Here a few thoughts about teaching my first week of hybrid-model school:
1) hybrid doesn't work very well . . . you can either pay attention to the kids in the room-- and we are tending to have two or three kids in the room-- or you can pay attention to the kids on the little screen, but it's difficult to pay attention to both groups . . . what tends to happen is that the kids in the room become "virtual" kids and they just participate on the screen, and then there's no reason to have them there in the first place;
2) it's hard to hear the virtual kids unless they have a nice microphone . . . one virtual girl told us she learned to sew during the pandemic and that she sewed a "flag" and I told her that a flag seemed pretty easy to sew, because it's a rectangle and she said, "let me go get it" and she retrieved a "frog" not a flag-- which looked much more difficult to sew;
3) it's hard to understand the in-person kids because they are wearing masks, so I'm constantly asking them to repeat things;
4) got two drama kids to do an impromptu scene on the Microsoft teams;
5) a number of us have insanely large classes, I have 31 kids in a college credit writing course-- so this is going to be difficult to manage virtually and grading-wise, and it also ensures that we are never going back to school because-- pandemic or not-- there's no way to stuff 31 seniors into my classroom
6) I'm still teaching elective classes: Philosophy and Creative Writing . . . I'm not sure why if the actual English courses are packed . . . didn't anyone think of this?
7) I'm taking a lot of walks with my in-person kids-- I put the virtual kids to work and then we go outside and discuss the reading like normal humans;
8) my son Ian-- who is a sophomore and is all remote-- was on a virtual "scavenger hunt" and he got his beloved weighted blanket and put it on his head-- as instructed-- and it fell off his head and landed on the laptop-- MY good laptop-- and ripped the screen from the body of the computer . . . Ian was crying and totally regretful and I felt really bad for him . . . but at this rate he's going to go through 90 laptops this virtual school year . . . I did manage to duct tape the screen to the computer, so it works . . . sort of;
9) I've now sent several rambling emails to administration, about class size of the senior English courses courses and about opening doors, courtyards and windows because we are in a global pandemic;
10) Genesis, Microsoft Teams, and Canvas are impressively dysfunctional and unsynchronized; we are doing all our own tech support and trying to get things to clean up and work, but everything is fragmented, disorganized and incomprehensible;
11) in an attempt to organize things, I deleted all the channels where various teachers are supposed to meet on Microsoft Teams . . . who knew I had this power?
12) I was running late for work this morning because I was filming a video of myself for work;
13) it's fun to break up pretend fights off-camera-- you just get up quickly, bang a bunch of stuff, and then come back and tell the kids you broke up a fight;
14) we need an all virtual day to catch-up . . . this isn't sustainable;
15) people are already getting laryngitis from teaching with a mask on . . . once coachign starts back up again, my throat is going to be raw every day;
16) my eyes are so tired that I feel like I'm going blind;
17) at first I thought the four rotations of in-person kids would give up and go virtual because there are so many 1-3 person classes, which are awkward . . . but the kids I talked to kind of like it because they only go to school every eight days-- so it's like a weird little masked adventure-- but the teachers are masked and teaching EVERY day, for extra long periods . . . it can't last;
18) my own children are enjoying virtual school -- they can sleep until 8:55 and then school is from 9 AM to 1 PM . . . my high school is still making kids get up to attend class at 7:26 AM . . . it's cruel and unusual punishment for a teenager;
19) Stacey almost cried twice today: once because she forgot her laptop charger-- which is now a vital piece of equipment-- and then later in the day when she taught twenty minutes on mute and then had to repeat the entire lesson;
20) I have a girl with a one-on-one aid that accompanies her to my room and I teach this girl in two different classes, but she only comes to school once every eight days-- like all the in-person students-- but her aid comes to my room every day, though the aid doesn't have a laptop yet . . . so the aid mainly just watches me say weird stuff into a computer;
21) East Brunswick Vo-Tech shut down yesterday, so I think we are the only school building with kids in it in the county . . . and so far it has been quite an adventure.
Aristotle's advice on how to lead a happy, virtuous life holds up pretty well. Like the Buddha, Aristotle was interested in the middle path, the mean between excess and deficiency. And like the Buddha, Aristotle saw the pursuit of the good life as an ever-changing journey. Also, Aristotle and the Buddha are two people who have never been in my kitchen . . . if they had been, and I were to buttonhole either one of them, I'd have a certain gripe to discuss. Why else would I bring them up? To enlighten you? If you're looking for that sort of thing, the most I can do is recommend The Celestine Prophesy.
Aristotle was not Belgian! The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself!"
But before we get to my complaints with the golden mean, we need to understand how Aristotle defines happiness. He does a fine job with it. Happiness, according to Aristotle, is not just pure hedonistic pleasure, but as flourishing. A state of Eudaimonia. And this sort of happiness is the end goal of all pursuits. Aristotle was certainly not a Belgian, but there is a sort of "every man for himself" quality to his ethics. So Otto wasn't completely off base. But Aristotle explains why a you should be mainly concerned with your own path to happiness and not particularly worried about other people. He posits that if a person uses his method of the middle path to attain a state of happiness, it will follow that this virtuous person will have true friendships with people of similar virtuous character. This will be good for society. Take care of your own happiness, and the people you wish to associate with will be reflective of your virtuous ethics. Thus, there will be a flourishing society of good people (except for women and slaves . . . he wasn't so keen on their potential). He explains this in Book I of Nichomachean Ethics:
Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else. Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for itself and never for the sake of something else . . ."
So happiness is the thing that we don't seek in order to acquire something else. Happiness is the something else, the ultimate aim. We seek money in order to use it for things that make us flourish, not to roll around in it (unless you're Scrooge McDuck). We seek a nice car so we can drive our friends around; spending time with our friends (at high speeds, listening to music on a bangin' system) makes us happy.
Aristotle lived a long time ago-- he wrote the Nichomachean Ethics in 340 B.C.-- and so he would probably struggle with paradoxical post-modern folks who do seek happiness in order to acquire something else . . . these are the people who seek happiness so they can post pictures of themselves-- super-fucking-happy pictures of themselves-- on social media so that their ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends from high school can witness just how fucking-super-happy they are and then these ex-boyfriends and girlfriends will get really jealous and finally realize exactly what they missed out on by dumping these super-happy people. But that kind of behavior is probably only possible with the internet, so we can't blame Aristotle for not predicting just how bananas people would become once they had access to platforms like Facebook and Snapchat and felt the need to show the world just how happy they are (despite the Zoloft). So let's consider these people who seek happiness in order to rub it in other people's faces outliers and move on with our lives. Because if you're reading this blog, then you're definitely not the sort who likes to infinitely scroll through Facebook pictures, right?
Aristotle sees virtue as habitual action: "Moral virtue is the outcome of habit." He is a consequentialist, unconcerned with deontological principles (e.g. Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative). Good people deliberately commit good behaviors. That is their purpose. He is a teleologist. Or so says my neighbor's dog.
We are defined by our actions: "It is by doing just acts that we become just, by doing temperate acts that we become temperate, by doing courageous acts that we become courageous." But how do we figure out what is just, temperate, and courageous? Aristotle concedes that it's not easy. We need to seek the mean between the excess and deficiency. And not the mathematical average, but the mean relative to ourselves.
If being "courageous" is the target trait and the deficiency of courage is cowardice and the excess is being foolhardy, then Aristotle believes we need to chose actions that are neither "neither too much or too little." There are so many ways of doing it wrong, and only one way of doing it right. And it's partially determined by who you are. If you're a soldier, then your level of expected courage is so much higher than if you're a dude prone to motion-sickness at an amusement park. A soldier may need to fearlessly charge at a machine gun nest. Perhaps he shouldn't throw himself on a grenade during the charge-- that might be foolhardy because he could just run away from the grande and direct others to do the same-- but he can't not charge with his company. That's what he's trained for. The dude at the amusement park needs to take a Dramamine and ride the looper with his children, but he doesn't need to go beyond that . . . he doesn't need to forego his seat belt. That would be foolhardy (though it's intrinsically less dangerous to charging a machine gun nest. It's all relative).
