Showdown

When I was in high school, I was an uber-nerd (perhaps I still am now).  I sang in chorus, was on the student council, took piano lessons, got good grades, did academic bowl, and honestly never did anything illegal.  I was the kid who, upon running into a teacher in the hall without a hall-pass, would receive a wave and a smile instead of an interrogation about my destination.  “Oh, it’s Jonathan.  He’s probably going to a study session or something.  And if not, he’s definitely not doing anything bad.”  It was a safe assumption.

I remember I once received detention for forgetting some homework.  It was mortifying.  I think my teacher thought it would be good for me to feel like I had been bad for once in my life.  She was a chain-smoker, and while I don’t think she was a very good English teacher, the class was entertaining.  She would regularly break down into coughing fits and say things like “Oh [hack hack] this chalk dust is really [hurl] terrible!” or “[Spasm] I can see you are all [fit] struggling with the ragweed [attack] today too!”  She loved talking about sex scandals, and it was extraordinarily easy to get her side-tracked as long as you had some juicy comment to make.  English was always one of my best subjects, but this teacher simply would not give me an A.  She just laughed when I once asked her why I had gotten a lower grade than expected on a paper.  I didn’t like it, but I can’t deny that she has proved to be the English teacher I refer to most from all my years of schooling.  Her life would undeniably make a great movie.  God rest her soul.

But the real showdown of the century came two years later in my senior year English class. I actually loved the class.  The teacher helped me develop tremendously as a writer, but our class gave her some trouble from time to time.  We did a project near the end of the year that was intended to be a fun, though serious, activity.  We were to write a reflective essay concerning something of personal significance and read it aloud to music of our choice.  On the day I was to go, I stood up and read mine.  It was terribly grave and was accompanied by a depressing Shostakovitch string quartet that was written shortly after the composer was forced to join the Communist Party.  A few other classmates read theirs, also serious, often melancholy.

Then one of the quietest members of the class, though also one of the most comical, stood up with somber face to read his essay.  He hit the play button on the CD player, and what should grace our ears but the theme song of Pokemon, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All.”  He launched into a long and colorful explanation of how Pokemon had changed his life, how every little furry creature inspired him to greatness, how it didn’t matter if your opponent was big and bad if you could be like Pikachu and zap them with lightning.  I was inspired.  So was the rest of the class, and we all struggled to restrain our mirth which grew at the same rate as the rage upon our teacher’s face.  The speech ended; we didn’t dare applaud; steam rose from my teacher’s ruby face.  She then launched into an invective as livid as our classmate’s speech was comical.  We left the class unsure if we should laugh more or feel ashamed.  I think most of us opted for laughter.

While this was the most notable conflict during the class, it certainly was not the only one.  But I doubt she anticipated any trouble from someone like me.  This teacher gave me more Cs and Ds than I have received in any other class.  All year you would write short, timed essays and get them back ripped to shreds.  But it seemed that the final grades always rose substantially at the end of the year.  The mid-year grades were more for motivation to do well on the AP exam than for anything else.  For me, though, Cs and Ds were to be avoided at all costs, even if I knew my class average would precipitously jump before grades came out. 

At the end of a long train of bad grades on these essays, I received yet another unsatisfactory grade.  Apparently so had many others, so our teacher decided to write us a sample essay on the same topic we had all just dragged through the mud.  She went up to the overhead and began to write.  As she wrote, she talked about how she would frame her thesis.  The first point was one I included in my own thesis.  She discussed it for awhile and I thought I must have really messed up the next two points.  Then she got to her second point – also identical to mine.  Then I was beginning to think my grade was too low.  Finally, we reached her third point, and it too was in my own thesis.  I sulked in pity for a few moments as she expounded, but I finally raised my hand, heart pounding, mood black, and said, “I wrote exactly the same thing you did and you gave me a 72!”  I also thought I had written it more eloquently. 

She expressed her doubt, and I could have left it there.  But I couldn’t let go.  I fired back.  There was no turning back now.  I hurled myself in headlong, expostulating on my seventeen-year-old brilliance, succinctly summing up all my paper’s merits with force and persuasion.  My teacher calmly responded saying something that I did not really hear.  I immediately retorted, and she again responded calmly.  After a few more of these passes, she began to become frustrated.  It continued, building, my classmates looking on in dread, wondering what was going to happen to me, until finally, I heard what my teacher said.  “What do you want?  Would it make you happy if I gave you a 96?” she spoke with passion and a red face.  Not really expecting her to have actually given in, I said, pausingly, “Yes?”  “Fine!  Have your 96!”  She slammed down her pen, came to my desk, took my paper, crossed out the old grade with my pen and wrote a large 96 atop it, her upper lip twitching in fury.  The bell rang, thankfully, as we all sat in stunned silence, or in my case, fearful silence.  My grade had just risen 24 points; my stature had fallen much further. 

I later ran into my English teacher from the previous year, who happened to have in her possession at that time one of my college recommendations, uncompleted.  She also happened to be very good friends with my current teacher.  “So, Jonathan, I heard you had a little run-in today?”  I blushed, never having considered that this would undoubtedly get around.  At that point I knew I couldn’t just let the incident go.  I ended up apologizing to my current teacher, and we finished the year on good terms, and I still got my college recommendation from my former teacher.  But it was surely an episode to be remembered: the day the good kid went bad.

