Ten YEARS, Man!

It was an historical weekend on several fronts. First, Friday the 22nd was the ten year anniversary of meeting my college roommate, partner-in-crime, fellow Cool Math teacher, and all around BFF Alison C. Brown, aka AliBrown, Ali N. Brown, "Sally," Alicakes, and Monsterface.

Freshman Year

The summer before college, everyone I knew regaled me with their stories of crazy roommates. The roommate who didn't talk but compulsively sniffed things, including my friend's clothing and shower poof. The roommate who stole my friend's address book and attempted to steal all his friends. The roommate who -- when my friend woke up with a start in the middle of the night -- just happened to be lying ON TOP OF HIM. Whoops! Needless to say, I was completely terrified of the possibility that my future roommate would be a complete and utter psychopath.

Instead, I got Ali.

Ten Years Later

Though some might argue that Ali is, indeed, a monster (Cam, for one, can't get through a single conversation with me without making fun of Ali, even if she's not there to hear it), she's certainly a loveable one. Ten years ago, there was a moment where we stared at each other in our room in Langan, worried about our mother's descriptions of us (they got along fabulously, and chatted on about their darling daughters in language that made us both sound incredibly uptight and unfun), by the end of that very first day, Ali and I were BFFs for life.

Monster Attack

My roommate is fabulous. Her name is Ali, she’s from NY, and we have so much in common. We listen to the same music, we are both directionally impaired (can’t tell our right from our left), both have friends named Jesse with whom we were in love in [HS] Freshman Bio... we even have the same toothbrush! Last night we were sitting out on Mac Field until 3 am, just talking.... (23 August 1998)

In retrospect, it seems rather amazing that such a strong friendship could be built on such a simple foundation. Same music! Both have to look at our hands to know which way is left! Crushes on boys named Jesse! Same toothbrush!! WE'RE OBVIOUSLY DESTINED TO BE BFFS!!!

Funny that it turned out to be true. It's been ten years and I can wholeheartedly say that I would not be the person I am today without Miss Ali N. Brown, and I love her for it. Happy Ten Year Friendship Anniversary, Ali!

The World According to Ali

Oddly enough, the weekend I celebrated Ten Years of BFFhood with my college roommate was also the weekend of my Ten Year High School Reunion. Particularly observant readers will notice that this was actually my second school reunion of the summer. I started the summer at my five-year-cluster college reunion (technically, six years after graduating) and ended the summer with my high school reunion. It was hard not to compare the two. For most people, the high school reunion is more meaningful, because most people went to college with thousands of other people, and it is their high school class of only a few hundred other people that feels like a family. But I graduated from college with about 300 people, only fifty more than my high school class. AND, unlike my high school class, I lived with my college class in a tiny square of rural Iowa where there was almost nothing to do that didn't involve a bunch of other college kids. We danced and drank and slept and studied and gossiped and grew together in four of the most intense years of my life. In comparison, high school was pretty tame.

On the other hand, I graduated from high school with people I'd known, essentially, since birth. We grew up in the kind of small town that leads you to go to prom with the same kids you sat next to in preschool. At our reunion, we weren't just reminiscing about our four years together and catching up on the six years since; we were telling stories going as far back as preschool, and catching up on a decade apart. It was intense.

Matching Tiger Suits, ca. 1986

I got a ride to the reunion with my other BFF, Cindy Owens, aka CJ, CindyJo, CJFO, and Seege. Cindy and I have been friends since we were four years old, when she and Jenny Buchner gave me the ugly Barbie in a brown dress and piled all their Barbies into a Barbie camper and drove away without my bad Barbie, who hopped after them on her chewed-on plastic feet. "Hey guys... wait for me...." As a little girl, I was known as "Cindy's Shadow." My small family was folded into her large one decades ago, and her son calls my mother his aunt and treats my childhood home as his own (much as his mother did in high school -- I remember being startled sophomore year when Cindy grabbed me in the hallway between classes to let me know she'd gone over to my house at lunch to "borrow" some aluminum foil for a class project).

Ben Franklin Bitches, ca. 1996

But of course I see Cindy all the time. She's one of the few people I've been consistently in touch with since graduation. It's not that I have anything against the people I went to high school with -- if anything, I've been impressed by how interesting and rich and diverse their lives are. In high school, I saw our small town as a cultural sinkhole from which few of us would escape. Now, I admire equally the people who have stayed close to home to share their lives with their extended families and the people who have left the state, the region, and even the country. Everyone has a story to tell.

Some of the people I talked to this weekend surprised me with how kind they've become since high school, or how insightful, or how funny. Natalie made me laugh out loud with her ranting about how few Cheesemakers have actually attacked anyone. Jess wowed me with her deep empathy and insights about life. Joe entertained me with gossip and questions like "Why didn't we call [Geri Sphatt] G-SPOT in high school? Answer me that!!"

Senior Year

Overall, I left feeling fond of my town and proud of my classmates who have grown into such caring, insightful adults. Of course, there were a couple of d-bags there and a few people whose high school personalities have calcified into utter obnoxiousness. [Not you, of course. If you're reading this, you're clearly one of the most enlightened and awesome people from our class.] I realized that in high school, I always gave people the benefit of the doubt, assumed that they'd grow into themselves, get over themselves, grow up. In high school, everyone's personality had a glow of potential to it, not only what they were, but what they could be. Now, most of them -- most of us -- have grown into that potential, have broadened our horizons and let the world expand our understandings of who we are to ourselves and to each other.

I expected it to be more Grosse Point Blank, but instead of getting to kill a ghoul with a pen and rolling him in a school spirit banner, I got to watch a third grade program from twenty years ago with a bunch of laughing grownups who still recognized the third graders inside the adults, and vice versa. I saw third grade Molly standing in a row of little girls, standing on tiptoe to see over the girl in front of her as they all sang "My Favorite Things," and I got to imitate her bobbing head while a table full of old friends laughed and looked for their third grade selves. And I have to say, it was pretty sweet.

Moosies

Sometimes I wonder what exactly my life is missing. It's nothing obvious, no clear gaping hole in the center of my life I have to step around during the day and fall into each night, nothing so apparent. Just that, from time to time, I have this ghost of a yearning, the feeling that my life should be slightly more, that I'm not adequately cashing in on all life has to offer.

Today it becomes clear: oh yes. Of course. What I've been missing is BABY MOOSE PLAYING IN MY BACKYARD.

Walking in Chicago

Ever since I sold my truck in May, I've been walking to and from work nearly every day. I work about three miles from my house, and sometimes I walk the entire way home, though the last mile or so is rather ugly. I prefer to walk through the neighborhoods, off the main streets, but the Chicago River limits the ways to get home.

The Chicago River from Diversey

I can wander through the neighborhoods for a good while, but eventually I have to pick Damen, Diversey, or Western to get me across the river, and they're all ugly. Generally, I prefer to wind my way through the neighborhoods over to Western or Damen and then take the bus home from there. Either way, I've been averaging about three miles a day.

I love it.

I love walking to work in the morning. I like to get off the bus early and walk down Grace, with its big houses and leafy trees. I like the cool, early light and the morning friendliness of the firefighters hanging out at the station. Even if I'm feeling cranky and stiff, a leisurely mile's walk wakes me up as well as coffee, and I find that I arrive at work feeling rather fond of the world, unlike the days I take two buses and arrive glowering.