Aristotle adds another rule. There are certain characteristics that are simply evil. There's no middle path with those. There's no right amount of betrayal or adultery. So there are traits to be avoided. Even positive traits provide difficulty. It's incredibly difficult to find the mean in anything. According to Aristotle, it takes a man of science. He also believes it is "only a man of science, who can find the mean or center of a circle," so apparently most Greek laymen did not have access to a compass.
All of us can understand this struggle. My teenage teenage children desire "pleasantness of amusement" but the waver between the deficiency and the excess, what Aristotle terms as "buffoonery" and "boorishness." Only occasionally are they "witty." The great divide in American politics is essentially defined by this conflict over money: "anybody can give or spend money, but to give it to the right persons, to give the right amount of it and to give it at the right time and for the right cause and in the right way, this is not what anybody can do, nor is it easy."
Americans tend to carom back and forth between the extremes. Last week, I had to cook dinner every night (a birthday gift for my wife) and this led to some over-indulgence in alcohol. I swore this week that I would abstain completely. But that's unrealistic. And so I found the middle ground between dipsomania and tee-totaling. Moderation. Moderate alcohol consumption is fueling this post.
The problem with this Aristotelean method of trying to attain the mean is that it's two-dimensional. Our lives don't operate on a line, they operate in a three-dimensional space. Whenever we work on some two-dimensional triplet continuum, there is some other force pulling on this line. So say we want to work on eating healthy. The deficiency of healthy eating is gluttony. Stuffing your face with Oreos and pudding. The excess of healthiness is anorexic obsessiveness. Only eating kale. You want to be in the middle, eating in a smaller window of time, no late-night snacking, fewer carbs, more protein and vegetables. So you end up eating a shitload of meat. Every kind of animal in the barn and then some. Bacon . . . ham . . . pork chops.
And you don't want to do that, but it's a consequence of trying to stop eating crap. When you're fixing your golf swing, you can only work on one thing at a time. But the other things screw up the one thing you're working on. It's a conundrum. And Aristotle didn't really offer any help. Physics does . . . sort of. My analogy for this dilemma (trilemma?) is called the "three body problem." If you need to compute how two bodies will move in relation to one another, say the earth and the moon, this is relatively easy (for a mathematician . . . I have enough trouble tracking down a high fly ball in left field). But when you add a third body to the system, the problem becomes notoriously difficult to analyze and solve.Wired unravels it in this article. Good luck. And for an extremely detailed narrative look at the consequences of the chaos endured by a planet orbiting a three-body star system, check out Cixin Liu's sci-fi masterpiece The Three-Body Problem (or wait a few years and watch the Amazon series based on the trilogy).
The way I see it, it's pretty easy to compute the relative mean between two extremes. There's complete abstinence of alcohol. Prohibition. No drinks. There's excess. Ten drinks a night. And then there's moderation. A beer or two a couple nights a week. Maybe a few more on the weekend. But then add the pull of a third body. The holiday season and multiple parties. This throws a monkey wrench in things. You need to socialize. What is the mean of socializing? The deficiency is introverted reclusion. Avoiding people entirely. Then you could control your drinking perfectly. The excess is extroverted delirium. You need to attend everything. You have a fear of missing out on anything. And the mean is some sort of convivial participation. But this is going to screw with your plan on drinking moderately. And the drinking screws with the eating. And the next thing you know, it's January and you've gained ten pounds and the gym is packed.
Basically, once you add a third body to a relationship, it's extremely difficult to compute the forces and understand what habitual actions you should take. Which is why people like categorical rules. It's often easier. When you're pressed to order at a restaurant, it's difficult to fulfill both your ketogenic diet and your green ethics.
The Hidden Brain episode "A Founding Contradiction: Thomas Jefferson's Stance on Slavery" investigates an infinitely controversial historical example of the moral three body problem. There is no question that in the realm of politics, Jefferson flourished in the virtuous mean between oppressive monarch and reckless anarchist. He forged documents and laws designed to give the right amount of freedom to the man in the middle. He revised property laws, wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, outlined the proper relationship between the Church and the State, and generally conceived ideas and policies that were built to last. And during this fruitful period, he owned 175 slaves and fathered six children with one of them (Sally Hemings).
Jefferson clearly spoke against slavery (though he considered himself a "good and benevolent" slave owner).
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal."
In 1807, three weeks before Britain did the same, Jefferson signed a law banning the importation of slaves into the United States, effectively banning the slave trade. Yet Jefferson only freed a few slaves during his life; when he died, 130 of his slaves were sold as part of the Monticello estate.
Jefferson knew slavery was wrong and must end, but he wasn't ready to expend the personal capital to end it. He was working on a lot of other things. So he never computed the Aristotelian triplet on slavery that would lead him to habitual moral action. Perhaps the excess is "slave master" and the deficiency is "wanton sluggard" and somewhere in the middle is "cooperative employer." He felt the pull of the immoral nature of slavery, just as I know eating factory farmed animals is wrong-- these animals are the slaves of our time-- but if I'm going to be working on my own diet and fitness, I'm going to be eating animals.
This is not to minimize, as I would never do, the depredations of the institution of slavery - but I imagine, 100 years from now, people are going to look back at certain things that we do and say, why didn't people understand? You know, why didn't people do something? And there are a lot of things - there are a lot of times human beings don't act according to what they know is the right thing to do. Monticello was Jefferson's place. This was his way of life. It's what he knew. And he felt that he helped to found a country. He helped the United States come into existence. Breaking with Great Britain, setting up a government, that was a pretty big deal, and that the next generation of people had something to do, as well, and that was to make the progress on the issue of slavery that he thought could be made. Now, we're not satisfied with that because we say, you had the talent to do this thing. Why didn't you use the talent to do the other thing? But that's not, you know, what he thought he was here to do. The American Revolution was the most important thing in his life. And the tragedy is he couldn't see that, after the union is formed, that the thing that would split it apart would be the institution of slavery.
It's easy to espouse theoretical, deontological rules, but habitual action is hard. While it's difficult to argue for relative ethics-- I'm never going to excuse clitoral castration-- it's also difficult to universally condemn Jefferson for owning slaves. He was trapped within an economic and social machine reliant on slaves. And so while he wrote like an abolitionist, he also framed a pragmatic triplet that we might find abominable and contradictory. Jefferson saw that the excess as a slaveholder was to be a "cruel overlord" and the deficiency was to be an "apathetic and irresponsible patriarch." You couldn't just free your slaves, you also had to provide for them. There was no system in place. (Sally Hemings was freed but then negotiated to return to slavery at Monticello, but with "extraordinary privileges.") So Jefferson arrived at the mean . . . what he considered to be "benevolent ownership." We find it repugnant, but people in the future will laugh sardonically at our attempt to be environmental by foregoing plastic straws, while we drive our gas guzzling vehicles from store to store buying plastic gewgaws.
Jefferson was busy building the framework for many, many progressive policies . . . policies that were far-ranging and significant. The Louisiana Purchase. He did what he could, and did it well. We need to remember that sometimes we can't change a habitual action without the help of technology. As far as slavery goes, we have it easy now . . . it's not even an option (unless you're in the sex slave trade . . . and then, shame on you!) We would never go back to slavery now that we have better agricultural technology. It's not even a moral choice. Jefferson couldn't see a simple way to attack the problem, and there would be no simple way until the plantation system-- a system of which he was a participant-- was completely dismantled.
People in the future may look back at us as savages because we tortured so many pigs and cows and sheep and chickens. We created huge cesspools of fecal waste and huge clouds of methane. But these future folk will be sitting on high, criticizing our evil ways, while they partake in delicious lab grown beef. No animals harmed, no animal waste, and no habitual action to compute. The Impossible Burger may solve this problem sooner than later. It's apparently "hyper-realistic" and bleeds just like real meat. It's a hell of a lot easier to fall into a virtuous habit when it's widely available and cheap.
