thoughts about things

2012-02-16T16:36:00.000-06:00

I'm ready for my creativity to be healed from the wounds caused by the blunt force trauma of misery. I'm ready to write about more than what I hate, or what I see wrong with the world, or how ridiculous it all is. Life is absurd. Our society is nuts. All we try to do is control each other. Yup. It's settled for me. On to the next one.

2012-02-09T16:26:00.002-06:00

Making plans.

Making moves.

Bread And Circuses

2012-02-01T18:57:00.001-06:00

A long time ago, the B.C. era, in fact, the Roman Empire figured out how to effectively control its population: bread and circuses. The leaders of the era realized that, in order to completely distract the people from the brutal reality of their lives, all they needed to do was constantly bombard the people with food and entertainment. The method has proven itself effective, since the human mind can only focus on so many things, and we usually just accept the reality with which we're presented.

When I think about our society today, I am baffled by how many opportunities for bread and circuses present themselves to us. We go to the grocery store and have not just Cheez-Its, but twelve different types of Cheez-Its. We meander over to the alcohol section and get lost in the aisles of liquor. On the drive home, we drive by multiple restaurants and see billboards advertising the following: ballets, upcoming movies, fast-food restaurants, grocery stores, and more. We turn on the radio and hear hit song after hit song, hundreds of stations, and hundreds of commercials. We get home, load our fridges to the brim, crack open a brew, plop down on the couch, and turn on the TV. Or we get on the Internet, a place where, within seconds, we can have access to anything. Ads abound on both the Internet and TV. On the weekends we can go see a movie at a multi-million dollar complex with over 30 screens. Each morning we brew a pot of coffee (the Americas, Arabia, Africa, Pacific...pick your region) because we'll get a headache and be sluggish if we don't. Maybe once or twice a month we go shopping, and at every store the music is always happy, the lighting is always good, and the customer service is always helpful.

What if all these breads and circuses went away? What if we had no radio, TV, or Internet? What if we stopped drinking coffee and alcohol? What if we didn't have twelve types of Cheez-Its, or Cheez-Its at all? What if there were no blockbuster movie previews, no Netflix, no DVDs and flat screens? What if we didn't have all the fast-food chains and hip local restaurants? What if we didn't have malls and Ebay and Best Buy and Apple and Craigslist? What if we didn't have Tumblr and Formspring and Blogger and StumbleUpon and Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Grooveshark and Pandora and Reddit? Would life be bearable?

I would argue not. Each day, I feel more and more that all of these things blind us to the slavery we are all living in. These breads and circuses keep us full enough and entertained enough to forget about everything else about our society: 35 million Americans are binge drinkers; Starbucks made $3 billion in 2011; half of Americans are one financial shock away from poverty; people are working jobs they loathe to pay for houses they can't afford; student loan debt now totals $1 trillion; only .45% of Americans are in the military, and only 1% of that .45% ever see combat, yet 16 soldiers commit suicide every month.

It's not just the U.S. This is what the whole world is like. Debt, wage-slavery, foreclosures, poverty. 90% of the fish in the ocean have been fished. Our civilization does terrible things to us, and forces us to become inhuman drones who serve a larger, faceless, destructive machine that's killing us and the planet slowly.

Without coffee we'd realize how overworked we really are. Without alcohol we'd realize how stressed we really are. Without TV, movies, and the Internet, we'd actually have time to feel that stress. Without restaurants, grocery stores, and 12 varieties of Cheez-Its, we'd lose our false sense of choice and autonomy. How strange is it, that, even in knowing this, we continue to participate? I watch Netflix and TV and DVDs as much as the next guy. I depend on coffee to keep me from feeling the effects of being overworked. I am typing this on a Macbook Air. I can be in the system, aware of its damaging effects on me, and still actively participate in it because my options have effectively been stripped. It's a strange juxtaposition, like an environmentalist who finds that the best way to get a book about deforesting to as many people as possible is to publish a book. Publishing the book kills trees, but when you're in a system that leaves you no other options, even the best options are warped.

The fact is, we're living in an oppressive society that forces us into school, then work (reframed as the chance to make money as teenagers), and then wage-slavery, all while stuffing bread down our throats and circuses in front of our eyes. We convince ourselves it's what we want, that we're living in a highly-evolved society. In one episode of The Office, Michael Scott tries to leave it all behind and forage in the wild, but find himself unable to do so because he has never truly interacted with the wilderness (he's never done so because this society strips us of our options completely and separates us from the earth we live on). He comes back to his office and says, "I don't need fresh air. I have air conditioning - the freshest air around. I don't need the outdoors. I have screen savers of the beach on my computer. It's like I'm really there." We tell ourselves these lies because if we don't reality is too much to bear.

Interesting Conversation

2012-01-25T19:00:00.001-06:00

Today I had an interesting conversation with a student at lunch that further affirms my belief that schools and society serve as prisons, and that we live in an absurdly violent culture. Here it is:

Student: I found out yesterday that they are giving my dad 20 years. So I won't see him until I'm 30.

Me: Oh my goodness. I wish I knew what to say. That's awful. I'm so, so sorry.

Student: Yeah, I know. It makes me sad. But he might get 10. They aren't sure yet.

Me: Wow. That's still a lot.

Student: He might get time off for good behavior.

Me: Really?

Student: Yeah, like, if he doesn't do anything bad in prison. Kind of like recess.

Me: Recess?

Student: Yeah. Like how you have to owe time at recess and you serve your time before you can play.

Me: ...

Student: I miss him.

Me: I am sure. I miss my dad, too.

Student: Yeah.

Me: Tell me, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Student: A soldier.

Me: Why?

Student: Cuz it's cool.

Me: Really? How so? What's cool about it?

Student: You get camouflage, cool clothes, grenades...

Me: Grenades? What do soldiers use grenades for?

Student: For blowing people to smithereens! And you get smoke bombs to shoot up fox holes and stuff.

Me: How do you know all this stuff?

Student: I just do. I know a lot about guns. You get guns as a soldier.

Me: Oh? Tell me about that.

Student: Well, you get, like, machine guns, AK-47s, pistols, and shotguns. My favorites are a pistol and a shotgun.

Me: You have favorites? How do you know which is your favorite?

Student: I just do. I've held a pistol and a shotgun. I like them both.

Me: Oh, okay. Just wondering.

Student: Actually, my favorite is the machine gun. I love the sound it makes...tukka tukka tukka tukka!

Me: Yeah, it shoots a lot of bullets...

Student: And there's this one gun, I saw it in a videogame, it, like, charges up and then shoots a bullet that's smaller than a missile but super powerful.

Me: What videogames did you see this in?

Student: Call of Duty, Halo. There's lots of games about war.

Me: You're right about that.

Have-To Disease

2012-01-25T08:10:00.000-06:00

We live in a culture of force. If the force is not immediately visible to us, it's always seething beneath the surface. You may live in a nice home or apartment, but miss three payments and someone's going to come knocking to force you out. You may have a job, but if you decide you want to take extra time off for your own good, soon enough you'll be experiencing some threat of force: do your work or lose your job. You may have heat, water, and electricity, but stop paying those things because you feel it's not right to have to pay to live, and you'll be cut off and your information will be sent to bill collectors who will try to get that money by force.

When I think about what the overarching pattern of our society is, I can't help but think we suffer from the having-to disease. It's everywhere and we're all infected.

Why do we work? We have to. Why? Because if we don't we won't have money. Why do we need money? We have to. Why? Because without money we can't buy our way into society. Why do we have cars? We have to. Why? Because we live in a society that's not designed for walking. Why do we need to spend huge amounts of money on gasoline? We have to. Why? Because our entire world depends on the perpetual use of dead dinosaurs and millions-years dead plants.Why do we pay taxes? We have to. Why? Because if we don't we'll go to jail. Why do I have to teach this? I have to. Why? Because the government tells me to, and if I don't and the kids fail a test, I could lose my job. But, why do we work? Now we're back at the beginning again.

Over a long enough period of time, realizing how much of life we're forced into without our consent can become overbearing. We have one solution: to continue living in unbearable conditions, we must lie to ourselves. To keep up the way we do, we have to daily, hourly, constantly tell ourselves lies. We tell ourselves that all the have-tos are want-tos. I addressed this in a previous post. If they're really want-tos, why do we keep doing them? Because the force, the threat, the violence is invisible and seething just beneath the surface.

The brilliance of our culture is that it completely segregates us from the realities of our existence. I've been taken aback the past couple of days by how perfect everything appears. Look around you. Everything is so shiny, so clean-looking, so nice and warm. Docile. We don't see the realities of things because the lies must keep coming for the system to carry on. We don't see the seven year-old girl getting whipped with a cane for sewing the Gap logo on too slowly. We don't see the calluses on the hands of migrants in the strawberry fields of California. We don't see the Middle Eastern wailings over the bodies of the children killed by predator drones, all so we can get around town.

