Terry, Mike and I were having a literary discussion in the English office about The Catcher in the Rye, and I said that one of the lessons that Holden has to learn in the novel is that things can't stay the same forever-- Holden wants to catch all the children running in the rye and save them from falling over the cliff of adulthood, which he equates with corruption . . . he wants put everything in a museum -- behind glass-- and, of course, this just isn't possible . . . he struggles most about his sister growing up, that she might eventually have sexual desires like Sunny the prostitute and he's also crushed that Jane Gallagher -- the pure and innocent girl that he platonically loves -- also has sexual desires and goes on a date with the studly Stradlater . . . and it was just the guys in the office and so I expressed this idea very succinctly . . . I said: "Holden has to learn that girls want to get out there and bang people too!" and -- Murphy' Law -- just as I said this the student teacher -- who is young and sweet and female -- walked into the room, and gave me an odd look, and so instead of just letting the comment hang there . . . which was awkward enough, I made the situation even more awkward by turning to her and saying, "Right?" and so now I had put her on the spot and she had to reply to this stupidity, and so she said "Right" in a not-so-sincere manner and then rushed out of the office . . . and then Terry described with great relish how incredibly awkward I made the scene, and I guess that is because he is a big fan of Awkward Dave.
Awkward Dave reared his ugly head last Tuesday, and if it wasn't for my colleague Chantal, things might have gotten really awkward, but she heroically stepped in and saved the day; to understand the situation you need a bit of backstory . . . fifteen minutes before this Awkward Moment of Dave, I was introduced to a very silly game on Kevin's phone, called "Duck or Llama": the game is simple but frustrating, you are shown a picture of a duck, or a picture of a llama, and you must press the appropriate button -- "Duck" or "Llama" -- VERY quickly, or you lose; I was terrible at first but once I got the hang of it, I got quite good and scored sixty correct answers in a row . . . more than double what anyone else got; the pictures get more and more ridiculous and abstract: there are line drawings and close-ups and llamas with sunglasses and duck-butts and rubber ducks and stuffed llamas, and everyone has the same stupid story at the end of their round . . . either, "I was doing really well, and then I mistook a duck for a llama!" or "I was doing really well, and then I mistook a llama for a duck!" and this is the sort of thing that I can get obsessed with, which is why I don't have a video game system in my house, and so when a woman from another department, who runs a committee that I am part of, totally went out of her way and came upstairs to the English office solely to help me sign-up for a workshop at Columbia University, I really, really tried to pay attention to her; she showed me some forms and explained how to fill them out . . . but then, without realizing it, I picked up the phone -- determined to get one hundred correct answers in a row -- and started playing "Duck or Llama," and I guess this nice woman, who totally went out of her way to help me out with this project, made quite a face, but luckily my friend Chantal saw the face, and was a good enough friend to yell at me and tell me to focus, and this was enough to break my obsession with the game and allow me to finish the now rather awkward social interaction with the woman who had gone out of her way to climb the stairs and find me in the English office and help me out.
In the past decade, I've tamed Awkward Dave to some degree, but he still occasionally rears his ugly, awkward head; one of these times is when adults-- grown-ass adults-- proclaim their love of Disney World; this boggles my mind and-- unfortunately for my awkwardness-- we've got a bunch of these people in our school (and there are several in the English department!) and some of them visit Disney every year-- it's like a religious pilgrimage-- and some of them visit Disney World and they don't have children . . . and while I understand taking your kids there once so they don't feel alienated and neglected-- although my wife and I refused to go and swore we would never take our kids until finally my parents actually dragged us all there and footed the entire bill . . . I had a lot of problems with the experience, but I'm an extra-high-maintenance pain-in-the-ass . . . but that's not what this sentence is about, it's about the awkward fugue-like state I enter when adults mention their love of Disney World . . . I start saying crazy, insulting, and awful things right to their faces, and these are people I work with and see every day; here are some examples of things I start spouting to perfectly nice co-workers:
-- I rant and rave about how lame it is to share a bunch of antiseptic engineered memories with the rest of the Philistines in the park;
-- I explain how happy I was when an alligator ate a small child at the Disney Grand Floridian Resort and Spa because it injected some reality into the fantasy;
-- I told someone they were totally fucked in the head because she was touting the merits of the Epcot food and wine festival . . . I told her for that amount of money you could go to Italy and have real food and wine!
-- I like to call out people who claim they are feminists yet worship the princess culture;
so I've decided this can't go on . . . if people want to spend their hard-earned money on Disney vacations, so be it . . . I need to be more tolerant; also, I don't think they can help it-- I wish I could claim to have noticed this myself, but it was Chantal who pointed out that all the devout Disney worshippers are practicing Catholics . . . so maybe there's some tie-in between actually practicing religion and loving Disney-- and we all know you can't control whether you have that "belief" character trait . . . I don't have a lick of it and I think it saves me a lot of trouble (in fact, I just read a great little piece in The Atlantic about how politics has replaced religion in America . . . and Disney is better than politics, I suppose).