I have always been very concerned with being right.  I will argue my point until I am blue in the face and I get my 24 points.  Even if I don’t get the points, I will still argue.  I must be right.  I must be logical.  You must listen to reason.  Regardless of the topic, the most important thing to me is the cogency of the argument, and if I am convinced that my own perspective is cogent, then yours must not be.  It is fortunate that I have a wife who is similarly logical and who is not easily hurt.  We don’t really ever argue, not in the traditional sense.  But we have epic debates.  Whenever someone asks us if we fight, I always refer them to our multi-day standoff on the intent of the Framers with regard to the Second Amendment.  It was legendary.  I ended up being wrong.

Sometimes it is important to stand your ground on an idea, especially when it comes to moral issues.  For instance, I will always be opposed to racism, regardless of who encourages me to accept it.  But more often than not, life is not about being right.  For the more common interactions in life, the wise path is more subtle.  The argument with my English teacher probably only endangered our mutual amity.  At worst, I might have gotten a detrimental college recommendation from my former teacher.  Today, my interaction with authority has greater ramifications.  A similar encounter with my boss could easily lead to the loss of my job.  In certain places in the world, the unwillingness to stand down could land me in jail.

I have been learning this reality slowly and painfully for the last several years of my life.  I am passionate about truth, so it has been difficult for me to back down.  Sometimes the need to be correct only leads to the deterioration of a relationship, and relationships are much more important than a trivial fact or two.  In business, if you don’t know the right people, you can’t get anything done.  You look high and low until you find someone who knows what you need.  But it’s even worse when you know the person who can help you, but that person stymies your efforts because of a broken relationship.  The same is true in almost every realm of life.  Knowing truth is important, but it only leads to progress if you can convince someone else of it too.  So when it comes to everyday interactions, the people who are able to achieve great things and push the world in the right direction are always more concerned with being effective than with being right.

Religion, Story, and Truth

When I grow up, I want to be a writer.  That is why indulge in this blog.  I enjoy it, and it’s good practice.  And though I am currently focusing on nonfiction, my goal is to be a novelist as well.  Regardless of whether I ever attain this goal, I love story, and I have a certain passion for defending it against all attackers, be they family, friends, acquaintances, or people I do not know.  Unfortunately, I often find myself defending story from fellow Christians.  This week, I find the need to do so once more.

Before I saw Avatar, a number of Christians told me that they enjoyed the movie…but the religion was weird and distasteful; in fact, it was downright evil.  This is not the first time I have heard a similar argument.  Most recently, there was all the hubbub about witchcraft in Harry Potter, which continues to this day in some circles.  Similarly, even works by Christians, such as A Wrinkle in Time, Lord of the Rings, and even The Chronicles of Narnia have come under fire for their elements of magic, which many conservative Christians view as inherently evil.  Some of you may be surprised to hear this, and if that is the case, I am very glad.  But I assure you these groups exist and in larger numbers than you might expect.

So I was not really surprised by the backlash against Avatar, which went as far as to include the Pope.  But the Christians who bash Avatar for its religion are just being ridiculous. Regardless of any political, religious, environmental or other motives, Avatar was first and foremost a story.  Stories must keep your attention; they must be believable and cohesive.  If they do not accomplish these tasks, they fail in any other more complex motives.  And James Cameron is a master of making a story cohesive.  In fact, for every plant seen in the movie, Cameron and company developed a full description of history, ecology, manner of reproduction, relationship to the Na’vi, and names in Latin, English, and Na’vi.  Na’vi itself is also a completely functional language, created just for this movie.  And the way in which the Na’vi learn English, while perhaps sped up to prevent the audience from becoming annoyed with their errors, is representative of the process we all go through when learning a foreign tongue.  So why did Cameron include religion in the first place?  He did so probably because we humans are historically religious, and we are thus able to identify with the religious tendency in the Na’vi.  It is another detail that reinforces the story, making it more cohesive. 

So if there was going to be religion, why isn’t it something closer to Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism, the three largest human religions?  Pantheism was the earliest of human religions.  It was the natural first perspective for the primitive man who was so mystified by the forces of nature.  The Na’vi obviously have some basis in early man (bows and arrows, loincloths, face paint), so it would be appropriate to use a primitive religion in the story.  Given the other aspect of the Na’vi biological connection to nature, pantheism seems not only reasonable, but almost required for credibility. 

One may retort that Cameron could well have written the screenplay any way he wanted to prevent this particular form of religion from being appropriate.  But who knows what struck Cameron first in the development of this story?  Perhaps he developed many of the themes about nature first and then realized that pantheism fit well in that scheme.  Regardless of the process, though, I think if we were to consider it, we would all realize how absurd it would have been to throw any sort of complicated theology into that story.  The Na’vi are simple, living in harmony with nature.  Christian theology would have been extremely awkward, if not terribly destructive, on the story as a whole. 

The backlash against Avatar reveals a common trend.  All stories are capable of revealing truth, regardless of their religious affiliations.  But conservative Christian groups are often unwilling to accept truth unless it is explicitly stated in the Bible (even if out of context) or unless it comes direct from the mouths of certain far-right editorialists (who often call themselves newscasters).  These same groups then bring their dogmatic ideas into the realms of science and politics.  Evolution can’t be true because it’s unbiblical, so is global warming, and, in case you had forgotten, so are democrats.  Their mindset of a Christian exclusivity of truth permeates all they do.

