Cross-posting

This is probably a case of too much social media/too many platforms, but I wrote this over on Tumblr and I liked it enough to at least put up a pointer here:

Learning from Hunter Pence's game-winning flail swing last night

In other Phillies news, happy Cole Hamels day!

Jaywalking in Montréal: A Meditation on Home and Belonging

I'm a big fan of making overly dramatic statements about fairly inconsequential happenings. Last weekend, I was in Montréal in the first part of a week-long vacation that included that city, Utica/Cooperstown & Buffalo, New York, and two days of Phillies baseball in Denver before heading back to Casper. In the course of walking toward the Métro station near our little hotel, I said something to my husband that went something like "Death before looking like a tourist." I had just jaywalked through an empty, but orange-hand-marked crosswalk, though at least twenty seconds after all of the native Montréal folks had gone through it. My husband is not a jaywalker.


People in Montréal do not wait for walk signs. I didn't see anyone defy death and step out into traffic or anything like that--the issue was just that if there was no reason to wait for the signal, if the streets were empty, why, in fact, should anyone wait? (This makes perfect sense to me.) At busier intersections, it almost seemed as if there was a silent competition to see who could cross first. No one dashed out--people in Montréal seem to only run when they mean to, particularly on the paths of Mont Royal, in terribly attractive running shorts and coordinated shoes and with appropriate and attractive accessories. (The citizens of Montréal are collectively at least sixty percent more gorgeous than people in other places, excepting maybe Brazil. I had heard Montréal was full of beautiful people. I admit I hadn't believed it, but I should never have doubted.) But all of this is to say that people jaywalk there. Not stupidly, at least in my estimation, but with a decided lack of patience for the technicalities of timed lights in the face of stopped or absent traffic. 

I was doing likewise at the first intersection we came to after disembarking the bus from the airport at Berri-UQAM. I am not, on the whole, an impatient person, at least when it comes to things like that. I queue like a champion. If the necessity is to wait, I can wait, quite happily. But leaving that bus station, because it is the drop-off point from the airport and thus many tourists, I saw a lot of people with maps tiptoeing up to intersections. 

Let's not pretend: I had a map. It was definitely in my hand. I was dragging a suitcase. But I couldn't bring myself to tiptoe up to the intersection like I didn't know where I was going. Nevermind, of course, that I didn't know where I was going, not with terrible certainty. I'm just lucky with directions in the sense that luck favors the prepared (excepting that one time on the Tube when I was distraught over not getting to see the Beowulf manuscript and got myself and a friend going in the wholly wrong direction for a bit, but I blame acute emotional distress). The heart of it: it's not like anyone was fooled by my attempt at feigning nativeness. It's not like Montréal, at three in the afternoon on a Saturday, is one of those places where appearing to be a tourist is dangerous or ill-advised. 


And so I have to ask myself: what is so terrible about being the person on a journey? Why am I apparently so invested in not being that person, at least from the outside? Because I really am invested in it, it seems.


I've noticed it on the last several trips I've been on, this impulse to pretend I belong, to feign being a native. It didn't work on the trip to Sweden for many reasons (being short, dark-haired, and possessed of a striking lack of Swedish language skills being among them), but we did succeed in being taken for German tourists rather than American tourists (quite unintentionally and without speaking a word of German). It worked quite well in the UK, and I think it worked out all right in Vancouver. 


Since coming back from Montréal, I've tried to figure out why that is. It's not necessarily that it makes things easier. I actually got myself into several moments of intense awkwardness by replying to hellos in French (which is just about as far as my French can get me), and then having to backtrack and repeat the ensuing conversation in English. One of those happened over a pint of strawberries at the Marché Jean-Talon, and my apologies for being a doofus and my gratitude to the young woman who spoke with me for being kind. I want to participate even when I actually can't do it. I can't fake knowing a language. I know that. It was silly of me to do. Terribly silly. But it's become a reflex, a desire to respond in-kind.


Last summer, I spent two weeks in the UK and Ireland, and it included my third trip to Edinburgh, the only city that is currently vying for my affections the way Montréal did. There, of course, when I open my mouth, everyone knows I'm not From There. But it's not often that people can pinpoint where I am from because I'm a sponge and an Anglophile and I use strange syntax that's peppered with pieces of language from the things I've read and the places I've visited and the places I wish I lived. People often ask me where I'm from. 


I don't know how to answer the question. I feel obligated, always, to say that I am from Pennsylvania. I always specify that I'm from the middle of it, too. (The middle, of course, is quite different from the sides, culturally, linguistically, and so on.) But I haven't lived there since 2003, and I've been in Wyoming three years and have a career and a life here, and so I have to say Wyoming, too. But it's not possible to say that I'm from Wyoming--that's untrue. Even in the sense that people say they're from wherever they're living all the time--it's too untrue for this place. Being truly from Wyoming is a fairly rare thing; it's too disingenuous to own that to let even a perfect stranger leave with the wrong impression. (Maybe this is part of the root: if overtly identified as "not from here," I stand a likely chance of being asked, then, where I am from. The answer I am compelled to give is complicated and probably longer than the asker really wants to know. If I blend in, I save us all the trouble.)


On occasion, people will ask, instead, "Where's home?" Technically, that should be easier, shouldn't it?