Back by popular demand, the recurring feature you never thought would recur again, has, of course, recurred again . . . it's time for yet another Awkward Moment of Dave -- this time the setting is a school bus, on a rainy day . . . and both the 8th grade boys soccer team and the 8th grade girls soccer team have been stuffed onto this bus (because our home field flooded) and it's now 6:00 PM and I've been with this screaming horde of pubescent maniacs for over three hours and there's not a seat to spare on the bus . . . I'm squashed between several kids and a pile of equipment and the girl's coach is up in the front of the bus trying to help the bus driver navigate home, so I don't even have an adult near me to commiserate with; the kid next to me is screaming in my ear -- high pitched, shrill screaming because his voice hasn't changed yet -- he is trying to convey some sort of primitive message to the girls team, and I ask him to stop once, then twice, and then I finally snap and tell him: "You're not allowed to yell until your voice changes -- it's so high pitched that it's breaking my eardrums" and this frank statement got him to stop yelling in my ear, but it also brought him to tears -- and so I learned that 8th grade boys can be very sensitive about their feminine, screechy voices . . . the kid in front of him tried to console him, he said, in a high pitched voice: "My voice is high too, and I know it" but it didn't help, the kid that I insulted, who was sitting extremely close to me, (making this an especially Awkward Moment of Dave) was despondent -- head down, holding back the waterworks -- and though I tried to apologize, it was an exercise in futility, and when I talked to him after we got off the bus -- and this was a chore, he was so pissed at me that he didn't even want to hear my apology -- I realized that he was so upset because there were girls present -- and he thought they heard my comment (though I doubt they did, the bus was extraordinarily loud) -- and I am sure this kid will forever think of me in the same way George Costanza thought of his mean and grouchy gym teacher, Mr. Heyman, who always pronounced George's surname "Can't stand ya!"
Regular readers may be familiar with the many Awkward Moments of Dave . . . and fans of this recurring feature will appreciate how this incident was almost The MOST Awkward Moment of Dave: before I went running on my free period at work on Monday, I changed my clothes in the women's staff bathroom-- which is next door to the men's staff bathroom and has a similar layout, a square room with a sink and a toilet, but no stall or other feature . . . and both these bathrooms open right into "B-Hall," a busy thoroughfare with many classrooms-- and the reason I use the women's bathroom is because there is furniture: a chair and a bureau-- and so while I am changing, I can put my clothes and belongings on the furniture instead of the urine soaked floor of the men's bathroom; it was cold Monday, and so I decided to wear spandex and while I was slipping out of my boxers, I was simultaneously fooling with my iPod and my underwear tangled around my ankles as I tried to flick it off with my foot and I fell, and because my hands were occupied, I fell hard and nearly hit my head on the toilet-- I was just able to break my fall with my left hand-- but if I didn't, and I knocked myself out, then the discovery would have been horrendously embarrassing, especially if it was between classes . . . a half-naked male teacher lying unconscious in the women's bathroom, with a pair of '90's style headphones tangled around his head . . . I was inches from infamy.
Last weekend, we took a road trip to my brother-in-law's new place just outside of Harrisburg, and I wasn't terribly excited about making the trip: the weather was beautiful and I didn't want to spend two and half hours in the car-- and we were driving up Saturday, staying the night, and then driving back Sunday-- and I am loath to admit that I was treating these five hours in the car as an ordeal and my poisonous attitude was driving my wife crazy-- and while I admit my behavior was childish and immature, it was a very long drive-- and then, to add salt to the wound-- we couldn't find a spot to get lunch; fans of Awkward Dave know that I don't operate well in social situations when I'm hungry (I don't operate well in social situations to begin with, but add hunger and things get really ugly) and by the time we finally found a cheesesteak place, waited thirty minutes for them to complete our order, and finished the drive to Eddie and Lisa's place, I was grouchy and ravenous and so when we arrived, I immediately sat down and dug into my cheesesteak, which my brother-in-law completely understood because he knows me, but then Catherine's Aunt approached me-- she was visiting as well-- and I guess she was expecting some kind of formal greeting-- a hug or a kiss or something-- and I vaguely understood this expectation because of the way she was standing there, looming over me, and I started to wipe my hands off, but they were all covered in ketchup and melted cheese, and so I made an executive decision, greeted her verbally and kept eating . . . and then a few minutes later, when I was outside,I noticed that her little dog had escaped the house-- and it was my son's fault-- so I yelled (in a panic) to my son "go tell the owner her dog is loose!" and Catherine's Aunt heard this and apparently she was already offended that I didn't give her a hug when I was eating the cheesesteak, and then was doubly offended that I called her "the owner" instead of her name . . . but things were happening rapidly and I was hungry and tired and nervous that the little dog would get run over by a car, and so things were awkward between us for the rest of the day and she brought it up later in the evening, when everyone had drank a fair bit, and wanted to "clear the air" and we had to hug and then she had the nerve to criticize my hug-- I guess it wasn't emotional enough-- but my brother-in-law reminded her that I "wasn't much of a hugger" and I don't think either of us learned anything from the incident, so in that sense it was very much like a Seinfeld episode.