Once when I was travelling in Scotland, I met a young man in a hostel in Edinburgh.  We had both been separately to see the display of Rembrandt etchings at the National Art Gallery earlier that day, and we found ourselves discussing it that evening.  After only a few minutes, he brought up the fact that while he loved Rembrandt, he wasn’t terribly keen on many of the etchings in this display.  I asked him why, and he replied that most of them were on religious themes, and as an agnostic, he just couldn’t relate.  I found this odd because most of the etchings were not obviously religious.  If there had been no descriptions, I would have only guessed one or two of them were on religious themes.  I told him this, and he agreed, but somehow when he found out they were religious, they lost all relevance.  I tried to persuade him of how illogical that was, but he would not be won.

I found this incident to be terribly sad, for the etchings were beautiful, and this man could not enjoy their beauty because of an unfortunate association.  But I realized later that this is exactly what Christians are doing when we spurn truth because it lies beyond the familiar language of Christianity.  In both cases, the viewer of truth or beauty does not just maintain the status quo after his experience.  Rather, he is worse off than he was before, for he has seen something good and rejected it. 

Veracity On!

Facebook is a fascinating creature that seems to be on evolutionary steroids.  I remember when it had first come out and it was only for college students.  We all had a chip on our shoulders back then.  Only certain schools had access originally, and you had to write in with requests to get new schools added.  And you couldn’t actually do much on the site, just put in your interests, get as many friends as possible, and write on everyone else’s wall.  Then before you knew it, anyone in college could have an account, then anyone in high school (of which we all highly disapproved), then anyone at all.  And along the way there were groups, applications, a privacy scandal involving extraordinarily large e-petitions, and about three hundred different layouts, each of which confused me.  I am yet to grasp the most recent layout changes in their entirety. 

As Facebook became larger, security became a more important issue.  At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, Zuckerberg and friends introduced word verification as a way to fight spam.  Most of you are probably aware of this process, but for those who are not, when you post something on your status or on someone else’s wall, you now often must type in two words that are randomly generated for you to copy.  They are displayed in such a way that is supposed to ensure only a human could actually read them.  So you type in the words and then your message is displayed.

Well, I have always been a fan of these often ironic or otherwise comical word pairings.  So I have recorded the last few verifications I have had to enter, and now I offer you a tribute to the irony of random word generation.  The following story is fictional, and the word verifications will be the only dialogue.  This is probably going to be a little random, but indulge me.

Persephone was not easily crushed.  All her life she had been told she had no sense of expression, but she could not abandon her dream of acting.  She wanted more than anything to express ideas on stage, to open up the door to new possibilities, to explore the fuzzy boundary surrounding truth and reality.  Now she had her chance.  She had heard of an independent film that was looking for a few actors and actresses in town, so she drove down one day to a large warehouse near the Perimeter where much of the production was going to occur. 

She found the warehouse, verifying the address on a print-out she had brought with her, though she knew she was in the right place by the eclectic group of people milling around in the parking lot waiting for the doors to open.  They looked like dramatic folk.  It must have been the greasy hair. 

She got out of the car and walked up to join the small crowd.  After standing around for a minute or two, she plucked up her courage and asked the person next to her what this was a movie of.

“Of evacuees,” he replied.  She wondered how he had discovered this, for it not been listed on the ad. She also thought his answer was odd – who puts the word of at the beginning of an answer?  But she was pleased that the topic was substantial, one that could use some exposure in the world.

After a few more minutes, during which Persephone began to grow anxious, unconsciously curling and uncurling her flowing black hair, the doors finally opened, and the crowd flooded into the building to the gratuitous welcome of a young man.  As they piled into a small antechamber, the man receded to the back door of the room, which presumably opened into the larger production area.  The crowd’s murmuring and motion began to die down, and Persephone noticed a short woman discreetly come through the door behind the man.  She was so short that had it not been for the door opening and closing, it would have looked as if she had just appeared out of thin air, so effectively was she hidden in the young man’s shadow before moving next to him.  To the general surprise of the crowd, as soon as she stood next to the young man, she began chiding him for something, and the man’s previously strong demeanor faded into meekness as he tried to apologize through a gushy mixture of sycophancy and touchy gestures (the woman was obviously his girlfriend).  After nearly a minute of this spectacle, which was now being keenly observed by the whole crowd in silence, the woman tersely commanded the man back inside the production area, and he quickly obeyed.

“He whipped,” Persephone heard an indiscreet voice mumble, which brought out a small cascade of snickers and restrained laughter.  The woman, also apparently catching the remark, glared in the general direction of the speaker, though she could not make out who was responsible.  Without a word, she motioned for all of them to follow her through the door behind her.

Inside they found a large room with two small occupied areas.  There was a portion just ahead cordoned off with ribbons where large pieces of electronic equipment still resided unpacked.  To the left and beyond this first station was a stage room, well lit, which looked like a sitcom set from the seventies.  The film crew was going to revamp it soon, but it would serve the purpose of their audition space today. 

The woman was now passing through the ranks handing out pieces of paper, one color for the men, another for the women.  She explained that each scrap had a number on it.  They would be trying out in groups of two, one woman and one man, in some sort of prelude to a love scene.  Apparently the greasy man who suggested the topic of evacuees had been wrong; it was a romantic comedy, and a fairly risqué one at that.  Persephone became all the more nervous when she heard the woman say something about breaking new ground in love scenes. 