But the word "home" is one I will use interchangeably. Central PA is "home" in that it is where I grew up, where the bulk of my family is. That home is the place that shaped so much of who I am. I "go home" at Christmas, and it takes three flights to do it. Home, though, is also any place to which I am returning. In the space of a weekend, I can refer to a hotel as "home." After Christmas visiting is complete, I also go home, to Casper, to this house. I've often wondered if this bothers my parents, to hear me call so many different places home, if it feels like a slight. (I used to call going back to college in my BA days "going home," too, even though I was also going home when my dad picked me up outside of Skeath Hall.) Home is wherever I happen to be. And there are a thousand clichés about that, and a Billy Joel song that connects home to another person, and so on. But there is a sense that home is the place that one misses most, maybe, the place one would rather be. It's the last part that I am missing, it seems.


I have never been homesick, not that I can remember. There was one morning--I think I was in the fifth grade--when I really desperately did not want to go to school. There wasn't any reason for it--I loved school until high school, and even then, it wasn't bad. I simply did not want to leave home (and I am often like that now). But when I am gone, once I leave for parts distant and/or unknown, I don't miss it. I would not rather be at home than in Montréal, or in Denver, or in Thermopolis, or in York, England.  

The altar of the Notre-Dame Basilica of  Montréal.
Everything is so lovely and blue.

That's a terrible thing to say. At least it feels like a terrible thing to say. There are people I love and adore in all of the places I call and have called home. But I don't generally ever want to be back. I often wish X person were where I am, but until the moment I get on the plane or in the car, the idea of a fixed home, of the place of belonging, evaporates*. Why should I be so happy to be gone from so much that I love?  It's a question I haven't found an answer to. Maybe it's because I love places easily. Especially places with public transportation and cassis beer and maple cotton candy and the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montréal**. But also places with no transportation and only the peanut butter sandwiches one has to carry in oneself.


But I have to see all of this as related: perhaps part of feeling at ease and at home almost anywhere, part of not missing home, is the sense that there is no home for me, no one true place. (I like to think Edinburgh could be it for me, and maybe someday, but I'm not there now.) I tried on the habits of those who call Montréal home, at least in crossing the streets, and it was grand. Even fooling no one at all--except maybe myself, for a little while--I was in one place where home was.

On the plaza of Kondiaronk Belvedere at the top of Mont Royal. 

*Once the trip back starts, though, I generally want to skip it. Usually because the route involves O'Hare or I-25 between Douglas and Casper***, which makes fifty miles feel like forever because it's always after at least four hours of driving. Sometimes it involves both.


**I should really do a post on the food of Montréal. I would use so many superlatives.


***The ninety miles between Casper and Shoshoni, though, is the longest distance I have ever driven. Nebraska is shorter than those particular ninety miles. Be careful in Wyoming. Time and space behave differently here.

"Out of Habit": Necessity, Procrastination, and I Am Still Trying to Figure Out What Order Everything Goes In

I like to think I'm not really a procrastinator. I generally use the definition academically, I suppose, and in that field, the statement is and has been true. I don't think I've ever finished a paper on the day it was due, I've never pulled or had to pull an all-nighter to get an assignment done, and I know that I've never turned in anything for a grade that was a first draft. That's probably good because I teach writing, have always wanted to teach writing, and I'd have to look at myself very sternly if I did. 

Hang on. Let me push up my glasses. They've slipped a bit down my sanctimonious nose.

But something this morning (and a lot of days for a lot of years, if I'm honest) caught me out. I've had this small task to do (literally updating the formula on two places in an Excel spreadsheet and then making sure it copied correctly down twenty columns) for more than a week. I have a meeting later today that requires said spreadsheet to be updated. I've been avoiding it--complete with that sour feeling of knowing I'm avoiding it and knowing that's stupid--for each of those days. So last night, in champion procrastinatory fashion, when I could have done it and didn't, I said that I would do it this morning. 

Problem is, in the morning, I write. And this morning is all wonky because I usually get up very near to five a.m. and try to be actually writing before six, but I slept until a little after seven because I was up much too late. I blame baseball and the fascinating process of watching Bill take his stitches out. So everything's a little broken, as daily habits go, and now there was this Task I didn't want to do hanging over it. 

My whole adult life, I've been fighting with, around, about (and other prepositions) putting my writing first. Thinking the art is worth it--my own, of course, because it's easy to believe that everyone else's is worth it, but not so easy when it's mine--has been a struggle. It's something I keep talking about, keep fighting with: grade the papers, then write, because you have 90 students and that is cumulatively more important. Or the opposite: you will write right now before you are allowed to do anything else, you ridiculous writerly slackass.

Either way, not a really healthy relationship with the idea. And maybe it's because I listened to a lot of Ani DiFranco when I was in my most formative years (and still--I love her), but I've always been coveting that fragment from "Out of Habit": "Art is why I get up in the morning." And it's in a song that's about the idea of habit, and I'm not going to get all analytical about the lyrics, but those things are connected. Art. Habit. Every day. 

I have habits: wake up, cup of tea. It is automatic. It is easy. It is something I wouldn't think of not-doing. I am fairly cross when I don't do it, even though I can function just fine without it. I wake up and am alert and capable (as opposed to my functioning during afternoons, which are awful and fit only for the gym and for naps). I don't need it in any kind of physiological way (unlike the way I need to eat something in the morning to avoid murdering anyone by ten). But aside from the deliciousness and the pleasure of the ritual and the sheer stupid happiness I get from my mug collection, it isn't necessary. Still, I will go out of my way to be certain that I can make that cup of tea happen: I will wash out the teapot the night before. I will be certain that I have Good Tea in the tin. I will even wash all the mugs so I have all possible choices awaiting me in the morning. It's not necessary, but I'm surely doing everything I can to make the tea happen. 