Tree in Roscoe Village

The walk home is even nicer. I have more time to stop and look closely, to explore new streets and look for secrets. All my life, I've looked for secrets on familiar journeys: the falling down barn on 151 whose slow disintegration marked my years between Grinnell and Madison, the beautiful bridge slowly eaten by creeping vines off of Hwy 6 on the way to Iowa City, the pond outside Oregon where I often see cranes, herons, and swans. This curve of road, along a woods and down into a meadowed plain. That stand of rock which looks different in every light. The moment when the sky opens up, the decent into river valley, the place where we always see hot air balloons. Before, my commuter secrets were wild places, the kind of secrets you can see from the road as you go speeding by.

Reminder

Now, my secrets are smaller, slower. The house with the pretty shutters. The block where every building's street numbers are fixed in antique stained glass. The window where the cat watches the street below. The gated garden full of wildflowers. The wrought-iron fence covered in grapevines.

Sidewalk Art

One day I meet dogs named Walt and Harper. "After Harper Lee?" I ask, and the man nods unhappily. I don't bother to ask him if the lab is named after Whitman. Another day I find a necklace hanging on a low branch of a tree. There is art on the sidewalks, a woman carrying a bouquet of flowers, a gutted building with a dark brick cave where the stairs should be. A little girl in pigtails intently painting spindles on a porch railing, alongside her father, both cross-legged.

Pirates

Walking through the neighborhoods makes me love this city. Last weekend, we camped in the woods of Northern Illinois and woke to a morning raucous with birdsong. We wandered through a giant meadow of prairie flowers and examined the blood drops in Queen Anne's Lace, the undersides of milkweed leaves, the textures of different grasses. We held our hands to the horizon to judge the minutes before sundown, watched the stars come out in spots between treetops, built a fire and cooked dinner on sticks and told stories in the flickering shadows of flames. On the trainride back into the city we were quiet, and when we reached the big intersection near our house it was uglier than usual. "Dirty urban wind," we told each other, our shorthand for the way nature eludes you in the city, the way you forget the earth is still under your feet though you have to imagine your way down through layers of brick and concrete to find it. Back from the woods, Chicago was stark and dirty and too bright, too harsh, too loud. In that moment, it was hard not to hate it.

Warning

Some people are enlivened by the city. The lights and noise, the culture and food and music and streets and art and people and pigeons and speed and life, some people it feeds. Me, it depletes. I need quiet nights, starry skies, opossums on back porches and flashes of fox in back yards. I am a country mouse at heart. But walking through the neighborhoods and quiet streets helps me to love this city too, and almost - almost - begin to call it home, and mean it.

Obama's Stand on LGBT Families

While we live in a nation that is enriched by a vast array of diverse traditions, cultures and histories, it is our commonality that most defines us. The desire to build a life with a loved one, to provide for a family and to have children who will grow and thrive — these are desires that all people share, regardless of race, sex, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

[...]But we also have to do more to support and strengthen LGBT families. Because equality in relationship, family, and adoption rights is not some abstract principle; it’s about whether millions of LGBT Americans can finally live lives marked by dignity and freedom. That’s why we have to repeal laws like the Defense of Marriage Act. That’s why we have to eliminate discrimination against LGBT families. And that’s why we have to extend equal treatment in our family and adoption laws.

I’ll be a president that stands up for American families – all of them.

Sincerely,
Barack Obama

Read the whole letter here

In this area...

But you know, they don't really care if you go a block or two that way.

Stay in School, or I Will Kick Your Ass

I know that most of the readers of this blog are grownups. Most of you even have college degrees. Good job! Go, you! You deserve a cookie.

If you have already graduated from high school, this blog post is not for you.

If, however, you are one of the approximately 400 students I taught in New Mexico, or you're a kid whose overbearing parent or grandparent or teacher sent this link to you, or you're a high schooler of any kind, or you're seriously considering dropping out of high school for any reason, or -- well, you know what I mean -- this blog post is for you.

This morning I responded to two separate emails from two separate former students asking about whether or not they should stay in school. You GUYS!! You're killing me! Of course you should stay in school! Even Mr. T knows that.

Look, you guys. I know that high school sucks. Of course it does. It sucks for everyone. Anyone who tells you that high school will be the best years of your life is either mis-remembering high school entirely or just completely deranged. High school is NOT the best years of your life, but it IS practice for the best years of your life.

You don't need me to tell you all the statistics about how high school dropouts make so much less money than graduates (and over a lifetime, a MILLION DOLLARS less than the average college graduate) or how high school dropouts make up a disproportionate percentage of America's prison and death row inmates or how high school dropouts are far more likely to apply for public aid and assistance. You can google all those facts yourself, and you probably should. I imagine, though, that the idea of making a million dollars more over the course of your lifetime seems pretty abstract in the face of the concrete suckiness of your day to day high school life. Right?

Here's the thing: high school sucks because you're learning big giant important life lessons, and it's always completely uncomfortable to learn big giant important life lessons. We humans are kind of dumb, and we only learn big giant important life lessons when the universe hits us over the head repeatedly with a giant metaphorical stick. In other words, humans have to SUFFER to learn. That's how we're made. When you were really little, and your mom told you not to put your hand on a hot stove, did you say, "Okay, Mom! Thanks for the heads up! I will take the wisdom you've earned from life and apply it to my own!" or did you go, "Don't what? Hmm, what would happen if I put my hand here? OWWWWW mother of god that hurts oh my lord the agony aaaaahhhhh!!"

Mmm-hmm, and which one made a bigger impression on you?

I hate to say it, you guys, but high school is an awful lot like life. Think of it as the bootcamp of adulthood. It sucks because you're encountering all these crappy aspects of life for the first time, and you're trying to negotiate your way through by trial and error. You're putting your hand on that hot stove every single day, and it freaking hurts. The good news is that all of the lessons you're learning now will help you later in life. I swear.

One of the most important things you'll learn in high school is sheer perseverance. SO much of your future success will depend on your ability to keep showing up, even in the face of major trials and difficulties and bad hair days and stupid people up in your face all the time and headaches and all the other mundane awful things of every day life. High school teaches you to keep on trucking, no matter how bad things get. Woody Allen said "Ninety percent of success is just showing up." Thomas Edison said "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." You see? Good things only come to those who work steadily, every single day, at making their dreams come true. Oddly enough, high school will make you better at this.

Another crucial life lesson you'll learn in high school is how to get along with people you hate. I know you're surrounded by small minded, stupid, annoying, ridiculous people. I know they drive you crazy. Unfortunately, you're going to have to work with them for the rest of your life. I have only worked ONE job in my entire adult life that didn't have at least one completely obnoxious co-worker I had to deal with -- and that's because I was only working with one other person. I hate to tell you, but we live in a group-work society, and high school is your training ground for how to deal with people that make you want to stab your eyes out with a pencil.