So this is my gripe with Aristotle's middle path, the mean between excess and deficiency. It's nearly impossible to tread. There are always other virtues pulling you off course. Like a tennis serve or a golf swing, you can only work on one improvement at a time . . . you can't fix everything at once. And these traits operate in a three-dimensional space, and each attempt at moving toward the mean influences the other attempts. We can't figure it all out. And our willpower might be a limited resource. This works on a larger scale as well. As a technological society, we are struggling with free speech on the internet. The excess of free speech allows every hateful opinion and every fake news story. The deficiency of free speech is censorship . . . as the internet operates in China. So we try to plot the mean, some sort of middle ground where speech is free as long as it isn't malevolent fictitious propaganda or hate speech directed to incite riot and violence. But then toss in another dilemma to solve, say how much the government should regulate big tech monopolies-- the institutions that are controlling the platforms where this conflict is occurring-- and you've created a many-body problem that's incalculable. Who should control what we read? How free should our speech be? Who should monitor this? Should tech companies have more power than the government over our First Amendment Rights?
Who knows?
That's the end of the line for me. We need a modern Aristotle to figure this one out.
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood . . . which one do you take?
You have time to ponder. You're not being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear. So do you choose the road less traveled by? Or head down the well trodden one? Either way, your choice will make all the difference.
Steven Johnson discusses these life-altering moments in his new book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He thinks we are woefully unprepared for these kinds of choices. He's probably right. We read "The Road Not Taken" in my Creative Writing class, and then we discuss times when we made these kinds of decisions. We all readily concede that once you journey down a particular fork in the road, you probably won't backtrack and take another path, but I don't advise them prescriptively on how to navigate these crucial moments. Instead, I present them with a literary example. We read it, discuss it, and run through the variables and options. It turns out-- according to Steven Johnson-- that this may be the best tactic imaginable.
Aunt Belle's Two Roads
I use an example from a book of anecdotes and recipes called Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's not fiction, but for folks in suburban New Jersey in 2019, it might as well be. It's damn close to a time travel story. If you haven't guessed, Mildred Armstrong Kalish is very old. She's 96. Coincidentally, my grandmother also goes by Mildred (though her Christian name is Carmella) and she's also 96.
When Mildred was a child, Aunt Belle tells her a story.
Once, before Aunt Belle died, I got up enough courage to ask her a very personal question.
"Aunt Belle, how come you never got married?"
She looked at me for a long time. She was standing by the kitchen stove, her delicate hands clasping and unclasping the stove handle, and she told me the following story:
"Well, I did have one beau. He told Art (her brother and my grandpa) to tell me Barkis is willin' and that he would be over Saturday night. Well, that made me so mad! I thought he had a lot of nerve asking me to marry him through Art like that! So when he came over Saturday night I wouldn't take his hat; I wouldn't take his coat. I wouldn't ask him to sit down. I treated him just as cold. I treated him so bad he never came back."
She stood absolutely still for a long time; then she continued:
"I'm kind of sorry I was so cold to him; he went and married Abbie Cross, made her a good home and was a good husband to her. They had a nice family."
She remained contemplative for a while and then continued, "It's been kind of lonesome sometimes."
Talk about roads not taken.
Aunt Belle obviously regrets her decision. She made it out of spite, and-- by choosing a moment of indignant retribution over a lifetime of possible happiness/contentedness -- she impulsively inverts Pascal's famous wager. After we read this, I remind my students that they are lucky to live in a densely populated area, where they will have plenty of opportunities for courtship and marriage. They probably won't have to resort to marrying a first cousin (which is apparently legal in New Jersey) but in Depression-era Iowa the pickin's were slim.
We're Talking About Practice
Big decisions are tough. We don't get enough practice. Most people only get married once . . . or twice . . . but rarely thrice. The same goes for buying a home. I got lucky with my marriage, but we all know the divorce rates; marriage is a coin-flip. Buying a home is similar (and often simultaneous). If I had more practice with home buying, I would have checked out the concrete more thoroughly. I would have been more annoyed by the basement crawl space. I would have found the roof suspect. I would have known just what an ordeal it is to redo a kitchen. But I knew none of this, and simply liked the location and the deck. Next time . . . if there is one, I will be more discerning.
I learned an easy technique to help with this decision-making-dilemma on The Art of Manliness (Podcast #465: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead) The guest, Warren Berger, suggests imagining yourself in the new scenario-- whether it be a new house, a new marriage, a new location, a new wife, a new job. Really vividly imagine this new life. And then ask yourself: would you go back to your old life? Would you make the switch in reverse?
Many times we get hung up on the small details and anxiety of change, and fail to think about the consequences of the actual decision. Aunt Belle got hung up on the way Art asked her to marry, but she never imagined married life with Art and compared this long-term scenario to spinster-life on a farm in Depression-era Iowa. If she had done that, she might have overlooked Art's graceless go-between proposal and thought more about the big picture.
Advice for the President
The most notable thing about Steven Johnson's Farsighted is that he lauds the power of literary novels to help us imagine and simulate these big decisions. Johnson also has more typical fare in the book: the history of weather forecasting and the theoretical, strategic, and tactical planning of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But his main example is George Eliot's Middlemarch.
I'm an English teacher, and I often wonder if my job is bullshit. Do kids really need to read Beowulf? The answer might be no. Lately, the Language Arts curriculum has been moving toward more practical coursework, non-fiction texts, and synthesis essays. I see the value in this. But the Johnson book validates the traditional inclination of English class: reading novels. The ideas he presents feel groundbreaking and pushing them on both my students and my colleagues. Sometimes we need a reminder of why it's worth it to read literature with kids. While there is a myriad of reasons to do this, Johnson makes the compelling case that people faced with big decisions should hone their skills by reading literary fiction. I'll explain why later in the post, but someone should pass this advice along to our fearless leader, Donald Trump. According to this list, Trump is not a fan of fiction, literary or otherwise.
Victorian Spoilers Ahead!
Johnson made Middlemarch sound so intriguing-- despite the fact that it's a 900 page Victorian novel-- that I decided to read it in tandem with Farsighted. This was no easy task, and while I recommend Middlemarch, I definitely had to use the internet to understand several parts. It's often dense. The sentences are beautiful, but often long and wandering. I'm guessing you're not going to read it (and the synopsis in Farsighted will suffice) but I still should warn you that there will be spoilers ahead.
Many years ago, my friend and colleague Dan saw me reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was five hundred pages in.
"Why are you reading that?" he asked me. "She's just going to throw herself in front of a train."
"What? Why did you tell me that!"
"Everyone knows that," he said.
I did not know that.
When in Doubt, Wait and Think Anew
The biggest decision (among many big decisions) in Middlemarch is whether recently widowed Dorothea Casaubon should follow the codicil in her dead husband's will and lose her fortune, or ignore the codicil and marry the man she truly loves . . . a man her dead husband despised. Mary Anne Evans doesn't make it easy. She details all the forces that might weigh on a life decision of this magnitude. Johnson explains charts these forces:
At its core, Dorothea's choice is simply binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequences that surrounds that decision. A full spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:
MIND → FAMILY → CAREER → COMMUNITY → ECONOMY → TECHNOLOGY → HISTORY
In Middlemarch, each of these levels plays a defining role in the story.
Johnson then points out the difference in scope between Middlemarch and a more narrowly bound (but still wonderful) literary novel like Pride and Prejudice. We get insight into the personal lives of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, but we are "limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connections between the two lovers, and the apparent approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors." Mary Anne Evans goes all the way. Things get so complicated that all we can do is what Dorothea does: "wait and think anew."
Great novels don't give us prescriptions for what to do in complex situations. They are not morality plays or fables. There is no set of invariable rules. Once again, Johnson explains this better than I can:
Great novels-- or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing-- give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacies. They map all the thread-like pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.
It's a lot easier to read literary novels than it is to amass the experiences within them. My buddy Whitney recently reflected on these moments in a numerically epic post . . . he's lived a life that might encompass several novels, and so he's got more moments like this under his belt than most folks. Most of us don't get this much practice, and Johnson suggests that the next best thing is to ingest fiction, things that never happened.