Is my writing necessary?

I'll be honest: nope. I know that because I so often don't do it. Aside from the nagging guilt, which I feel about most everything, I suffer no really ill effects. 

But by God, this summer, I'm doing everything I can to make it happen, even updating that spreadsheet within four minutes of sitting down at my computer (even though there were five hours between me and the meeting), because I said there must be no writing until that (ridiculously easy, quick) task was finished. I just had to put that task in front of something I wanted more. 

In this case, it turned out to be easy to keep it there (probably knowing it would be easy if I just did the damn thing). That is the eventual solution to procrastination: the task has to be entrenched between oneself and something one wants. For most of us, the want is something like a passing grade or a desire to keep a job. The consequence of not-doing it becomes a large enough stick to beat one into action (or a large enough carrot to tempt us into completion for the reward). 

I'm not sure how to use that to overcome the initial issue that got me started on this post, though, that nigh-interminable avoidance of the task. The constant circling of the thing to be done: I know it's there, I know it will not go away, and I know no one else will (or can) do it. Things like phone calls for appointments, returning those e-mails that didn't require an answer the second I opened it but should be addressed--even things I actually like doing, like replying to blog comments. Why the evasive maneuvers? Why the sidelong glance?

But now that I have a big enough carrot, so to speak, something I want to be doing all the time, which is the writing, and that's still gloriously weird to say, maybe the trick is to put everything between me and it. Maybe that will backfire. Maybe it won't. But writing this means that I'm actually going to call the tailor right now, and maybe I'll have to listen to her laugh at my hope that I can get a dress altered in a week, but I will have actually made the call I've been avoiding since May.

"Never too drunk to use 'whom'": The Art of Fielding, Telling Stories, and That Time I Wrote Joan of Arc Erotica

I frequently flirt with the idea of doing book reviews, but then I have to come to grips with the part where I am generally the Last Person To Read The Book, or so it seems. This is quite often related to a confession I hate making, particularly as a teacher: it's been a long time since I could firmly categorize myself as a real reader. I just don't do it all that often anymore with things that aren't related to work. And even if I'm gobsmacked with new and exciting details every time I re-read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, doing it for class-prep isn't the same as simply sinking into a book, as submerging myself in someone else's words and worlds.

I'm three full years out of grad school, too--I don't think I can claim needing a break anymore, and, honestly, it was only during my MA that I had to read books I wanted to throw. My four years at Binghamton was full of really quality reading, and I enjoyed doing my comps, insofar as I got to read and write about things I loved, pretty well across the board. I don't know what happened. 

It's not like I quit reading or anything--a few times a year, books will take me by storm (cf. GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire series, summer 2011, when I'm pretty sure I caused my glasses prescription to get more heavy-duty because of a week of terrifying binge-reading). But I forgot about reading on a daily basis, and kept forgetting, what kind of joy there is in a really good book, in a damn fine story. 

This spring, my friend Laura sent me a copy of The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. I know it sold really well, I know there were both gushy and highly critical reviews, and that's pretty much all I knew about it. I started to read a review, and it tossed up a major plot spoiler in the first two sentences, so I ran away and just sat down with the book. What I truly knew is that I should have done that right from the beginning.

The book and I had our differences at times, but this is not a review so I'm skipping that. There was a lot to love about it, too. What I want to do with it is use a few of Harbach's sentences as a jumping off point. (Some spoilers ahead.)

Harbach writes some real beauties, as far as sentences go, as far as the way the internal processes of the characters work. And even though Henry Scrimshander may be the center of the novel, Mike Schwartz was the heart of it, as I read. Maybe it's because he was the catcher, and I was a catcher, and I am one of those whacky believers in the sanctity of the battery (Roy Halladay and Carlos Ruiz, anyone?). Maybe it's because his chapters are loaded with the kind of interiority that I love (and am perhaps terribly guilty of). This is my favorite Mike Schwartz moment:

He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer. (Harbach 149)

This is, of course, pedagogical. One size does not fit all. This is also the nature of the very best creative writing exercise I've ever been given, and when I was given it, I thought it was torture. It seemed both cruel and unusual, the task set before me.¹

But to understand why it was so, I need to look at myself as that player, as that young writer. Who was I, the first semester of my second year of college? I was much as I still am: too optimistic, prone to too many words. I was also afraid of the page. Don't get me wrong--I'm still pretty terrified of it--but the reasons are different. Now, I'm afraid to suck. That doesn't stop me from writing (and it surely doesn't stop me from sucking at it), but I'm not afraid of anything I write and I'm not afraid to write anything. Back then, I was afraid to write the wrong thing, the unsafe thing, the messy thing, the dirty thing, the ugly thing. And I spent all of my early creative writing courses writing "beautiful" (read: pretty and dull) crap in overblown historical settings.²  I can say I legitimately love historical fiction, but that writing was also designed to show off how well I paid attention in history courses (it was a liberal arts college--someone would approve of that) and to disguise how fearful I was of letting a story get messy (which is to say interesting) on the page because I had no idea if I could pull it back together if it got out of control.

So that's the start of the narrative. The final assignment in that class, Fiction Workshop I, was a personalized writing assignment. The instructor reviewed everyone's work for the whole semester and then set each of us a challenge related to the work we had done. My second story of the semester was a historical piece about a silversmith's apprentice who followed Joan of Arc. It was saturated with detail, it was reverent, it was grim and grave and contained an epiphany that I loved that probably could have had its own army of horn-blowing zealots it was so obvious. I loved that story. I still kind of do. The apprentice's name was Remi.