As a teacher, you hope that you are forewarned certain things about your students, or else incidents like this and this are going to happen; one of the things that requires a warning is if your student has a twin . . . but I was not warned, and so when I saw one of my particularly clever students on the stairway, and was excited that she had coincidentally used the word "anthropomorphize" in her essay-- because this was a word that came up in class that day and she was the only student who knew what it meant-- I yelled this non sequitur to her: "Anthropomorphize! You used it in your essay! That's funny!" but I did not realize that this was NOT my student, but her twin (because, as smart as my student is, she did not warn me she has a twin, so I blame her for this awkward moment) and so her twin gave me a weird look of non-recognition-- a look that said, "Why are you yelling sesquipedalian words at me, creeper?" and then she gave me the cold shoulder and continued up the stairs . . . but we sorted it out later in the day and now I am on my guard for doppelgangers.
Earlier Thursday, it was more TV. So much TV. I watched some Bosch with the wife, The Expanse with the kids, and The Wire with the wife and kids. I tried my best to watch some of the Parks and Rec reunion but found it awkward and sluggish. Headed back to Zoom pub night (which is also awkward and sluggish, I think that's just what Zoom is like).
I woke up at 4:45 AM this morning. Decided to get up and get some grading done. Waded through a bunch of narratives and some other assignments. Then went back to bed. That's a plus about remote learning: you can work on your own schedule.
Zoom meeting with the English Department at 8:30 AM.
Then I did some community service and went shopping for an old guy. Bought the usual stuff: liverwurst, ham turkey, pineapple chunks, soup soup soup, grapes, applesauce, etc. Old person food. I'm getting quicker in the store. Listening to electronica helps (Amon Tobin and Boards of Canada).
When I dropped the food off, a cute lady finally witnessed my community service! She answered the door. She was either a relative or some sort of aid. It's nice when someone cute sees you doing community service, but-- unfortunately-- I was dressed like a homeless person.
Note to self: if you wear a mask and you forgot to brush your teeth, you're going to smell some bad breath. Your own bad breath. And there's no way to escape it.
Ian and I did our usual three-mile run. It started pouring rain ten minutes in and didn't stop until we got home. Huge drops. Now it's warm and sunny. Springlike.
Ian stumbled on a fawn while walking the dog.
I just finished my second Josephine Tey mystery: a Shilling For Candles. She's a great writer. Weird characters, a run-of-the-mill detective without the tortured past, and a great ear for dialogue.
Here is a sample passage, summarizing the information the police received about possible sightings of an alleged murder suspect on the run:
By Tuesday noon Tisdall had been seen in almost every corner of England and Wales, and by tea-time was
beginning to be seen in Scotland. He had been observed fishing from a bridge over a Yorkshire stream and had
pulled his hat suspiciously over his face when the informant had approached. He had been seen walking out of a
cinema in Aberystwyth. He had rented a room in Lincoln and had left without paying. (He had quite often left without
paying, Grant noticed.) He had asked to be taken on a boat at Lowestoft. (He had also asked to be taken on a
boat at half a dozen other places. The number of young men who could not pay their landladies and who wanted
to leave the country was distressing.) He was found dead on a moor near Penrith. (That occupied Grant the best part of the afternoon.) He
was found intoxicated in a London alley. He had bought a hat in Hythe, Grantham, Lewes, Tonbridge,
Dorchester, Ashford, Luton, Aylesbury, Leicester, Chatham, East Grinstead, and in four London shops. He had
also bought a packet of safety-pins pins in Swan and Edgars. He had eaten a crab sandwich at a quick lunch counter in Argyll Street, two rolls and
coffee in a Hastings bun shop, and bread and cheese in a Haywards’ Heath inn. He had stolen every imaginable
kind of article in every imaginable kind of place—including a decanter from a glass-and-china warehouse in
Croydon. When asked what he supposed Tisdall wanted a decanter for, the informant said that it was a grand weapon.
And here is my favorite line from the book:
It is said that ninety-nine people out of a hundred, receiving a telegram reading: All is discovered: fly, will snatch a
toothbrush and make for the garage.