Just the Fiction, Ma'am
Why fiction? Why not stick to the facts? We could spend out lives in the world of reality, watching documentaries and reading non-fiction, and never want for compelling stories. Why involve ourselves in lives and worlds and decisions that don't exist? Johnson takes a guess: "Stories exercise and rehearse the facility for juggling different frames of truth, in part, because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act."
Glitch in the Matrix?
We can run our limited perspective through many other minds and fictional lives, hypothesizing both about the reality of truthfulness of that world and the reality and truthfulness of the decision making within it. It's why I love Middlemarch and Brothers Karamazov and it's why I think the TV show Ozark -- though it's well acted, set in an interesting location, and looks like quality work-- might be totally stupid. Something is off with the simulation. There's a glitch in the matrix. There's something foggy floating in the suspension of disbelief.
The new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green, handles this in an incredibly in-your-face manner. While the book is ostensibly a first-contact, robots-from-space sci-fi story, the irony is that the weirdest, most alien technology is actually the social-media-verse created by the humans. April May, the heroically awkward anti-hero, has to navigate her viral first contact fame and make several big decisions about the arc of her life. The novel inhabits the same space maturity-wise as the works by John Green, the author's brother. The story is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy it, but the portrayal of politics and the dialogue can be a little schlocky. And the ending devolves into more of a Ready Player One puzzle-fest. While the book is probably more suited for a an advanced young-adult reader, I still like how it tackles decision-making . . . it literally exemplifies Johnson's reason for reading fiction. Here's how April May breaks down her first big moment: Option 1 (the sane option):
I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died. Option 2 (the not-sane option):
Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance wasn't going to come along . . . ever.
Hank Green
Don't Be Shallow and Pedantic
I'm going to let Steven Johnson finish this post off, with an especially long passage that I really think you should read. I made my students read it, and I gave it to a number of English teachers in my department. It's a great explanation of why we should spend time reading novels . . . literary novels. What designates a "literary" novel is another question for another post, but for now we can use the same benchmark that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to recognize hard-core pornography. He said he couldn't easily define it but, "I know it when I see it." The same goes for literature. As long as it's not "shallow and pedantic," then I think anything goes.
The novel is a better tool for simulating decision-making than a movie or TV show. Images move too fast and we never get to truly inhabit the interior of a character's mind. A novel allows for turning back and contemplation. It allows you to stop and hypothesize whenever you like. It's literally your world. Netflix tried to emulate a bit of this contemplative freedom with the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch", and while it was fun to make the choices, the story felt a bit contrived, and you never felt the threads and pressures that George Eliot portrays with such accuracy. You just picked a path so you could see what happened. The stakes were low. But when you invest in a challenging novel, and really live inside it, then profound things might happen.
This is the other reason novel reading turns out to enhance our decision-making skills . . . many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with an enhanced theory of mind skills. We don't know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their ability to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity . . . The novel is an empathy machine. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I'm-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can't run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It's true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories in our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband's estate and the matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating a move to the suburbs, Middlemarch does not tell you what to do. No form of outside advice-- whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or pop-psychology paperback-- can tell you what to do on these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel--along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored-- does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called "a keen vision and feeling," and keep you from the tendency to "walk about well wadded with stupidity." The novel doesn't give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads . . . more than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multi-layered choice, even if the choice happens to be a fictional one . . . the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world around it.
Sports can often be a weird exercise in futility: you practice and practice but never get to use your skills in the perfect situation (unlike learning how to knit or draw or play a musical instrument, where practice usually rewards you with a linear increase in skill and enjoyment) but once in a great while, the sporting gods shine their light on a lucky soul . . . and right now the light is shining on my son Ian . . . he plays on the middle school soccer team that I coach, and the team is comprised of 6-8th graders and this means there is a HUGE difference in sizes and development among the players-- Ian is on the small size for a sixth grader (78 pounds) and so when he's next to a large 8th grader, he looks like a midget-- the jersey goes down past his knees-- but he was the only sixth grader in attendance at last Friday's home game (I made him come to cheer on his team) and it was a close one, we were playing better soccer but the the other team (South Amboy) had a free kick specialist who bent it like Beckham used to bend it: he scored two forty-five yard curling spinless rocket shots and they also had a six foot tall Asian kid playing goalie who wasn't that coordinated but swatted down everything we shot at him; it was tied 2-2 in the second half and we just couldn't finish, so I threw Ian a bone and put him up top-- I figured it couldn't hurt and I could give him a few minutes of time as a reward for showing up (the rest of his sixth grade friends were playing Nerf war) and within moments, he got to use every soccer skill I've ever taught him, all in one play-- he ran through a ball forty yards out-- I'm a huge proponent of opening your hips and running through the goddamned ball, instead of stabbing at it-- and then he kept it glued to his body, juggling it on his chest, thighs and feet, then he sealed off a giant defender, faked a shot with his strong foot (he's lefty) and then cut it to his right and shot to the far post with his weak foot . . . it was, as my friend Roman described it, a David and Goliath moment . . . unforgettable and awesome . . . and, as if this wasn't enough, on Wednesday we had an away game against Woodrow Wilson, a middle school three times our size, and once again, we were playing much better soccer but the field was awful, the bumpiest I've seen, and we gave up a handball PK and an ugly counterattack goal and were down 2-1 in the second half . . . so I threw Ian in again, for luck, and two minutes later he snuck over to the far post and one of 8th graders zipped a ball across the box, from the left to right, and Ian-- a lefty-- took it off one bounce from ten yards out and slotted it in with his right foot . . . most kids will take a whack at that ball with their strong foot, and often whiff or knock it over the goal, but Ian kept his composure, used the proper foot, and scored another critical weak foot goal . . . this fired us up and our star player drilled one in from the eighteen moments later and that was enough to do it-- we won 3-2 . . . so good stuff for Ian: two huge goals in twelve minutes of play . . . I'm interested in what he'll do in the game this afternoon, as he insists he's going to score again . . . but I've got another son on the team: Alex-- he's a seventh grader and he's a skilled player as well, but despite skillfully juggling with me for an hour on Saturday, he didn't play very well in his game on Sunday-- not for lack of practice, but probably because when we were at a BBQ on Saturday night, he was attacked by a swarm of yellowjackets and got stung eight times (including two stings on his testicles) and so you'd think the sporting gods would reward him for enduring the stings and still showing up to play on Sunday, maybe give him an easy goal, but instead he was recompensed with a cleat to the ankle in the early minutes of the game, and then-- once he limped back out there-- an elbow to the face, so he was a gimpy bee-stung trainwreck, and while he toughed it out and didn't ask to sit, he didn't play particularly well . . . so you never know how it's going to go out there-- one moment you're the hero, the next you're the goat, and it doesn't always correspond with how hard you practice.
Last Friday was one of my strangest afternoons as a soccer coach: though the sun had been out for days, our field was still a mess-- there was standing water full of goose-shit all along the near sideline-- but luckily there was a pile of sand near the goal . . . so all we needed was a way to carry the sand over to the puddles so we could fill them in; I asked my players what we could use to move the sand and one of them suggested "a wheel barrow," which I told him was a great way to move sand, but unfortunately, we didn't have a wheel barrow (and honestly, would I have even asked that question if I had a wheel barrow?) but then in a flash of coaching brilliance I realized I had enough orange practice cones to give every player two, and so we formed a cone brigade and filled the puddles fairly quickly, but apparently this wasn't the best way to warm up for the game because we gave up three goals in the first half (we were playing into a strong wind and trying to score on the muddy side of the field and they had a big fast kid with a mustache, but that's still no excuse for giving up three goals) and then we gave up a fourth goal early in the second half and I was getting ready to call it a day when we finally knocked one in . . . but 4-1 in soccer is still pretty much insurmountable (even with some wind) but then one of my players literally ran a ball into the goal with his chest and our kids realized that they could score and so we knocked in two more to tie it up, and had the ball on their goal line twice in the last minute, and you've never seen kids so happy about a tie.
I was doing a big clean out down in my study-- otherwise known as Greasetruck Studios-- and I decided I would take a crack at solving the mystery of the phantom reeking toolbox.
The haunted article looks like your typical yellow plastic snap-it-shut tool chest.