My assignment: write a love scene between Joan of Arc and this character. My folder was flipped shut and handed back to me, and there was another student waiting in the hall. I left with my assignment, feeling traumatized. I didn't argue about it. I had an assignment. The assignment must be done. I spent most of a week in what Pat McManus would call the "modified stationary panic." Everything about the assignment caused a separate and discrete part of my brain to fuse. Love scene. Joan of Arc, a saint and a minor. Historical setting wherein the two characters are barely acquainted. The assignment posed every possible problem to my nineteen-year-old brain: logistical, moral, technical.

I don't remember what I wrote, not well. I do remember that I changed the setting--I made it contemporary, which was certainly cheating, but I got through it. I think I even managed an R rating. (I was told love scene; I was pretty certain that fading to black = bullshit in that case, so I wasn't about to half-ass that part.) I was mortified at the prospect of having to show it to anyone--most particularly the instructor whose respect I wanted--but I was more paralyzed by the idea of not handing in anything, of not doing it. The day it was due arrived. I went to the instructor's office, and I stood there with my folder, holding it out.

The instructor glanced at the folder. "You did it?"

I nodded. I had.

"Good." He waved me out with a reminder of the date the final portfolio was due, my folder still in my hand. My suffering, my few pages, and I walked back to the dorm. It took me the length of that summer to figure it out: the story I needed to hear about myself was that I could write anything. It didn't matter if I showed it to anyone. It surely didn't matter if anyone else read it or liked it or hated it or responded to it. The simple fact was that I could do it and the world wouldn't end.

I'm still trying to keep that in mind; it's a really good starting point.

It takes me back to Harbach's book, to Scrimshander trying to figure out what was going wrong with his disintegrating ability to make even the most simple throw from short to first: “The problem, like most problems in life, probably had to do with his footwork” (Harbach 174).

That exercise, that assignment that made me want hide under a rock, was something to help me find the footwork I was going to need later. Everyone's got the step that makes her hesitate, everyone has his paralyzing over-think. Mine was self-consciousness, self-consciousness on the page. (Even now, I'm second-guessing every word I type here because it's so much harder when it's true, but I'm doing it, and even though this post has taken weeks, I'm posting it.) I'm not going to say that that exercise made the problem go away--see the previous sentence--but that exercise does mean I have a place to go back to, a place to put both feet, and it is always there. No matter what the circumstance, no matter what other problems I have with my writing, it's not going to be because I think I shouldn't write something, that I couldn't possibly, that it Isn't Done. And that's not to say that it's all going to be beer and skittles and sex with martyrs, either--it's simply remembering the permission to do what the work needs one to do. Remembering that at the root of everything.

It works in the same way as the grammar of Pella Affenlight, who is "never too drunk to use whom³" (Harbach 296). Hopefully I am never too lost in my own doubt to remember this. I don't expect I'll forget, though. It was the story I needed to be told about myself, and stories are the reason I'm here. Thanks, Chad Harbach, for writing a book that reminded me of that, that reminded me of this moment, that reminded me of many, many good things.⁴

¹This is the point where I knew where this entry was going. I've spent almost two weeks staring at this post-in-progress, willing it to finish or willing myself into enough guts to CTRL+A & delete. Neither happened. What did happen is that I also just sent a pages-long e-mail to the instructor this passage reminded me of. And here we are.


²I still love overblown historical settings, and I probably always will. Every stab at them leads to a little less pretty dullness.


³This is certainly one of the most fantastically quotable lines from the book.


⁴Maybe someday I'll actually talk about the book as a book about baseball, too, but I think that's probably been done to death already.

All or nothing

Per last post (hello, February!), baseball did come back. If you've been paying attention, it hasn't been going well for my Phillies, but there's a lot of season left. There isn't a lot of season left for hockey, though, and the Penguins exited the playoffs in an ugly fashion. Not going to lie about that--I mourned for the end of this season. I mourned for a lot of reasons. I'm still mourning it. However, I took some solace in the Penguins' AHL affiliate's bid for the Calder Cup, and the IIHF World Championship and the really surprising playoff landscape are deeply entertaining. There's a reason I'm talking about these things here, though, and it's that my writing's really jazzing me right now. But I'm not talking about that. I'm going to talk around it all, and I will tell you why.

G. W. Hawkes once told me, as an undergraduate at Lycoming College, that talking about one's work is a mistake if a primary motivator to write at all is to discover the story itself. Joan Didion says pretty much the same thing in "Why I Write":

Who was this narrator?  Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write:  had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

That discovery is, too, why I write, but more importantly, how I write. The window of interest after I understand the answers to those questions is short, at least in any actually productive, generative way. (I will maintain something that I can only define as a crush on my characters indefinitely, but that never leads to plot or story. Mostly it leads to spending more time deciding what they'd order at a coffee shop than what I'd order at said coffee shop. Most of them, actually, would never have walked into the coffee shop in the first place. They judge me. I feel shame.) The process of discovery is longer and lusher in a novel, of course, and that's what I prefer, but I'm in a fit of short stories right now, and the process is much more confined.

What I'm learning while writing these short stories, then, is that I can't hesitate when something's moving forward. I need to be writing, and I only give myself enough of a note at the document's end that I know a place I can pick back up in the morning. It's another variation on the "stop in the middle of the sentence" strategy. The breadcrumb trail cannot lead all the way home for me.

