To Mourn With Those Who Mourn

Happy Easter!  I've been religious my entire life, so it it sometimes hard to speak or write on religious themes with originality--how can I do justice to the meaningfulness of the same core beliefs I've heard repeated so many times?  The ideas themselves have a vitality that transcends what I can say of them, but I will add that my heart is sincerely full of gratitude for the good news--the belief in life beyond death, the great miracle that is repentance, and the idea that participating in faith and partaking in ritual can help us to grow holier. I think often of what it means to live as a Christian; I'm beginning to understand the importance of relationships and community.

Circa 2003 in Prague, I was visiting with a good friend and fellow Mormon whom I had met at church.  She was, like me, a foreigner far from home, (Ukraine, in her case) and single, but about seven or eight years older.  She was frustrated with lack of dating opportunities, perceived unfriendliness at church, and general heartache and disappointment.  One afternoon I was over at her house, drinking fruit tea and eating wafer cookies (how very Czech of us).  She was verbalizing all her loneliness, her pain and anger at life's injustice.  I remember feeling so linguistically inadequate--I could understand most of what she was saying to me, but didn't quite have the skill to try to assuage her grief-- an intricate and delicate task, to be sure, and one that could be easily botched by someone with a limited vocabulary or pragmatic range.  So instead, I mostly just nodded and gave her sympathetic glances, punctuated by the occasional "Omlouvam se"--I'm sorry.

I felt regret afterwards for a long time--there was so much I was prepared to say to her, and felt I couldn't for fear it would come out wrong--things about my own loneliness, timing, and the purpose of suffering and what good might come from it.  But now I look back and think how fortunate it was that my poor Czech forced me to remain mostly silent.  I don't know that my pedantic attempts at comforting her would have done much good.  They may have even been harmfully trite and cliched.  I've come to think that perhaps expressing our most profound hurt to another person is simply a request to share the grief, at least a bit, at least for a moment--therein lies the comfort, in the companionship itself, not in the substance of the response, definitely not in simple answers about God's will or what good may come.  What more can be said, really, than "I'm sorry"?

IPad Misadventures

I had a technology mishap at a meeting a couple of weeks ago.  It was the culmination of an unfortunate series of coincidences, like the reverse of stars aligning (black holes aligning?  Do black holes align?  Maybe consecutive black holes just, I don't know, suck each other in, or something): it started when my tech guys dropped by, at my request, to show me some potential apps for my students for the new iPad my district had bought me.  One of them was so eager to show me everything that it might do that he insisted on turning on voice activation.  I didn't pay much attention, taught my last class, then rushed out the door to get to a meeting across town.  I slipped into my meeting twenty minutes or so late and slunk to the back of the room and thought, "Hey, I'll take notes on my new iPad!"  That seemed like a good idea until somehow, while my boss was mid-sentence, I accidentally clicked on my notes and activated voice recognition on the word "ESOL".  And unfortunately, the pronunciation of my iPad sounded EXACTLY like something else--a bodily orifice, or something you call someone you think is a jerk.  So my iPad was belting this out (I forgot to mention that tech guy had also thought it would be a good idea to turn my volume all the way up), and everyone turned and stared at me.  So of course I shut it off and quietly schlepped it to the side and wanted to crawl into a tiny hole.  It was a feeling that I hadn't felt in many years, but immediately recognized--the "I am so humiliated that I the only way I can survive this is to pretend I have no idea it happened" feeling that hearkens back to seventh grade.  We all sat there stunned while my boss said something like, "Debby's iPad is freaking out back there!"  Once we broke into groups, I overcame my mortification for long enough to stop everyone and try to explain.  They all seemed to find it amusing (one woman: "You know what that sounded like, right?"), but I had burning cheeks for the rest of the meeting.

The moment only continued when someone reminded everyone about an upcoming summer institute where we could present, saying, "Debby did databases last year," to which another colleague added, "hm, Debby does databases?"  I thought it wise not to remind everyone that I was going to Dallas the following week for the TESOL Convention.  Sheesh.  Glad that day is over.

Punctuated Equilibrium and Language Learning

The title refers to an idea within evolutionary biology that evolution occurs by fits and starts--organisms remain largely the same for long periods of time, and then something spurs a relatively quick and dramatic change. (I can't remember when I first saw or heard the term, but it was likely something I came across when I was team teaching Biology and felt I should have more of a clue about the subject matter.  In any case, it was probably something I found on Wikipedia.  Such is how we acquire knowledge these days, I suppose: in a haphazard, unmemorable, roundabout way.).