Just then she received her scrap of paper and, unfolding it, saw the number one on it.  She would be going first!  Great.  Without wasting any time, the woman called the number ones forward.  Persephone was smitten with fear, and when no woman moved, a few of the actors around Persephone pushed her forward, seeing her piece of paper.  The woman handed her a script and told her to read, pushing her further onto the stage.  The man was waiting.

Persephone glanced down at the script and saw she had the first line.  Gathering herself, she spoke, “Vacuous Mr…” She was immediately cut off by the male role, who launched himself into a passionate monologue about how lovers should never refer to each other as mister or miss.  Apparently he missed the fact that Persephone had just called him vacuous to his face.  And apparently the female roles in this movie were solely focused on providing flesh for the audience to slobber over: she had only one other line, and here it came.

She missed it.  Silence reigned.  She peered confusedly at her script.  Was this really all she was supposed to say?  The woman who wore the pants came stomping into the light looking irritated.  “Remember ‘and!’” she growled.  Persephone had not forgotten.  She just didn’t think and was much of a line worth saying.  But she uttered her single syllable answer to the opposing man’s constant stream of emotion.  And must have been inviting some response from the man, though Persephone was not sure exactly what, as she hadn’t really been listening.

The man got a strange look in his eyes.  To Persephone it looked like he might throw up any second, and she turned her head away in disgust, throwing up her arms for protection.  The man lunged at her, as a lion pouncing on his prey, and the director again came forward, this time throwing her stool into the scene, which quite startled the two on stage.  She yelled and cursed for a moment then told the man to go back to his original position.  The look in his eyes was supposed to be one of deep love, and Persephone had missed it.  But the director had advice for the man this time.  After all, the woman was just there to be pretty.

“Advance steamier,” she said with emotion to the man, making some grotesque motion with her hands about her middle, seeming to indicate that she was being disemboweled.  Persephone didn’t bother to say her one line – she knew it was pointless.  Even were she a terrible actress, she was above this pitiful excuse for a movie.  As the man began to lunge once again, this time looking like he had just crossed a desert and was about to fall on top of the well of Persephone, she dropped her script and walked off the stage toward the exit. 

The man missed his target, crashing into the wall and bringing down a deluge of old lights and props.  Amid the chaos that ensued, Persephone could hear the director shouting hysterically about truth and art and how Persephone clearly did not understand the ideals of artistry, otherwise she would recognize what a great film she had just flouted.  The screams grew more and more intense as Persephone realized the director was truly enraged at her.  She picked up her pace, and finally reached the door to the antechamber.  She turned around briefly and saw the livid director, her boyfriend crouching behind her in panic, pick up a defunct light casing and hurl it towards Persephone, shouting in her rage.

“Veracity on!”

Persephone squeezed through the door and heard the casing crash against the other side.  Maybe it was time she started trying to express truth in another field after all.

Avatar

As a kid, I loved getting up every Saturday morning to watch cartoons.  There was Batman, the Ninja Turtles, Scooby Doo, Darkwing Duck, Looney Tunes, Animaniacs, Tailspin.  Then there were the renowned Disney movies of old – Aladdin, The Lion King, and Toy Story probably being my early favorites (later to be followed by the best of them all – The Emperor’s New Groove).  These were all created to appeal to someone like me – your average kid.  But many of them, especially the classic movies, still appeal to me today.  This is partly due to nostalgia, but it is also due to the fact that they all present the same basic story, the heroic ideal that has been with us since the dawn of legendary human exploits, which is to say, since the dawn of humanity.

That being said, Sunday I finally saw Avatar.  First of all let me expound upon its greatness.  It was absolutely dazzling.  It is perhaps the only movie I have ever seen that I am considering seeing again in theaters. Vivid and creative, it certainly deserves the hype it has received.  I had been told a variety of things about it beforehand.  But the most frequently heard comments were that the visual effects were amazing, the plot was terrible, and the religion was weird.  The last of these I will address in my next post.  As for the others, I agree completely with the first point, and disagree with the second in spirit.

Maybe the plot was terrible to the detached viewer, but I simply was not detached.  From the moment I acclimated to the stunning picture before me and saw the gorgeous landscape that Cameron had created, I let down my guard and immersed myself as I did in those Saturday morning cartoons.  It was the sort of movie that, in my opinion, easily sucks you in.  It was so familiar: boy begins a task with wrong motives, boy gets girl, things start getting complicated, boy loses girl, boy fully repents of his former ways and commits to doing what’s right, boy proves himself and gets girl again, boy helps save the “world” from evil, they all live happily ever after.  Some may call it overused.  And indeed, this could just as easily have been a summary of The Lion King.

But this is the classic hero story, and we have a passion for them.  Hero stories of old tugged at the hearts of Greeks, Romans, and Elizabethans, and they continue to intrigue us today. Recasting the model in new ways is one of the great traditions of art.  Avatar succeeded at this task by introducing enough visual novelty to make the willing viewer trade his critical mindset for the perspective of an eager child who glories in the story for its own sake. I knew what was coming by instinct, but like the child who has heard his favorite story over and over and still fears it might turn out differently this time, so I was caught up in the excitement, allowing myself to wonder if it would actually work out in the end or if everything would fall apart. 