And what about us? Our pay is segregated from the reality of our existence. Since most of us don't get paid daily, there is the illusion that our work is somehow disconnected from our money. When you break down what we spend our money on, and realize that we literally had to work for what we have, it all gets very confusing. Wait, so a portion of my work goes to paying for gasoline in my car so I can continue to work? And I have to pay for insurance, license plates, oil changes, and maintenance with my work - with hours of my life? And a portion of my work goes to the government in the form of taxes? When I break it down, I am literally working for the government for three days a months for free. Working for free...isn't that...slavery?

I realized two days ago that I am in debt. I used to tell others that I graduated from college without debt. I felt so proud that I had made it through the insane system unscathed. Then when I started teaching I was miserable. Hate(d) it. After a while, I began asking myself, why should I keep doing something that makes me miserable? The answer became clear. I have to. Why? Because if I don't, I will owe back $54,000. Invisible, beneath the surface, seething. The threat of force and violence. I'm in debt, only the thing is, I'm paying back that debt not with money but with years of my life - four, to be exact. Paying for something with years of your life...isn't that...slavery?

All these have-tos. They are all around us, whether we want to admit it or not. The sooner we admit to them being have-tos, the sooner we can stop lying to ourselves and begin asking ourselves what our real want-tos are. What do we want to do? What do you want to do? What do I want to do?

steel, stucco, aluminum, plastic, particle board, glass

2012-01-19T08:25:00.001-06:00

I drive through this scene every day on my way to school:

It's the West Bottoms area of Kansas City. It's this agglomeration of railroads, old buildings (used for haunted houses in the fall), and stretches of highway. Every morning I drive through this area, and lately I've been thinking about all the other places in the world that aren't here.

I've written about this before: how strange and sad it is that while we are busy bustling around areas like the one pictured above, there are millions of acres of beauty sitting silent because we're all crammed into the cities.

This summer, my wife and I are going to Greece. Here is one of the places we are thinking of visiting:

I read a book last summer called The River Why. A line from the book has stuck with me and gnawed at me in the way life-changing literature does. I don't have the book in front of me so I can't quote it directly, but I've turned it over and over in my mind for so long that I think I can get it pretty close.

All those people living crammed in cities like the cities are God's gift to earth, when they could be living on acres and acres of land in the wilderness.

Think about it. We live in an artificial landscape of our own design, and, frankly, a lot of it is poisonous. We live in a mass of steel, stucco, aluminum, plastic, particle board, glass, and metal. We live in a designed reality that requires we give our lives to it to keep it from collapsing. The Sears Tower would collapse in five years without human upkeep. We convince ourselves we're free, when we're really working to keep up a lifestyle that can only be supported by work. It reminds me of the character Desmond in Lost, who must push a button every 108 minutes or, he's told, a terrible thing will happen. He can never venture out too far because he's got to push that button every 108 minutes. One day he doesn't make it in time, and, yeah something bad happens, but it wasn't the end of the world. He's still alive, and the system he was a slave to is destroyed.

It was Oscar Wilde who said, "I don't want to earn a living; I want to live." Why don't we do that?

The stark contrast between the two pictures is jarring. We tell ourselves, no, I can't have that, that's only for rich people, I've got too much going on here to leave, I will when I retire, I would go but I've got to save up for a new car, I'll go next month, next summer, next year, next time. We use that excuse next time like we've got an infinite amount of them. If we use next time enough, the only one we'll have left is dying. And like Louis C.K. said, you're going to be dead for way longer than you're going to be alive.

January Tomatoes

2012-01-07T01:29:00.010-06:00

In September, discombobulated with the madness of teaching and burdened by the constraints of a long-term contract, I told my wife, "I'm in prison." I felt the imprisonment in each and every moment. I had begun to acutely sense that, were this feeling to continue long term, my youth would slip through my fingers quickly. I felt it slipping through my fingers each day; over and over again I poured the water into the coffee maker each morning after dragging myself out of bed; over and over again I walked with slumped shoulders to my car and drove; over and over again I cherished the hotness of the fresh coffee because hot coffee meant I was further from the start of the school day; over and over again I floated through the madness of each day - the insane demands of administration, the oppression of poverty, the inanity of the system - in a whirlwind of emotion; over and over I questioned myself and whether or not I would wake up one day and be sixty and wonder where my life went.

A lot has changed, and not much has changed. This is a blog about both.

The not much has changed part will be a little easier to explain. There was a time in my life where I was wont to shrug off any questions, as I was informed to do by the many environmental influences surrounding me (more on that in a moment). These days I'm much less hesitant to question things, and I think I'm at the point where I run to the questions first and enjoy finding new things to question. They've proven far more liberating to me than anything else I've encountered; they relieve the pressure of our pain by giving it a voice and allowing us to honestly take a look at our lives. Often, we shy away from the most uncomfortable questions because we're afraid of the responsibility and truth the answers may hold. Over the years, I've found myself time and time again in environments which actively discourage the kind of critical thinking that gives birth to freedom. I know many of the readers of this blog are religious, so I want to preface what I'm about to say with a caveat: If you are easily offended, the rest of this blog may not be something you will want to read. I'm going to be very honest about some things I've been feeling for a long time, and I'm probably going to say a few things that some will find offensive. I'm being honest when I say I warned you.

I've always been a doubter. My mom tells this great anecdote about when she told me the truth about Santa Claus. I was five, and when she told me she saw my face turn dark, and suddenly the questions came pouring out in rapid succession. Is the Easter Bunny real, I asked. No, my mom said. Is the Tooth Fairy real? No, she said. I paused, my five year-old gears cranking furiously. Is Jesus real? My mom caught her breath. Yes, she said. I looked at her and said, Why should I believe you?

I never liked raising my hands in church. Something about it just didn't sit right with me. It felt like such an...awkward thing to do. It didn't make sense to me, yet I forced myself to do it, from a very young age. I also didn't like singing in church - the eyes closed, uncomfortably rocking on my heels, cheeks burning from embarrassment - but I (you guessed it) forced myself to do it from a very young age. I wanted to fit in, and I somehow felt like I was taking a stand for something (God?) when I sang. Which, when you think about taking a stand, you don't really envision doing so in places (like church) where everyone is gathered for the same reason. But I suppressed my doubts.

My next experience with church doubt was when I was in elementary school and was told by youth pastors that I would go to hell if I didn't speak in tongues. After hearing that, lo and behold, I developed the gift of tongues. I'm pretty sure all I was really doing was saying Kamehameha from Dragon Ball Z. But I wanted to belong (and, uh, not burn in hell forever), so I suppressed my doubts and tried to make sense of it. There's the time I was in high school, and I preached a sermon about the importance of irreverence, and was very promptly shut down by my peers. There's also the time that I made the Bible study teachers uncomfortable when I asked about the timeline for Adam, Eve, and the dinosaurs. But I wanted to belong, so I suppressed the doubts further. When everyone was telling me that I was wrong, I internalized that there must be something deeply wrong with me, and I condemned the doubts I had as some sort of disbelief in the obvious.

Fast forward to being in my early twenties, working for a church. The childhood doubts were deep beneath the surface, beneath all the (still!) rocking back and forth on my heels while humming to an esoteric song about majesty. I suppressed the doubts even further, because I was, after all, a preacher, and preachers are the ones who suppress their doubts most of all. I was quiet even when I was advised by bosses to make a sermon about my father's suicide more lighthearted because it was "a little heavy." Sure, fair enough, maybe there's some sense to be made in all of it. Even when my wife was shut down for questioning the Bible in a group meeting, we both suppressed our doubts and tried to make sense of it (she questioned the story of Noah - how could that have been the first rainbow if rainbows are light reflecting off water droplets? Was there no water on the earth before then?).

I eventually left the church, mostly by petering out. No one really contacted us, except for one couple. I breathed a sigh of relief. Time to think, finally. I began teaching soon after. That's when the suppression, all the doubts, began to bubble like magma beneath the surface of my certainty that there was some sense to be made of this society, this culture, this civilization. When I finally began to ask honest questions, I found an emerging pattern.

Before I began teaching, I took a month-long road trip with my wife across the west coast. It was ultimate freedom, for the first time in my life. I lived. Then I came back and began working in a school, and experienced the opposite. Control, manipulation, deceit. I began to ask dangerous questions, such as, Why do we need to work to support a lifestyle that can only be supported by work? Why do we need to essentially sell the hours of our lives in exchange for crummy pay? Why are we locked into a wage society that depends on constant income? Why do we need to have to pay just to live? I began to realize that, in a lot of ways, we are civilized prostitutes, giving our various services to people who are willing to pay us in exchange for, oh, not much, just the precious hours of our lives. Suddenly, I stopped buying into the predetermined boundaries of the debate and started questioning the basis of the debate itself. I began going right to the heart of it, questioning the basis of the power games we all engage in.