Aside from the fact that it's inhabited by a spirit . . . a nasty smelling vinegary spirit. It's been that way for many many years. At least a decade. So, inspired by last week's successfully delayed genius, I forged ahead with my exorcism . . . or, if I liked puns, I would call it a stenchorcism.
I emptied the tool chest on the porch table, hoping sunlight would be the best antiseptic. It was not. The smell was pervasive, pungent, and did not dissipate.
I had my son Ian confirm this.
I started smelling stuff. Wrenches and pliers and wire-cutters and box-cutters and tape measures and vises and screwdrivers. I finally located the source of the stink. It was the screwdriver handles. I had my son Ian confirm this.
I decided it must be the little rubber strips on the handles. They must have decayed. So I removed them.
And the smell is coming from inside the house. It's not the rubber strips, it's the material the handles are made of: cellulose acetate butyrate. Apparently, if screwdrivers with handles like this sit in an enclosed space, and there is the right humidity and bacteria levels, the handles decay and outgas. And it smells bad.
It's not so easy to get rid of the film of butyric acid. I washed the handles with some soapy water and sprayed them with 409, but I think the smell might linger for eternity. My older son, sensing the reek, added two items of his own which have the phantasmagoric funk of teen spirit to the tableau-- his cleats and shin guards.
Here is a table full of stuff which will never give up the ghost, and all of it will head back into the house later in the day. Yuck.
It looks like my stint as a community service pandemic shopper is coming to a close. While there were occasional rewarding moments, I'm happy that this chapter of my life where I pretend to be a good person is over. Unlike my wife, I don't think I'm cut out volunteering for things that are not directly tied to my own self-interest (or the self-interest of my kids, wife, friends, students, etc.)
Of course, it also might have been luck of the draw. She's been shopping for a lovely and grateful Trinidadian woman who lives in the senior community building in our town. The woman regales my wife with stories, dirty jokes, and thanks. My wife truly enjoys doing things for this woman.
I've been shopping for a laconic older gentleman who seems to be something of a shut-in. He lives on the second floor of a house divided into three apartments. An old lady with an eye-patch lives on the first floor. I think she's the landlord. She doesn't approve of all the diet soda and iced tea that my guy buys each week.
I think it's time for my guy to get out and about. He lives right around the block from Stop'n Shop and he mainly eats soup, pineapple chunks, crackers, and lunch meat. They've removed the one-way arrows from the aisles in the store, so I think restrictions are loose enough for him to go for it. He needs to see for himself that there is no such thing as "Medium" eggs. These days it's all "Large" and "Extra-Large."
I don't think he understands that I'm a volunteer and that I don't get paid to buy and deliver his groceries (though I've told him this . . . the graduate student that lives upstairs next to him understands this and has been appreciative of my service and the lady with the eye-patch understands the deal as well).
So we parted ways today with nary a thank you. And his emails have been getting a little weird. I'll give you a sample, so you know what you're getting into when you volunteer for community service. It's not all medals and parades.
Here's a recent one . . . so he's discussing a receipt from two weeks ago:
I went through the register receipt for the groceries you bought on 5/22/20. On the bill from Stop’n Shop on 5/22/20, This item was rung up 3 times—I don’t know what it was. SB is the code for Store Brand: SB.CD.HMST.CHKNN 1.19. Also, on 5/22/20, this item was rung up twice—CMP is the code for Campbells: CMP.GRFORCK.FRN 1.89. I don't know what that item was. The Campbell’s products I bought were rung up elsewhere.
This is what I wrote back:
Not sure what to tell you about this. I don't know the codes for various soups and this was two weeks ago, so I don't think we're going to be able to figure it out. I'll try to make sure that nothing is rung incorrectly-- I'm not sure how this happened or if it was some other kind of soup that got rung up, as they don't always have exactly what you ask for so I try to get something close.
I really love his reply to this. He carefully explains how to go to a grocery store and purchase items, though I've been shopping for him with some measure of success since March! In the store, I ask that you stay with the cart containing my products. Then watch the cashier's moving belt observing the products on it so that only my products are there. When the cashier is scanning the products, see to it that only my products are scanned. Hopefully, your vigilance will be enough to prevent this problem from happening again.
I'm really proud of my tone in the reply. I tried to channel Saul Goodman, when he was lawyering for all the old folks. He was always patient, good-humored, and empathetic. Never sarcastic.
You got it. I will keep an eye on things and make sure nothing gets rung up twice or mixed together with any other products.
I really wanted to throw around the word "vigilance" in my reply. Especially in regard to Italian Wedding Soup. But I didn't. I rose above it.
While I'm not going to rush out and volunteer for anything in the near future, I'm happy that I did some service. Before the pandemic, I never went to the grocery store. I was awful at it, so it was easier for my wife to go.
But today, I whizzed through the store, grabbing the stuff on my old man's shopping list like a pro: liverwurst here, bananas there, diet root beer in this spot, reach down for the applesauce, grab a few pears, etc.
Fast and fearless.
When I look at the guy I was shopping for, I certainly think: there by the grace of God goes I . . . but perhaps learning to navigate the local grocery store is a step in the right direction for me to avoid that fate.
In the winter I play pick-up basketball and indoor soccer in the same spot-- an elementary school gym-- which is conveniently located two blocks from my house; there are only two people who play in both games, myself and a guy named Bruce . . . so we'd be in the middle sliver of the Venn diagram, but the rest of the folks don't occupy the same world; here are the differences between the two games . . . draw what inferences you like:
1) for soccer, you need to bring a white and a dark shirt-- so that you can wear the same color as your team-- but for basketball, you have to memorize who is on your team-- this is fairly typical and I suppose it is because in soccer you are looking down more and have to make longer passes and might not be able to recognize someone's face from that far away, but my eyes aren't great and I wouldn't mind if the basketball game adopted the soccer policy;
2) in the soccer game, if you have to sit out a game because there are too many players, you are guaranteed to play in the next game-- even if someone from the winning team needs to be relieved-- but in the basketball game, if there are more than five players, and you miss your foul shot, you will NOT play in the next game . . . as the winning five always get to stay on;
3) because of this rule, more fouls are called in the basketball game and the score is more important;
4) the soccer crew has an email group but the basketball group does not;
5) if the weather is decent, the soccer group will play outside, while this has never happened with the basketball group . . . even when it was 95 degrees in the gym in the summer;
6) more advice and strategy is dispensed by the experienced basketball players, and it is more often accepted, or at least entertained and discussed . . . while during soccer if anyone mistakenly attempts to give someone else advice, it usually results in a vehement argument (which may happen in a language other than English)
7) sometimes at soccer, while we are warming up, we talk world politics . . . this never happens at basketball;
8) there are a couple of women that occasionally play in the soccer game-- and they can hold their own-- but I have never seen any women at the basketball game;
9) you can bring your kid to the soccer game, and if you get there early then he might get to play some-- my seven-year-old son once played for a while before everyone got there . . . but I've never seen any kids at the basketball game;
10) the soccer game has people with names such as Mario, Gio, Jose, Guillermo, Felipe, Mohammed, Javier, Yorim, Ahmed, Yusuf, Ari, Josi, Bruce and Mike . . . the basketball game has people with names such as Al, Keith, Ben, Tom, Chris, Anthony, Richard (Cob), Eugene, Bruce, Isaac and-- of course-- Mike.
