March 2002 Archives

Easter is always a somewhat strange holiday for me, even when it's not rainy and grey and accompanied by the drudgery of dorm duty. My religious upbringing is such a bizarre mixture of experiences that I never expect to feel completely involved in any expression of faith, but I feel at least somewhat engaged by Christmas, or Passover, or Halloween. Not Easter, though. Of course, in America, Easter is the most culturally bizarre of celebrations, one which has its origins in mankind's primal belief in blood sacrifice and rebirth, but which is now rendered in nursery-school pastels and cute little ducky-and-bunny icons; it's the Passion Play re-enacted by the Teletubbies.

Today it's even weirder, given that I'm a bit irked by Indiana coach Mike Davis's comments last night. Actually, it's not just Davis, but a whole knot of athletes who seem to worship a peculiarly binary God of the Gym, a Supreme Being who expresses His love for His children in the sporting world by handing out victories, but only to the ones who've been good. These worshippers don't seem to realize that victories don't exist in a vacuum--they must be taken away from the losers.

In short, what we have is a bunch of people who thank God for yanking victory out of their opponents' hands.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable in considering this set-up to be both theologically suspect and at base unfair. I've always been told that God likes everybody equally, but in a contest, somebody's got to come out on top, even if the competitors are among God's very favorite people. Surely St. Peter and St. Andrew would have played friendly games when they were kids; they were brothers, after all. But if Peter were to school Andrew in a game of one-on-one in the driveway, would that suggest that God found Andrew less worthy, or just that Peter had made better use of his God-given talents and opportunities?

Everybody likes Santa Claus, but I have to wonder if he'd be such a popular guy if he worked on these principles. "Dear Santa: please bring me the N-64 System that you were going to give my brother. I like you better than he does."

Of course, the Easter Bunny brings eggs and candy to everyone, regardless of their piety or moral character. And if you ask me, he looks unsettlingly like Tinky-Winky.

7:12 PM

I'm about to start my annual bachelorhood. Every year, Kelly and the boys go to her mom's during the boys' spring break, and I stay here. Why? Because I work at a school that uses a trimester schedule. Our spring break is in early March, after winter exams. The boys' spring break starts on Good Friday and continues through the week after Easter. In other words, the public school system observes Easter with a week off, while the private school with required chapel services has no Easter break at all.

In any case, I usually celebrate Easter by sitting around at home watching a lot of movies, usually movies in which Kelly has no interest. I try to mix things up a bit, though--I don't want to watch drek and nothing but drek. Thus, last year I had a double feature of Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde and Babette's Feast. Let me tell you, there's nothing to set off the lonely beauty of the Scandinavian coast like watching Tim Daly turn into Sean Young.

I'm also working on the whole "Wizard of Floyd" thing. I'm sure some of you have tried it--putting on Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz? It's supposed to reveal all sorts of hidden connections between the two, like the "ching!" of the cash register when the movie switches to the more expensive technicolor scenes. I've tried it myself, and it's a cute way to spend 45 minutes. Unfortunately, some people--my students, for example--have developed some sort of drug-induced conclusion that the boys of Floyd deliberately set up their album to correspond with the movie. I'm here to debunk that one good and hard, folks; if nothing else, back in 1973, Roger Waters & Co. would have had to predict the existence of both the VCR and the CD player. The latter is especially important, because when they recorded Dark Side, the listener had to get up and flip the record over--a startling truth for those of you in the post-vinyl generation, I know--which would have thrown off the syncronization with the movie.

So one of my projects this week will be to find some other record that will correspond to The Wizard of Oz just as well as Dark Side does. I'm thinking of starting with something straightforward, like Revolver or Blood on the Tracks, but I may have to try something a little more adventurous, like Robyn Hitchcock's I Often Dream of Trains; I just know there's some fascinating bit of Judy Garland-related synchronicity hidden in the lyrics of "Uncorrected Personality Traits."

9:38 PM

I'm still not really used to the idea of my name appearing in print. It's happened reasonably often, I guess, but whenever my byline appears publicly, I find myself stupidly pleased and eager to see it with my own eyes.

I think the first thing I had printed in a form that others could see was a first-person account of a trip I took to Vermont when I was twelve or so. Chapel Hill's pioneering recreational soccer program, Rainbow Soccer, had given birth to a similar program in Middlebury, Vermont, and a delegation of Rainbow players, ranging in age from about ten to about forty, caravanned up to New England for a celebratory game or two. For some reason the Chapel Hill Newspaper--yes, that was really its name in those days--thought a twelve-year-old's viewpoint might be entertaining, and like most twelve-year-olds, I was more than willing to share my opinions. Whether I knew anything worth sharing I have no idea.