I began thinking about church, and the things that bothered me so much growing up. I began to think about how, the most powerful thing the powerful can do is to reinforce their own power. This seems obvious, but it manifests itself in different ways. Oftentimes, this is done by convincing the oppressed that, without the powerful, the oppressed would suffer greatly. As I think about most Christian theology, it can be boiled down to: Let me save you from what I will do to you if you don't worship me. That's a mighty powerful way to reinforce a power structure. Also, there are many verses in the Bible about being a happy slave. Accept your slavery as an inevitable condition of life on this terrible earth, and simply smile through it because you've got God on your side. When the master leaves and entrusts you with property, you better work to increase the master's riches. Think about how these verses reinforce an incredibly destructive power structure, and how they ultimately benefit the slave-master. Don't question the framework of your reality; accept it and move on. All the theology about predestination that keeps us complacent with the way things are, keeps us docile. The worship songs, too. All the verses about majesty, power, longing for another life because this one's so hard but that's just the way it is. I can remember a youth pastor telling me that spending 1,000 years scrubbing God's toilet would be better than another moment on this earth. I didn't like that image. Another youth pastor told me none of us would remember each other in Heaven because we'd be so focused on God. I didn't like that image either (why would I want to go to amnesiac heaven?). But, I was told again and again, God's in control, so don't worry about it. These days I'm wondering if heaven and hell aren't anything more than carrots and sticks aimed at placating our most deep-seated fears, doubts, and hopes. Just keep waiting on Jesus and keep your eyes to the ground.

In reading that last paragraph, I noticed a word came up more than once: slave. When I'm in my braver moments, I'm able to acknowledge that we are all essentially slaves. You might say, no, of course I'm not a slave! I have a nice car, a place to sleep, grocery stores and coffee shops and a job. I'm pretty sure you have payments on that car, insurance payments, gas to buy at the gas station (which, might as well get a slushy while you're there, right?), rent to pay, utilities as well. We convince ourselves these are our responsibilities and duties as free adults. As far as the grocery stores go, they certainly have a monopoly on that. None of us grows our own food because we a.) don't have access to land, b.) don't know how, and c.) depend on the grocery stores to provide for us. And the food we do eat is outsourced from around the world. And the coffee - would we really have a coffee culture if we didn't have a work-centric culture? We need legal stimulants in our lives in order to function efficiently. We tell ourselves, I can back out at any time, I can leave it all and be free, truly free, to spend time doing things I love and not worrying about time and money. But we never do, do we? Interesting. And it's not just us. We each have anywhere from 80 to 300 ghost slaves working for us at any time. Our clothes, our computers, our food, and our oil all come from somewhere, and people all around the world are doing the work to create it for us.

It's because, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we've been effectively stripped of our options. We live in a destructive civilization, a force which aims to control and oppress. Religion is only a small part of this, as is coffee. As is school. I was reading portions of a CIA torture manual recently, and I was disturbed to find many striking parallels between the manual and teaching. Things like: Let them hate us so long as they fear us; overwhelm the subject with incessant babble for a long enough period of time and they will eventually cave in to your demands (politics, too?); it is important to maintain the power of the threat - create an environment where they will be inflicting the damage on themselves only because they are more afraid of what you will do to them.

That last one was referencing the tactic of forcing prisoners to stand for extended, painful periods of time. The only reason they keep inflicting the pain on themselves is because they fear what would happen to them by the hands of the torturer if they stopped doing what they were told. Substitute standing for sitting in that last sentence and you've got teaching. These days I feel like schools are places of preparation for lives as a wage slave. The practice of teaching is called pedagogy. The word is rooted in the Roman pedagogues, the slaves of the empire who were required to teach others the ways of the empire. When they're stripped of all the propaganda, schools are places where children are indoctrinated with the values of the American empire. Curriculum is the required material to cover which will achieve this goal. Spend thirteen years (if you don't get retained) in this system and you're lucky if your creativity survives, because it's a system hell-bent on oppressing all individuality, creativity, beauty, and genius. And we're all bored to death.

A practice of institutions which keeps power structures in place is to blame the abused. Abusers often blame the abused for their actions. I believe we live in an abusive society (pizza's a vegetable now and corporations are people, didn't you hear?) that harms our world and our humanity. We are encouraged by the powerful to focus only on ourselves - where are we impure, where is the plank in our eye, where is the hypocrisy, where is the violence in our hearts, what can we give and do to make a difference, etc. By keeping it abstract and self-centered, the powerful and the power structure continue to move full-steam ahead. The truth is that we are, like children in violent situations beyond their control, stripped of our options, so to focus solely on ourselves is ultimately to learn to hate ourselves and loathe our lives. It's a convenient plot for the powerful, because it keeps us in a perpetual state of self-doubt and denial.

I think I've given up on trying to make sense of our society. There's no sense to be made of it. There's no sense to be made of all the misery I see all around me - the oppressive poverty; the cultural and land-based colonialism; the dependence on destruction in order to keep living (read: oil); the 3,000+ ads we see each day telling us we're ugly and fat; the working our lives away. A while back a writer described the dissatisfaction of Occupy Wall Street as being total. It's not one thing, it's everything, and the protesters are giving a middle finger to our entire society, shouting fuck this shit. Why can't that be okay to say?

I don't know. There's a proverb - Don't bother talking sense to fools, they'll only end up poking fun at your words. This entire society is foolishness - church, school, wage slavery, government - and trying to make sense of it is in a way settling to the terms of a debate I fundamentally oppose. Trying to make sense of it - and by sense I also mean focusing your energy on trying to transform something destructive into something healthy - will steal your soul and poke fun at you in the meantime. There is simply no sense to be made of it. We live in a civilization which is based on slavery (we even got millions-years-dead dinosaurs and millions-years-dead plants to work for us by using fossil fuel), and turning life into death.

The best example I have for this right now is a January tomato. It's not right to get tomatoes right now, in January, yet we've built this entirely unsustainable lifestyle around being able to have whatever we want, whenever we want it, at any cost. Even if it means dying. January tomatoes are purely imitation; they aren't even really tomatoes in the true sense of the word. They may look like tomatoes, but they are artificially ripened in a greenhouse. Their growth is sped up to make it to the shelves sooner. They are covered in pesticide. We see a January tomato in a grocery store and we marvel at how technologically advanced we are, when really we are consuming gross misrepresentations of what life was meant to be. January tomatoes are a parody of nature that's been around so long we've forgotten what the natural order of things looks like. A January tomato is a warped version of reality rooted in the our civilization's desires to control all aspects of existence.

When I was younger, I would want to throw up any time after eating fruits and vegetables. I got this sick feeling in my throat, and I would start gagging. I thought the problem was with me, so I stayed away from fruits and vegetables; I assumed I had some weird disorder. Later in life, I had my first tastes of all-natural fruits and vegetables, and I didn't feel like throwing up at all. In fact, I couldn't (and still can't) get enough. I realized at some point that the reason I felt sick after eating is because that is a natural response to being poisoned. I was being poisoned with bad food, pesticide-ridden and pumped full of preservatives. The fruits and vegetables of my childhood - still on the shelves of our grocery stores - were parading as life-giving and healthy when really they were destructive. My body knew this, and I didn't listen. My heart knew this, and I didn't listen. I've made the mistake of not listening to my heart too many times. I think I owe it to myself to start listening.

Adventure Is Out There!

2011-12-18T15:46:00.002-06:00

When I was a teenager, I asked my mom if there was a way to touch every part of the earth in your lifetime. She thought about it for a moment, and then told me she didn't think it was possible. The thought made me sad.

Years later, the thought still makes me sad. Most of us will die within 50 miles of where we were born. There is so much out there to see...so, so much. There are endless mountains, snowcapped and silent and cold. There are pristine and unnamed rivers, whose waters have never known the touch of a human hand. I'm at once amazed and disturbed by the thought that there are so many places that humans won't ever touch. There are so many places that I will never touch.

And it's not just the earth. Oh my God, I've been researching the universe lately, and I can't fathom how much there is that we will never see. Sometimes I forget that we are actually in this, this amalgam of dust and light that spans forever. We're the remnants of stardust that's billions of years old, and we're not so much a continuous physical presence as we are an undulating wave of energy. Even our existence is something that flows in and out of the universe. We're constantly on the move because we aren't even we essentially. We're made up of everything, and there's something strange about the fact that the everything we're made up of is often things we will never get to see.

Perhaps I'm suffering from pre-winter wanderlust, knowing I will be spending the majority of the next few months inside. Maybe. But as I reflect back on the question I asked my mom years ago, something tells me that I'm an adventurer at heart, never content to sit back on my haunches and let life happen.

It breaks my heart that there's so much out there that so many of us will never get to experience. Just this past summer, MacKenzie and I saw a particular view of a waterfall on a secluded and obscure trail in the San Juan Forest, and odds are that nobody we know will ever see that waterfall. It makes it special and lonely at the same time. We all want to share beauty with one another. MacKenzie laughs at me whenever we fly because I always get the window seat and I always take tons of pictures of the clouds. I'm just blown away by the fact that this view of clouds has only recently become available to humans because of the awesome development of flight. How much more is out there to be discovered, yet we trap ourselves in payment plans and obligation?