Finally, high school will help you to learn how to make the most out of your life. Believe me, the next sixty-odd years will be full of people and situations you don't want to deal with, busy work that makes you crazy, boring tedious repetitive tasks (just ask anyone without a dishwasher), financial and emotional and time constraints, regardless of who or what you are. The good news is that within that framework of all the stuff you have to do and all the limits you have on you, you get to choose what your life will be. I'm serious. Whether you end up working three jobs to support the seventeen children you managed to acquire or living in a mansion with a butler and six ferrets, you will get to choose whether you're happy or sad, whether you're a victim or a hero, whether your life is full of loneliness and tears or love and laughter, YOU GET TO CHOOSE. When I was in high school, my best friend used to remind me (constantly), "You know, Abraham Lincoln said that most folks are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be!" and I would say "Shut the hell up, Matt, I am full of angst and rage and you don't understand my pain!" and then I would punch him in the face. But eventually, and to my chagrin, I learned that he (and Abe Lincoln) was right. You're going to be as happy as you make up your mind to be, whether you're sitting in Algebra or touring the circuit as a professional rodeo clown. Living through high school is excellent practice.

Finally, in response to those of you who have emailed me complaining that your high school is awful and your teachers are morons and the whole experience is just making you DUMBER: look, I sympathize. I had a high school English teacher who didn't know the difference between the words "resume" and "résumé" and it made me want to call the presses and run a major exposé in all the papers about the idiots who were teaching in our schools. And I actually went to a pretty good school. And really, as a teacher, I know for a fact that some of your teachers probably are dumb, because I know that I've had a colleague or two over the years who's shocked me with their ignorance. But I also know that MOST of your teachers are a lot smarter than you think they are, and even dumb people can occasionally teach you something of worth. If you feel like you're not being challenged by the school, then take the reins into your own hands and challenge yourself. Take the hardest classes you can find. Push yourself to get straight As in all of them. Learn a new language. Teach yourself how to draw. Write a book. Read every single one of the 100 Best Novels. Invent something. Take up cross country running, or knitting, or fencing. Learn how to cook and bake and make your own yogurt. Find ways to help out people who are worse off than you. Challenge yourself.

And hang in there.

Love,
Ms. Backes

What I Love, A List*

Walking to work in the morning through the moving shadows and leafy light. An endless supply of lemonade in my refrigerator. A cup of hot tea while the rain splats against the windows outside. Fireworks from a city roof, 360 degrees. Grinnellians. Watching the mice poke their noses through the bars of their cage. An unexpected gift, a necklace hanging from a tree. Postcards. Sitting in a green back yard as the sky turns tangerine and lavender and deep blue and the fireflies bob among the bushes and the flowers. Tiny Italian lights. Floyds. Trusting myself (hard-earned and a long time coming). Reconnecting with people from the distant past. That moment in the morning between sleep and waking, when it seems anything could happen. The Chicago Public Library. Reaching out for a hand to hold and finding that a hundred people have been holding you up all along. Free artwork. Our newly working doorbell, and all the possibilities it offers. Dinner with teachers. Finding new people who feel like old friends. Strolling to the pooch park to pet other people's pooches. Weekends in Wisconsin. Walking all over this city. Secret doorways in vine-covered walls. Ice cream, anytime. A brand new bottle of expensive shampoo. Talking to my neighbors. Discovering wonderful new books, and rediscovering old ones. Freshly clean laundry. Houseplants I dragged all the way from New Mexico. Votes of confidence when you need them the most. Cold junior mints and hot coffee, together. Opening the window and yelling down to the people on the sidewalk below. A quilt from my mother, thirty years old. Lots of things.


*

What Writers Can Learn from Wall-E

All about that adorable little robot and what he has to teach storytellers over at Cooler By The Lake.

The Dreaded Passive Voice, and How A Friendship Was Nearly Destroyed by It

Reader, I'm sorry I've been neglecting you. I'm up to my waist in questions of emotional logic and over-parented characters (don't even ask) and character arcs and plot twists. In other words: BO-ring! Instead of putting you to sleep with descriptions of my incredibly exciting days (I work! Every day! And I write! Every day! Sometimes I drink tea instead of coffee! It's madness!!), I thought I'd repost a story I wrote last spring, which originally appeared on the StoryStudio Chicago blog, Cooler By The Lake.


The Dreaded Passive Voice,
and How A Friendship Was Nearly Destroyed By It

This spring, the Bad Habits met up in Barbados for Sister Nadia’s wedding. The four of us – Sister Alison, Sister Mary, Sister Nadia, and I – lived together our senior year of college, in a house we called “The Funnery Nunnery.”

The Funnery Nunnery

We became known as the Fun Nuns, and then (after we beat everyone in town at darts) the Bad Habits.

Sister Mary Mary, Sister Mary Nadia, and Sister Mary Alison,
with honorary Fun Nun Sister Mary Dan

Sister Nadia is from Barbados, and in college we used to joke about her wedding, complaining about how we’d all be forced to travel to Barbados for it, and what a terrible burden that would be. Little did we imagine that the day would come when the Fun Nuns would indeed reunite on the beach.

Our first night

It was the first time we’d been together in six years. Sister Nadia, now living in Ethiopia, had only been back to the States once since we graduated. Sister Mary, Sister Ali, and I all live in different cities, and don’t usually get to see each other more than once or twice a year. But here we all were, happily ensconced in a Beach House. While Nadia stayed with her parents, Mary, Ali, and I worked in secret to make a scrapbook for her, The Tale of the Fun Nuns, to let Sister Nadia know that though she was leaving the convent, she’d always be our sister. I spent the days before I left gathering pictures, making photocopies, and spending WAY too much money on markers, stickers, and paper. In the Beach House, the girls and I gathered around the kitchen table, mere feet from the ocean, cutting and gluing and decorating and chatting to the soundtrack of Bajan Radio. It was bliss…

The Beach House

…until the very last day, the day we had to write the text for our lovely, hilarious history of the Fun Nuns. We had thirty or so pages of pictures and stickers and glitter with little scrolls on each page for the text to complete the fairy tale motif. We knew roughly what each page would say, but we hadn’t written the exact words yet. When we started writing, to my utter HORROR, Sisters Mary and Ali wanted to write the ENTIRE book in PASSIVE VOICE.

Needless to say, I kind of freaked out.

They read the draft aloud. “Beer was drunk… hygiene was maintained… mountains were climbed… friends were made with critters great and small… thoughts were thunk…”

“Thoughts were THUNK?” I asked. “That’s not even ENGLISH.”

“It’s cute!” they said.

“It’s passive voice! It’s terrible! No no no. Write it in active voice!” (In my defense, I was an English teacher for years, where I picked up a nasty little habit of demanding changes in sloppy writing. I know, I know, it’s obnoxious, but come on! Before they give you a license to teach English, you have to sign an affidavit swearing your loyalty to the active voice.)

“We don’t know how,” they said.

“This is the story of the Fun Nuns,” I said. “So: they drank beer, they brushed their teeth, they climbed mountains, they made friends with critters.”

“That sounds dumb,” the Sisters complained. “We like it our way.”

Beer was drunk

“Girls,” I said, “Nadia’s mother was already making fun of us for being terribly stupid despite our fancy university educations.” (This is true. The problem was that a dressmaker was making the bridesmaids’ dresses before she actually met the bridesmaids, which meant that the girls needed to send their dress measurements months ahead of time. Seeing as how most women of my generation acquire clothing by going to the store and picking out something that’s already made and already fits, the girls had no experience taking their dress measurements. One of them sent a measurement from the nape of her neck to the front of her belly button, with a note that said, “But I can’t imagine what you’d need this number for.” The mothers laughed for DAYS.)