Deacon King Kong is the 51st book I read this year-- 2020 was good for something-- and it is the best piece of fiction I've run into in a long while; I'm not going to write a long review-- just read the thing-- but I will post up my Kindle notes . . . my favorite sentences from this fever dream that's exploded from James McBride's brain-- a fictionalized account of the Brooklyn housing project in which he grew up . . . the year is 1969 and it's all going down in this book, which is about urban decay and revitalization, baseball, drugs, race, language and tall tales . . . it is so much fun, even when it gets dark-- and there's some romance and a mystery to keep the plot cooking . . . the book begins with Sportcoat-- the old drunk church deacon, walking up to a young heroin dealer (who he coached as a child) and shooting him in the ear . . . but really the book begins with the mystery of the free cheese:
“Look who’s talking. The cheese thief!” That last crack stung him. For years, the New York City Housing Authority, a Highlight hotbed of grift, graft, games, payola bums, deadbeat dads, payoff racketeers, and old-time political appointees who lorded over the Cause Houses and every other one of New York’s forty-five housing projects with arrogant inefficiency, had inexplicably belched forth a phenomenal gem of a gift to the Cause Houses: free cheese.
and then there's some backstory on Sportcoat:
When he was slapped to life back in Possum Point, South Carolina, seventy-one years before, the midwife who delivered him watched in horror as a bird flew through an open window and fluttered over the baby’s head, then flew out again, a bad sign. She announced, “He’s gonna be an idiot,”
At age three, when a young local pastor came by to bless the baby, the child barfed green matter all over the pastor’s clean white shirt. The pastor announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel Highlight and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime.
At age five, Baby Sportcoat crawled to a mirror and spit at his reflection, a call sign to the devil, and as a result didn’t grow back teeth until he was nine.
Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team.
and then-- in contrast to old school Sportcoat-- you've got the corrupted youth:
you've got the Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. None of the old ways meant a penny to him. He was a child of Cause, young, smart, and making money hand over fist slinging dope at a level never before seen in the Cause Houses.
and the requisite Italian mobsters . . . this is Brooklyn in the late '60s:
Everything you are, everything you will be in this cruel world, depends on your word. A man who cannot keep his word, Guido said, is worthless.
and various kind of crime:
“A warrant ain’t nothing, Sausage,” Sportcoat said. “The police gives ’em out all over. Rufus over at the Watch Houses got a warrant on him too. Back in South Carolina.”
“He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.”
Where’s the box?” “The church got plenty money.” “You mean the box in the church?” “No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.” “Where’s it at, woman?!”
“You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now.
and superstition:
His wife put a nag on him, see, like Hettie done to you.”
“How you know Hettie done it?”
“It don’t matter who done it. You got to break it. Uncle Gus broke his by taking a churchyard snail and soaking it in vinegar for seven days. You could try that.”
“That’s the Alabama way of breaking mojos,” Sportcoat said. “That’s old. In South Carolina, you put a fork under your pillow and some buckets water around your kitchen. That’ll drive any witch off.”
“Naw,” Sausage said. “Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it about your neck.”
“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”
“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.”
“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.”
“Step backward over a pole ten times.”
“Swallow three pebbles . . .”
They were off like that for several minutes, each topping the other with his list of ways to keep witches out, talking mojo as the modern life of the world’s greatest metropolis bustled about them.
“Never turn your head to the side while a horse is passing . . .”
“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.”
“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on a Thursday.”
“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times . . .”
They had reached the remedy of putting a gas lamp in every window of every second house on the fourth Thursday of every month when the generator, as if on its own, roared up wildly, sputtered miserably, coughed, and died.
and there's a shooter in the vein of The Wire's Brother Mouzone:
He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no Highlight photo, only the vaguest description that he was a Negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.”
and a romance between an Irish cop and an African-American church sister:
“I’ll be happy,” he said, more to the ground than to her, “to come back and bring what news I can.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Sister Gee said. But she might as well have been speaking to the wind.
the dark side of the drugs:
Men who made their girlfriends do horrible things, servicing four or five or eight men a night, who made their women do push-ups over piles of dogshit for a hit of heroin until, exhausted, the girls dropped into the shit so the men could get a laugh.
and, finally, a clash of values that is epic and poetic:
"I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.”
He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit Highlight the headboard and he nearly passed out again. “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”
My wife is an excellent cook-- creative, efficient, and unflappable. Her skills are crucial in the fall, when our house is extraordinarily busy. She's usually consumed by teaching elementary school math and science, running the community garden, and directing the school garden club. The boys and I are consumed by soccer. Despite these hurdles, she whips up meal after meal, day after day-- often without any help. This fall she worked around four soccer schedules: Alex played JV soccer, Ian played middle school soccer and for a club team, and I coached the middle school team and the in-town travel team. She's also the go-to person for help with school work (I'm more of a school work consultant, good for specific questions but not really capable of sustained service). Catherine times our family dinners around games, practices, and buses. She's the household MVP, keeping us full and healthy. We rarely ordered pizza.
Years ago, at the end of a similarly busy soccer season, Catherine went on a two-week cooking strike. She decided there was a lack of appreciation for all the planning, shopping, prepping and cooking she had been doing. It was a difficult period. The scab labor was unskilled, surly, and mainly underage. Negotiations were tense. Meals were lame. We survived but did not thrive. The boys and I learned our lesson: it is difficult to plan and serve delicious healthy meals all week. Though we learned our lesson, we didn't learn how to actually pull it off.
Last year when the season ended, we preempted any sort of labor dispute by announcing that we would do the cooking and dinner clean-up for a week. The end of the season coincides with Catherine's birthday, so not only did we avoid a cooking strike but we also provided her with a birthday gift. That's a win-win.
This year for Catherine's birthday, I upped the ante. Not only would I cook for a week, but I would also plan the menu and do the shopping. At the grocery store. Now I know-- truly know-- what it takes to cook various, creative, delicious and healthy meals for a week. It takes the planning skills of Hannibal, the scope and courage of Alexander the Great, and the confidence of Napoleon. And running a campaign like this is stressful, and the best way to relieve stress while you cook dinner is to imbibe. So you'll also need the liver of Winston Churchill.
Tuesday: leftovers . . . everyone had something planned
Wednesday: grilled shrimp, snap peas, and thin-sliced crispy potatoes
Thursday: grilled chicken, broccoli and rice
Friday: out to dinner . . . yes!
The second step was the hardest (behind butterflying, pounding, and marinating the chicken breasts . . . so gross). The second step was to go to the real grocery store . . . the big ShopRite in Edison. We have a small Stop & Shop in town which I can handle-- I know where things are and there isn't a big selection, but the big ShopRite in Edison is much cheaper than the Stop & Shop in town. Catherine gave me an out on this one: she said I could do the week's shopping at the smaller, more familiar store, but I decided it was time to man-up. If I was going to do it, I was going to really do it. She told me that there were a couple of products that wouldn't be in the main store. They would be located somewhere called "the annex." The "annex" was connected to the main store by a passageway akin to King's Crossing Platform 9 ¾. I would have to sprint towards an aisle of cat food and hope for the best.
There was a point during my shopping trip when I nearly broke down and quit. I almost shed tears. Seriously. You'd cry too. The store was huge, disorganized, and there were too many choices. I was in there forever, wandering. I actually found the annex (and bought some facial tissues . . . but I never found the 9-volt batteries). And even after all that time in the store, I still had to stop at the Garden Farm Market on my way home for produce because I couldn't find anything decent at ShopRite.
Why was it taking so fucking long to buy some basic shit? Why are food stores insane?
The new episode of Freakonomics tackles this question. In it, business Professor Michael Roberto makes a pitch:
ROBERTO: “I’d like to open a new kind of grocery store. We’re not going to have any branded items. It’s all going to be private label. We’re going to have no television advertising and no social media whatsoever. We’re never going to have anything on sale. We’re not going to accept coupons. We’ll have no loyalty card. We won’t have a circular that appears in the Sunday newspaper. We’ll have no self-checkout. We won’t have wide aisles or big parking lots. Would you invest in my company?”
This store sounds like a train-wreck. But it turns out that this is a successful business. It's a description of Trader Joe's.
I highly recommend "Should America be Run by . . . Trader Joe's?" It's Freakonomics at its best. The topic sounds boring: grocery stores. But there's a compelling narrative, and an explanation of how you can succeed in a low margin, super-competitive, rather bland business. Trader Joe's is killing it in terms of sales per square foot. How the fuck do they do it?
There are no sales, no discounts, no Whole Foods/Amazon algorithmic data tracking. When you enter the door, you've joined the club. It's kind of fun. Sometimes there's free coffee. There are lots of employees and they are instructed to drop everything and help you if you need help. The last time we were there, my wife couldn't find blue cheese. An employee told my wife that she would go in the back and find the blue cheese for her, and then she told my wife to keep shopping and I'll find you and give you the blue cheese. Brilliant. My wife continued to shop and because the store is small, with no annex, the employee was able to easily find my wife and give her the blue cheese.