I used to feel so possessive of everything I owned. I needed it to feel like mine and only mine. But I think that was born out of the need to forge my own identity, and lately I feel like I want to see as much beauty as I can before my short time on this earth is up, and I want to show it to as many people as I can. Happiness is only real when shared, and I'm thankful I have MacKenzie to share it with.

Because think about it: all the mountains and rivers and pastures and trails and pathways and deserts and forests and jungles and oceans and seas and reefs and islands and caves and peninsulas and beaches and continents and hills and valleys and cliffs and crashing waves and plateaus and stars and moons and planets and galaxies and meteors and black holes and supernovas and dust of the earth that was forged in the furnace of genesis billions of years ago. We're a part of all of this, and this place is so mysterious and wonderful and, sweet Jesus, vast as all get-out.

I want to see it all. I want to touch as much of it as I can with my own hands. I want to take in as much of this world with all of my senses as I can. There is so much to explore, so much to be found, so much to feel and do and see and taste and hear and smell. This world, this life, this short breath of existence that we have, is a feast for the soul, and I don't want to starve myself of the experiences life has to offer. Think about this: you're going to live your years on this earth, and then you're going to die and never exist again, for the rest of earth's history. The universe is billions of years old, and we're lucky enough to live in the most advanced society ever, and we get time here to explore! If we're fortunate, we may live to be 80 - 8 decades. I'm in my 2nd decade, and I still have so much exploring left to do. I'm getting antsy. Adventure is out there and waiting for us to seize it with vigor - are ya with me?!

2011-12-05T19:02:00.000-06:00

There reaches a point in any struggle when the pain becomes almost comical. Perhaps it's the apex of trial. I can remember what it felt like after my dad died. I was laying in bed, two or so months after the funeral, crying my eyes out into a pillow. Suddenly I could see myself from above myself, and it seemed so silly to be so sad. I began chuckling, then laughing, the howling hysterically. I can't explain it. There's something about reaching the highest point of grief that your soul can't take it anymore, and it passes through into a carefree realm. I still miss(ed) my dad, but it's different now.

I feel like I'm reaching that point with teaching. I told MacKenzie yesterday that I feel like I'm approaching the "fuck it" point - the breaking point of my ability to care in the capacities that I have been. Today, I tried to send a student out of my room who was shouting at me because I asked her to sit down. She wasn't responding to my request for her to leave, so I walked to the door to ask for another teacher to help me. She ran in front of me and kicked me three times in the shin, and then stomped on my foot seven times. As she did this, I kept a calm face and demeanor. She wanted to hurt me, and I wasn't going to let her or the other students see that she had done so. But once I got a break later in the day, I checked my shin and there are bruises. It really hurt. The student got three days out-of-school suspension and will be back on Friday.

This student should be seeing a therapist, but budget cuts have caused the local counseling center to cut her therapist's position. She will not be getting a new one. Budget cuts have also caused the tutoring for O.S.S. students to be cut too, so she'll just be hanging out at home for three days. Government. They can send a cruiser to mars but can't get a 9 year-old a therapist.

I am rapidly approaching the point where I will throw up my hands, say, "I tried", and walk away. At this point, just about anything sounds better than being a first-year teacher who is the only fourth-grade teacher in the building, who deals regularly with having things thrown around the room/being assaulted. All those statistics about throngs of new urban teachers quitting within 5 years - I get it now. On the flip side is a strange thought: if I can put up with this, what won't I be able to put up with once this era is over? It's a strange new confidence, like going through the wringer is making me grittier in a good way. I feel like my youthful innocence is being replaced by an adult understanding of the world that will benefit me greatly since I am so young. 23 is young to put up with as much as I do, and in the end I'll be stronger for it, because anything after this will be cake.

But I want that cake, and I want to eat it too. I'm tired of shoveling shit. I've reached the point where, to continue caring at the level I do and in the way that I do, will destroy me. I've reached my capacity for caring. I feel like soon I'll be like Ron Livingston in Office Space. He just stops caring, pushes down his cubicle walls, and everything gets better. He insulates himself from the inanity of his existence by putting up an indefensible wall of "fuck this shit". It's impermeable, and I'm pretty close to building that same wall myself.

Rant

2011-12-04T20:51:00.001-06:00

I've been reflecting on the state of us lately. It's become apparent to me that this world is burning. Working within the education system has, more than ever before, opened my eyes to the systemic issues that are crippling our society. Since we live in a globalized society, our culture is indelibly entrenched with the rest of the world. We move like schools of fish; where they go, we go, and vice-versa.

Coming face-to-face with the inequalities of our country every day is taking its toll on me. Most of my students live in government subsidized housing, and many of them are up against more than children their age should ever have to face. Because of this, they are angry. And, since I am the person they spend most of their day with, they unleash their anger on me each day. It's relentless, just wave after wave of receiving the pain of their lives and what I perceive to be the weight of an entire system buckling.

I have been appalled lately by the actions of law enforcement toward those who are peacefully protesting the financial sector's misdeeds. Elderly women pepper sprayed, a pregnant woman miscarrying her baby because of pepper spray, books burned, people trampled, rows upon rows of police officers marching onward, increasing brutality each day. Since 2008, not a single arrest of a banker involved in the economic meltdown, yet Attorney General Eric Holder is telling us we should narc on our neighbors who are illegally downloading music. Priorities, priorities.

The federal government...where to begin. The censorship of the internet with the SOPA act. Declaring pizza a vegetable so schools can keep serving kids shit. The government ok'ing its right to detain indefinitely/assassinate any U.S. citizen. Collecting bargaining rights being stripped right and left. The Patriot Act being extended indefinitely. Student loan debt is now at $1 trillion. Secret wars being conducted. $16 trillion in secret bailouts unaccounted for. CIA drones killing innocent Middle Eastern civilians every day, including teenagers. Surveillance is at an all-time high. There is no end to the depravity.

What disturbs me about all of this is that I am an arm of the federal government. I am a teacher working for a district which is run by the state, which is heavily controlled by funding from the U.S. government. I am at once a recipient of the pain of societal injustice and a willing participant in its perpetuation.

The history of our country is mired with injustice, actually, rooted in injustice. I feel, though, that the injustice is continually coming to light these days, at an unrelenting pace. You and I and a bunch of other people are getting sick of it, too. I keep asking myself, how much more will it take? How much more will we take?

We all work harder these days for less money. The American Dream, false though it always may have been, has finally been shown to be fraudulent. It was a carrot dangled in front of every single person in order to make them feel more complacent; "If today sucks, at least the American Dream tells me I could make it big tomorrow." Welp, turns out, we live in a plutonomy/oligarchy. Opportunity is vaporous, and where there is little opportunity, there is much unrest and much poverty. Bingo.

What I am tired of feeling is disrespected by economic and governmental forces. During times of economic strife, personal rights always take a backseat to property rights as the national mindset turns more survivalist. For instance, my school district is proposing a change that would cause teachers to have to work a full month in order to receive 1, count it, 1 sick day. If we don't work the full month and get sick more than once, we are docked for our pay. We would no longer be salaried employees. More like workers at Kohl's.

I'm tired of all the accoutrements of American life. All the material excess coupled with crushing debt because people want it all, all the propaganda about brash consumerism, all the globalistic panic that has devolved into nothing more than barbaric competition masquerading as civilized "competitive marketplaces", all the government secrets and oppression, all the injustice, all the mass media shibboleth that creates tension to report on the tensions it created. It's all an endless feedback loop of B.S.

Matt Taibbi wrote a great article about the Occupy Wall Street movement a while back for Rolling Stone. In it, he wrote about how OWS is about more than being fed up with the financial injustices being perpetrated every day by corporate suits. It's about being fed up with everything. All of it, the whole American kit-n-kaboodle, the whole ball of wax. They're sick of it, I'm sick of it, and I wonder, how much more will we take?

Working under constant pressure to keep up with day-to-day living, living in concrete jungles when there's so much out there to be explored, living in a country with a completely effed-up health care system, always being one accident away from serious financial woe, all the food we eat coming from the same manufacturers and sold to us in brightly lit warehouses, ugh. It's all so ridiculous when you take a step back and look at it. Always being told what to do, how to do it, who to be, what line not to cross, being threatened with consequence and fear, being boxed into a country that is slowly holding us hostage, working in insane systems that have zero respect for us outside of the economic benefits we can provide. All of us working like madmen to try to make a few more bucks.

/rant

Eat My Words

2011-11-26T12:50:00.000-06:00

This is a season of food. During this time of the year, we gather around tables and share the delight of carefully crafted dishes. We load up our plates with the concoctions of different people, each with its own flair, each with its own history, significance, and ingredients.

It's got me thinking about how writing and food have much in common. Yesterday I was peeling potatoes for about half an hour, and during that time I had a vague feeling that I was learning something about writing. A potato isn't that spectacular of a food on its own, but yet potatoes create some of the most spectacular, comforting, and historic foods in our national cook book. But as I peeled the dirty lumps that would be transformed into a tasty dish, I felt like I was acting out a physical rendering of the writing process. Complex, delicious, well-made food and writing take time and work. We are hungry for meaning like we are hungry for food, and what we choose to feed ourselves in a large way defines the nutrition of our soul. When I say what we choose, I'm not talking about content, as if a certain type of writing (religious, fiction, etc.) provides more sustenance than another. I'm talking about the overall purpose for the writing itself. When we take a step back and look at what we're consuming as readers, will we find that we're constantly visiting fast-food restaurants or that we are taking the time to indulge in a well-prepared meal?