I’m glad it worked out.  But as confirmation that the movie had really succeeded, I was sad too.  I left the movie theater faintly wishing that there was such a story, that Pandora was real, that I had won my own girl through courage and danger, that I was a part of that story.  When you approach a story just as it is, a story, with a hero and a villain, with love and hate, war and peace, it is easy to project yourself into it.  But you never think of those fallen warriors or unrequited lovers; you view yourself as the hero who gets the girl and saves the world from destruction.  For a few hours, the screen is your portal into heroism.  You become the hero, experiencing all his ups and downs, and in this case his ultimate triumph and joy.

Then you leave.  And it’s over.  You feel the joy being stolen away as you acquiesce to the fact that you do not live on Pandora, you have not just protected a species from their doom.  You exit the building into the vast asphalt parking lot, squinting in the glare of a thousand windshields.  You see no pristine jungle landscapes.  Even if you have the girl, you remember that relationships are more than just perfect romance.  That world in which goodness and love have so thoroughly triumphed has vanished, and this world where death and decay loom large returns. 

The melancholia sticks around for awhile, perhaps until dinner time, and then life gets back to normal.  The perfunctory essentials return.  You realize the kitchen still has to be cleaned; you must still go to work; your bathroom scale still shows a number too high for a hero.  But we fight our own heroic struggles.  Some decide to fight for their marriage that has been falling apart around them, a decision sometimes more heroic than going to war.  Others decide to continue helping that seemingly hopeless child at school, though all others have abandoned him.  Many decide to face the next day, though there is no hope for a better life anywhere in sight.

I did not learn anything new about human nature when I saw Avatar, nor did I leave with any surprising or revelatory new ideas about truth, beauty, love, or joy.  But I was reminded that justice is worth fighting for.  I was reminded of how similar have been man’s faults all through the ages, and how similar they will likely be into the future.  Once my movie melancholia had faded, I also remembered, trite though it sounds, that I could be a hero too.

And it was just awesome.

A Day in the Life of a Paranoid

Flames shoot in all directions, not just up, but down, left, right, diagonal.  Various objects of affection careen out of the inferno like scorched animals, still carrying bits of fire on their tails.  There is my copy of The Complete Icelandic Sagas, churning its weighty way through the air, 700 of the 1000 pages already burnt to a crisp.  There on the left I see my Brahms recordings balanced on a charred wooden precipice.  They plummet into a seemingly endless abyss as their support finally gives way.  I feel a burning sensation on my neck and swat away a chard of a memory on a piece of glossy, evaporating paper – my wife and me on our wedding day.  The conflagration rages ever on, and Chopin’s Funeral March fades in, growing louder and louder, its ominous tones pounding their way methodically into my desperate soul.  Louder, louder, the dirge pulses and throbs, bursting in and receding again.  It grows harsh, cacophonous, in and out, over and over…

“Jonathan!  Turn off your alarm!”

My eyes open slowly as I fade into reality and I hit the alarm, grateful to find myself in my comfortable, unoxidized bedroom.  Safe, I lay back down to sleep a few more minutes.  I doze in and out again, dwelling in that place between waking and sleeping where dreams can be manipulated.  I masochistically bring back the image of my burning apartment and wallow in its depression.  I vaguely sense my wife walking around the room, bringing with her faint spines of peace piercing the raging fires of my dream.  I hear myself starting to snore, pulling me further into reality, and the fires begin to melt away, drifting as on a piece of paper in a gentle ocean swell, now near at hand, now distant, now near again, until the dream has vanished on the waning tide. 

I get out of bed and begin to go about my day.  I shower and eat, check my email, putter around the place doing nothing in particular.  I turn on the coffee pot while I get dressed for work, and I hear it gargling and purring from my bedroom.  The smell lazes its way through the rooms, finding me and lifting my spirits.  By now, all I remember of my dream is that it ended very peacefully.  Dreams only seem terrifying when you wake from them suddenly and permanently.

Now I am ready for work.  I have seen my wife out the door to her school, and I prepare for my own departure now.  I pour my coffee and prepare it, gather my few other effects, put on my coat, and head to the door.  Then I turn back around and make for the master bath.  “Is Ashley’s curling iron is off?”  I find everything in order and verbalize it, “Off.” 

I march back toward the door but make a stop by the kitchen.  “Off, off, off, off, off, off, off.”  That covers the coffee pot, the toaster oven, the four stove eyes, and the oven.  Now running a little late, I quicken my pace as I remember to check the library for any lights that are still on.  I find them off and take a shortcut through the guest bath on the way out, or so I tell myself, though really I’m checking to make sure Ashley did not leave any other hair paraphernalia plugged in there either.  “Good.”

Finally I walk out the door when I realize I have not checked the heat!  I unlock the door and find the dial in the hallway, turning it down a quarter of a degree to make myself feel better about the fact that it was already set where I intended.  I scan the lights on the stove one last time, just in case, and then head outside once more.  I lock the door and jiggle the handle in and out several times.  “Locked.”

I hesitate on my way down the stairs, torn between the idea of going back up to make sure I really turned off the coffee pot, but I force myself on.  Ten minutes after originally heading to my apartment door, I finally make it to the car.  Inside, I start the car and simultaneously start worrying that I didn’t lock the door completely.  But I know I’m paranoid, so I drive to work.

On the way there, I think of how much I dislike being this way.  I blame the American way sometimes, and its obsession with security.  Other times I settle on the notion that I’m just that way, buying into our culture’s perverse idea that we can pass the blame for any of our unsavory aspects onto our genes, stymieing personal responsibility.  On occasion, though, I make some lofty goal of eliminating my paranoia.  I give myself a pep talk, ending with a rousing call to action, a declaration that “I can do it,” and a loud battle cry as I charge against the menace of anxiety.  But then I have arrived at work, and I have to calm down.  The will to fight fades as I walk the path into work, and by the time I scan my card at the door, I have forgotten my determination to improve.