It's interesting what people lose themselves in during quarantine. Some people are watching old sports. My buddy Whitney is mainlining music documentaries. All I want is crime stuff. The chase scenes, the investigation, the freedom of movement, the bars and dives, and the various localities pull my mind from the reality of quarantine confinement.
This time, Dave didn't make the situation awkward, someone else did, and I'll keep it vague to protect all parties involved, but I was coaching my junior varsity team to victory the other day (a big deal, since we didn't win a game last season) when the mother of a certain player decided she needed an extended and serious conference with me about her son during the game-- and while those of us who play sports respect the imaginary boundary around the coach and players, even when the game is taking place in a public area, this mom had no problem walking right through that invisible barrier . . . and because of this I thought the matter was pressing-- a heart condition or an allergy or a death in the family-- but she essentially wanted to tell me to tell her son to get his act together or he would no longer be allowed to play on the team-- which I immediately understood, and told her I would communicate this to her son, but then she wouldn't give up on the story and when I suggested that we could talk after the game, she said that wasn't possible, because she had an exam to study for and then she kept right on talking, while I was trying to sub players in and out, check a kid for a concussion, and change tactics because of a gale force wind-- and though she wasn't exactly heckling me, I still felt like Seinfeld in the episode where Kramer's girlfriend heckles him at the comedy club, and so Jerry goes to her office and heckles her while she's trying to get some work done, but -- in a sense this was my fault, because I should have dealt with her quickly and abruptly, but I'm not very good in awkward situations of conflict, so I finally just turned my back on her and didn't look in her direction for several minutes, and when I finally looked back over, she was gone.
Nothing upsets me more at school then when a student disrespects one of the hall aides, especially if the victim of the disrespect is an elderly lady, and so when I saw a student refuse to show the aide at the front door an ID (IDs are required to enter the building) and then walked away from her, I told her I would take care of it and I turned to follow the kid -- and as I turned, I caught him giving the aide the classic two-handed-double f-- you bird, and so I confronted the kid -- and he refused to show me his ID, and attempted to walk away -- and so I blocked his path and things got into that weird gray area where you've lost your temper with a student but you know you're probably not legally allowed to tackle him (but maybe you are?) and so you wonder how you're going to detain him (or you can simply just follow him, I once followed a kid who refused to show me his ID from the cafeteria into the gym locker room, where he attempted to hide in the corner) but luckily, before I completely blew my stack, another teacher showed up and she knew the kid's name -- and so instead of following him, I simply went to the office and wrote him up-- and all this happened before first period, I hadn't even taken my jacket off, so then I had some time to cool-off before my first class -- which is second period, as I have hall duty first period, but I still had to tell this wild tale to my Creative Writing class, but when I was halfway through, one girl said, "You better stop this story now" and I said, "Why?" and she said, "because that's her boyfriend" and pointed to a very sweet girl, who I turned to and said, "You're going out with a guy who gives the middle finger to old ladies?' and she smiled sheepishly and said, "Yeah, but I already talked to him about it, and told him he shouldn't do that."
If you are at your local pub, and an inebriated stranger approaches you and asks whether he should play Molly Hatchet or The Allman Brothers on the jukebox, the correct response is, "Whatever, man, they're both awesome!" but that's not what I said; instead I took a moment and sincerely thought about the question and told him, quite sincerely, that I couldn't recall any songs by Molly Hatchet so I wasn't qualified to decide, and this really astounded him-- that I wasn't familiar with Molly Hatchet-- so much so that he sang an a capella version of "Flirtin' With Disaster" to me and several of my friends, really belted it out, holding a fake microphone and everything, for an awkwardly long time, but I couldn't bring myself to walk away because he really wanted me to appreciate Molly Hatchet (but, of course, this had the opposite effect, as now any time I hear the name Molly Hatchet, I will associate the band with this horribly awkward moment).