When you start to think about all the different varieties of food and writing, the parallels become clearer.

Take a tweet, for instance. Could tweets - those 140 character bursts - be the equivalent of candy? They are short, dissolve quickly, and don't fulfill the deepest nutritional needs we have for depth.

Magazines, blogs (this included), and news - more lengthy pieces of writing, but entirely dependent upon current events - are like fast food. They're everywhere, easy to consume, and ready-made; if you wait to long to eat it, though, it gets cold and stale quickly, and then you're wondering why this seemed to matter so much a short while ago.

In between the fast food and the carefully prepare is a large gray area. There's a lot of writing that falls between a magazine article and The Brothers Karamazov, and that area is much harder to define. This type of writing may be akin to the day-to-day meals we eat that still fill us up, but don't nourish as much we know we need to be nourished. After a long day, which would you rather prepare for a meal - a delicious stew that took an hour to prepare and gets the kitchen really messy, or a can of soup that's ready to eat in 90 seconds? These are the choices we make every day, and they are most often out of necessity. It's more difficult to take the time to read an epic novel than it is to read the latest Janet Evanovich novel. The payoff is immediate, but the amount of payment is different. A deep, meaningful book will pay dividends far beyond what's on the ever-rotating bestseller list, but it takes longer to get there. And just like the dinner scenario, it may mess up the kitchen of your soul a bit.

Last, there are the beautiful meals, the epic novels, the books that tell the story of entire groups of people through the lens of a few. There are the books that reach into your heart and shine light on parts of you that you didn't even know existed. They are the the words that ultimately nourish us because they bring us into something bigger than ourselves while affirming our identity and need for significance. They are the large meals with assortments of flavorful dishes. They are the tables filled with morsels of truth. Nourishing literature begins with meager words, like potatoes peeled with patience. Words in and of themselves are somewhat unremarkable, but when they are mixed together like ingredients to create new, exciting, and savory dishes, then words become something truly remarkable.

Each different style of literature - tweets, magazines, news, blogs, fluff books, and deep books - all have a proper place. Lately I've sensed a self-imposed malnourishment of what I've been reading. I've been spending too much time caught up in the whirlwind of "gotta read it now!" pieces, when I should be reading more timeless, labor-of-love works. Because those are the words that nourish, the words that are passed down like recipes in a family. I can only hope that someday I can create a meal of words good enough to nourish someone deeply.

The Many Parts Of Myself

2011-11-06T12:45:00.000-06:00

In A Gentler God, Doug Frank writes about how there is not one person inside us. There are many versions of me living in tension, each with different opinions and desires, and lately I've been acutely aware of this. Here are some of the different parts of me, and what each desires:

- the adventurer in me wants to get in the car with my wife and drive away or buy a one-way ticket
- the pragmatist in me wants a stable career and a reliable income
- the rebel in me sings Jakob Dylan: "This place is always such a mess, sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn."
- the homebody in me is content to always stay at home and live in a cocoon
- the American in me loves the convenience of consumerism
- the globalist in me hates American life and concrete jungles and wants to get out of here
- the socialite in me wants to live in a cool loft in an awesome downtown area
- the practical part of me wants to buy a nice home to grow into
- the young part of me never wants to have a family and keep gaining friends
- the aging part of me wants to settle down and slow down
- the faithful part of me knows deep down that we aren't alone
- the cynical part of me knows without a doubt that nothing ever changes
- the revolutionary in me wants to change everything
- the writer in me wants acclaim and time to sift through ideas
- the worrier in me doesn't want a mortgage or any kind of debt
- the restless youth in me wants to be famous and receive acclaim
- the wiser part of me knows that fulfillment isn't found in crowds but in love and relationship
- the speaker in me wants a stage and a microphone and, of course, a crowd
- the intellectual in me is driven crazy by the pablum of American society, politics, and economy
- the giddy consumer in me can never get enough stuff
- the frugal in me understands the value of a realistic budget
- the dreamer in me wants private jets, island resorts, and mansions
- the realist in me wants groceries, internet access, and coffee filters
- the frivolous in me tells me, "the sooner you get richer, the sooner you can do whatever you want!"
- the extrovert in me wants to talk to everyone he sees
- the introvert in me wants to stay in the corner
- the selfish in me wants to do what I want, when I want, and to hell with the rest
- the compassionate in me wants to lay down my life for others

There are many parts to us. There is no singularity. What about you? What parts of you are living in tension?

Ha-Ha

2011-11-03T20:47:00.001-05:00

In the early 1900s, a designer by the name of Carl Hagenbeck created a new design for zoos. Up to that point, zoos were a somewhat depressing affair. The animals paced in barred cages, and the insides of the cages were made up of cold concrete with minimalistic housing. Visitors to the zoo were reminded that the animals they had paid to see were imprisoned against their will in an isolated, unnatural habitat. The owners of the zoos realized that they needed to create a way to make visitors forget that they were paying to see rare, imprisoned animals on display. Carl Hagenbeck created what is now the most common design for zoos, and which creates the necessary illusion of freedom.

It's called a ha-ha. What Hagenbeck realized was that it wasn't important to give the animals actual freedom, only that the visitors perceive that the animals had freedom. The ha-ha satisfied this need. The actual ha-ha is a deep ravine around the animal's cage, and it is dug deep enough so that there is no need for cages. It is a prison without bars because the bars are invisible to all but the creatures inside the cage. For the visitors, this innovation was and is thrilling. It allows the visitors to forget the bleak reality of the animals because the animals appear autonomous. The illusion of proximity to the animals makes the encounters with the animals feel real, which is why it is called a ha-ha.

The animals inside aren't tricked by this. The creatures in the cages without bars are constantly aware of their reality. They are not free. The zoo designers have also innovated new ways to make the scenery look realistic and authentic, but the only ones fooled are the visitors. It allows those on the outside to feel a sense of ease and comfort about the grim truth that zoos are at their core inhumane. The animals may have nicer cages, but a cage is a cage is a cage. What the ha-has don't reveal is that even what looks like plants growing out of the ground are actually pieces of rebar bent to look like foliage. The ha-has also conceal thin electric fences that further ensure the animals stay caged.

A ha-ha is ultimately confusing, because it is an illusion. Zoos have not really changed, they have only gotten better at concealing their true nature, which is to exploit various species for profit. The ha-ha creates the illusion of equity. In a way, the barred, cold cages of the early 1900s were more honorable, because they were at least up-front about what they were. The ha-ha is misleading and deceptive, because it creates the perception that freedom exists, and while it appears like those inside the cages can leave at any time, there is always the deep ravine, the hidden rebar, and the tiny electric fence to remind the creatures inside: we own you, you will stay where you are because you make us money, and you are not allowed to be free.

Halfway Orphaned

2011-10-30T17:44:00.001-05:00

Halfway Orphaned

The day before I found out about my dad's suicide, I received a phone call from his mother, Lena.

"Alex?” "Oh, hey Nonnie, how are things?"

"Well Alex, not so good. It's about your dad."

"Oh...okay. What is it?"

"Well, I got a call from his apartment complex and they told me he has been in there all along. He hasn't left once since they evicted him, and they told me that on Monday they told him that if he isn't out by Friday they were going to remove him by force and take him to jail, and then throw his things out onto the street."

This was Thursday, October 30th, the day before we celebrate ghoulish things and watch horror movies with questionable plots about the undead rising from the grave to terrorize the living. So this means that my father, Joel Wayne Gamble, was last spoken to on Monday, October 27th. He would not open the door to speak to anyone, so the apartment manager spoke to him through the door. This was the last anybody ever heard from him.

This phone call came as a bombshell to me. The last time I heard from my dad he told me that he had been evicted from his apartment and was living in his Jeep. He had stopped going to work around the middle of July, and hadn't paid his rent for a few months. I was under the impression that my dad was somewhere on the streets of San Antonio, or perhaps staying with one of his old high school friends. I had slowly been coming to terms with the idea that I probably wasn't going to ever see my dad again. Not because I thought he was going to commit suicide; I had asked him if he was planning on killing himself and he said no. Me and my dad were on the same phone plan and since he didn't pay the bills, they were shutting off service to our phones. My dad sent me a text in early September that said, "Our phones are being shut off at the end of September. Make Plans. Sorry." After I received this text I just assumed that this was the final break, and that my dad was just going to go his own way and forget me and my family existed. Suicide was a concern, obviously, and I had even told a friend once over breakfast that I was just waiting on the phone call that my dad had killed himself. But I never actually thought I would receive that phone call.

After I got off the phone with Lena, I called my mom.