The day goes smoothly.  I give that big presentation on the work I’ve been doing for the last six months.  It goes well, and I’m glad to have finally finished it.  I am mostly free of paranoia while I’m at work, and after a tiring day, I return home. 

As soon as I step in the door, fears that had been lurking somewhere in the corners of my mind pounce upon me.  What if my numbers were off in that presentation?  What if I was mistaken about the entire premise of the project?  I could have made some tiny error that threw off the whole process.  Then I would have to go in and tell everyone who had heard my presentation that it was all wrong.  The foundation of the project was an error, and I just wasted six months of time.  My wife assures me I am being crazy, and I settle down to dinner, Jeopardy, and some reading. 

Bed time rolls around and I am fatigued from fighting with my mind.  I brush my teeth, read a little more, take my allergy pill, and then prepare to turn off the lights.  Picking up my alarm, I check that it is set for the right time, assuring myself that the alarm is set for AM, not PM, and that the current time says PM, not AM.  Then I turn the alarm on and off several times, just to confirm that the little symbol of a bell I see appearing is actually related to me pressing the alarm button.  I hit the snooze button, which is also the light, and then worry that by doing so I may have disengaged the alarm, just like snoozing does in the morning.  So I repeat the whole process again.  Finally, when I feel confident that all is well, I stare at the display for at least thirty seconds, looking for any sign that my confidence was ill-founded.  Then, doubly-confident, I put the clock down, turn off the light.  The peace of the night and the comfortable bed soothe me.  I sigh pleasurably, and roll over.  Maybe I can beat this worry after all.  Maybe I can slowly free myself from its net.  But then I wonder, “Hon, is your alarm set too?  Just in case?”

Balancing the Checkbook

I’m 23.  I sometimes forget my age; I guess it just seems irrelevant and my brain has decided to stop remembering it.  But I am always reminded of my age when banking comes up in conversation with members of another generation.  I’m not sure where the gap is, but I would guess it corresponds closely with the development of the internet.

A conversation with a member of my parents’ generation or earlier might go something like this:

“So Jonathan, make sure with all those car problems you’ve had that the bills tie out at the end of the month when you balance your checkbook.”

“Checkbook,” I ponder.  “Ah yes, the checkbook.  I hardly ever use it.” 

“Well you do balance it every month, right?”

I pause, awkwardly.  “Of course!  Who doesn’t?”

“Good!”

I leave the room in search of someone in the know.  Spotting my wife, I duck into a dark corner and gesture for her to come over, “Psst…Ash…come here a sec.” 

“What are you doing?”  She looks around to find out who I’m hiding from.

“Just, come here a sec.  I have a question.”

She comes over, giving into the fact that her husband’s strangeness is incurable.  “Hey, do you know what it means to balance your checkbook?”

“Um, sorta, I think.  Isn’t it just making sure your bills match the checks you’ve written?”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure.  They were saying something about tying out to the penny, so I guess that works…Have you ever done that?”

“No.”

“Ok, just checking...”  She rolls her eyes and starts to walk away, but I stop her.  I don’t want to be spotted.  I stealthily look around to see if anyone has noticed this covert conversation, and then jump back into the light and walk down the hall whistling.

The truth is, I’ve never once balanced my checkbook, and I don’t intend to ever do so.  I’m pretty confident that most of my generation conforms to this pattern, and here’s why.  First of all, we never write checks.  It took me five years to make it through my first packet of checks.  Why write checks when you could be getting one to two percent cash back on every purchase you make?  There is nothing so pleasing as checking your rewards at the end of the year and seeing you have earned a couple hundred bucks just by paying your bills and buying what you would have bought anyway. 

Generally, proponents of the checkbook point to the security it provides over the plastic option, but I have to respectfully disagree with this perspective.  It’s true that these days you can almost count on one of your credit card numbers being stolen during your lifetime.  But you can dispute any charges that you know someone else made, and I have never heard of anyone who was defrauded in this manner actually having to pay for the fraudulent charges. 

Credit card companies are putting much more effort into identity protection now anyways.  I recently got a new credit card that had better rewards, and I immediately started using it (because of the rewards).  The next day I received a phone call from the company to verify charges they thought might be fraudulent.  Apparently, most credit card users do not jump right into their new card like I did.  So I verified the expenses and that was that.  But I was pleased with their vigilance. 

Then there is the obvious factor of internet banking.  If I couldn’t go online and see every purchase I had made, on both my credit and debit cards, I would be tempted to go back to checks.  But I can see everything – every tiny interest earning, every automated bill, every singular coke that I didn’t have enough cash to pay for because I wanted my credit card rewards so earnestly.  It’s all there. 

Now let’s think about the check.  There are two obvious drawbacks in my opinion.  First, it is slow and cumbersome.  Between the actual writing of checks and the checking and rechecking of sums at the end of every month, much time is wasted.  But more importantly, in terms of security, using a check is openly handing out your bank account number, complete with your name and address.  I find it ironic that some people can be so careful about blocking off their bank account numbers on other documents, but are completely fine with handing it out on every check they write. 