“This is a book that Nadia will show people all over the world. We don’t want them to think that we’re ignorant Americans who don’t know any better than to use the passive voice.”

“You are really blowing this out of proportion,” they said.

Things were getting awfully tense at the Beach House. These were my best girlfriends in the world. I didn’t want to make them mad, but I honestly couldn’t drop it. “Everyone knows that passive voice is a crutch for shady people who don’t want to take ownership of their own actions. That’s not us! I mean, beer was drunk and thoughts were thunk? WE drank that beer, damn it! WE thunk those thoughts. WE incorrectly conjugated those verbs! They were crazy times! We don’t need to be embarrassed about our actions! We don’t need to hide behind the passive voice! If the book is in passive voice, then it’s like the world was happening to the Fun Nuns. But this is our story! We went out into the world! The mountains weren’t just climbed by anyone – WE climbed those mountains! The critters shouldn’t be the subject of this sentence, we should!”

We drank that beer!

I tried to pull our honorary Fun Nun, Brother Carlos, into the argument, but since English was his second or third language, it was a losing proposition. He and I got into a tangled discussion of voice while trying to find a common ground between his good English and my bad Spanish. Pretty soon, I felt everyone in the room glaring at me like I was completely off the hook. Brother Carlos asked nicely, “This is very important to you, yes? But the other way sounds good too.”

Brother Carlos stays out of it

Finally we reached a compromise. Sisters Ali and Mary could have a section of passive voice inside the text, as long as the entire story wasn’t in passive voice. Sister Molly could have her active voice at the beginning and ending of the story, and flip quickly past the passive voice pages. And Brother Carlos could have the left-over glitter dumped all over him (but that’s another story).

Of course the book turned out beautifully, and of course Sister Nadia loved it, and of course we all got a little weepy when we read through it together.

Sister Nadia and The Tale of the Fun Nuns

“Still,” I said that night, “if I ever get married, you girls had better skip the passive voice section.”

“If it will make you happy,” they said, “an active voice book will be made for you by us.”

Teacher’s Pet

Zeke was a bad dog. The first time I saw him, he was streaking across a campus quad, ears flying in the wind, leash dragging behind him, while his owner followed on a bike, screaming his name. “Zeke! ZEKE! Bad dog!” He lived across the street from me my last year of college, and I watched him, surreptitiously, from my porch. Sometimes I stopped on my way home to pet him. My dog had died the year before and my mom had gotten herself a new dog, but the dog your family gets when you are 21 and in school is not the same as the one they get when you are ten and lonely. I patted Zeke on the head, gingerly, because his dull brown fur was sticky and dusted with dandruff. He had amber eyes and a stump for a tail and an extreme arthritic limp that didn’t prevent him from running away every chance he got. It became routine: Zeke ran away and his owner chased him on his bike, screaming and cursing. “Bad, bad dog!”



Sometimes I saw the man go after Zeke with a stick, yelling and hitting him. Once I tried to talk to him about it, asking if it was really necessary to hit the dog. “Oh yes,” he said. “He is a very bad dog. How else will he learn?” Politeness and fear trapped me in silence, and I shrugged unhappily. “In this country, you treat your dogs better than people,” he said. “In my country, dogs are for working.”

I told myself it was a cultural difference and not my place to interfere. Still, I flinched whenever I saw the man hitting Zeke. Even if he was a bad dog.

Eventually I graduated, moved across town, and began student teaching in a seventh grade classroom. The ten year difference between them and me felt like nothing. Trent Kidder sat in the last row of my last class of the day, and he was a problem from the first. “Oh, Trent Kidder,” the other teachers said knowingly. “He’s a bad kid.”

The other teachers told me that I needed to be harsh with Trent, to show him who was boss. They told me never to smile. They told me to send him to the principal right off the bat, to establish my dominance. I followed their advice, but Trent just got worse and worse. After school every day I went back to campus where I attended methods classes and wrote research papers and thought about how to tone Trent down and spice up my lessons so the rest of my students would care about class.

One Thursday afternoon in early September, the man showed up at my door with Zeke. It was an emergency, he said. He had to go out of town for the weekend and there wasn’t anyone else. Could I please take the dog, just until Sunday night?

“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t do it; my landlord had a very strict policy against dogs.

“Please,” the man said. “You’re the only one.”

I looked down. Zeke was wearing an ill-fitting red harness that cut under his legs and across his neck. He looked uncomfortable. “Oh, all right. Just until Sunday.”

When he was gone, I looked at Zeke. “I guess you’re stuck with me, buddy.” Zeke wagged his stump.



In my family, we’d always left the dog food out all day, and the dogs would eat when they were hungry. I put out a bowl of food for Zeke and he gobbled it as if he didn’t know when he’d see his next meal. Taken aback, I filled his bowl again, and he immediately finished it. “Hey,” I said. “I’ll feed you every day. I promise.” I washed him and brushed him but my family was not impressed. “What a dirty old dog,” they said. “He’s so old! He probably won’t live through the weekend.”

“He’s not dirty,” I said.

On Sunday, I waited for Zeke’s owner. I read a book, and Zeke slept at my feet. The minutes ticked by. I read another book. The man didn’t come. Finally at ten o’clock he called me and said he wasn’t going to make it. He was in Atlanta. “What am I supposed to do?” I demanded. “I can’t keep him!” The man begged me. Just one week. Please. Next Sunday. He promised.

What could I do? I said fine and hung up. Zeke wagged his stump and went back to sleep.



I spent the week sneaking around, trying to keep him hidden. I left him in the basement during the day and took him to campus with me when I could, letting him curl up at my feet in the curriculum library after everyone else had gone home for the night. He panicked when I left, and broke out of every kind of barrier I could make. When I was home, he stayed close to me, winding himself between my legs as I walked through the house and sneaking under the covers at night, like he thought I would leave if he let me out of his sight.

His owner called again Sunday night. From New York this time. No, he couldn’t come get him. Maybe next week.

I took Zeke to the vet and got him glucosamine, and he stopped limping. I brushed him every day and fed him eggs to make his coat soft and shiny brown. I talked to the people who knew his owner, followed a trail through his past to learn as much as I could about him. In the last year, the man had already left Zeke with three other families.

The next week, he didn’t come back, and he didn’t call.

My mother the social worker said Zeke reminded her of the foster children she’d worked with over the years. She put him in her car to take him on a play date and said he looked like a foster kid, resigned to the fact that she would leave him again, that no one wanted to be his forever family.



After six weeks, we got an envelope in the mail with Zeke’s medical records and a note from one of Zeke’s previous foster homes. Congratulations on your new dog! the note said. “I thought you were dog-sitting him,” my mother said.

I looked down at Zeke, who stood leaning against my legs. He wagged his stump at me. “I guess not.”

A few weeks after that, a friend of mine yelled at him as a joke. “Bad dog!” he yelled, and Zeke cowered in fear, whimpering. I nearly kicked my friend out of the house. “Don’t you ever yell at my dog again.” I knelt down with Zeke and wrapped my arms around him, shushing him. “You’re safe,” I told him. “You’ll always be safe with me. I promise you.”

