some merit to it. Maybe if you want things badly enough, you just kind of make them happen by the sheer force of your will and your inability to accept anything else.

And THAT makes me wonder if I could will a tiny house into being??

I've been trying to buy a house for 9 years. The first one, I reneged on the contract after a failed relationship. I didn't want to live in a house we had picked out together! Then I switched jobs and had to look for houses in a totally different place. Then I got a one-year work contract and couldn't afford any houses. Then I got another job and tried to buy some more houses. One, the seller changed his mind. Another went to a higher bidder. And on and on...

I feel like a very unsuccessful adult living in an apartment with sketchy management. It might be nice to have a place where I belonged. But at this point, owning a house feels like owning a unicorn that poops Skittles...apart from the history of failed attempts to own a home, there is now the added factor that I would rather shoot myself in the foot than live anywhere near the area in which I work.

I wonder if home ownership is one of those things that I can just WISH into being? I mean, obviously The Secret doesn't work with everything or I would own book shop in England by now...

Mr. Personality

You know how sometimes when your friend is trying to set you up on a blind date, you ask all the appropriate questions and then "Is he cute?" And the response comes back: "...he has such a great personality!!!!" And you know immediately that he is Not Cute and that his great personality is supposed to make up for this?

 But really, the great personality is a commodity that is extremely under-rated. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have one. I myself have a horrible personality. I rub people the wrong way all the time. 

My friend Stratski said that now I have to do damage-control at my new job. I have to make a list of all the people I could have potentially offended and start going around and apologizing to all of them "just in case." This upsets me enormously but Stratski said it is necessary and that neither of us can show our true, real personalities at our new jobs because people wouldn't understand them. We are too brusque.

I just finished reading this book called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was a national bestseller when it was first published (around 2003, I think?)

The main character and narrator is Christopher, a 15-year-old autistic boy who can't look people in the eye, can't stand to be touched, can't eat foods that are yellow or brown, and is something of a math genius. Because he loves prime numbers and the story is told from his perspective, the chapters are ordered 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, etc.

Anyways, in chapter 181, Christopher explains why he hates France. This is where his parents used to take him on holiday.  He notes that most people, when they visit the French countryside, will have thoughts like, “Oh it is nice here. There is a field. There are some cows. There is a village in the distance. There are some clouds and flowers.”

But when Christopher sees the field, he thinks this:

1.     There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and white.

2.    There is a village in the distance, which has 31 visible houses and a church with a square tower and not a spire.

3.    There are ridges in the field, which means that in medieval times it was what was called a ridge and furrow field…

4.    There is a plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a snail on it, and a long piece of orange string.

5.    The northeast corner of the field is the highest and the southwest corner is the lowest…

6.    I can see 3 different types of grass and 2 colors of flowers.

7.    The cows are mostly facing uphill.

Christopher can list 31 more things about this field, which is why he hates France and also new places in general. His mind just goes into overdrive trying to process everything new, so he “freezes up” like a computer. That’s when he puts his hands over his ears and lies down on the ground and starts groaning loudly.

When I read Christopher’s story, it resonated with me deeply because I understood that feeling of not wanting to look at people and interact with them sometimes. It seemed to me that personalities don't fit into neat boxes: "normal," Aspberger's, Autistic. It seems like they are all just a part of one big spectrum and we are all somewhere on it. I got one of the personalities that doesn't find it particularly easy to interact with people, make small talk, or dissemble. Unfortunately, all of these skills are necessary parts of the professional world. 

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actress. I ultimately decided not to do this because sometimes I had the feeling of getting lost inside a character and I was afraid that one day I wouldn't be able to find myself and get back out. But now it occurs to me that maybe, if I can't enjoy small talk and niceties and being full of sugar and spice, perhaps I could just pretend to be like that. I would be the only one who knows that I am merely pretending to have a great personality.

Okay.

When I read Gone Girl, I thought it was a good book. My friend hated it because she found it imminently predictable. I did see what was coming pretty quickly, but what I liked was the concept of the unreliable narrator, the person telling their own story as if they were a saint when all along they are the worst kind of sinner. It started me on a search for more books with unreliable narrators, which led me to Before I Go to Sleep.

It is apparently also a film, which I have no interest in seeing since I know how the story ends and who the most dangerous players are. But the book is interesting in that it is told from the perspective of a woman with bi-polar disorder. She has these horrible episodes that oscillate between blinding, omnipotent clarity and utter futility and despair. Anyway, she is a suspect for a murder of which she has no memory and she is racing the clock during her manic phase to figure out her involvement. Booklist described the writing as such:  It is both an affecting portrait of the profound impact of a debilitating illness and a pulse-pounding thriller whose outcome no one could predict.