This is a long one, but if you're a fan of awkward moments and bad decisions, then it might be worth your time: once we finish Act II of Hamlet, I have my students rate the artistic, practical, and ethical nature of the various schemes in the play, and we discuss how Polonius forces his daughter Ophelia to turn over Hamlet's love letters, so he can read them to the king, and I always provide a real example-- for educational purposes, of course-- and ask them if this sort of behavior is ethical, to take someone's private, romantic writing and make it public . . . unfortunately, my example involves my friend Kevin, who teaches next door (and we are only separated by a thin, temporary accordion wall with an foldable opening, so we often pop in and out of each others classrooms through this "secret" entrance) and he was kind enough to sit in my class while I told my students this "case study" last week: so here it is . . . once upon a time, many years ago, before I was married, a "small world" coincidence occurred-- I met my wife on the streets of New Brunswick outside The Corner Tavern Bar, and I was with my childhood friend Rob, and Catherine-- my future wife-- was with her good friend Tammy and-- wildly-- eight years later Rob and I ended up married to these two lucky girls . . . and if we had walked out of the bar moments earlier or or stayed for last call, then we would have never met our future spouses . . . so after several years of dating Catherine and Tammy, we learned-- another weird coincidence-- that my long-time friend and colleague Kevin (who teaches next door to me) dated Tammy-- Rob's future wife-- in high school, when Tammy was a freshman and Kevin was a senior, AND-- miraculously-- Tammy had kept all the notes and correspondence that anyone had ever sent her in high school in a shoe-box . . . in other words, she had love notes that my friend Kevin wrote in high school-- which was the greatest news ever-- BUT, she wouldn't actually cede the notes to me because she knew I would use them for nefarious purposes (perhaps photo-copy them and give them to Kevin's students) so Tammy just gave me a quick glimpse and then hid them, but I was able to ascertain one fantastic piece of information: he signed all his love notes to Tammy "TTFN" (Ta Ta For Now) and so when I finish telling the students the story, I reveal his "signature" valediction and they laugh and laugh and scream it through the thin wall at him and taunt him with the information whenever they get the chance, causing him much embarrassment (although he's used to it by now-- since I do it every year-- and I think he actually enjoys the whole charade, which is why he sat in my class last week while I told the story . . . so he could face the "Ta Ta For Now" taunts head on) and then I remind the students that this was an educational case and I ask them if it was ethical for Tammy to let me see the letters, and if it was ethical for me to tell them the story, and then we compare the case to Hamlet and everyone is happy except Kevin-- but he knows the deal, which is that I will pretty much use any example that connects in my class to prove a point, but, unfortunately, not everyone knows this and my big mouth can lead to some awkward situations, such as last Tuesday, when I was explaining to my Creative Writing class how I am often a terribly illogical arguer and that I often make points that are rhetorically powerful but lack substance, I told them the breast milk example from the other day, and the fact that I shared this rather personal story found its way back to Rachel, the woman who tasted her own green-tinted breast milk, and she was NOT happy with me using that example because her students mentioned it in class and it made her truly embarrassed and red-faced . . . so there's a lot for me to learn here and I think I've learned it, but in case I haven't learned it, please remember: your secret is NOT safe with me.
I was eating some delicious and weird food at Chef Tan today with my wife and kids, sitting outside on the patio, slurping down some cold clear noodles and hot sauce (these clear noodles are especially transparent, square, and gelatinous . . . like something squeezed out of a psychedelic Asian Play-Doh extruder) and the two teenage sisters from next-door walked by, enjoying a stroll down Main Street on a beautiful day and we said,"Hello" and once they passed my wife remembered something and said, "Oh my God, I forgot to tell you!" and then she told me, and I had a momentary lapse of reason, and then realized the gods of time and space had smiled upon me . . . here is why: my wife informed me that she had seen the older of the two teenage sisters totally out-of-context, when she took the boys on a trip to H2Oooohh water park in the Poconos earlier this summer; I wasn't there-- I was down in Nags Head with friends-- and so I missed this incident; they were inside the park, and Alex was riding the infinite wave rider and our neighbor appeared in front of Catherine and said, "Hi" went over and said "Hi" and my wife didn't recognize her for a moment, because it was so weird to see a neighbor in a water park in Pennsylvania, and it turns out she was working in the park as a counselor, and when my wife told me this, I thought, "Yikes! That was close" because this particular water park was the scene of one of my more egregious awkward moments, when I changed into my bathing suit in a corner of what I thought was the locker room, but it was actually an open waiting area that was masquerading as a lock room, and so I essentially stripped in public . . . it was quite embarrassing and my family still gives me shit about it, but now there's a silver lining, at least I committed this rather heinous act when our teenaged neighbor was not working at the water park . . . so thanks Time, for allowing me to escape years and years of awkward interactions with my neighbors (and to repay you, I will do a naked dance in my yard, slathered in olive oil, at the stroke of midnight on the next Leap Day . . . hopefully, no one will be peering through the bushes).
