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.