I liked it. I described it recently to someone looking for a good read and that person said, "Oh, interesting. You know, I'm bi-polar."

I was all but stopped short. 

Bi-polar is not something one admits to. Isn't that the way our society operates? I'm not sure why. Someone with BP has no more control over their disability than someone with Downs. But somehow, we look forgivingly on someone with the latter; the former, we draw away from. As if bi-polar were catching. 

And it's the worst kind of hypocrisy that I was taken aback, because I know what it's like to live with mental illness. I don't have bi-polar disorder myself. (I know this because I insisted on being given a comprehensive battery of tests at the hospital the last time I was there). No, I have what doctors can only agree in labeling as "mild depression" (when I'm doing well) to "severe clinical depression" when I am not.

I wish that not wanting to be alive could be looked at like having a broken leg. That people would help you and give you flowers instead of looking at you automatically like I looked at that friend, involuntarily, like Why would you admit that? Don't you know that's Not Cool? We don't talk about that here.

I would be okay if I could be. I've tried awfully hard, in the 12 years since I first started taking the twenty or so different medicines that I've tried. I don't want to live the next 50 years like this, but I don't know how not to. In our society, you don't talk about mental illness, unless it's the innocuous kind like ADHD or OCD. But you don't talk about how it's hard for you to even keep breathing everyday because you feel so much despair. Trust me, I know. I get that if I were just more open to "seeing the Lord move" in my life and "being filled with the Holy Spirit," I could get better. And that just makes the despair worse. Because the truth is that no matter how much of a Christian I purported to be or how much medicine I take, my body will just keep adjusting and rejecting.

If there's a silver lining here, it's that I have good friends. Mer, for instance, drops everything to rush over in her pajamas and tuck me into bed. And Sarah and Nicholle and Christie have sat with me while I cried, too. But sometimes, I get tired of asking people to help me pick of up the pieces of my broken mind. I just want to be like others, the ones who enjoy being alive. I spend a lot of time wondering what that's like.

Don't worry, I have no plans to off myself. I just wish that mental health and physical health could be seen the same way. I wish that it was okay to be not okay. I am the unreliable narrator of my own life. I describe everything as dark and ruinous because that's the way it looks to me. I don't mean to be a Negative Nelly or ungrateful for the good things in my life. I just can't seem to process them somehow.

Crazy McGee

A few years ago, a guy from church had a bunch of us over to his house for a get-together. He had a humidor in his living room and handed us all cigars. As we sat around his back yard puffing our smokes, I said, “You know, we should really do this more often.” My pal Justin thought this was an excellent idea, and that’s how Cigar & Scotch Night got started.

How Cigar & Scotch Night got ruined is a more elaborate story.

We had decided the patio in between me and Justin’s apartments was a decent place to hold get-togethers. The only other thing I used the patio for was ice-skating in the winter, and that was purely accidental. So Justin hauled over his 15 camping chairs and we decided everyone would bring his or her own cigar and beverage (I had just returned from Scotland and Ireland, which was why I thought scotch or whiskey ought to be involved in the evening).

We had recently listened to a message at church about getting more involved in the daily lives of our neighbors, and C&SN seemed like a prime opportunity to try this out, so every neighbor who wandered across the patio got an invitation. Only one neighbor actually took me up on the offer, though. That’s a woman we’ll call Lana.

At first, I was quite pleased that my efforts to be more neighborly were paying off. However, as the evening wore on, I realized that Lana was drunk and probably had been even before she arrived. She quickly became overly-intimate with me (which is my #1 Pet Peeve) saying she loved me and that we were exactly alike (because we’d attended the same local prep school and had fathers who were pastors). After Lana finally retired for the evening, I looked at Gigi.

“Was she plastered?” I asked.

“Uhhhh, yeah,” Gigi said. (I’d just wanted to be sure because I hadn’t been around a lot of drunk people, as you may remember.)

“Cool. I’m getting better at spotting drunk people!”

 It was an interesting night, but on the whole, really fun. We decided Cigar & Scotch Night was a success.

The only problem ended up being that instead of attracting the rest of my neighbors, the night seemed to invariably attract Lana, who got increasingly drunker and more chummy with each successive visit.

Cue, last Saturday.

Dan and I showed up early (and by early, I mean on time) to get things set up. Then we sat around playing Adult Truth or Dare by ourselves for awhile (it didn’t work very well; “Who is the most attractive person here?” only works if there is more than one person for you to choose from).  Suddenly this handsome African American guy wanders onto our patio.

“Hey, you guys know someone named Lana?” he asked. “I’m her Uber.”

Lana wanders out with a purple hairbrush in her hand. “Hey, girl, oh my gosh I love you so much and I’m so nervous and I just don’t know what to do I have a blind date and I look a mess and you gotta fix me up because I just can’t go like this…”

I just wanted her to leave. I had NEVER seen her this wasted before. I told her she looked fine and to have fun. But when she turned around, I saw her dress. It was completely unzipped in the back.