When I receive a new class of students, I generally try to make a good first impression; I try to come across as fun and easygoing, but remind the students that my class will be challenging and I will reward diligence; unfortunately, this doesn't always happen . . . for a fantastically awkward pair of back-to-back examples of my worst start to a class ever, read this . . . and something similar happened two weeks ago; I had bronchitis and I missed two day of school . . . including the first day of my new Creative Writing class, so, as sub work, I gave them a fairly long New Yorker article about brainstorming to read: it's a fantastic article, and while the first few paragraphs explain some of the history behind traditional brainstorming and how much everyone loves it, the thrust of the essay is that brainstorming doesn't work at all, and in fact, is worse than working alone; there's been a battery of psychological tests, and the research indicates that people produce the best ideas when there is healthy debate and criticism, and not a system that embraces blind acceptance of any idea at all . . . but I wasn't in school and so my students-- who had never met me and didn't know that if I give you something to read, you'd better read it-- perfunctorily read a few paragraphs of the article and then wrote a bunch of unfounded BS about how much everyone loves brainstorming, and so when I returned to school on Friday, still ailing and weak, but in school because it was a delayed opening because of snow and I didn't want to waste a sick day on a truncated schedule, and I read the pile of papers that got the thesis of the article completely wrong, I got very indignant, and-- because of the wackiness of the schedule-- I didn't have lunch at the proper time, so I brought a steaming bowl of soup to class, told the kids that they did a terrible job with the article and I was really angry because they made me read a pile of unfounded BS, gave them the article again, commanded them to reread it and do the assignment again and to type it up over the weekend and then explained to them that they had made a horrible first impression on me, and then, while they silently read the article, I slurped my soup and glowered at them . . . occasionally I stopped slurping my soup and enjoyed a phlegmy cough, and then I went back to slurping, while they read in silence . . . it was a really awkward first impression, and while we've reconciled since then (aside from the one girl who dropped the class . . . she probably thought she was dealing with a lunatic) I don't think they'll ever quite forget it or get over it.
I had an incredibly "realistic" dream last night that I ran for governor (absurd) and actually won the election (ridiculous) and then, when I went over to the statehouse to start my term, I learned that the salary was abysmally low (which is patently untrue, New Jersey governors are paid the fourth highest salary in the country-- 175,000 dollars) and so I told them that I couldn't afford to do it; it was embarrassing and awkward-- and everyone was really pissed off at me for wasting their time-- and, as a compromise, they made me do the job for a month while they found someone else, and that really annoyed me because I had to drive to Trenton every day, which ruined my summer vacation (also silly, as the next gubernatorial election in New Jersey will take place on November 7th).
One of the nice things about the recurring Awkward Moments of Dave feature is that it encourages my friends and colleagues to confess their own humiliating moments to me: for example, my friend Connell donated this gem to the good of the cause, and he prefaced his story by saying he had just read this sentence, and I'm sure if he hadn't read it, then he wouldn't have been emboldened to tell me his horribly embarrassing moment . . . but here it is, for all of you to savor: he was walking out of the grocery story with both hands full, and somehow he shifted lanes and unknowingly found himself walking out the "in" door, and as he walked towards the door a person on the other side triggered the electric-eye and the door flung open, and nailed him right in the face-- and, of course, because his hands were full, he was defenseless-- and had to take the full brunt of the door with his face, and then he stepped back, stunned, and looked around for the correct door and his eyes met those of a lowly cart-boy-- who resembled Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys-- and this lowly cart-boy was sitting on a bench, chewing on his tongue, but he paused in his chewing in order to point out the correct door to Connell, and then went back to his tongue-chewing.
My family recently watched two coming-of age movies: Jonah Hill's Mid90s and Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade. They both capture the lonely awkwardness of middle school (the former from a female perspective and the latter from a male perspective).
These are tough movies to watch, especially if you've got a genuine awkward middle schooler living in your house, enduring these very particular struggles (and we do). Middle school was a long time ago for me, but these films (and my son) remind me that it's a tough age, odd and half-baked. There's this inchoate desire to want to be something and want to belong to something, before you've become anything. Before you know what that something is.
Eighth Grade begins with a video: Kayla's advice vlog. But it's really self-help. No one is watching. Kayla mainly lives inside her phone. Her forays into the outside world are awkward and ugly. She encounters traditional mean girls, who are more adept at living in the real world-- mainly because they are better looking-- but even the mean girls still shield themselves from the ugly reality of middle school with technology.
Kayla has several unpleasant confrontations with people in meat space: a middle school crush who turns out to be a pervert, a creepy senior boy, and a couple of bitchy girls. She handles all of the situations with as much grace as she can muster, and learns that there's a bigger (and possibly better) world just ahead, in high school (that will have it's own perils and pitfalls, digital and analog).
Ostensibly, Mid90s is the more hardcore movie of the two. It certainly hearkens back to the gritty documentary feel of Larry Clark's Kids.
Eighth Grade begins with Kayla's amateur video . . . because with the advent of the cell phone, amateur video is ubiquitous. Mid90s ends with a video, and it took some time and work to make. This symbolizes the difference between the two worlds.
Fourth Grade-- who aspires to be either a film director or work at the DMV like his dad-- diligently compiles footage for the length of the film. The video takes hard work and complete dedication. Fourth Grade is the only one filming. The rest of the gang lives out their life on the streets, and they live large. There are no cell phones to disappear inside, to buffer reality. They do it all in public: skate, trespass, drink, do drugs, party, evade the police, fight, and bond.