I fed him every day and though he always ate with relish, he lost that haunted look that said he didn’t know when he’d get his next meal. Our family vet helped perfect his glucosamine dosage until his limp disappeared altogether. I walked him every day and let him sleep next to me with his head on the pillow at night. Night after night I watched him fall asleep, marveling that an animal who had been abused and neglected could ever feel safe enough to fall asleep with someone watching.



Zeke became a very good dog.

Little kids could hit him on the head and he’d just stand there, smiling his doggy smile and wagging his stump. I took him to visit my elderly relatives and saw decades drop from their faces as they stroked his soft ears. He was my co-pilot, my hiking buddy, my muse, my partner in crime, my entertainment when I was bored, my relief after a long day at school. My best friend.

Trent, on the other hand, got worse and worse. He interrupted my class at every opportunity, and started to rally the other kids to his cause, until I worried about mutiny. One day I watched him running around the field at lunch, and thought of the first time I saw Zeke, of his unfettered glee as he flew across the quad. The advice of the other teachers suddenly reminded me of what the man had told me about Zeke. “How else will he learn?” I thought about the light that came into Zeke’s eyes, slowly, after months of care and love. Hitting him with a stick made him bad. Treating him with gentle care made him good.

So I forgot the advice of the veteran teachers and followed a hunch instead. Rather than showing Trent who was boss by punishing him, I waited until a day when he was less obnoxious than usual and pounced. “You did such a great job today!” I told him. “You’re a leader in the class, and the other kids look up to you.”

I saw a tiny light appear in Trent’s eyes. “Really?”

“Absolutely,” I said, and smiled at him.

By the end of the semester, Trent was a model student – but only in my class. The other teachers still complained about him and asked me what my secret was. “I just told him he was a good person, and he bloomed.” Maybe that’s all any of us needs, really: someone to pat us on the back and tell us we’re doing a good job.

Nine months after he left, the man reappeared and tried to reclaim Zeke, acting as if that was the plan all along. Though I’m the least confrontational person in the world, I stood my ground, refusing to give the dog back, then threatening to file a restraining order when he didn’t leave me alone. I was only 23, but I was discovering my inner Mama Bear, the part of me that would fight to protect my charges at any cost.



For the next five years, I kept a picture of Zeke on my desk at school to remind me to focus not on punishing the worst in kids, but on bringing out their best. Zeke taught me how to use laughter and kindness to make my classroom a safe place for students, where they could grow into the best versions of themselves. The kids loved to hear stories about him, and instead of giving me the usual mugs and trinkets that teachers get, they gave me tennis balls and bones for Zeke. In class, we diagrammed sentences about him chasing squirrels and eating cheese. They came back from the high school to visit me and asked about him before anything else.

Zeke was a wonderful dog. I promised him I’d take care of him for as long as he lived, and when his time here was up, the vet came to our house and I lay on the floor with my head on the pillow of his dog bed, stroking his soft ears and whispering to him. “You’re a good dog,” I told him. “You’re my best dog.” The whole family gathered around us, crying and petting him, but in the end it was just me and my best dog with our faces together, and I watched him close his eyes for the last time, knowing that he was perfectly safe and perfectly loved.



A few weeks after Zeke died, Trent Kidder graduated from high school. I heard that he grew up to be a serious, studious young man who argued passionately for his beliefs. I thought about him a lot during Zeke’s last days. As a teacher, I often wished I could keep my students safe, as I kept Zeke, for their entire lives. Still, a year is better than nothing, and I’m grateful to the dog who taught me spend what little time I get with students teaching them that they’re good people, they’re safe, and they’re loved.

Happy Fourth of July!

That was terrible! Horrendous! I'm offended! I'm appalled!

Eavesdropping

In line at Walgreens:

"Aveda! They're like Earth Nazis, man!"


At Ipsento:

"He's worse than Bill Clin-ton. You remember Bill Clin-ton? What did he say? I did not commit no crime, I only had a little fun in the oval office. I did not have sex with anyone, I just had a little fun in the Oval Office. Isn't that what he said? He was a world class con-man. But I still like him, though. He did not drink moon-shine."


On the bus:

"My babies ain't never been. The closest they ever been to a zoo was some deers and a snake. It was hot as fuck though and they got flies in their eyeballs and shit."




Ah, the narrative possibilities abound....

Covert Ops

The feds never have gone for subtlety. Natalie said, "They should call themselves 'Not Selling Guns' or 'You're Not Under Surveillance.'"

The truck moved right after I snapped this picture.

Iowa Update

My friends (and fellow Grinnellians) Liz and Andrew have started a blog to document the experiences they've had with the flooding in Iowa City. Today's post includes a video tour of their house. Check it out.

As with any disaster, the media will stay with the story as long as there's shocking footage and new developments to grab audience attention. As the floodwaters recede, so will media attention, and the press will move on to the next story. But Liz, Andrew, and the many, many other people in Iowa will be dealing with this flood long after the cameras stop running.

Keep them in your thoughts.


Local news stations have information on how you can help:
How to help Des Moines
How to help Cedar Rapids
and see www.2008flood.org for additional information on volunteers and donations.

Oh, (([Iowa]))!

A few weekends ago, five of my friends and I rented a van and drove down to Iowa for Grinnell's Reunion. It was our five year cluster, so the classes of 2002-03-and-04 were all lumped together on one side of campus. Grinnell does one big reunion weekend for everyone, so there were people on campus for their ten year (1998), twenty-five year (1983), thirty year cluster (1977-78-79), forty year (1968), fifty year (1958), sixty-five year (1943), and seventy year (1938). The older you are, the better the snacks.

Gates Tower, Grinnell. Photo by Emily Westergaard

The weekend was wonderful and intense and surprising and fun. The weather -- for the first time in MONTHS -- was absolutely perfect for two and a half consecutive days. Some kind of record, I'm fairly certain. There were more than four hundred people from my cluster there, so much of the weekend felt like freshman orientation, only instead of Where are you from/what's your tutorial/what dorm are you in/what do you think you might major in? it was Where are you now/what's your job/what have you been doing since graduation/what do you think you might do next?. Also, unlike freshman orientation, we already knew almost everyone, so instead of three days of deeply bonding conversations, it was three days of brief chats perpetually interrupted by "Oh hey! Um, forgive me a moment, but I HAVE to talk to --" and then a mad dash off to a new three-minute conversation with someone else you hadn't seen in five or six years.

In the middle of all this crazy chaos, somehow I also found time for a Dari Barn run (key to every Grinnell visit between May and October), a Harris Party, breakfast with my education prof Jean Ketter (which ended up being a sort of convocation of education nerds, in the very best way), a Titular Head screening, a bakery run (thanks for the donut, Mike!), some baby smooching and dog petting, multiple McNally's beer runs, coffee with my fiction professor and dear friend Mark Baechtel, a solitary stroll through the leafy streets of town, and a late-night Kum & Go run for oatmeal creme pies.