“WOAH,” I ran after her. “You can’t go on a first date like this! Your dress isn’t even zipped!”

“It’s because I’m fat,” she said. “Quit being such a bitch and make it look better.”

I tied her cardigan around her neck to try to cover the back of her dress and looked at the end result doubtfully. “Well, I think this is as good as it’s going to get,” I said. “Have fun.”

“I’ll be home soon,” she responded. “I’ll make it real quick so I can come back to the party.” (DAMMIT)

About 15 minutes later, Lana and Travis (her Uber driver) wandered back up onto the patio.

“I forgot my pipe,” she announced. “And here, have some brownies.” Travis shook his head at us sorrowfully. Eventually he managed to haul Lana away, and the rest of our friends showed up to the soiree. Everything was great until…

…Lana returned from her date. Her cardigan had come off, her zipper had unzipped itself to the full extent, and her dress was hanging from her shoulders about to commit suicide.

“He was such a douchebag,” she announced. “He only wanted sex!”

This effectively put a stop to Truth or Dare. After about an hour of arguing with her about the merits of going back inside her apartment and going to bed, I said, “You are drunk off your ass! I want you to leave, please!”

She became furious then, and wouldn’t stop screaming. It didn’t matter how hard I tried to ignore her, she just kept yelling about what a bitch I was.

You might wonder what the other guests were doing at this time. Well, Lily and Lucy (my sisters) alternated between hauling Lana back inside her apartment and trying to reason with her when she barreled past them back out onto the patio repeatedly. Dan instructed me in what to say to my landlady and the police (who were called 3 times). Tyler did his best to serenade Lana with songs on his guitar. Niki played a tambourine. One Courtney played on her phone while the other Courtney just laughed in bewilderment. Michael drank grapefruit cocktails. Justin and Alyssa begged Lana to go to bed. And then in a panic, Charlene and Dan doused the fire and hid the scotch, worried that we’d be in trouble with the police.

The police never came, but -- increasingly malcontent with Tyler’s guitar and Niki’s tambourine -- Lana became even more hostile.

“I’M GOING TO FILM YOU, YOU BITCH!!! YOU JUST GOT ME KICKED OUT OF MY APARTMENT! GO AHEAD! GO AHEAD! I’M GOING TO SHOW OUR LANDLADY EXACTLY WHAT KIND OF DRUNKEN PARTY YOU’RE HOSTING!!!!!!!”

“I don’t feel like I’m actually drunk,” I said from my chair.

But right then Justin, Charlene, and Michael (the only black people still present) jumped into the camera’s window. “BLACK LIVES MATTER!!!!” they yelled.

About this time, Lana’s dress fell almost completely off and someone pointed out that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

I sent the landlady a picture of this and she commanded us to all go inside because Lana couldn’t exactly be banned from her own patio. This brought our party to an effective end, but not before Dave could point out, “So the invite said Cigars and Scotch, but all I see is cigarettes and beer…?”

I felt badly about this. What kind of classy soiree involves cigarettes and beer and a half-dressed neighbor in her 60s?


“I’m sorry! We hid the scotch down here on the ground so we wouldn’t get in trouble with the police.”

I guess somehow I had convinced myself that it was less dangerous to be caught with cigarettes and beer than with cigars and scotch.

In any case, the landlady gave Lana an ultimatum…move out now with no blemish on your record, or wait until your lease expires in January but receive a bad reference.

For the sake of future parties, I hope she chooses the former. I don’t have high hopes though.

oops.

I'm back from the doctor's office, but I'm not allowed to think about philosophy for awhile. So we'll turn our thoughts to career quandaries.

A former colleague texted me recently, discouraged about not hearing back yet on a job she'd applied for at my new school. She said she was deeply depressed.

I was tempted to snort at that. Really? You're deeply depressed because none of the 3 interviews you've gone on have panned out yet? As I sat in my car, I tallied up 28 interviews I'd gone on....and this is just the ones I could remember off the top of my head while driving down the highway.

Going on that many interviews, many of them right on top of each other, one is bound to make a mistake sooner or later, and it turns out I have. I accepted a job offer, thinking that I was accepting another one. Oops.

See, what had happened was [this is how my students start every explanation] -- I applied for somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 different jobs. One school brought me into their "Book Room" and showed me all the dozens of novels their school board had approved -- and these were great novels. "You can pick whatever you want to teach from here," they said. "And you can pretty much teach it however you want, too, as long as you hit the Standards."

SWEET!

Only...I interviewed at another district right after that. An extremely conservative district. One where  there is actually a script to read from. I'm not even kidding! The curriculum looked like this: "Teacher says: 'Now students, we've just finished reading Flowers for Algernon. Take a few moments to write down your thoughts...'"

