Listening

Observations on myself: I am unusually sensitive to sounds and unusually insensitive to sights--I might walk past the same building or sign many times and never notice it, but a loud or jarring (or beautiful!) sound is sure to catch my attention.  Here are some of the sounds I love:

Crickets--a relaxing summer evening, sitting on a back porch with people dear to me, having the pleasure to slow down just to listen, being near to nature and its beauty

The sound of a neighbor's outdoor basketball game--comfort, homeyness, familiarity

Ocean waves crashing--the combination of a soothing, reassuring, repetitive rhythm coupled with the ocean's (almost literally) unfathomable mystery

An orchestra tuning--dissonance, difference, resolving into unity while maintaining uniqueness

Musicians breathing in the background of classical music tracks--a big intake of breath right before an important passage--it's almost like they're reminding you how to live: play and work with intensity, but don't forget to breathe

Children laughing--really anyone laughing, especially people you love--a blessed reminder that perhaps not all of life is suffering, after all

Traveling Alone

This past weekend, a dear co-worker was married in New Hampshire.  After receiving her invitation I assumed it would likely be impractical to attend, but I looked online and saw that ticket prices direct from DCA to Manchester were cheap, and on a whim, I bought a ticket.

I arrived late on Friday night, rented a car, and drove to a small family-owned lodge.  I woke up with light poring into my windows through the brightly tinted leaves. I loved having a room to myself, tucked away in the New Hampshire forest, quiet, restful, private, protected.  I felt like I didn't have to live up to any expectations.  I slept in, read a bit, went for a long walk, ate a late breakfast, and drove myself to the wedding.  I chatted with strangers and friends of the family, congratulated the bride and groom, headed to the reception, ate, danced, chatted, and went home early to read in bed.

It was perfect.  It was restorative.  I should do this more often!

The view from one of my windows:

My glorious morning walk

:

The lovely stained glass in the church:

The bride and groom:

View from the reception site:

Connected

I read this article today about gang violence in El Salvador.  It made me think about how many stories are in circulation regarding suffering in far away places, and how their sheer volume makes it hard to feel compassionate about all of them--we have to live at some point, running errands and making money, and stopping to feel properly empathetic, to consider whether our consumption is exacerbating the problem, or to wonder if contributing funds might help, becomes simply unbearable over time.  Yet how unfortunate to feel myself becoming hardened!

I write about this now in the context of beginning another school year with a new crop of students.  As the level 1 ESOL teacher, I see my students every morning first thing and thus become the default homeroom teacher/counselor/social worker for students.  Students routinely ask me questions in the minutes before and after class on everything from free lunch to homecoming tickets.  The harder cases are the ones where I have to ask the questions: why is Douglas sleeping? (Answer: working illegally long hours in the evenings to help the family put  food on the table).  Why is Maria so despondent? (Answer: in fear that his daughter has become too "loose" and Americanized, her father has been beating her).  Why does Danny seem so angry? (Answer: in immigrating to the U.S. to flee his father's gang-related aspirations for him, he has been reunited with a mother he hasn't seen in 10 years--and after the initial joyful reunion, it has been a difficult and frustrating adjustment).  My beginning students are disproportionately Central American in origin, and so stories like the NY Times article cited above are more than an abstraction--I see the impact of violence and poverty on my students' learning and behavior, which in turn has a direct impact on me.

I didn't choose this profession because of an unselfish desire to comfort the afflicted.  I saw in it an opportunity to earn a living in something I enjoyed: I both love teaching and feel naturally gifted to do it well, and I am fascinated by the intersection of language and culture.  It was only after being in my field for a few years that I even realized how essential it is to acknowledge what a huge impact the circumstances of my students' lives can have on their performance in school, and how I can never ignore that if I want to help them reach their best potential, academically or otherwise.  I became connected to this community by accident, and I care about immigration, about Central American countries with their soaring murder rates, corruption, and horrifying poverty, not so much because I am compassionate and selfless, but because it affects me, actually and quite concretely.  Trying to get a deeply angry seventeen-year-old boy to care about improving his writing has made it abundantly clear that I cannot separate myself from the woes of a far-off country.

I ended up here by accident rather than by any inherent goodness.  However, I feel acutely that experiencing things like this--where I can directly observe the suffering of others because of real connections with those it most affects--is an essential part of helping me to become more loving, more compassionate, and a better Christian.  I should do more good--I should find ways to serve outside of what I already do in my profession.  So many people do that, and in this way their lives become interwoven with another community, and they learn to feel compassion and understanding for those who are in distinctly different circumstances from themselves.  It is so natural to cling to others like us who are of similar faiths, professions, academic backgrounds, with similar interests.  I, too, choose to spend the great majority of my time with those with whom I have the most in common, but I've come to see that I am simply too limited in my capacity for far-off compassion.  I cannot understand or care about other people in a meaningful way without knowing them with some degree of intimacy.

Slipshod

This summer I picked up the habit of walking to the local branch of the library to read for an hour or two.  It's a pleasant spot, with large and airy windows, lots of trees so the light isn't too intense, and an interesting mix of local people, yet is never too crowded.  I love having reference books at my finger tips, and while I was perusing the dictionaries the other day to look up a Spanish word that showed up in my novel (I didn't have my computer with me), I saw a copy of Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage Dictionary, the dictionary made famous by David Foster Wallace's sparkling review.

I flipped through it and within seconds I had completely abandoned my original purpose in visiting the reference shelves.  It was deliciously fun to see how authoritatively Garner explained his stylistic preferences, giving examples of improper usage straight from the pages of well-known publications (the San Diego Union-Tribune came off especially poorly).  It stroked my cattiest impulses--it was like fashion police for the usage stickler.

Here's one of my favorite terms of Garner's: "slipshod extension," which "denotes the mistaken stretching of a word beyond its accepted meanings, the mistake lying in a misunderstanding of the true sense."  I love this--"slipshod" is a word I need to use more--it's so much more visual than "slovenly."  It makes me think of something like this:



In his list of slipshod extensions, he includes "protagonist."  L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan (who is less obnoxious to me than most film critics) is cited for making the embarrassing mistake of referring to mere characters as  "protagonists."  Garner has the amusing habit of citing a malapropism and then correcting it:

I find his parenthetical "read characters" to be delightful.

I love having all my annoyances called out like this.  In a culture where it's increasingly common to hear people say things like "it literally broke my heart" in all earnestness, Garner's comments are simultaneously validating and amusing.

But of course if I read more of the book, I'll be sure to find examples of words and phrases I use incorrectly.  I have a fairly brilliant friend, one of the smartest people I know, who misuses the word "tendentious."  I was 25 before someone pointed out to me that my pronunciation of miscellaneous as "mish-ell-aneous" was incorrect.  I think what I'm deciding is that I feel okay allowing myself to laugh at other people, to smugly smirk at Kenneth Turans and Union Tribunes, if I can maintain my sense of humor at my own expense.  We're all somewhat ridiculous.