At least with debit, the card number is auxiliary to the account number.  And for credit, where the card number is often the account number, no one is leaving that number in someone else’s keeping.  You swipe the card and get it back.  Sure, people still manage to steal it, but they have to be trickier about it.  And when there is credit fraud, the money is coming out of the bank’s keeping first, rather than coming straight out your bank account.  When the fraud is recognized, it can be fixed entirely without affecting your personal cash balance. 

No – I don’t balance my checkbook, but I keep a very close eye on all of my accounts with online technology and I pay my full bill every month.  I see only one possible benefit to the checkbook habit.  For those who are tempted to overspend when using credit or debit, because it doesn’t seem like real money, using checks is a good way to temper this habit.  But for those who have no trouble keeping track of their finances, it seems to me that using checks for everyday transactions is throwing money away, wasting time, and less secure to boot. 

Emergency Books

“Jonathan come here quick oh my gosh Jonathan hurry hurry hurry HURRY!”

Computers careen through the air; chairs helicopter lopsidedly; small tremors shiver through the apartment. I charge upon my invisible steed toward the sound of my damsel in distress one room over. I overshoot my target, since steeds are hard to stop once charging, then back-pedal to find my wife gesticulating wildly toward some dark corner.

“It was HUGE hurry get it before it runs away there it is!”

I swing my mighty battle axe at the fell beast and smite it upon the head repeatedly until it is cloven in two. (Despite being mighty, my battle axe is not very sharp).

“Is it dead let me see.”

Once again I have saved the day. I gather up my wilting battle axe and the beast within and flush them into the toilet’s twirling torrents, never mentioning to my wife that the bug was smaller than my pinky fingernail. Okay, so sometimes I do mention it, but I still kill the foul little creatures. And occasionally they are considerable enough to warrant both my respect and a larger weapon than a tissue.

Though I am generally the more emotional of us, my wife has a more sudden and cataclysmic response to perceived emergencies. Or perhaps my responses are just as intense, but my mind classifies fewer events in the category of emergency. For example, a few minutes into a trip, my wife will sometimes suddenly release the sort of severe gasp that I would reserve for situations akin to the moment when I realized Evelyn Waugh was a man. I respond:

“Where are they? Where?” The gasp indicated to me that a herd of antelope was charging at our car from somewhere outside my line of vision.

“Dang it, I forgot to bring my white sweater in the car with me!”

“Your sweater? It’s in your suitcase - are you telling me there are no antelope?”

At this she seems confused, and I emit my own sigh. But I have to give her credit for putting up with what I consider emergencies, particularly issues related to evolution, theology, or Swedish holidays (and their accompanying gastronomy – mmm St. Lucia buns).

Concerning one particular emergency, though, we are ardently united: the travesty of having to wait somewhere for more than five minutes without something to read. And I mean something worth reading, not those awful magazines that befoul countless waiting rooms across the nation. (The least they could do is cancel all their subscriptions to Horse and Hound and pool their funds to get a worthy news periodical like The Economist.)

I might even admit that one of those gasps without warning is justified when one has forgotten her emergency book, and my wife and I have both had this misfortune. My wife is really responsible for helping me establish the habit of the emergency book, and I can no longer imagine life without it. She has had this practice since she was a youth, when she would sometimes even bring books when her family went out for dinner. I never brought a book with me on common errands until I married my wife, but now it is one of the items on the list whenever I go anywhere. And her habit of reading during meals has influenced me as well. It is not uncommon for us to read through meals at home together, and this often greatly improves are conversations later. Rather than just making small talk about the day, we can discuss issues raised by whatever we are reading, whether it is the social consequences of the bubonic plague or the effects of censorship in China, the diction of Shakespeare or the merits of natural food. And I assure you all of these topics have actually arisen.

One of my favorite topics to discuss is Medieval Literature and History. It would not be strange for someone to find my wife and me discussing The Battle of Maldon, Volsunga Saga, and Lord of the Rings in conjunction some night at a coffee shop. This sort of conversation would undoubtedly be enriching for us. While my wife would have been equipped for such a discussion due to her degree, I never would have been able to participate were it not for a day trip when I stole Ashley’s copy of Beowulf as my emergency book. What literary passions I would lack without having encountered Beowulf I cringe to consider.

In a world where conversation often descends to the banality of voyeuristic reality TV shows, there is an easy solution for recapturing quality discussion. Rather than picking up that remote when you’re bored, pick up a book. And if you find yourself so busy that you don’t even have time to be bored, the emergency book is one of the easiest ways to squeeze in some extra time immersing yourself in new (or old) ideas.

Suburban Regalia

I don’t exactly have a backyard. In fact, I definitely don’t have a backyard. Nonetheless, this very day I discovered a wonderful place in my own backyard. It’s really the sort of thing I should have known about years ago, and I know I had the opportunity to do so. I knew the name of the location, and I knew that it had a place to do some rock climbing. But it remained vague and distant until today.

Vickery Creek and its accompanying trails comprise this wonderful place. Not two miles from my current dwelling lies a small wooded area containing a few miles of scenic trails. These trails criss-cross the wood and follow the creek as it twists its way toward the Chattahoochee River. I would have never ventured into this realm had I not learned a vital fact – there is a waterfall along the trail.

Water has always been a key inspiration for me to go hiking. Forests are pleasant, but they lack the vitality of waterfalls or even creeks and streams. And there exist few boys who do not enjoy getting wet on a warm day.