That certainly isn't true for everyone. A friend of mine makes most of her writing breakthroughs through discussion: seeking questions from the outside that the work hasn't answered yet. I'm not going to lie: I'm horribly jealous. It makes the process both social and visible, and though I'm not what anyone would call particularly social, there is undoubtedly something lovely about discussing something one loves. And if one doesn't love writing, why would anyone do it? The visibility issue, too, would be nice when, as many other writers have noted, "working" also looks a lot like pissing around on the internet, staring at the ceiling, or walking so many circles around the block that the neighbors are getting a little nervous. If I could make my process more tangible (and I'll take conversation as tangible in this case), it might pass more clearly as "work" to the rest of the world.

But that doesn't work for me. I talk, and the story withers. That means, when friends and family say, "What did you do today?" (because I teach, and my semester is now over, and thus I must be "on vacation" and thus I must defend that I did something with those hours, in a stereotypical Germanic Protestant sort of way), I get to reply with the always-convincing "I wrote some stuff." I can't say, "I got X to this important moment" because X might decide to backpedal after twenty pages of meaningful progress because I've spoken the moment's name. What is worse than that is when the person who asks what I did today follows that up with, "What happens after that?"

Answering with "good question" (which is my go-to reply, and it is absolutely true about 95% of the time--I don't know until it happens on the page) basically undoes most of the ground I might have gained from the People With Jobs Who Don't Get 2.5 Months Of Not Going To The Office. But the worse answer for me, for the story, is any one where I a) am able to respond with actual content b) actually do respond with said content.

So I try not to talk about it (which is damn hard when you're incredibly energized by what you're writing), at least until there's a draft to be dissected. but that leaves a lot of pent-up...everything. What is there instead, what else can I do in the hours that aren't spent writing?

Most of the time, I feel guilty about any time I could be writing but am not. Sometimes, though, I can convince myself that it's okay to do something else. It all becomes grist.

One of the things I do, mentioned above, is pay attention to a lot of sports. I was feeling a little ridiculous about that one Tuesday night while I had the Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins' game on radio feed in one ear, the Phillies on the screen, and the Flyers' last gasp and the Nationals/Pirates on website updates. I was so overstimulated, so nervous--particularly because the BabyPens went into double OT to stay alive in their series--I was paralyzed in my chair and didn't realize that I was freezing, had forgotten dinner, and was sitting in a stupidly uncomfortable wooden chair in the kitchen when I do have a sofa.

I crave that kind of absorption. Sometimes it happens with the writing, but there's no evidence of it. So forget it ever happened. More usefully, it makes me incredibly happy, even if that experience and me weeping into my homemade granola over the end of the Penguins' season doesn't sound happy at all. I dig in, obsess, become fanatical. I enjoy the hell out of it.

That fanaticism--the act of "geeking out"--smacked me upside the head in the No Headline AudioZine: Issuepisode 6. It is appropriate for me to say "smacked me upside the head" in this case because this is, according to the creators, the Ramones issuepisode. (Can I take a minute here to love on the word "issuepisode?" Doing it anyway. I enjoy portmanteau words.) In the fortyish minutes of eclecticism, humor, and occasional curmudgeonliness, there's a two-part piece called "no, you're not." It is, at its heart, about the appropriation of geek/nerd/dork, etc., and how it's now "cool" to be those things (and this is a good time to mention it all because Avengers and everything Joss and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss and Felicia Day and Jewel Staite and and and). The hinge in "no, you're not" is that if it's simply about consumption and display of the consumption, it isn't very much different than any other consumption and that is, well, kind of lame.

I'm not going to lie. When impelled to check myself, so to speak, to reflect on my motivations, I have to admit that I love that I can call home and kind of school my dad on what's going on in MLB and tell him about Bryce Harper and the stitches in his face because my parents don't spend all day with the Gameday widget open in their browsers. My parents don't spend much time in front of screens. (I aspire to be like that someday.) And it's not necessarily because I want to show off the knowledge (okay, maybe a little--no one's perfect--but I also acknowledge that there are a lot of people who can totally school me on most of it, too, and I love that because that's learning), but because it's also something I can talk about with the people who first put sports in my life. People with whom I don't actually have that much in common outside of sports and an inclination to identify wildlife in the distance and roadkill as I drive past it. People who are, also, the people who have done a lot of things the hard way so I can do the things I do. I am grateful and excited to have something at least a little relevant to say.

My dad, at least, appears not to be annoyed by it, definitely doesn't discourage it. My mom will listen because at least then I'm talking about something. Maybe it's making up for the weeks that I simply drop off the face of the earth, or for the fact that both my dad and my brother are pretty quiet people and my mother and I are not. With most of my coworkers (who are decidedly not sports people), there is the BBC and what-are-you-reading chatter wherein I get kind of embarrassingly flappy-handed. So much so that a friend and colleague told me, last week, while I was babbling kind of incessantly and indiscriminately about both Russian hockey and the BBC Sherlock production, that he likes that I own it. That I don't censor it. I took it as a compliment because I think it's good to really, really like things. Lots of things. But that's another issue.

As it pertains here, I think I get so excited about all of these things that are more or less on the periphery because I can't talk about the other big excitement in my life: my writing.  Because talking about my writing is bad for my writing, at least in any way concrete enough to make sense to a second party. If one's chosen task and (not-so-chosen) method is inherently solitary, inherently silent, what can one do with all of that built-up noise? I do a lot of things, but that's a different energy.

Maybe most folks out there don't have built-up noise.