Em and Laura at the Cluster Social. Photo by Emily Westergaard

Reunion's a strange beast: so much hugging and partying and hanging out, a person might forget that Grinnell wasn't just a four year long huggy lovefest. I felt a little off-center for much of the time, like this wasn't exactly the Grinnell I remembered and I couldn't quite figure out why -- it wasn't that the buildings had changed or that not everyone I remembered from all my five years was there, or even the absence of a creeping dread about upcoming papers and books and guilt that you really should be working on something productive instead of lying around on Mac Field -- it wasn't until I walked by myself from Mark's house back to campus that I realized what was so different: I spent so much of my time at Grinnell alone, walking around the town on lovely spring evenings just like that one. Senior year I walked between 2.5 and 5 miles every day -- I particularly loved the loop west of the golf course out to Penrose and around. I took the long way back to campus, enjoying the satisfaction of a walk alone after coffee with an old friend.

I was surprised to find that the town itself is still as dear to me as a person. At times I have thought of Grinnell as a skeleton, fleshed out and breathing only with the addition of the people I love best. Turns out I have a deep connection to the streets themselves, the bones and sinews of my time under that Iowa sky. I miss the town. I miss the land. A part of me wants to away from this sooty gray city and claim a life for myself that includes a big green lawn, some dogs, leafy strolls through quiet streets at dusk....

East Campus Loggia. Photo by Emily Westergaard

I think if I'd been alone I would have spent an hour sitting up in the windowsill of the drawing studio, writing in my journal, just like old days, but as it was I had Natalie with me and so spent most of my unstructured time trying to show her what Grinnell was for me and help her to understand why all the Grinnellians she's met are so crazy about this dumb little town in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa. Hard to explain, myself, other than: it was home, and for the time that we lived there, it was the place to which we anchored ourselves and against which we pushed in our efforts to grow. And as such, I suppose, it's as much a part of us as anything else of that time.

Natalie has her own interpretation of her weekend in Grinnell here. I wrote about the weekend in my journal as we headed home that Sunday, winding through the green Iowa fields watching dark clouds give way to rainbows and listening the Garrison Keillor on the radio.

Whenever anyone mentions Iowa, I immediately say "It's a little gem." Iowa has the kind of beauty it takes a long time to see, unlike the states of the west with their showy, craggy, breathtaking beauty, or the states of the east with their crackling culture and deep roots and historical markers around every corner, or the states of the south with their shocking fecundity and abundance of bright, sensual flowers. Iowa takes time to love. I spent my entire first year there making fun of it, not realizing how deeply I loved it until the summer after my sophomore year when I was suddenly overcome with an intensely physical desire -- a yearning -- to walk along the wildflower paths between Quad and Burling, to stand beneath the budding fuschia crabapple trees and fill my ears with the heavy buzzing of summer bees.

Iowa. It takes time to grow into you, but once its wide horizons and July fields of floating fireflies move into your understanding of home, I don't know that you can ever unlock its hold on your heart.

Now, Iowa is suffering, and every time I read the news it hurts my heart. My friends are being forcibly evacuated from their homes in Iowa City; bridges are being shut down all over the state, barring access to cities like Cedar Rapids and Des Moines and Iowa City; houses and histories are being destroyed, daily. And there's no end in sight.

Red Cross truck braves the flood in Iowa City. Photo by Andrew Sherburne

Reports from some of my friends:

Jeremy: "Driving home this afternoon, I got a phone call from a friend, saying he'd heard my street (Foster Rd. [in Iowa City]) was on the mandatory evacuation list. By the time I made it home, the cop at the intersection informed me it was true. In about 30 minutes, I randomly threw some clothes into bags, loaded up the dogs, turned off the gas, electricity, and water, and took off for Dubuque. The normally-90 minute drive took two-and-a-half hours. We had to detour through Cedar Rapids--a challenge since there was only one bridge open in Cedar Rapids (its entire downtown is underwater).

I don't know how long we're going to be evacuated; the property manager in our neighborhood said he'd heard three weeks. The latest I heard is that the Iowa River's flood stage is 22', the river is currently at 28', and the predicted crest on Tuesday is 33'."

and

Carolyn: "There was a team of 6 Grinnellians who were sandbagging until they were sent over the the Main Library to help bring up film reels from the Special Collections storage areas in the basement of the library. They had just finished clearing out the films when they were told that the whole operation was shutting down b/c the University is closing . . . so they left, leaving a huge part of the special collections materials sitting there in the basement."

Flooded park in IC. Photo by Andrew Sherburne

and

Em: "i'm high and dry, thankfully, but am sick from what i see all around me here in iowa. mike's work is about to be flooded, so he's there shrink wrapping and loading what they can onto semis. my parents have a foot of water in their basement, and are pretty lucky to have that. my late grandmother's neighborhood is being evacuated - the entire area was destroyed in 1993, but the levee upgrades were a casualty of budget cuts and were never completed."

and

Liz: "last night at 1:30 AM the police knocked on our door to issue a mandatory evacuation for our neighborhood and told us we had 30 minutes to get out. Andrew ran up the street to get our car, as we have been parking it up the hill at a friend's house just in case the flood waters make the street impassable. There is already a low spot that has flooded, but as of Wed night it was passable by our camry. Because the police had just come to our door and told us to evacuate, he was worried that the water in the street was too high and drove on the sidewalk. And he drove at a faster than expected speed, as we were rushing to get out. The lovely Pigs of IC actually *pulled him over* and threatened to ticket, then arrest him. We stayed for 2 hours putting everything we could into a couple of friend's trucks and then getting everything up on blocks. Meanwhile the police harassed us that we needed to get out (even though the river wasn't rising and the street was no more flooded than before) and then finally they told us we had 5 minutes to get out or they would forceably remove us. 12 cops surrounded our house and continued to yell at us, despite my plea for them to find it in their hearts to let us get our house ready because this was our first home, we'd just moved in, and we didn't have flood insurance. And what difference would 20 extra minutes make? Luckily somehow we were able to get our house ready in those 2 hours.

This AM we went back down to our neighborhood and were again told we had only 1/2 hour to get our things and get out. We hid in our backyard and filled 25 sandbags using dirt from our compost pile, as we were afraid that if we went down the street to get sand we'd get arrested. I said a prayer of hope for our house and we left it, still dry. In '93 the river crested at 28.5 feet and was up to our sidewalk. It is supposed to get up to 33 feet this tuesday. This most likely means we will have 1-2 feet of water in our house. Sadly, we only put everything up 8" and we didn't sandbag our house because we helped with the levee in the hopes that it would hold back the flood waters. It's times like these when you're happy to have a roof over your head, your health and safety, friends who call/email to help out, and a partner to lean on through the whole thing." (See a picture of Liz's husband, my old friend Drew, in the Iowa Press-Citizen here.)

and

the University of Iowa: "UI employees who park in the Hancher and Main Library parking lots, the parking lots near USB, and the North Ramp, are asked to stay home unless they are essential personnel fighting the flooding. Those employees should also notify their supervisors." (UI's Floodblog is basically a record of the University shutting down, building by building and program by program.)

Man pushes car in Iowa City. Photo by Matthew Holst

and

the City of Coralville (outside of Iowa City): "The Iowa River crest is now predicted to occur on late Monday night (assuming no more rain). The Army Corp estimates the current outflow from the reservoir is 34,000 CFS and have increased their projected peak rate on Monday to be 44,000 CFS. (Peak in 1993 was 27,000.) So it will get much worse before it gets better. The flow information on the Army Corp website is incorrect because their gauges are no longer functioning."

Iowa Governor Chet Culver has declared 83 of the state's 99 counties to be state disaster areas. Eighty-three.

Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, and South Dakota are all struggling with flooding problems (or, in the case of Lake Delton, the opposite of flooding), but for some reason, it's Iowa that hurts my heart the most. It's like watching the baby of the family battle cancer.

Downtown Cedar Rapids. Photo by Jeff Roberson

If you're the kind of person who prays, you might want to say a few extra prayers for the people of Iowa today. If you're the kind of person who sends love out into the universe in hopes of positive manifestations, do that. If you're wealthy, send money. If you're close, go help sandbag. But whatever and wherever you are, keep Iowa in your thoughts today and in the days to come, because even after the flood waters recede, Iowa is going to need a lot of help.

Goodbye, My Zeke

You were my best dog.

The Weather Sucks, But the Cops Are HOTT... er, Doing a Very Good Job

Or: Why Chicago So Totally Kicks Your First Responder Ass, New Mexico!

Tonight I was lying on the couch, half wondering if I should go ahead and take a nap, half contemplating getting back into the Graham Greene novel I'm reading (half dreaming about the green chile cheese bagels currently in our refrigerator.... mmmmm....) when I heard a braking noise and then a faint crunching noise.

"Was that a car crash?" I asked.
Natalie called from the other room. "No, it was just the wind. Go back to sleep." But a moment later she went to the front window (aka Front Page to the World) and started making horrified little gasping noises.
"What?" I asked. "What happened?" She didn't answer so I was forced to run to the window and see for myself: there was a girl all crumpled up in the street in front of our house, surrounded by concerned women.

Like any good urban neighbors, we watched the drama unfold through our window. The girl had been hit on a vespa. She had a friend who hadn't been hit. They were wearing identical silver helmets. Two ladies stopped their cars in the middle of the intersection, but we couldn't tell who was the hitter: the black Pontiac, or the blue Mercedes? The girl who hadn't been hit kneeled down and talked to her friend with a huge smile on her face. It's easy to smile when you haven't just been hit by a car and thrown from your vespa into rush hour traffic on Western, I guess. You'd think the fact that your friend was just hit would make it a little harder to smile, but who knows. That's what keeps us glued to our windows.

We've seen a lot of accidents here. Most notably, of course, the best. car crash. ever! last summer. Natalie saw a girl get hit on foot, on her way to the train one morning. Yesterday, the Damen bus I was riding nearly ran a girl off the bridge into the Chicago River. Today a ghost bike showed up at one of the bridges on my commute. (Incidentally, Time Out Chicago was all about hardcore bikers this week, and every single one of them had been in several serious accidents. Natalie and I were JUST talking about how we were way too scared to ride bikes in this town, an hour before the crash. As we stared out the window at the crying girl, we said, "Looks like vespas are too dangerous in this town, too.")

We've also seen other kinds of drama. Two weeks ago there was a huge fire down the block from us, with giant flames engulfing an entire apartment building. When I was here taking a class at Second City in the summer of 06, a Blue Line train derailed not far from here. And of course, last winter, the bank robbery. In just under a year here, I've become quite the witness to Chicago emergencies.

And so, I would like to take a moment to give a big shout-out to some of the least lame people in this entire city: the Chicago Police and Fire Departments. Every single time I've been in or near a situation that warranted their attention, I've been impressed. For one thing, they are SO FAST. When the bank got robbed, the police were there in under five minutes. UNDER FIVE.

By contrast, when my truck was broken into in Albuquerque, I waited for the police for three hours. THREE HOURS. I kept calling the dispatcher and saying, "Look, I know you're all busy, but I'm a single woman alone downtown and it's four in the morning." They kept saying, They'll be there shortly ma'am, just hold on. Look, ABQ police, I get that a woman all by herself with a truck covered in shattered glass isn't a huge emergency compared to all the cows loose on the highway and people driving the wrong way on off-ramps, but if you weren't going to come for me, you should have just said so. I would have appreciated a "Look lady, we don't really care about your broken truck or stolen stereo and we're not going to do anything about it anyway, so why don't you just go home and get some sleep." Similarly, the Moriarty police could have cared less when my wallet was stolen out of my classroom & within two hours over $800 had been charged to my credit cards. Again, I get that my little dramas aren't a huge deal, but it's MORIARTY. Tell me you honestly had anything better to do. Or there was the time that a sheriff was murdered right outside my house in Tijeras and I was too scared to go home for days, and when I finally went home there was a policeman in my backyard, staring into my house, who yelled at me and asked what I was doing there. I live here, I said. What are YOU doing here? Surely the murderer isn't still hiding in my kitchen, four days after the murder?

New Mexico police could learn a lot from the CPD, is all I'm saying.

With the fire down the block, the firefighters did such a good job holding everyone back and getting their ladders up and making sure everyone was out of the building and safe. And again, they were there FAST.

By contrast. In high school, a car spontaneously combusted in the student parking lot and it took the Oregon Fire Department a half hour to get one truck there. A half hour! In Oregon! The fire department was only like three blocks from the high school. They could have CARRIED BUCKETS OF WATER all the way from the station in less time than it took them to drive their truck out. By the time they finally rolled up, the car had burned itself out and nearly taken a bunch of other student cars with it (including my poor, sainted Renault, who had to watch the immolation of one of her fellows from across the aisle, and was very traumatized and covered with ash when I came out of school that afternoon).

So again: Chicago Fire Department, 1. OFD, minus twelve.


I can't imagine being a police officer or fire fighter. I can't imagine the kind of spirit and dedication it takes to show up for work every single morning after facing emergencies and tragedies (both devastating and tiny) nearly every single day. I can't imagine what kind of heart you would have to have, to stand witness to all that sorrow.

But man, do I appreciate it.





Thanks, CPD & CFD. You're doing a great job.

Name That Novel

My friend (and fellow writer) Mark needs your help. He's finished with his novel and currently in the process of sending out queries, but... he doesn't have a (good) title. He's burned out on brainstorming (and completely unimpressed with ALL of my suggestions!), so he's turning the wheel over to you. If you come up with a winning title for Mark's novel, he promises to buy you "many expensive Belgian beers and/or overpriced coffee concoctions."

About Mark's novel:

Seven years of bad luck, seven years spent touring in a van held together by duct tape and coat hangers, rehearsing in a loft infested by incontinent rodents, causing shallow pings in the vast music machine, and just before giving up, one last chance to make it.

Finnegan is a blink away from thirty-three, the talented lead singer/songwriter for indie rock band The Babylon Sonic. A last gasp demo snags the interest of a label, luring them from New York to snow-plagued Chicago. The show is three days away and nothing is going right. Sullen lead guitarist James disappears from a hospital after overdosing on absinthe. Cranky English manager Shemp paces the frigid loft threatening to quit. Longtime girlfriend, neurotic fringe theater actress Holly, abandons him without explanation. And dodging the smothering blanket of depression seems impossible with each sleepless night. What’s that one shot in music really worth? Can Finnegan recapture the intensity he had when adolescence was still winning the battle and everything was sharp inside, buzzing and humming with the strange electricity of youth?

YOUR TITLE HERE is a 130,000-word novel for anyone who loves music or songwriting and imagines what it might feel like to climb on that stage, and anyone whose compass has ever spun wildly out of control while chasing that dream they’ve had since childhood.