Stevie, the twelve year old at the center of this story, frequently gets beaten up by domineering older brother. Stevie takes some hard hard falls. He gets hurt, he recovers. He gets hurt for real.
Both films are about that protean time when you might be anything, anyone. And which is the better place to experiment and explore (and possibly get hurt). Reality or social media?
Which is worse? Which is better?
Should youngsters develop their identities in digital space, like Kayla does? There are so many scenes in Eighth Grade where she's so terribly alone. Her dad tries to help and understand, but it's like he's talking from another planet. Her emotions are real, but she's in no actual danger. We know she's going to pull through and flourish in high school (but that's not the case for everyone . . . social media has been linked with depression).
Mid90s abounds with real danger. Some of these kids are not going to make it. But they're having a helluva time skating and partying. And some of them are learning lessons. Ray goes straight-edge and decides he is going to make it out. He's got aspirations and has given up on the drinking and slacker nihilism. Fuckshit, not so much. And Stevie is a coin toss. But they're all going to have amazing memories of a wild time when they skated, hung out, partied, and seized life by the balls. And no one remembers anything from the internet.
Maybe I'm making too much of this. Maybe social media is just another teen fad, like skateboarding. The rest of us old people, searching for eternal youth, have appropriated it. Maybe we'll all wake up in a few years from this fever dream of posting and liking and trying to go viral, and think: what the hell was that? And the kids will lead the way out. They'll start doing something else. VR sports. Massive holographic sculptures. Levitation.
Or I could be totally wrong. Maybe social media really is the crucible where future generations will form their identity. And what is the role of adults in these worlds? We know what to do when kids are skateboarding and drinking and doing vandalism. We yell at them, call the cops, run them off. It's easy enough. The kids scatter and go somewhere else to hang out.
But the internet is too big for that.
Maybe when this generation sees the effects of the social media lifestyle-- the vacuous distracting time-suck; the lack of concentration; the depression and loneliness and FOMO; the lack of anything substantive, memorable or insignificant-- they will change. Most of us have learned by now that if the internet was a book, no one would buy it or read it. Case and point: this shitty, half-thought out post. It's self-help, like Kayla's video, but putting it online gets me to think harder. It helps me work through it. But does the rest of the world need to see it? Probably not.
So things might change. People might wake up. I have hope for that. What gives me the most hope?
Crack cocaine.
Crack gives me hope. Or the lack of crack. Because the social media environment of the internet might be like the rise and fall of a heavily abused drug. Which particular drug? It doesn't matter. The podcast The Uncertain Hour has been doing a detailed history of the opioid crisis. They began with an episode about the crack epidemic of the 1980's.
What happened to crack?
One theory is that the reason the abuse of certain drugs rise and fall is that it takes a certain amount of time to see the devastating effects of addiction to that drug. Crack was supposed to destroy our nation, but people saw the effects: crack babies and crack dens and crack addiction, the drug was stigmatized. Crack still exists, but it's not an epidemic, not even on the radar. The same with acid. People saw the effects and most stopped. Hopefully, the same will happen with heroin, fentanyl, and oxy. People will get educated, get woke, and move on.
Could the same thing happen with the internet? Will some future generation collectively shut off the screens, dust off their skateboards, and head out into the world? Recognize the banality and stupidity of flicking through tiny images?
My older son was certainly inspired by Mid90s. But he was already a skateboarder, with his own rig. The film was preaching to the choir. He likes to film himself doing tricks. He rides around without a helmet. He lets our dog pull him while he's on his board. It's totally dangerous and he's going to get hurt. He's already been hit by a car, and he wasn't even on his board. It's scary, so I don't watch. But I still think it's probably better than living inside a phone. The trouble inside a phone is more abstract, but the emotions are real. And stuff posted on the internet can go viral, it can get amplified. And it has the potential to be permanent. A broken arm heals, but you never know on the internet. Some of that stuff never goes away.
Still, I'm not sure where I stand on this. Doing stuff on the internet can be fun and creative and rewarding, just as doing stuff in meat space can be the same. There's potential and danger in both zones. And both zones often bleed into each other.
One of the best takes on this is the Atlanta episode "The Woods." Check it out. If adults struggle to navigate between reality and social media, how are middle schoolers supposed to figure it out?
Analog and binary and the stuff in between. Mainly, we are left with questions.
Which is a safer space for kids? Which one is healthier and more relevant? Which space is better a place for experimentation? A better place to form your identity?
Are these even our questions to ask? Maybe not. The kids will figure out. I hope I'm around to see what evolves, but I know my understanding will be biased. I'm too fucking old to get it.