I have lots of it. This is some of it. The rest of today's will come out now, since the Phillies are playing and the Kings/Coyotes game is about to start. I have a completely inexplicable attachment to Slava Voynov--why would I be interested by a rookie for the LA Kings? The Kings only really became relevant to me when the Nashville Predators dropped out of the playoffs because I had to have someone to cheer for in the West. It's band-wagonish. It really is. But I can't bring myself to not care about it. I can't bring myself to detach. I can only let everything well up and out, to let it bubble over.

I'll also spend the rest of the night trying to figure out an ending for a short story that's been lingering for weeks, and the less said about that, the better.

The Return of the Light

It's not the end of winter. I live in Wyoming--the third week of February is nothing like the end of winter. And it's still dark early enough. So what is this light my title speaks of?

The return of baseball. Opening Day is still a little more than a month away, a bit longer than that for Opening Day in the States, but today was the first proper day of Spring Training. The rest of the teams join their pitchers and catchers in Florida and Arizona and other sun-kissed places, assembling with new and old teammates. There are, of course, the dramatic (and frankly tired) stories regarding last year's scandals and heartbreaks; I'm a few hours of coverage deep in the season, and I've already heard enough about Manny and more than enough about Rallybeers/Chickengate in Boston. Those kinds of narratives are inevitable.

But they're certainly not everything, and they're certainly not where my interests lie. Nor, even, where the anchors' and sports talk show personalities' interests lie. That much is visible. It's that, for those of us who love the sport, baseball is back. It's in the childlike joy that's been percolating in the breasts and brains of baseball fans since November, or, if you gave up on the playoffs because your team didn't make it or you simply decided that there was no way to top the last day of the season, since the end of September. And maybe that's a little hackneyed--"childlike joy"--but I can't think of anything else that really gets close. Last week, The Classical ran a piece by Matthew Callan about Gary Carter that really holds up that sense of joy as not something just pertaining to the fans, but to the players themselves. And that's sometimes strange to think about for career players, and it certainly doesn't hold true for everyone, all professional athletes. Major League Baseball is a profession, and there is an emphasis on the professional. I'm a Phillies fan, and my husband and I are still trying to decide if Chase Utley is people or a baseball-playing robot. My jury's still out; Utley's a blank wall for fans like me who love the colorful personalities. And there are all the jokes about Roy Halladay being a baseball-bot, but that's derived from the mechanically indefatigable nature of his arm, from his near-legendary work ethic. Halladay doesn't need to sleep and to rest like normal mortals. But looking at Roy Halladay's face when he's pitching--that's pure humanity. That is sheer drive and a little bit of rage and more focus than I can think of applying to anything. He might be super-human, but he's definitely human because his prowess all about desire. It's all about want.

And that's what this week is about, too, for fans: being perched on the edge of desire. The season looms, the narratives start stitching themselves together. And we wait. We wait and watch and hope: how will it happen? How will this season reveal itself? What are the stories in the wings? This week (and during the whole off-season), the analysts and the announcers are working their predictions for those stories. They gather the data, they crunch the numbers, they spin scenarios from sunflower seed husks and leather oil. And I watch, and I listen, and I agree and disagree and none of us really knows anything and we all know that and it doesn't stop us. The pleasure is in the conjecture; the pleasure is in the wanting to know. Even if it ends in heartbreak. We want to know how it's going to end.

Last October, Gary Smith wrote a piece for SI called "We're In Baseball Heaven." As an English instructor and a writer of fiction and a member of the editorial staff for a damn fine literary journal, I should probably not admit that this article was the thing I loved most of all of the things I read last year. I won't recap the whole thing; I'll just say it's well worth the time to read the whole thing, particularly if you (like me) love the Phillies. If not, you're probably still able to imagine a time when it felt like everything was coming together for your team, how light each step became. Even as you knew it was silly because you still had to go to work, your job still sucked, you still had to pay rent. Nothing changes, but everything changes.

Smith's piece captured everything Phillies fans were hoping for about the 2011 season: that perfect storm of pitching, the near-invincible feeling that accompanied looking at the record. But it didn't pan out, of course. It was just four days after that article went up, October 7, that the dream season ended. And that stung. I won't lie: I sulked. And then I had to watch the rest of the season feeling that sense of despair, the we should have been there, using that first person collective as though I had anything to do with it. But I was still watching because those were the last games of the season, the last breath of summer before the long, baseball-less winter. Any baseball is better than no baseball. And so I watched every last minute of the season, even when it felt like sandpapering the insides of my elbows.

But why the burning need to know? There's a thirty to one chance that your season's going to end in heartbreak. I know those aren't weighted odds (if you like the Yankees, historically, your odds are better than most other fans'), and yes, at the start of every season, some of us have a better all-over shot at the World Series, but there are no guarantees. Our October proved that.

So, why? This is why. In Smith's piece, he asked a number of Philadelphians to talk about the 2011 team. Bryan Dilworth hit it:

 "And it all just keeps getting better and better," he gushes. "When the Roy Oswalt thing goes bad, the Vance Worley thing appears in its place. Everyone here loooooves Worley. He's fearless, and we won—what?—14 straight games the kid started? That's crazy. The dread we used to walk around with, it's gone for 75 percent of this city. And now Hunter Pence. He's perfect for this team and for this town. He just wants everything so badly. He's like watching a baby giraffe run. This has to be heaven. An angel just appeared here—Hunter Pence." 

This is that paragraph of childlike joy. It's in how Worley and Pence play. It's in how these players--not just these two, but the players we love for so many reasons. The way Gary Carter played: not perfectly, but passionately. Wanting everything so badly: desire. We share that much.