If that's not quite enough inspiration for you, check out Mark's music page, featuring music similar (and in some cases identical!) to that of The Babylon Sonic.

Submit your suggestions in the comments here, or email them to info@storystudiochicago.com. Have fun!

How's Your Soul Doing?

If this picture of an otter mama holding her little tiny grover doesn't make your heart rejoice, even a tiny bit, for all that is good and true and itty bitty on this often-wretched-but-still-full-of-baby-otters planet of ours,





then wow. You're really in trouble.

Plans, Facebook, and Why No Amount of Sheep-Throwing Will Ever Lead Me To Predict the Downfall of Human Society

Plans went down this week, and I’ve been thinking about community ever since. Do virtual networking sites like Facebook and Twitter really help to build stronger communities, or do they impede actual human interaction, until one day we’ll never leave our houses at all and merely communicate with people by sending them one-sentence updates about the minutia of our shut-in lives and then throwing virtual sheep at them?

I vote stronger communities… of shut ins.

No, I’m kidding. It’s just the gray skies and 49 degrees Fahrenheit talking. Clearly, Chicago hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s MAY and thus could bring on the sunshine and springly weather any day now. And until it does, I’m sticking to my winter policy of never leaving my house unless I have to, dammit.

And that’s kind of the point, I guess. Lately I’ve been feeling more connected than usual to the wide circle of people I’ve met in my life, thanks to the marvel that is Facebook. Look, I know that you probably hate Facebook. You probably think that it represents everything that is silly and intemperate about our stupid society with its one-sentence updates and its zombie fighting and its obsessive reports about who has added or subtracted what from their interests, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But Facebook is also like a giant living phonebook, with entries for everyone under (and some over) 35 that I’ve ever met, and in that sense it’s been an amazing tool of reconnection. And every time a new friend pops up in my inbox, it’s like turning another corner at a reunion and running into yet another person I really liked ten years ago but haven’t thought of or heard from in a while… but this isn’t just a school reunion, it’s a reunion of everyone in my whole LIFE.

Just in the last month, Facebook has reunited me with:
-- the children of my parents’ friends, those friends-of-convenience we all had in childhood because it was easier to play with them than it was to be a baby misanthrope as our parents drank too much wine and pretended to be normal people for once. Most of these people I haven’t seen since junior high, and yet in retrospect I realize that even though we were sort of just friends because our parents were friends, as it turns out they’re cool people in their own right, and I’m pretty excited to reconnect with them. Even if I have to drag my parents along to do so.
-- the first person who ever taught me improv. That’s huge, right there. He gave me the gift of Chain Murder Mystery when he was a skinny teenager with a mullet, and now he’s a high school theater teacher in Ohio. This morning we had a conversation about 1992 and high school musical.
-- my fifth grade pen-pal. I’ve never actually met her, but I have met her parents. They took me out for dinner in Albuquerque a few years ago, which was a little weird, since – again – I’ve never actually met their daughter, only sent semi-illiterate letters and HIDEOUS pictures of myself to her in the early nineties. And now she’s my friend on Facebook. (One day, Becca, we WILL meet. I swear. And it will be heartwarming enough to get into the Reader’s Digest. OH. Or if one of us gets cancer or something, maybe we could get Oprah to foot the bill. And buy us both new cars. Just a thought.)
-- the high school English student teacher who was cool enough to come to our Poetry Society and who we called Franz, who let me give him advice about writing and life when I was 17 (because really, who DOESN’T want advice from a precocious, overly-dramatic seventeen-year-old who’s never lived outside Wisconsin?) and who, after finishing out the year with us, moved to Turkey to teach, and who is now a travel writer based in Madison. Check out his blog here.
-- a bunch of the amazing people I met at Nadia’s wedding.
-- tons of people I haven’t seen since high school, which is great, because now if whoever’s in charge of these things actually gets around to organizing a ten year reunion for us, I’ll actually be able to match some names and faces. Not to mention the fact that, again, I went to school with some really incredible people, only I was too much of an idiot to actually recognize that particular fact at the time. It didn’t really help that I only thought about myself, back then. (And SO much has changed since then. Ha.)

So, I admit it: I’m kind of in love with Facebook right now.

For a while, I actually thought that my love of Facebook would eclipse my love of PLANS, which is to Facebook what Model Ts are to corn-powered jet packs. [If you’re not a Grinnellian, or if you haven’t already heard me explain Plans a million times, here’s a little (long-winded and perhaps overly-informative) History of Plans that I wrote about five years ago. (I just realized that I’m coming up on my ten year anniversary with Plans. Weird.)]

While Facebook has been one giant reunion, Plans has been a continuous community since the very beginning of college. Unlike Facebook, where you generally only connect to people you actually know in life, Plans allows you to meet new people, through the web of interconnected discussions and references. Over time, it’s not uncommon to become a regular reader of plans written by people you’ve never actually met in real life – and then, over time, to start thinking of those people as friends. Moreover, because Plans is nothing but text, it’s a place of discussion and reflection. Not that there’s no place in this world for virtually poking people, but… that place is Facebook. When I need advice, or want help sorting through my thoughts and feelings about some issue of ethics or current events, I go to Plans. When I want to find friends from sixth grade and then attack their vampires, I go to Facebook.

After graduation from Grinnell, we spread out across the globe. Recently I found something I’d written as a senior in high school, announcing my intention to find a college that drew people from all over the country, so that I could take a post-college road trip and crash on my friends’ couches in every state. As it turns out, I set the bar a little low. I ended up with friends all over the world, and Plans has helped me to keep up with many of them. A few years ago, I went out to dinner with a Grinnellian I hadn’t seen in years, and though she went around the table asking everyone what they’d been up to since Grinnell, when she got to me we just looked at each other and grinned. We were on Plans. We kept up with each other’s lives. We hadn’t seen each other since college, but we were still connected.

When Plans went down this week, I realized how much I’d come to rely on that community of friends, classmates, and colleagues for their insights and wisdom. A week without Plans and I had no idea what was going on in the wider world. Sure, over at Facebook they were all partying til dawn and playing Scrabulous, but I needed the Plans community to help me think about environmental legislation and the legal and moral implications of polygamy and what was going on with the democratic candidates and what cute thing Doug Cutchins’ daughters said this week. The Plans exiles ended up huddling in a chat room over at Facebook, bolstering each other’s spirits and trying to figure out ways to help. The Facebook Plans group felt a lot like the time there was a tornado in fourth grade and we were all stranded inside the school’s Little Theater for hours, sitting on the floor in tight groups, worried, and trying to make the best of things. We were survivors, exiles from the same community, joined in concern over our lost home. And when Plans finally went back online Thursday night, we straggled back and welcomed each other home.

Plans has been a great gift in my life, as it has given me access to a wide network of thoughtful, kind, intelligent people with tons of collective life experience to share. It’s an incredibly rich, deeply supportive community that – even though it’s just a bunch of text on the screen – feels an awful lot like a family.

And so I have to say that this trend of social networking doesn’t worry me at all, because I know that the best kind of social networking can help you to grow as a person, and keep you grounded and connected to people and events all over the world. Because after all, it’s about people, about building connections with other human beings, and in that sense it’s no different than writing on cave walls or composing blank verse: just another way to reach out to another human and hear them say, “I hear you. I understand you. I’m glad you’re here.”