"Mom, it was all a lie. He never left his apartment even though they evicted him. He just dead bolted the door so no one could get in. They talked to him on Monday and said that if he isn't out by tomorrow at noon they are going to break the door down and take him to jail and throw his stuff to the curb."

"Has anyone talked to him since Monday?" she asked.

"No." My mom started crying. "Mom, why are you crying?"

"No one has heard from him since Monday?" she told me, her voice quivering.

I hadn't even thought about suicide until she started crying. She would know better than anyone my dad's tendencies. He had tried two times before.

My mom told me to call the airline and talk to a manager. Sometimes in the case of extreme emergencies, airlines will grant tickets at a very low price. I didn't have much money or time, but I tried to call the airline. I wasn't getting anywhere. Lena called me back. She told me that she thought I should go down there, to San Antonio, and so did her daughter and my dad's sister, Brenda. I agreed. If anybody had a good chance at talking some sense into my dad, it was me. None of us knew it was already too late.

Night came and went like a pale dream filled with anxiety and concern. I woke up the next morning, waiting to hear from Lena and Brenda at noon. They had decided to drive down to San Antonio from Amarillo, a 14 hour drive. I had a geometry test at 1, so most of my thinking was split between two totally different worlds, academia and death. Strangely enough, the two aligned in more than one way since it was Halloween. Everywhere I looked at school there were wall decorations of ghosts and tombstones and skeletons.

I tried to study for my test, but I had this weird feeling that no matter how much I tried I wasn't ever going to have enough time. This feeling has the effect of making us work harder, and working harder only increases the feelings of hopelessness. It is a vicious cycle. It didn't help that I kept checking my phone every few minutes for a text message or missed call.

Noon rolled around. Nothing. 12:03. 12:08. 12:14. 12:17. Nothing. I wasn't sure what to do, because by this point studying was impossible because my mind was filled with scenarios of what was happening a thousand miles away in San Antonio. I kept rubbing my eyes and holding my face in my hands every few minutes. The waiting was torture.

My friend and coworker, Gerardo, came and sat next to me. A few weeks earlier, while we were in Tulsa on a business trip, I had told him and a few others that my dad had been missing for over a month. I told them this in a sub-par Mexican restaurant while eating chips and salsa. So Gerardo knew what I knew at that time. A short and stubby Mexican lady sat down in a chair next to the couch I was sitting in front of. My homework was sprawled out on a wooden coffee table in front of me. I was sitting on both knees, trying to focus. I chatted with Gerardo for a few minutes about his Halloween plans.

My phone vibrated on the coffee table, slightly moving from the vibrations. I grabbed it immediately. The screen on my phone told me my mom was calling me. I stood up and answered.

"Alex?" her voice was heavy and weak. At that moment I knew.

I was scared to reply. "Yes?" I said feebly.

"Can you go somewhere where you can talk?"

I jogged for the door and walked outside.

"Yes, I can talk, I can talk, go ahead."

"Honey they found him dead!", she cried, creating a hissing noise after the word "dead" because she breathed in a gasp of air, like she couldn't believe the words coming out of her mouth.

"No no no no no no no no no no no no", I said, trying to force back the broken dam.

My mom asked me, "Honey, where are you?"

"I'm at work", I said, looking at Gerardo sitting on the couch. I almost fell to my knees.

"Is MacKenzie with you?"

"No, but I am going to go to her house", I said through whimpers and gasps.

"Are you going to be okay?", she asked. My hands and legs were uncontrollably shaking at this point. I held my left hand up and watched it twitch and jiggle.

"Yes. I am coming to Amarillo. I will be there as soon as I can."

"Okay. Is anybody with you?” she asked.

"I will be with MacKenzie in a few minutes, but I need to go." Both our voices were shaky and peppered with whimpers.

"Okay. I love you Alex. I am so sorry."

I went inside and started to gather my things. I kept swallowing. I was shaking. Gerardo asked me what was wrong. I couldn't believe what I was saying.

"My dad killed himself," I said as I was stuffing my books into my backpack.

"Oh my God," Gerardo said, and the Mexican lady just stared before responding.

"Are you okay?" she said.

"No," I said, standing up and flipping my backpack onto my shoulders.

I headed back into the office to grab my helmet and walked out the door. I started my scooter and drove away.

As I was driving through the parking lot I felt a great absence fill my heart as I looked around. The world was continuing to exist without my dad. He wasn't here. I started screaming and crying while I drove. The wind was hitting my face and tears were flying off my cheeks. I must have looked pretty strange to the other drivers on the road, what with all the frantic crying and whatnot. It was so strange to think that these people were driving and laughing and talking and breathing, and my dad was gone. He will never do any of those things again. As I drove to MacKenzie's house, I felt like the world was suddenly vacant, like a hole had opened up in the universe and was swallowing me up and pulling me into a world no one else would ever understand.

Once I got to MacKenzie's, I parked my scooter. I contemplated just jumping off it and letting it crash to the ground, still running, but collected myself enough to get off my scooter like every other time I had done so. It seemed so strange to do things normally when my dad had just been found dead. I ran up to MacKenzie's door and rang the doorbell. I was crying and wore a terrifying look on my face as I peeked through the side window to the right of the door. She was sitting on the couch when I rang the doorbell, and jumped up when she saw me. She would later tell me she knew immediately what had happened when she saw my face.

She opened the front door, then the screen.

"What's wrong?" she asked me, raising her voice pitch and furrowing her brow as she said wrong.

Each word was a sob. "He killed him self!"

MacKenzie grabbed me and held me as I collapsed onto her shoulder.

"Oh noooo!" She cried, and soon we were crying together, just inside her doorway.

Details trickled in like they do after all disasters. Surely we can all remember the confusion after September 11th, and how each minute it seemed we learned something new.

For me, each phone call was a revelation and a heartbreak. Thankfully someone was always with me through each phone call.

"He was inside his apartment the entire time?"

"He shot himself?"

"He was found in his closet, surrounded by pillows?"

"He had already partially decomposed because of the heat?"

"He shot himself with a shotgun?!"

As each of these details came in, I drew closer to Texas. I was already on the road by the time I had heard about the shotgun. I was sitting in the backseat of Shawna's - MacKenzie's mom - black Acura. She had decided to come with me and MacKenzie to Amarillo, and Shawna and MacKenzie split the driving time. We left around 4:30 P.M., and each passing minute was a whirlwind. Already the condolence calls had started. It was all happening so fast.

On the way to Texas, I watched the sunset in Kansas. It seemed to never end, and the last bits of twilight continued almost until we reached Oklahoma. We stopped at a rest stop and I ordered a #6, the Spicy Chicken Sandwich. I ate little more than half before I lost my appetite. Ciera Dunnel, a classmate, texted me and asked me why I wasn't in Geometry class earlier in the day for the test. I sent her two sentences.

"I am on my way to Texas. My dad committed suicide."

A couple minutes later, she called but I didn't pick up. I didn't feel like answering anybody's questions, so I let it go to voicemail. I was still in shock I think, because I am not sure I even knew that the words I was writing were true. I kept flipping the words over and over in my mind (and I still do, trying to wrap my mind around it).

My dad committed suicide. My dad committed suicide. My dad committed suicide.

It just didn't seem real. It seemed like I was telling someone else's story. Since then I have read about grief and realize that during those first hours and days after finding out, my mind protected itself by not allowing me to fully understand the reality of what had happened. I have read about how, after a death, our bodies will shut down our minds so we cannot grasp what has happened, or else we run the risk of physically shutting down from shock. This might explain why I was able to park my scooter like any other day, and also explains why, when I was packing for Amarillo, I was thinking about what shirt looked best on me. I was in shock, and my mind was also protecting me from over- shock.

We arrived in Amarillo around 2 A.M. I had not seen my family since they moved out of the house on Yorkshire Court and moved into a small three- bedroom apartment. I didn't know what to expect because I had only seen my family twice in the last year: once for Christmas break (also the last time I saw my dad), and another time when I was passing through with a group of friends on our way to an orphanage in Mexico.

As we pulled into the mazelike parking lot of the apartment complex, I was experiencing every emotion at once. Excitement and fear and deep, inexpressible grief. My brother was coaching us through the maze, and when our headlights finally illuminated his figure in the darkness, I knew everything was really happening. He directed us like an air traffic controller into a parking spot. Me, MacKenzie, and Shawna all got out of the car, not really sure how to greet Evan, who had just turned 15 in August.

"Hey man," I said.

"Hey."

We hugged and smiled. I offered the obligatory comments anyone says after not seeing someone for a while. You look so different! You are taller than me! You must be working out too. Wow, I can't believe you're a sophomore.

We walked inside, with our bags. None of us knew how long we would be staying, so we packed one bag each. I walked up the steps to their second story apartment. Evan opened the door and there was my mom, in a robe, smiling with mascara runs beneath her eyes. She looked exhausted. She stood and hugged me, holding me for a few moments.

"I'm so glad you're here," she said.

"Me too. I wish it could have been under different circumstances."