Other readers have shared their Favorite Stories about Dave, and most have these have been in the Awkward Moments of Dave genre, but I would like to tell my favorite story about Dave, and it's not awkward at all, in fact-- believe it or not-- I am the clever hero of the story, in the tradition of cunning tricksters like Odysseus, Loki, and Br'er Rabbit, but don't worry, this theme won't be a recurring feature because it never happened again, so enjoy the one time I came through in the clutch: several years ago, when my two boys were quite young-- just able to walk and talk-- and we took a trip to the Newark Museum, which has a mini-zoo, art galleries, a fire museum, and a natural history section . . . and we were walking from the mini-zoo to the elevators, and the only way was through the art galleries, and so I was making the best of it, pointing out things my kids could recognize in the paintings, boats and cars and colors; the museum was empty-- a ghost town-- and so the guards, who were probably bored out of their minds, started chasing Alex and Ian around a bit, which my kids loved . . . Ian went one way and Alex ran the other, and I chased Ian because he was younger and then I heard BEEP BEEP BEEP from the room next door and when I got in there, I saw Alex touching a large painting, and this had triggered the alarm system-- so I told him you couldn't touch the paintings and apologized to the guards, but they weren't upset at him, of course, since they had instigated the running around, and when we finally got to the elevators, there was a post-modern sculpture next to the doors-- it was an intimidating pile of seven or eight televisions, and the top and bottom screens showed a silver Buddha head floating on the ocean, being buffeted by the waves, and all the screens in the middle showed the same rotating Buddha head, but each screen was tinted a different color-- red, green, blue, yellow, purple-- and right next to the tower of TV's was a video camera and a rotating Buddha head-- the same Buddha head that was on all the TV screens-- and so I wondered if the camera was actually filming the head and sending a live-feed to the televisions, or if they were just playing a loop of film, so-- naturally-- I stuck my hand in front of the camera (I also wanted to see if my hand would appear in a different color on each screen) and I was rewarded with both the image of my hand on every screen and the BEEP BEEP BEEP of the alarm-- like a child, I had set off the system, but when the guard jogged in to check out why the alarm was going off, I pointed to my son Alex and said, "Alex, I told you, you can't touch anything here-- it's a museum!" and then we got into the elevator and made a clean getaway; this is the only time in my life I was able to think on my feet and say the right thing at the right time, and-- even though I threw my eldest child under the bus-- it felt wonderful.
Today we'll take a trip down memory lane and visit another Awkward Moment of Dave; this is Whitney's favorite and it took place in college . . . Whitney and I needed to volunteer for six hours of psychology testing in order to get credit for a Psych 102 class and it was coming down to the deadline so we signed up for what was available: an experiment for people who claimed to be "date anxious"; we convinced the professor that we were indeed "date anxious," which was probably true since neither of us really did much "dating," and as part of the experiment we actually went on "dates" with other "date anxious" folks and then filled out surveys about the experience; for our first "date" we picked up some underclassmen in Squirrel's little dirty car and our plan was to take them to the movies to see Harlem Nights-- which seemed to be an easy way to ensure that we wouldn't have to talk to the girls, which was important because we were both quite hungover from some serious partying the night before-- and it was extremely cold and the ground was covered with snow and ice, so we were all bundled up, Whitney driving, me sitting shotgun, the girls huddled in the back-- wondering about the two terse strangers that they were now at the mercy of-- and I must point out that sometime in the late night partying the night before, I had consumed a 7-11 microwave burrito, which I had doused with 7-11 chili and 7-11 jalapenos and 7-11 cheese, and I was having some stomach troubles and so I found it necessary to open my window and let some fresh air into the car, some very very cold fresh air, but also very very important fresh air, if this date was to continue without incident, but the girls in back took the brunt of the cold wind and yelled at me to shut the window, and Whitney turned and asked me what the hell I was doing and all I could think to say was: "Just wanted to check how cold it is out there."
This blog is usually about my social failures, awkward moments, and general nerdiness but-- although I know it's not as entertaining-- I would like to write about a moment of triumph, so please bear with me; we took our children to the H20 Waterpark in the Poconos over the break and one of the attractions is the Komodo Dragon, which is defined as "an indoor Flowrider for Riding Waves"; it's a plastic hill with water jetting across its surface and you can boogie board or surf on it while the people in line watch you wipe-out . . . the surfing is especially non-intuitive and difficult and of all the people we watched, no one was able to remain on the board (except the employee running the thing) and after my son Alex rode on the boogie board, I tried my hand at the surfboard and I was able to remain on it for quite a while-- perhaps because of years of skim boarding and snow boarding, although everything worked opposite as far as turning and balance-- and my generally grouchy six year old son, who is rarely moved by anything his parents know or do, said, "I was impressed Dad, you were the only one who didn't fall."