I get tired, sometimes, of overblown sports metaphors, even as I'm desperately guilty of it, too. (As a writer, I spend most of the time being tired of myself. Goes with the territory.) But baseball is, at the end of the day, a game, I keep reminding myself. Just a game. If I see one more comparison of sports to war, I may scream. Because sport isn't war. Ask people who've been in wars. They'll clear it up for anyone who was confused. But there is a magnetism in sports, in following a team, and I may go my entire life without fully understanding it in a way that I can properly articulate (though, of course, I'll keep trying--that's what we do).

In thinking about this, I turn again, as I often do, to Annie Dillard. She's not talking (much) about baseball in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but she says this:

"The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." 

She's speaking most particularly to observing the natural world clearly, closely, sharply. But it holds true for me, here, perched on the start of a new baseball season: good things are going to happen. And I don't just mean victories (though I'm lying if I think I'm going to be happy with the Phillies not making the playoffs); I mean every one of those triumphs of spirit that takes place on the field. And those things certainly don't confine themselves to professional athletics--everywhere we turn, there are quiet marvels taking place. I encourage you to look.

But spring training, the emergent baseball season--this is just one place to see those things, and I plan to be there.

To the Line: Living Pedagogy from the Bleachers

Tonight I am spending my evening watching two basketball games at the community college where I teach. I have, combined, on the women’s and men’s teams, six current students, and at least half a dozen former students. This is not the first basketball game I have been to for my students—I attended one last spring, when the women’s team was tearing it up in the NJCAA tournament. Of the major competitive sports, I fully admit that basketball is the one I follow least. I am rabid in my following of baseball and ice hockey, and I put in a fair showing on the matter of European football and the NFL. I even got fairly embroiled in our (no longer) local Rookie League baseball team, the Casper Ghosts, a Rockies affiliate that has since moved on to greener pastures in Colorado.

But basketball has always been on the fringe of my sports-loves. I get caught up in the March Madness with everyone else, of course, but I don’t understand the niceties of the game. Sitting here on this vaguely uncomfortable moulded plastic, I still don’t understand them. I get the rules in a fairly basic way—shot clock limitations, fouling out—but unless it’s NBA-level traveling, taking the ball for a walk on a leash, more or less, I can’t see those sorts of infractions. And I watch too much ice hockey to see the foul in a little bump, in obstruction. So this is not a post about basketball, at least not in the way that it could be.

What this post is about is about putting my money where my mouth is.

Irony

Irony in that my last post (a jolly six months ago) was about routines, or my lack thereof.

To recap: had a completely brilliant August that included a two-week roadtrip with one of my dearest friends. Then the semester started again. That takes us through to December and the holidays. A lot of travel then. Glad to be home now.

It's not a very good recap. For reasons I don't quite understand, this autumn was hard for me. There was a lot of good in it--Patrick Madden at the Casper College Literary Conference (read Quotidiana--just a beautiful collection of unexpected essays); CrossFit (yes, I can't believe it, either); starting to plan the 2012 Equality State Book Festival; a publication in Memorious with excellent company (Bob Wrigley! Nina McConigley!)--but also a lot of feeling like I was never on top of anything, never caught up, never where I should have been. I also lost a pen I loved. A really *nice* pen. One I don't know that I can replace.

The rational part of my brain says that it's only a pen. It's a material thing. I have other pens. I even have the financial means that I could probably replace it with something even better. But I'd make a terrible Buddhist because my life is all about attachments, and I loved that pen, dammit. And losing it makes me feel irresponsible. This paragraph is my obligatory confessional, apparently. There. I'm done now.

Autumn is always hard for me. The growing dark. The cold. Skip that. Move ahead.

I've read very few books lately, but I did tear through Mark Gatiss's Lucifer Box trilogy (The Vesuvius Club, The Devil in Amber, and Black Butterfly) with more joy and excitement than I've had while reading for a long time. They're just cracking good reads--perfectly aware of themselves, playful, but containing a surprising amount of heart. My friend Laura has an excellent review of The Vesuvius Club at LibraryThing.

I'd say I'd resolve to read more of Gatiss's books, but there are only three novels in the Box series. That's its own tragedy. Mark Gatiss, if by some chance you ever read this, a few more books set between The Vesuvius Club and The Devil in Amber really wouldn't go amiss. But even if I don't get any more stories about the indomitable, irreverent, and irresistible Lucifer Box, I can remember that this is what reading (and writing) should feel like: there should be something joyful in it. Even when it's difficult, there should be something to love. Because, as Laura and I have been discussing, it's clear that Gatiss must have been having a smashing good time writing these books. I'd like to remember what that's like.

But this is the season of resolutions, isn't it? I'm not going to make any. (I'm lying--I'm making them, but I'm not blogging about them just yet. I abandoned this blog for six months; I clearly can't be trusted.)

I am going to link you to Woody Guthrie's list of 33 resolutions that he made for 1942. All of these "New Years Rulin's" seem wise enough models to follow.

This isn't a resolution, but something else I thought was worth sharing:

Yes, that is a mug with a Beowulf quotation on it. Also, a nautical star shotglass full of milk and a gingerbread cookie.
Don't judge me.

Taking the time to make a coffee or tea service all for yourself is absolutely worth it. Especially when the coffee is from Raven's Brew. Maybe it's in the service of being kinder to yourself. We could all probably use a bit more of that.

Routine (of a flittertigibbet)

I am interested in routines. I am constantly in search of a good one, of the right one, of the one that's going to fit and be productive and centering and lovely, forever and ever, amen. 