Jenna and Lily came out of their rooms, smiling but looking sad at the same time. Jenna, 11, had grown long legs since the last time I saw her, and was almost as tall as me. I couldn't believe it! Lily, 13 now, had gotten her braces off and grown taller as well. I was suddenly the smaller big brother. We all hugged and I introduced Shawna to everyone. Shawna and MacKenzie were in shock too, I think, and neither of them was sure how to act around us. Grief is an awkward thing.

It was so strange to see all the things I associated with the house on Yorkshire in this new, foreign place. There was the same couch, but in a different place.

Eventually, after all the greetings and hugs, everyone retired to bed except for me and my mom, who talked until 4 A.M. about how neither of us could believe this was happening. I was grossly crass about the manner in which my dad killed himself at times, partially due to the shock of what was happening. I think I was crass because I wanted to verbally work through it because it didn't feel true.

Eventually I went into Evan's room, where a sleeping bag and pillow were laid out for me. I was facing the door, which was also the same wall Evan's closet was on. I couldn't look at the closet, because I kept picturing my dad laying in it, lifeless. He was dead for a few days before anyone found him, so it deeply troubles me that the sun fell and rose on him many times before anyone knew of his fate. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned over and started hyperventilating quietly for about five minutes. My breathing slowly calmed but I couldn't shake the feeling that if I looked over by the closet, my dad was going to be standing there. I glanced a few times to remind myself that the idea wasn't real, but the feeling lingered as I drifted off to sleep, thinking about how different my life was when I woke up that morning.

III

The funeral arrangement plans were already beginning, just a few hours after I found out. Since my parents were divorced and I am the firstborn, I inherited the title of "Next of Kin", which presented to me the tasks of deciding virtually everything from where my dad was to be buried to what was to be done with his property. But I just wasn't ready to accept those responsibilities. Who is when a family member unexpectedly dies? Nevertheless, I accepted the responsibilities, and thus began having conversations I never imagined I would have. I was on the phone nonstop for about three weeks, but no conversations were harder than the funeral arrangements.

The shift from referring to my dad in the present tense to referring to him in the past tense has been a very painful process. Many times in those first few days I refused to refer to him in the past tense, but I found denial did not help. It was just that the conversations felt so inhuman and cruel to speak about my dad as a body, not a person.

"So he can only be embalmed from the neck down?"

"The medical examiners need my signature so they can release the body."

"He will be refrigerated until the day of the funeral, but there will still need to be scent packets in the casket because of the odor."

I cannot fully express how it much it hurts to speak about a person being refrigerated. It felt so cruel to speak about my dad in such a way, and I cried more than ever before that week. There was so much urgency to every conversation, all due to the fact that my dad had committed an irreversible act, and now we had to work quickly before his body was too badly decomposed. It was strange to be talking of honoring him and, as some family members said, giving him a good funeral. I don't understand what exactly a good funeral is, but there was much talk of it. It isn't that I didn't want to give my dad a good funeral, it is that I would have rather had my dad alive, but soon I realized that he was never coming back, so the best I could do was say goodbye with dignity.

The night after we arrived, we were looking at pictures and baby books. I flipped through mine to the pages my dad filled out. He spoke of unconditional love, of always being there for me, and how I had a special place in his heart as the first born. My heart broke because I knew that when he wrote those words he had no idea that things were going to end up like they did. I did not fully break down until later that night when we were looking through more pictures. I started to hyperventilate, and then Jenna pulled out a picture of my dad holding Jenna just after she was born. I gasped and ran into Evan's room and buried myself into the pillows on his bed. I started sobbing, and MacKenzie and Jenna came in the room and sat with me, rubbing my back and crying too. I sobbed and sobbed, gasping for air occasionally. The pillow was soaking wet in the place where I laid my face, but still I sobbed. I could only muster fragments.

"It's just so sad..."

Eventually I found the strength to stand again. I went into the kitchen to get some water.

Later that night, my mom pulled me aside and asked me what to do about telling Lily and Jenna. Neither of them knew he shot himself, and Jenna kept saying all she saw when she closed her eyes was our dad lying on his bed, lifeless. She wasn't sure if she should tell them the details. Whenever Jenna would ask how he died she would say, "They are still doing some tests to find out." I told her I didn't want to bear the burden of watching everything I say. We didn't reach a conclusion on what to do, but the conclusion found us.

We walked into the living room, where Lily and Jenna were watching TV. I asked them if they wanted to pick out a picture of themselves with dad to put in the casket, and I told them they could write a letter too, if they wanted. Lily put her arm over her face and started crying quietly. Jenna asked, "Have they found anything out about how dad died?"

I paused for a moment, praying that I didn't mess this up.

"Well, Jenna, we do know how Dad died."

"He killed himself didn't he?"

"Does that thought scare you? Thinking that maybe dad killed himself?" I asked, not really sure how to respond.

"Yes, but I want to know how he died. If he killed himself just say it."

"Well guys, yes, dad did decide to end his own life. He killed himself."

Jenna and Lily both sat quietly for a moment. I began explaining how, when someone is depressed, their mind works the reverse of how it should, and things that are normal seem not normal, and things that aren't normal seem normal.

"How did he kill himself?" Jenna asked.

"I don't want to know," Lily said, and hopped up off the couch and left the room.

"Jenna, are you sure you want to know? Because we can wait until you are ready like Lily if you want," I said.

"No, I mean, I already know he killed himself, so just tell me how he did it," she said, the frustration building in her voice.

"He did it with a gun, Jenna," I said.

My mom scooped her up and hugged her, and then I did the same. Then I found Lily and hugged her too. We explained to Jenna that Lily will find out when she wants to, and that she needs to respect Lily's wishes to not know for now. We told her that Lily may never want to know, and that she needed to respect that just like we respected Jenna's desire to know. Jenna understood.

Soon after, we ate some more food. People were bringing food by all hours of the day, so there was no shortage of stuff to eat. Grief will steal your appetite and make you hungrier at the same time. I found myself wanting to eat everything, but feeling a desire for nothing in particular. I ate brisket, potato salad, rolls, chocolate cake, ham, green bean and potato casserole, donuts, chips and salsa, chicken quesadillas, and washed it all down with water, Coke, Sprite, and Dr. Pepper. I didn't smoke, like my mom and Shawna. I ate. We all ate. The meals shared in silence were a bonding experience, because we just sat without speaking, because we were all on the same grief-stricken, tear-stained page.

Within those first few days we figured out the details of the funeral. He was to be buried in Tulia, the small town (about 5,000 people) he was born and raised in. Tulia is about an hour away from Amarillo. He was to be buried next to his grandmother Lily, whom he greatly adored and named my sister after. It was a family plot, one that was purchased in the fifties and had never been used. Lily and Jenna picked out pictures and wrote letters to be put in the casket. My dad was also going to buried with his grandmother Lily's quilt which she left to him when she died.

And I was to be a pallbearer at the funeral, along with six other men, some old high school friends and some family. Evan didn't want to be a pallbearer, understandably, and I wasn't sure I was even going to be able to do it. Even with the fear of my knees buckling while carrying the casket, I decided to be a pallbearer, and I was also to speak at his funeral.

My dad's funeral was on Friday, November 7th. The funeral was the darkest hour of my life. There we all were, friends and family, crowded into the lobby of Tulia's funeral home, Kornerstone Funeral Directors. When we arrived the man who had embalmed and dressed my dad, Steve, came up to me and gave me a sealed bag containing my dad's wallet and one of his favorite rings. The ring was silver with turquoise triangles wrapping around it. I looked at them for a moment before putting them back into the bag and giving them to MacKenzie to put in her purse. My family was dressed in black.

We had gone shopping on Wednesday for black clothing. The whole experience was strange and sad. Usually shopping is something that brings girls joy, but certainly not when girls are shopping for clothes to wear to their daddy's funeral. I didn't know how to act throughout the whole process. I kept stealing away every once in a while to hyperventilate. I hyperventilated a lot for almost a month, but especially during that first week when everything was happening faster than I wanted it to. Time felt like an enemy for the first time in my life. Each moment the earth kept spinning we were moving farther away from my dad.

My dad's casket was in a small room in the corner of the funeral home. I walked inside. I recognized the casket because I had picked it out. It was stainless steel with blue trim. I touched it and it was cold, metallic, lifeless. I couldn't help but think about my dad being inside, looking nothing like when I last saw him. I sat on the sofa, the casket directly in front of me. MacKenzie sat next to me and put her hand on my back. Evan came in and sat down. We both stood and walked to the casket, touching it, neither of us talking. I whimpered, leaning over to hug the casket. I was trying to make some sort of final contact with my dad. I just kept whispering oh Dad, oh Dad. Eventually Lily, Jenna, and my mom came into the room. We all sat together, staring at the closed casket. Tears rolled down our cheeks. We looked at each other, then at the casket, then at each other, then at the casket. We sniffled, passed tissues. Not many words were spoken in this place. My dad had no idea what he was doing to us.