I thought of this term as we were driving back from Monterey on a road trip today.  I get mildly carsick sometimes when I try to read, so I was staring out the window and just thinking. Somehow, in that untraceable way that happens, my mind leapt from idea to idea until it arrived at memories of learning French.  Language learning is a long-term process, as I know from being a language teacher; but at least as reconstructed in my memory, it sometimes resembles this idea of punctuated equilibrium.  One memory stands out: Paris, 1997, a baroque church.  I want to say that the church had some association with one of the king Louis--was it Saint Louis?  Eglise St. Louis?  This one, perhaps, although it's not where it should be.  In my mind's eye, the building was located in the general vicinity of the Tuileries and the Louvre--perhaps off in the direction towards the Madeleine?  But it could well be in a completely different part of the city.

I recall a middle-aged woman, a docent, who was obviously eager to share her knowledge of the church and give me and my friends a free tour.  She had shoulder-length, graying hair, kind blue eyes, and a gentle voice.  We warned her that our French wasn't great--I could understand a good chunk of what I read and could actually communicate quite a lot with a patient soul, but I was still having trouble following the rapid French of Paris, and my vocabulary was very limited beyond cognates.  She was so eager to help us understand, so she spoke slowly, deliberately, with clear emphasis and repetition.  To this day, I remember moments from her tour as being integral to my comprehension of oral French.  As she guided us around the church, she repeated "un hotel" while referring to a stone piece within each small section of the church, as paid for by various wealthy benefactors.  I was confused as to why this would also be referred to as "un hotel" (a hotel).  It wasn't until much later that I realized she was saying "un autel" (an altar).  She spoke of the four gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and I finally made the connection that "l'evangile" was "gospel" in French (this was before I studied Latin and learned, of course, "evangelium".)  I remember, as I listened, that the artificial slowness of her French helped me to finally start putting the pieces of language together in a way that made sense.  And the realization that I was comprehending went far beyond the message or the few new words I learned that day: I was following a tour all in French, and I knew what was going on.  Not everything, but the great majority, perhaps 90%.  It felt incredible--after weeks of disappointment in realizing how slowly I was progressing, a breakthrough at last .

I know that "punctuated equilibrium" as a metaphor for what was happening is limited, at best.  I was hearing new words all the time, reading, writing, trying to think in the language, which isn't anything like the idea of "stasis" and long periods of no change that the evolutionary hypothesis proposes.  But I remember that moment, and others like it as I have tried learning other languages--and I wonder how much of learning happens in this way, when circumstances are just right, when the stars align, when we are ready to learn and there is a teacher eager to teach us.  Can such situations ever be designed, or is it just a matter of being prepared for it, and taking it as it comes?

Dancing With Myself

This is pretty much a more public, more awesome version of what I do in the kitchen--my roommate is generally the only witness.  The best is from about 0:56 to 1:04.

Dance is pure expression: there are no words to limit to one interpretation or cause self-consciousness because emotions can only be inferred.  Dance can invoke joy, self-mocking, yearning, frustration.  And if you make it interesting and musical enough, people will watch and enjoy--it transcends the boredom created by talking about oneself.  An art form, for sure, one which I do poorly, but I revel in regardless.

And music--I feel like I should sing it here!--music has a primal power that defies explanation.  I'll try a little, but I know I'll come up woefully short.  When I listen to the best music, if it's joyful, I experience my deepest joy.  That sounds wrong, as if my joy in being human and love and relationships is outdone by a sensual experience.  But great music makes me experience all that love and pain in heightened form; so listening to great dance music is incredibly visceral--I don't have to think, and it may be the only time I really get out of my head and let myself just feel.  And it feels wonderful.

And here's the link to the Billy Idol song of the title, just because I always forget how great it is.

Stalking Old Friends: Facebook, Google, and Daylight Savings Time

I have 8:00 a.m. church this year, which means that I had to wake up at what felt like 6:00 a.m. last Sunday on the first day of Daylight Savings Time.  It is lovely to get out of church so early and have the whole day ahead, but I couldn't allow myself to nap since I already needed to try to go to bed at what felt like an early hour in order to wake up the next day.

Anyway, the point is that I was sleepy, but unable to sleep, with lots of unscheduled time in front of me.  I was reading, but then I needed to look something up as a reference, and then I got distracted, etc., etc., so I went on Facebook, that vast portal of time wastage.  A friend popped up who made me think of some people I worked with about 10 years ago, pre-Facebook.  I searched for some of my former co-workers, but only was able to find one.  I find it so ridiculously frustrating when former acquaintances are not on Facebook, as if their refusal to have the intimate details of their lives published on the internet makes them somehow evasive and antisocial.  I know, it's ridiculous--but it does make that strange Facebook-stalking thing I do, where I make inferences about someone's life choices (okay, okay, I JUDGE) based on photos and quick "About Me" facts, considerably more difficult.