During my ShopRite shopping epic, I wandered the meat section at for fifteen minutes, looking for ground pork. I was obviously bewildered. I stumbled on someone who might have been the butcher and asked him if they had ground pork. He said, "Nope. None of that today." Do they ever have ground pork? Could he go in the back and get some? Could he grind some for me? I have no clue and I didn't ask. He didn't offer any more information. I bought some ground turkey instead.
Trader Joe's offers a limited selection of each product and they may switch out a product at any time-- although they always have the staples-- but because the food is good and because you haven't worn yourself out looking for things, when the product you want isn't there, you might actually try something new. The store encourages experimentation. And it's small enough to browse but large enough to have everything you need (especially if it's a branch that sells alcohol). They have three kinds of salsa instead of seventy kinds. And they don't cater to everyone. There's an ethnic bent to the food and if you don't like it, you can shop elsewhere. I've only been inside a Trader Joe's once, and I was slightly overwhelmed-- but I get slightly overwhelmed when I enter any new place, especially when people are frantically buying things . . . it's because I vividly imagine the environmental disaster we are rushing towards. This is more of a "me" problem than a problem with Trader Joe's, and now that I've learned about the store through a podcast, I'm more inclined to go there. Ridiculous, but a little background knowledge goes a long way with me.
Trader Joe's is small on purpose. A typical grocery store carries 35,000 different items. Trader Joe's carries 3000. There aren't that many aisles-- I could walk up and down every single one without suffering a panic attack. And they rush you through the line. No weird interactions where you have to "borrow" the cashier's club card. I don't need to develop that kind of intimacy with someone I just met. If I see them on the street, am I obligated to lend them my umbrella? You don't have a card? Do you want to sign up? Uh . . . maybe? I made that mistake once. There's a Trader Joe's up the road from us now, in North Brunswick. I might go there. On my own. And buy some food. Coming from me, that's a bold statement.
Once I made the menu and purchased all the food, the week went fairly smoothly. Or it appeared smooth from my perspective. I only lost my shit twice. The reason for the smoothness was the lubricant: alcohol. I don't know how people who cook every night don't become raging alcoholics.
My thought process always went something like this: time to cut and pound the chicken! Yuck! Gross! You know what would help with a task this time-consuming and disgusting? Some music. And a beer. It's almost five o'clock.
The only night I didn't drink last week was Tuesday. Leftovers night. Soccer night. I now realize that soccer practice and the fact that my wife does most of the cooking are what stand between me and daily drinking. I know daily drinking doesn't always indicate alcoholism, but it's a step in that direction. And it makes you fat. If I had to cook every meal every night, with only my children to help (who are incredible at disappearing whenever there is work to be done) then my alcohol consumption would triple.
The two nights that I grilled were a double whammy. I normally like to have a beer when I grill . . . it's quiet and relaxing out on the porch; I can look over my sprawling bamboo plants into Donaldson Park. The dog accompanies me and occasionally descends from the porch to chase a squirrel off the property. A warm grill on a cold night, it's the life. But I normally have one beer while I grill. Because my wife is inside managing the other things. The vegetables, the rice, the potatoes, making the salad. whatever. Reminding the kids to finish their homework. Meanwhile, I'm "grilling," which includes a lot of staring into the park and enjoying the fresh air. Occasionally, I'll flip something. But grilling when you are also cooking other things inside the house is not relaxing. It's frantic. And when you're in and out so many times, feeling the pressure to get everything ready at the right time-- doing math, subtracting the minutes that the potatoes will be done from the amount of time it takes to grill shrimp-- then you might grab another beer as you pass by the fridge . . . or another glass of wine. Or another tequila, lime, and seltzer. It's dangerous.
I only lost my cool twice. Once was when I tasked Alex with cooking the snap peas while I finished grilling the shrimp. He decided they were burning-- even though we agreed we wanted them undercooked and crispy-- and he poured a bunch more olive oil in the pan. The peas turned out fine, but sort of drenched in oil. I snapped at him over those snap peas, and I shouldn't have. I told him he should have asked me before doing anything so radical, but then I changed my mind. Chefs get irate in the heat of the moment. I apologized and told him it was good that he took some initiative. Normally when I cook, I ask Catherine a million questions and it drives her crazy. Cooking is experimental, and Alex went for it. Next time he might know better.
The other time I got annoyed is when I was serving dinner and Catherine was fooling around on the computer. The house rule is that you're not supposed to be fooling around on the computer when dinner is served. This house rule is mainly designed for me, so when I chastised her, I had an out-of-body experience. It was like I was her, chastising me.
I'm going to chastise myself now. Time to get off the computer and do the dishes. And miracle of miracles, Catherine has already done the grocery shopping.
Last night, Catherine, Alex, Ian and I went to Red Bull Arena to watch Wayne Rooney and DC United take on the Red Bulls; Rooney put in an understated performance, playing a number of great one touch passes (and demonstrating that his vision and decision-making is miles ahead of the MLS players) but he never took on the defense in full Shrek-rugby-fashion (and he had a perfect opportunity at the six and cranked it over the crossbar) and the Red Bulls combined well, generally controlled the ball, moved forward with purpose, should have scored three or four goals, and made do with a one-zero victory . . . we thoroughly enjoyed the game, but the problem with watching the Red Bulls is the transportation situation: you can't park in Harrison, where the stadium is, because it's a traffic nightmare, so you can either take the train to Newark and then the PATH, or drive to Newark, park in a lot, and then do a rather treacherous walk along the (very polluted) Passaic River, then cross into Harrison over the Frank E Rodgers bridge . . . we elected to do the latter, because if you hustle out of the stadium and walk fast, you can beat all the traffic; we took off right as the injury time ended, and I warned the kids to take it easy and be careful because it was dark and this was not a well-marked or evenly paved stroll; despite my warning, Ian bit it hard when he tried to jog up to Catherine to ask her something-- he caught his toe on the stand of a portable traffic sign that happened to be on the sidewalk, he fell hard (and nearly into traffic on Raymond Blvd) and scraped up his knees, hands and elbows . . . he was bleeding and crying and had some glass bits in his rapidly swelling elbow, but he got up and we hobbled on towards the Edison ParkFast on Market Street . . . when we arrived, there was only one person working and a number of people waiting for their cars, and you had to pay at a machine and then give the guy the ticket, then he would get your key and drive your car around to the front of the building-- it was fairly disorganized and difficult to determine the line or what was going on, but Catherine fed our ticket into the machine, ran her credit card, was charged $20, and out popped TWO tickets . . . so she handed the guy both tickets-- and he immediately took one of the tickets and ran it over to a car that he had already pulled around and handed it to the driver and then he went back to getting cars so I told Catherine that we might have given him the wrong ticket and he wasn't getting our keys and when she explained this to him and how the machine gave us TWO tickets, he said that the machine couldn't take two tickets and that we had to pay and we explained that we HAD paid and that the machine DID spit out two tickets and he said this was not possible and then ran off to pull around another car and this is when I realized that we were going to have trouble resolving this issue-- it was an issue with the machine and the attendant had no clue how to solve it; Catherine tried to explain again-- she said that maybe we paid for the other person's ticket or something, or the tickets got jammed, but that we had paid but the attendant turned a deaf ear and continued serving people who had come after us because he didn't understand the situation-- and while all this waiting is going on, Ian is bleeding from his knees and elbows-- and the guy, who, judging by the accent, might have hailed from Trinidad, was not getting it and Catherine was getting pissed off that he kept ignoring her and he was getting pissed off that we were interrupting his work; things got more and more heated, and a random guy stepped in, took out a twenty, handed it to the attendant, and said, "Will this resolve the situation?" and the attendant said, "Yes" but Catherine was having none of that-- she took the money and handed it back to the guy and said, "We're not paying $40 for parking" and, while I admire her principles, I would have paid twenty bucks at that point to get the hell out of Newark, but Catherine tried another tactic-- she pulled up her Wells Fargo account and showed the guy that we had paid $20 at the Edison ParkFast at 9:27 PM but he wouldn't even look at the phone and ran off to pull more cars for people who had got there after us, and then Alex got vocal with him and he said, "I don't talk with children" and this pissed me off, so I told the guy the kids were people too and he was putting them out as well as Catherine and I and he said he would deal with this problem later because he was busy so Catherine laid it on the line and said, "Are you giving us our keys? Or do we have to call the police?" and the guy-- getting very defensive-- said, "Call the police" and so Catherine did-- and then another random guy made an excellent suggestion; he said, "Run the ticket again on your credit card and then call the credit card company tomorrow and say you were double charged," and that is exactly what we will do next time this happens (God forbid) but at this point Catherine was angry and determined and she saw a cop car across the lot and so she walked over to it, meanwhile, Alex got a complimentary bottle of water and we cleaned out Ian's wounds . . . right in front of the attendant's little booth, and perhaps this moved him, or the fact that the police were coming, but he gave me the ticket and said, "Write an explanation of what happened on it and your phone number" and I did so-- then Catherine got back and told me to put a fake phone number on it and the police were on their way-- but at this point, the guy had caved, he realized that we weren't going away and that he was holding a bleeding child hostage in his lot, and so he took the ticket-- with my hastily scrawled explanation on it-- and pulled out car around; that was when an officer showed up, and we told him that we had finally resolved the situation and thanked him for coming to lend a hand . . . all told we were at the lot trying to get our car for over an hour, but there is a happy ending to the story; we crated Lola before we left, she still isn't great about being left alone, and we were worried that with the delay, she might have peed in her crate, but she was fine and dry and happy to see us.