So when I found out about the waterfall, I pledged my loyalty to the trails even before I had seen them. And I woke this morning eagerly anticipating my day’s planned adventure, right in my own backyard. Sometime around 11 o’clock I gathered up my small hiking knapsack and filled it with a water bottle, a sandwich, a small pad, and a pen for I intended to lunch and reflect during the hike.

I drove over to the trailhead and began to tromp up the trail. (I never merely “hike.” Tromping is much more invigorating.) Not two minutes later I encountered a long entourage of middle-aged hikers and realized reflection might be a little more difficult than expected on a beautiful day like today. But they passed rather quickly and I let them get ahead a bit to at least create the illusion of solitude in the woods. I presently forgot how near humanity was and relished the sylvan atmosphere.

About ten minutes later I came back in sight of the creek and started to hear what I believed to be the waterfall. The thrill of being outdoors in simulated seclusion, breathing the fresh air, feeling the dirt beneath me, greatly lifted my spirit. I began to see myself like some conquering hero, ruling over the path before me like an Olympian god. Tromping can do that to a fellow. Then I tripped over a protruding root, and my hubris came a’tumblin down like Icarus. Fortunately, metaphoric falls do not often kill.

My pride back in check, I could now tell that I was very near the waterfall. Then the beauteous vision burst through the thick February foliage of bare tree limbs – the falls themselves, tumbling over a mighty precipice into a bottomless abyss, churning and flinging up mist in such quantity as to instantly drench anyone who dared venture near this manifestation of mighty Nature.

I tripped again and decided to keep my romantic side in more control for the remainder of my tromp. In reality, the falls were only about twenty five feet tall, flowing over the remains of the old dam that I believe helped power the Roswell mill in days of yore. Though the scene could not compare to the splendor of natural beauty elsewhere, the eroded dam and the falls were a very pleasant sight in the midst of suburbia. I climbed down a little closer to the water and sat on some rocks to eat my sandwich.

The group of hikers I had seen earlier seemed to have taken a different route than I had, and presently I saw them appear up the trail and come down to look at the waterfall. They lingered for a few minutes and moved on. A troop of boy scouts followed shortly thereafter, and their leaders diligently kept them from the water’s edge. They too lingered briefly and then passed by.

But it was the opposite side of the creek that really kept my attention. There was another path across the way, a paved trail that led down from the mill and the historic part of Roswell, and there was a steady flow of walkers there as well. In fact, there were many more on that side than on mine. That didn’t surprise me much; their side was paved and flat; it had nice viewing areas, and it was only a few hundred yards from parking, shops, and restaurants.

And yet, nearly every walker carried a burdensome load of hiking gear. Many had backpacks stuffed to the brim; most had some form of walking stick, and all looked as if they had been working very hard so far. At first I thought they must have crossed over the creek further down (where there is a bridge) and had been hiking on my side beforehand, but this proved an untenable belief as I watched group after group come down from the parking lot, take off their sacks to view the falls for a few minutes, and head right back up to their cars, leaning heavily on their walking sticks. And even if they were hiking on my side of the river, the gear could not be justified; I doubt there is more than three or four miles of trail in total. I couldn’t help but laugh at one man in particular who had the complete outfit – a steel-framed hiking backpack completely full, two walking sticks, a hat brimmed all the way around, and a variety of other objects dangling from carabiners on his pack.

Such is the regalia of many suburbanites (or, perhaps more accurately, super-urbanites, for Roswell is north of Atlanta). We love to show off our fancy gear amongst our neighbors, even if it is completely unnecessary. And we justify it as preparedness. After all, you never know when you’ll be walking a quarter mile and fall, breaking your face, desperately needing gauze, Neosporin, and a nice side of roast beef with roasted parsnips while you wait for extraction. This desire for security carries over into other parts of our lives all the time.

Risk is always unnecessary; there is insurance for nearly everything. From our health to our lives to our jewelry to our cars to our luggage to our mail to our weddings to our dogs, if we spend money on it, we can buy insurance for it. And we often do. And when there is no insurance available (or even when there is), we have intruder alerts, credit checks, car alarms (which have woken me two nights in a row and never seem to prevent robbery), background checks, smoke alarms, personal references, carbon monoxide detectors, warranties, good faith agreements, never-ending return polices (or just take it to Wal-Mart), rain checks, and – if all else fails – you can always sue.

These same litigious folk have taught us well how to travel. It all comes down to planning. First you plan for the travelling portion of the trip, because it comes first, and we are a people most concerned with the here and now. So break out the entertainment: the computer with a multitude of DVDs, the ipod, the Kindle, the Blackberry, and your portable satellite radio (for sports), and of course you will need a charger for each device.

Next consider your clothing and toiletries. Fortunately, there is a useful volume formula:

(Number of Travelers)(Number of Nights Spent Away + 3) = Bags Needed

For example, if my wife and I are going to Savannah for three days, we would need

(2)(3+3) = (2)(6) = 12 bags!

So fill them up! You just never know when you will need a safari shirt or a ski mask.

I understand that it is a fundamental human need to feel safe. Life does not flourish without security. But I would also argue that some risk and uncertainty is equally important. It pushes us to new achievements; it keeps us motivated; it reveals our weaknesses and hones them into assets. Even the most protected person will one day encounter something completely unexpected and frightening. If they have spent their lives only trying to be safe, they will stumble and fall. But the one who has shunned the secure regalia of suburbia to face reality from time to time will stand beneath the pressure.