Anyway, while thinking about past friendships, I remembered a good friend from childhood.  I moved to a town several hours a way when we were seven.  He is, much to the detriment of my curiosity, not on Facebook.  Google wasn't much more helpful, but I did discover that he is now math department chair at a high school not far from where he grew up.  I feel so frustrated that I cannot find out more--this instant-gratification world has led me to expect to find the answer, the details, the dirt, with a few clicks and maybe just a lucky search term.   How did the ability to find any old video from the past on youtube translate into a sense of entitlement as to knowing the intimate details of everyone's lives?  It feels frustrating and strangely surprising to be reminded that all the social networks in the world can't change how people are ultimately not completely knowable.  The invasiveness of the internet-age--and stalkers like me--cannot get us any closer to the essential mystery that is another person.  Unfortunate for my curiosity, but in a sense, reassuring that some things will always be beyond technology's all-seeing eye.

Losing Oneself

Everything I experience comes from my limited perspective--I can only see what my poor eyes allow me to, I can only hear what is within my hearing range, I can only feel what I myself have touched.  Literature expresses this so well, with those middle-school terms you have to memorize denoting perspective, like "first person" or "third person", or my favorite, "omniscient".  What a lovely idea that is--a narrative that tries to capture what it would be like to experience omniscience.  Literature is powerful for how it functions as more than a mirror to reality, but as a medium for helping us understand the unknowable.

This is especially a virtue because I think you could say that learning to transcend one's own limited perspective is what life is about.  It's easy to glibly state it, but it's really, really hard to do.  We tend to label and categorize so easily-- while it's frowned on to do it racially, we do it politically and religiously--with ideology it's somehow acceptable.  It's also much easier to gasp "men!" with exasperation when things go romantically awry (I should know--I do this all the time) than to try to understand another person's motivations as an individual, or as someone who, like me, is conflicted and flawed, who sincerely wants to do good but so often mucks it up.

What if--what if I could really feel just as happy for someone else to have good fortune as for myself?  What if I could really love other people so much that their professional successes would fill me with as much satisfaction and pride as if I had done it myself?  What if I really felt, at a dear friend's wedding, like her joy and hopefulness were as good as if they belonged to me?  We SAY things like that all the time--"I couldn't have been happier if it had been me promoted!", and I think to some degree we do this because our joy at the moment truly is so full that we feel words cannot adequately express it, so we resort to hyperbole.  And I also DO believe that there are some relationships so dear that this is actually true--I think many parents really feel the purest and most unselfish joy and pain for their children.  But I think this is much rarer than we acknowledge, and is limited to only our few closest relationships.  So what if the joy and pain of other people--people not ostensibly like me, who I might not have an easy affinity for--were so valuable to me that I could weigh my own inconvenience against their need and the greatest good would always win?  Yep--utterly unimaginable.

Love

I fell in love with my job and my students again today.  Like any job, this one has its ups and downs, many of which are related to how personal the relationships between teacher and students can be.  As lovely as it is to have a student express appreciation or show spectacular growth, there is the flip side: teenagers are excellent at transforming their displeasure into personal attacks and kids often have heartbreaking personal problems like abuse, pregnancy, poverty, and illness.

But today was delightful, and as it came to a close, I felt fortunate to do something I find so invigorating. It started when they cracked me up.  In my beginning class I was reminding students of their recent vocabulary word "skill."  "Ay, Miss, the hair de Douglas have a skill!"  shouted Fabricio, my salty-tongued, Brazilian/Bolivian student.  "Watch!"  He proceeded to pull out a tissue and rip it in half on Douglas's rock-hard, spiky faux-hawk.

Then in my third period ESOL World History class, I decided to risk the flop of having students perform brief scenes depicting the collapse of the Roman Republic.  I gave them only five minutes or so to prepare--I just wanted it to be a quick diversion and an interactive way of remembering the history--but one group managed to form swords, wreaths, and togas for themselves using only tape, paper, tissues, and their jackets.  Their scene--the assassination of Julius Caesar--had the class rolling in laughter.

During the last block, my colleague invited me to watch the same group of students, now in their ESOL literature class, present original poems explaining their feelings on leaving their countries.  Their words were so vivid and unguarded.  Were it not a violation of privacy, I would cite one here in its entirety so you could see just how astonishingly beautiful a few of them turned out.  .

I finished the day feeling grateful.  Here I am feeling challenged by my job, perhaps not always intellectually, but certainly in the sense that I am constantly trying to solve new and difficult problems and push the boundaries of creativity.  I love high school students.  They are young, impetuous, sometimes idiotic, but quickly learning to analyze and make sense of the world. More specifically, I love the population of students that I teach, so unspoiled and raw.  I feel like I can see into their souls--how can I not give them my best?  

And the beauty of today was that I could see that they are doing so well, and even thriving, because my coworkers and I work so hard for them.  It's not an exaggeration to say that there is real love here, at least of a certain kind.