I haven't found it yet. 

That may be because my schedule is a completely different animal every four-five months, according to when my classes are. It could be that I haven't found a pattern I love enough to fight for.

Two weeks ago, I started a new thing with a friend. (Credit where credit's due--it was her idea.)

Running. 

That's probably getting ahead of myself, actually. Let's call it "attempted running." Or "hike/dash/pant." I like the last one. It's the most true. We have a 4.5-mile loop that begins in the local Rotary Park and meanders up and down the midsection of Casper Mountain, a trail known as the Bridle Trail. It also crosses the top of Garden Creek Falls (and involves two in-trail crossings of Garden Creek).

This is not a post about the act. This is a post about what greets me nearly every morning. 

 

Natrona County through the trees. If it were a bit less humid that morning, you could see to the Big Horns.

This wee streamlet is Garden Creek. A bit further down, and it's a respectable waterfall in this wet summer.

The first two pictures here are on the ascent of our path. The trees around the creek are thick, the air dense and cool. It reminds me of Pennsylvania in all of the best ways (and without the mosquitoes and woods' flies). The landscape is dominated by pines and aspens, though some birch and maple still make their way there. 

The next images are the descent, and this is where it feels like Wyoming, the way I understand Wyoming. On this side, the bones of the earth are bared and raw, the rock red and white and vast.

I want to stand up there, with the lonely loose rock.

In this one, you can see the stark difference between sun and shade. My whole life on the East Coast, I didn't feel like it made much of a difference, courtesy of humidity and haze. Here, the sunlight is a palette knife's edge, cutting and turning the color over. 

Every morning for me now is a melange of work and rest, sweat and chill, pine-needle cushion and granite. These have been the best mornings for me that I can remember.

Lens flare for J. J. Abrams and the sun demanding notice at 6:30 a.m.

Another little adventure

I, like many other nerds in the world, have been spending a good bit of whatever spare time I have knee-deep in George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons. (I'm not quite finished with it yet, so no spoilers. On pain of maiming.) I've also had some visiting family, and the family visit included a trip to Denver. This post is about that trip, and I'll be back with something a little more focused in the not-so-distant future.

We've been and will be in Denver a whole lot this summer, at least compared to our first year in Wyoming. That is, though, never a bad thing--Denver's a great city, full of a lot of beautiful spaces and good food. And Pacific Mercantile Company, which is where I have to go if I want to get any Asian comestibles that haven't been on the shelf for two years already. (That makes me sound a lot more sophisticated than I am--I bought udon and some black vinegar, sure, but mostly I bought three kinds of gummy candy, including a delicious mango/tamarind sweet, strawberry daifuku, Ramune to drink on the walk back to our hotel, and panda cookies. Japanese candy makes me so happy.)

We also made return visits to the Denver Botanic Gardens and The Denver Museum of Nature and Science for their Real Pirates exhibit so that we could share two brilliant places with the visiting family members.

I don't know much (or what kind of
plant you are, but I know I love you.

No photos from the pirates exhibit, alas, but it is the most excellent thing and only there until August 22, so if you're in the area, you really need to get yourself to the DMNS.

I took a number of photos at the Botanic Gardens, though (with my phone, sadly, because I managed to leave home with a camera with a dead battery and no charging apparatus, but the phone did okay, all things considered). This image to the left is some plant that was housed in the Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory. It was potted beside a resting bench, and there was no marker of what it was called, but I thought it was striking because of its center. The purple inner leaves that shade out to regular green are very cool, too, of course, but look: at its heart, there's a small tuft of what looks like  moss, and it's sprouting its own flowers, tiny violet blooms with pointed petals. I was reminded of very, very small mountain harebell--it's just that color. The plant was also cupping a bit of water around the moss, making a wee island. I could have sat in front of it for hours, but I was already planning to spend an inordinate amount of time in the pirates exhibit, so one has to pick one's battles.

The visit also included a visit to Coors Field to see the Rockies play the Brewers. Coors Field is a lovely ballpark, and I have to admit a real fondness for the Rockies. My blood is Philadelphia red, but the Rockies (and their Casper affiliate, the Casper Ghosts) are great favorites of mine. (In August, when the Phillies play the Rockies in Colorado, it's going to be hard to not cheer for the Rocks, too. I might be that idiot at the stadium just clapping and hooting after every play, no matter what happens.)

Ubaldo Jimenez pitched for the Rockies, and I had a chance to watch him warm up in the bullpen, Coors Field being one of those places where fans can actually look down from the concourse into the bullpens. This is possible because Rockies fans are rather kind. You'll notice that, at Citizens Bank Park, where the Phillies play, the Phillies bullpen is not in open view to the public. That's because Phillies fans will harass their own relievers just as much as the away team's.

Ubaldo!

And then, because it was a bit rainy before the game, we were treated to a very lovely bit of rainbow above the Qwest building at Coors Field. The Brewers are on the field there. The Brewers got beat pretty badly at this game, but we did get to see Corey Hart hit a home run late in the game. The Rockies' Ryan Spilborghs also went yard. The only disappointments that I had at the game were that Carlos Gonzalez was still out following a collision with an outfield wall just before the All-Star break, and I didn't get a photo of our section's beer guy. Captain Earthman is apparently an installation at Coors Field, and I absolutely see why. I've seldom seen anyone who enjoys the job as much as he appears to enjoy his. If you're going to Coors Field, try sitting in the vicinity of Section 155 or nearby to get the most of the experience.