Those of you who know me might be surprised to hear this, but I know what it's like to be objectified. To be eye-balled, given the once-over. I understand this is an unusual statement when it comes from a hirsute middle-aged man with more hair on his back than on his head, but it's true. I'm often characterized solely by my big firm gravity-defying round ones. Their size and symmetry appraised and lauded.
God forbid I show them off in public.
Hello? My face is up here!
Just because I'm well endowed doesn't give you the license to gawk and ogle.
Or does it?
I'll admit I find the attention flattering, but it's also awkward and weird. I want to cry out:
I'm more than a pair of fabulous fleshy protrusions!
I'm an accomplished Scrabble player, an avid reader of non-fiction and a fan of the surrealist paintings of Max Ernst!
There's a brain in here!
I'm more than a pair of stunning calves.
And while it might not be exactly analogous to the comments a voluptuous woman endures when she walks past an urban construction site, it's in the same ballpark. So, ladies, I get it. I know what it feels like to be a hot, sexy nubile babe at a sausage hang. I can empathize.
I'll admit there are some situations where unsolicited calf-commentary makes a certain sense. At sporting functions, for instance. Last week at Wednesday night pick-up basketball, a dude remarked that I have the "calves of a powerlifter." Total non sequitur. We were not on the subject of calf-raises or calf-injuries or calf-tattoos. He just had to say it. While it was slightly off-topic, it was not completely out-of-the-blue. When you match-up on defense in pick-up basketball, you first engage in a frank discussion about the physical attributes of the opposing team. You then coordinate your team's height, weight, speed, and strength. You're allowed to be candid. So perhaps my calves were just part of the scouting report. My son Alex informs me that some of the soccer players I've coached are intimidated by my giant calves. I sort of get this. The muscle tone in my calves is epic, and I'm sure it's due to coaching and playing soccer. So it's kind of germane. And I can understand when my acupuncturist comments on them. She's working on them. Sticking needles into them to try to get the giant knots out.
But I also get calf compliments at work. This is partly my fault for parading around in shorts in a professional environment, but I like to exercise when I'm on the clock (it's like I'm being paid to work out . . . you're tax dollars at work). So I'm not claiming harassment here; I recognize that I'm flaunting my naked calves in the workplace and that there may be consequences. And I know I'm a lucky guy: Johnny Drama would be green with envy. There's no question that women young and old find my calves irresistible. So when they get a peek at them, they're compelled to say something. I get this. I feel the same way when I see a shapely woman, especially if she's showing some cleavage. It's a hard topic not to discuss. I refrain, of course, because it's 2019, but the impulse is there.
I would also like to assure everyone that I do not have calf implants. I would never be so shallow.
My calves are real. And they're spectacular.
I've obviously got to end this post in the same manner as Boogie Nights. I've got to show you the goods.
Here they are:
It's more difficult than you think to take a selfie of both calves. I used a mirror.
Feel free to comment, but remember: I'm more than just a pair of awesome calves . . . I've also got great pecs!
You wouldn't believe how much I can bench. But you tell first . . .
I've now written several thousand words to administrators and my son's 9th Grade Honors English teacher about the district homework policy-- and despite the fact that I'm a veteran teacher, I'm starting to feel like a crank-- but let me lay out the assignment and the situation so you know what I'm dealing with; my son is reading Catcher in the Rye and he generally has to read a reasonable amount, three chapters a night or so . . . but along with the reading he needs to complete two literary analysis journals per chapter . . . each journal must be at least 150 words and must analyze language, rhetoric, style, metaphors, similes, imagery etcetera-- these aren't free response journals-- and so if he's got three chapters of reading then he also needs to complete 900 words of literary analysis, and there are 26 chapters in the book so this adds up to 52 literary analysis journals . . . or 7800 words of literary analysis . . . 26 pages; in a few weeks, he's doing more analytical writing than we draft in the entire Rutgers Expos course . . . Zman recognized the fact that the assignment is more than ten percent of the length of The Catcher in the Rye . . . and the journals are due at the end of the book and she doesn't give feedback along the way or use them in class, the kids just grind them out (or copy stuff from the internet or steal their older sister's journals or write dream diaries, it doesn't matter because she can't humanly grade them all) and once I really understood the length and insanity of this assignment and how cavalierly disrespectful of time and intellectual energy it is, my only recourse was to find the district homework policy and see if I had a leg to stand on, and it turned out I had three legs to stand on . . . as the assignment is in flagrant violation of three parts of the policy:
4. The number, frequency, and degree of difficulty of homework assignments should be based on the ability and needs of the pupil and take into account other activities that make a legitimate claim on the pupil's time;
5. As a valid educational tool, homework should be clearly assigned and its product carefully evaluated and that evaluation should be reported to the pupil;
7. Homework should always serve a valid learning purpose; it should never be used as a punitive measure;
and so I wrote several emails arguing that this assignment was incredibly time-consuming and onerous in nature-- kids were spending all weekend on it, staying up until 2 AM, etc, etc-- and that the teacher was not "carefully evaluating" the product, nor could she ever carefully evaluate the product . . . she was going to receive well over 1000 journal entries from her students, so she might spot check a few or grade a few at random-- and neither option is acceptable-- and the assignment was obviously punitive because she kept telling kids "if you don't like it, drop Honors and go to College Prep," making this some sort of hazing/initiation/badge-of-honor ritual to whip kids into shape and break them . . . so I met with the principal Friday and it was a positive meeting in regards to the fact that they were hearing my concerns and the superintendent and the principal and the head of humanities met today and agreed to discuss this assignment and expectations in general with the English department, but that could be everyone just humoring me and hoping this will blow over, so I told the principal and superintendent that they need to enforce the district policy and my son brought a petition to school today with the district homework policy on it and got a bunch of signatures-- he is going to meet with his teacher tomorrow and discuss the assignment . . . the teacher keeps asking me if Alex needs help on the assignment and I've told her he doesn't . . . he's actually done a great job and he's caught up-- he's done 32 journals, without feedback, which is shameful-- and I've advised him not to do any more writing until he gets feedback on every journal he's written . . . what a shitshow and what a sad way to read Catcher in the Rye (I wonder if Mark David Chapman Had to complete an assignment like this when he read Catcher and it sent him over the edge) and I'm sure this isn't over and I'm going to end up angrily reciting a lot of numbers at a Board of Ed meeting.