Those of you who know me IRL know that not only am I at terrible at following written instructions, I am also terrible at being conservative. I tend to plan my own carefully-constructed lessons, and then throw them all out the window as students are walking through the door, adopting a wild idea at the eleventh hour. This is probably the same quality that leads me to perch atop my rolling cart singing "The hiiiiiiillls are aliiiiiiiiive with the sound of muuuuuusic..." while my students wheel me around the room ad naseum.

In any case, I somehow got the schools confused and thought that when I took my new job, I was signing up for a school where I got to teach whatever I wanted, however I wanted. So you can imagine my complete discomfiture when my new boss told me that I am expected to teach exactly what the other 8th grade English teachers are teaching, at the same time they are teaching it...and that I also have no common plan time with them (so I'll have to learn when and how they want me to deliver my script on evenings and weekends, in addition to grading).

$#!&

Oh well. You win some, you lose some, amiright? In this case, I've lost my autonomy and everything that makes a good teacher. I've also lost about $6,000 and one hour a day of sleep (my new school starts HELLA early). And my drum line. But hopefully there are some kind of perks that I have not yet discovered. Like, I don't know...not wanting to jump out a window everyday.

Men, Women, and Sagan

I watched a movie last year called Men, Women and Children.

It was probably the most depressing movie I've seen in my entire life. I'm still not really sure why I watched it. Probably I saw that it was directed by Jason Reitman and thought it said Jason Bateman and was all, "Oh! I love Arrested Development, this movie will be GREAT!"

Fail.

This movie was not at all a love story involving the boy from Fault in Our Stars, as the promotional poster above would have you believe. Instead, it is the story of how technology has completely destroyed our ability to connect with each other. The poster was only created after the movie tanked so badly that it had to be re-branded. Here's the original poster:

Now, listen. I know what you are thinking. Who cares? It's just a poster. It's just a movie. But this movie messed with my head 12 months ago and I am still mired in cynicism because of it. It was based on this book and here are the main story lines:

Don and Helen -- Married but bored. The internet allows him unlimited access to porn and her involvement with a man she met on a hook-up website for cheating spouses. They decide to stay together anyway because why the hell not?

Chris -- Their son. So addicted to seriously deviant online porn that he now has a complete inability to connect with girls

Hannah -- The would-be model Chris can't connect to because of his addiction. But don't worry. She's just as effed up. Hannah is "building her modeling brand" by posing in increasingly risque poses and garments for her website

Donna -- Her mom. Accepts payment from anonymous men through the website she "manages" for her daughter in exchange for putting Hannah in poses and lingerie they request

Allison -- A cheerleader at Chris and Hannah's school. She has an eating disorder, which she gets the "strength" and encouragement to maintain from pro-ana websites like this.

These are only about half of the characters. It just gets worse and worse. But the whole movie is narrated by Emma Thompson, whose voice is mesmerizing, and it's interspersed with images from the Voyager spacecraft and writings by Carl Sagan... so you are very confused: drawn into it and repelled at the same time!

What does the Voyager have to do with anything? you might be asking. That's there because Tim -- a high school quarterback -- reads A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan and decides that the earth and all its inhabitants are completely meaningless. They needed some shots of the earth from space to really drive this point home, hence Voyager:

All right. Here's the opening, which is composed of Sagan's writing read by Emma Thompson as the space probe floats by:

That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization... every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner...Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. 

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves...

That's a pretty depressing way to start a Jason Bateman (Reitman) film, that's for damn sure. After 12 months of reflection, I think the point of the movie is that the technology that has allowed us to travel 4 billion miles into space to take a picture of Earth is the same technology that is destroying us and our ability to interact with each other.

But what I really got out of the movie was the same takeaway that Tim had when he quit the football team: none of it matters. Who cares if you are so freaking talented that you are a starting quarterback at 15? You are just one of many quarterbacks who is one of many people living on one of many planets in one of many galaxies in what they are now hypothesizing is one of NINE universes!

This movie made me search out Sagan's writing. Consider this quote:  “Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust... If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”

The obvious point here is that we should not take the claim seriously.

Carl Sagan was a brilliant astrophysicist. When I look at his words and I look at pictures from the Voyager expedition, I cannot help but be swayed. It does seem extremely unlikely that "help will come from elsewhere to save us." I envy people who believe in God despite the vastness of our universe(s) and the obscurity of our mote of dust. But have they just not seen the space probe images? Have they just not read Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking? Is it merely easier to go along with what they've "always" believed and ignore new evidence?

I don't know. I wish I had faith. I miss having it. But for the last year I have not been able to shake the echo of Sagan's words:    We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.