I kept writing through high school, and when I got to UNC I published a few letters and columns in the Daily Tar Heel, despite the fact that the music editor of the DTH hacked up my review of Stevie Nicks's Bella Donna album to the point where several of my sentences were turned into fragments. I also had a heartfelt if extremely gimmicky short story published in the Cellar Door, UNC's literary magazine.

And god help me, I still have every publication in which something I wrote appears.

Yesterday, I was happy to see that a submission of mine had won third runner-up in the Washington Post's Style Invitational; all I really did was swipe one of my own contributions to Readerville.com's semi-legendary Books That Never Were thread, but I remain stupidly excited at the fact that the Washington Post has my name in it!

Part of me is hoping that I eventually get over this over-excited frame of mind, so that I can handle the idea that I'm getting published with some degree of decorum. But part of me simply won't be convinced. Publication is like sex, says that part; the fact that it's happened to you before should in no way keep you from whooping for joy when it happens again.

9:41 PM

The Whirlwind That Is Life has been especially damaging to my mental trailer park this week.

On Tuesday, I went riding with the school's cycling team. Being young and energetic, the guys set a pretty quick pace, despite the fact that the roads were either a) freshly re-gravelled, or b) muddy, two serious momentum-killers, and the weather was grey and abnormally cold for March, about 47 degrees. Nonetheless, we rode out from school about nine miles without too much trouble; unfortunately, then it started to rain. I was pretty sodden and chilled by the time I got back, and the dirt-road portions of the ride had caused a deeply unattractive spatter of mud right up the middle of the seat of my pants. Hey, it's exercise.

On Wednesday, my son got his finger slammed in one of the big metal doors at school. We drove him to the ER in Charlottesville, where they put eight stitches into his right middle finger. He was incredibly stoic the entire time, except when he first saw his mom. I have no idea why we hold up so well when there's no one around to comfort us, but we turn to complete puddles of goo as soon as we're reunited with the ones who love us most.

On Thursday, Duke lost to Indiana in the NCAA Tournament. Heh.

On Friday some of our friends from Readerville.com (Click on this site's link if you want to know more about my online home-away-from-home...) arrived at our house for the weekend. Kelly was a bit under the weather, but I went with them to Charlottesville that night to meet up with some other Rville pals. We ate fish & chips and drank cider at Rapture on the Downtown Mall, talked about books and publishing, and learned about the differences between Literary Sex (which Goes Wrong and Teaches Something) and Commercial Sex (which is, we presume, any kind of sex that the participants enjoy).

On Saturday, I taught my morning classes (Oedipus Rex and memorizing speeches, if you were wondering) and headed back to Cville with my pals for the annual Gordon Avenue Branch Library Book Sale, where I snagged a ridiculously large pile of used books for only $34. I was especially tickled to find several Ursula K. Le Guin books, including a hardback copy of The Wind's Twelve Quarters (which contains "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," one of the most powerful short stories ever written) and a hardback of her nonfiction collection Dancing at the Edge of the World, which I don't think I'd ever even seen before. (I'm a stone Le Guin fan, and if I ever get to meet her I fear I'm going to be reduced to pure fanboy gibbering...) We then met up with Kelly and the kids at Barnes & Noble (where we laughed smugly at the book prices) and went out for Mexican food before returning home, playing a savage game of Scrabble, and collapsing in exhaustion.

And today? We had waffles. All is well.

8:20 PM

I really need to clean off my desks.

It's normal for me to have a desk covered with papers, periodicals, books, and miscellaneous debris, but right now I've got TWO desks, one at work, and one at home, and each is groaning under a mighly load of written words. My desk at home is covered with bird stuff (my Peterson guide, maps of wilderness areas, newspaper articles about the hunt for the ivory-billed woodpecker down on Louisiana's Pearl River, etc.), catalogs for Woodberry's summer school, and random objects like my bike helmet. In my classroom, my desk has things like my battered Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1981), Lewis Thomas's The Lives of a Cell, Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe (Vol. 1), and a videotape of the Branagh/Thompson Much Ado About Nothing. The vast majority of the stuff on these desks, though, is oddly-sized scraps of paper with mysterious notes on them; "HERE, BUT...?" and "LEMME SEE BIKE" are two of the most mysterious at the moment. Clearly, it's time for me to enter the paperless age.

As a result, I'll be using this page to store a lot of the stuff that used to end up on oddly-sized scraps of paper. I can't promise that it will be great literature; honestly, judging by past experience, I can't even promise that it will be coherent. Maybe you'll learn something about me. Maybe I'll learn something about myself. Or maybe it'll just be a good way to keep myself from being buried under an enormous load of processed wood pulp.

"HERE, BUT...?" indeed.

3:39 PM