The family members who had gone to San Antonio got back late Wednesday night, bringing with them as many of my dad's possessions as possible. Evan and I went over to Lena's house, where everyone had slept once they got back, on Thursday afternoon to pick up my dad's belongings. We spent the afternoon going through them. His company, Valero, had been gracious enough to pack up my dad's office things and mail them. We went through all the piping and physics and conversion books. None of it made sense to me, but somehow it had made sense to my dad. We had all sorts of tiny awards he received from Valero for being a loyal employee, little glass hammers and plaques and pins.

Eventually, 11 A.M. came and it was time to begin the funeral. I stood in the lobby, just outside the casket room, as my dad was wheeled out of the casket room and into the chapel. I just stared at his casket. I could feel everyone's eyes watching his casket and watching me and my sibling's faces. I had to try my hardest to keep my composure because I knew that, once lost, I couldn't gain it back and thus would be in horrible condition to say my prepared words.

My family and MacKenzie waited outside the chapel while everyone else walked in. Once everyone was seated we walked down the center aisle. I led the way tour seats on the front row. The pastor, who had never met my dad, read the obituary and then the pianist played/sang a couple of my dad's favorite songs - songs I had shown him two days before - and one song Lena requested. When the pianist started the song my dad and I had listened to in the mornings as we drove to the oil refinery we worked at together, I began to lose my composure. My shoulders shook as I sobbed. Everything was so vivid and unreal. All my dad's friends were there, all his family, but he wasn't.

I collected myself and then the pianist played another song called "Water Under the Bridge" by Jars of Clay. My dad had told me he liked the song a lot. It is a song about broken love and wanting to heal the relationship. I think it reminded him of my mom. When the pianist started playing, I told my mom, "This is your song, mom."

I do not love you the way I did when we met

There are secrets and arguments that I haven't finished yet

My mom started sobbing, trying to control herself. I put my right arm around her shoulders and hugged her and she sobbed and sobbed.

It's only that grace has outlived our regrets

We're still here

Maybe we can stay

'Til the last drop of water flows under the bridge

We can stay

'Til the last drop of water flows under the bridge

After he finished “Water Under the Bridge” pianist played Lena's request, a song called "Farther Along" about not understanding why certain things happen. Lena began balling immediately once the song began.

Once the songs were over, the pastor introduced me. I walked up to the podium, my shoulders slumped.

MacKenzie would later tell me that I looked so broken and small standing behind the podium. I looked at Evan, Lily, and Jenna and realized that they are halfway to being orphans. I began words I had written just the night before.

"Hello everyone. I would first like to thank all those who filled our lives this past week with overwhelming support and love. This is absolutely the darkest hour of my life, as well as many others here today, and we are forever grateful for the love shown to us during the worst week of our lives.

"I would like to thank my mother, Beatrice Gamble, my brother, Evan Gamble, my sister, Lily Gamble, and my sister, Jenna Gamble, for their incredible resiliency and strength during this time. I would like to thank my girlfriend, MacKenzie Higgins, for her support and love for me and my family during this dark time. I love you all more than words can contain. Also, to Brenda Dunn, Jeannie Evans, and Lena Higginbotham, I am thankful for your strength and bravery. And to everyone here today, thank you.

"My last meal with my father was a joyous one. My siblings, my mother, my father, and I were in a booth at a restaurant called Buffalo Wild Wings. It was the first time in a long time we had all sat and enjoyed a meal together. Snow was spewing down like it always does in Panhandle winters, but even though it was freezing outside we were warm and safe with each other. We laughed, told stories, and took pictures. The next morning, my dad woke me around 6:30, and we said goodbye. We took one last picture together, and then my dad drove off just as the sun was rising. I didn't know this was the last time I would ever see him.

"My dad had been visiting for Christmas. Christmastime was always when the kid in my dad came to life. He was always so excited when the Christmas season rolled around. He usually went Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving, and didn't stop until Christmas Eve. Come Christmas morning, he always opened the packages of our toys for us and was the first to play with them. We were always standing there, tapping our feet, begging can we have our presents now?

"I think part of the reason my dad loved Christmas so much is because he showed his love through buying us things. He didn't grow up in a home where love was openly expressed or declared often, so he spent his fatherhood trying to find ways to express his love to us. For the longest time I was angry at him for this, up until recently when I realized the depths of my father's love. If the things he bought for us are any indicator, my father loved us a lot.

"Let there be no confusion: my dad's heart ran deep with love. He just didn't know how to show it. And my dad did say he loved us, every chance he got, every time we saw or talked with him. He made a point of it. But he never felt like saying it was enough. He always backed up his statements of love with presents and money because he wanted us to be sure he was serious about his undying affection for us. He bought us things to show us how much he loved us, as well as how proud he was of us.

"The hardest part about his way of thinking is what it did to my dad when he was running low on money. Right before he died, dad was at the lowest financial standing of his life, and he was struggling to make ends-meet. I imagine that in his mind, when he ran out of money, he also ran out of love. Of course this wasn't the case, but my dad fought a lifelong battle for mental clarity, and at the end of his life, fog surrounded his thoughts. My dad was always fixing things. He would come home from work and say to me and Evan lemme see your glasses. He would then lick our lenses clean, wipe them on his shirt, and perform minor surgery on them until they were perfectly straight. Even after my parents divorced, whenever dad would visit he would walk in the door, take a look around with his architectural eye, and go to town fixing anything that wasn't in pristine condition. He was always making sure things were running at their best. He wanted us to have the best in life, even if it was just changing a light bulb or making sure our kid's meal at Applebee's was just as we ordered.

"I don't know if my dad did what he did because he thought he was fixing things, or because he thought he had finally reached a problem he couldn't fix. Either way, he left us all with a brokenness that cannot be fixed. I too struggle with these feelings of needing to fix everything, but in these past few days I have had no other choice but to embrace the brokenness, and accept that things won't be healed for a long time.

"My dad was a brilliant, brilliant man. As I was going through his things, I found some of his work books. Just looking at them made my head hurt. His mind was so far above the average intelligence. He was a draftsman, and he was always drawing. Whenever he was on the phone, he would doodle his

thoughts on napkins or pieces of paper. At Valero, the oil refinery he worked for until the day he died, he was the only draftsman who could create piping drawings with a pencil. Everyone else did it on computers. My dad was an old-school artist.

"Whenever these tragedies occur, the initial confusion eventually gives way to blame. For situations such as this one, blame always turns itself inward, and we begin to think of everything we think we could have done differently. Last night I broke down and poured out all the what-ifs and feelings of responsibility I had been keeping trapped inside since last Friday. Of course, regret is a natural part of the process, but we must be clear that this tragedy is no one's fault. The love that family and friends had for my father gave him a long and happy life.

"And as always, we always have the question of eternity in the back of our minds. As I said, my dad fought a lifelong battle for mental clarity. I believe we worship a God so much larger than any illness, physical or mental, and God does not discriminate against mental disabilities. God's love is so much more vast than any of us can comprehend, and my dad is at rest in God's love.

"C.S. Lewis once wrote, 'No one ever told me grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation in like being afraid.' When I found out my father had passed, it was the scariest moment of my life. Many of us still feel scared. I pray that during this time, God would comfort us as we grieve through the pain and suffering.

"I love my dad so, so much. We all love my dad so, so much. Right now, my heart feels like it is being pricked by a thousand needles. In time, our hearts will heal, but for now, we are shattered by our loss. I miss you dad, and I want you to know that none of us are angry at you. We will always remember you.

"The last time I hugged my dad he squeezed me tight and readjusted his face so our cheeks touched. His face was scruffy from not shaving and his skin was cool. He smelled like Irish Spring and Old Spice. He was wearing a khaki jacket, blue jeans, a dark blue sweatshirt, and tennis shoes. I look forward to seeing my dad again. I don't know when that day will be, but when it comes, I will see dad walking toward me in the distance, hand in hand with God, and I will run to both of my fathers. And, outside the chains of time, outside the ailments and limitations of this world, we will embrace once more."

And then I walked away from the podium and back to my seat.

After the pastor said his words, the pallbearers were instructed to go out the side doors where the hearse was waiting. My dad was wheeled out the double doors and the seven of us lined up and took a handle, carrying my dad about five feet to the hearse. Then we all got in our cars and headed for the cemetery, which was about a mile away. My mom and sisters were the first car behind the hearse, then me, MacKenzie, and Evan were in another car, then Lena and her husband. Tulia police stood at attention as they blocked off the streets, holding their hats to their hearts. The policemen, mustached, balding, and wearing bolo ties, wore sadness and respect on their faces. My heart broke upon seeing this. My dad would never see how much he mattered to everyone. He was being honored and he would never know it. We wound through the hilly country roads. Everything was so dead and yellow. Some tumbleweeds were caught in barbed-wire fences while some were roaming the fields freely.

There were seven of us standing in two rows as the director opened the doors of the hearse. He instructed us how to pass the casket up to each other. He pulled it out, and then he slid the casket out by using the rollers inside the hearse. The first two men, my dad's high school friends, passed it up, and then I passed it up to the next two men, an uncle and a brother-in- law. We passed the weight of the casket until every person held a piece of it. It was like we were sharing the weight of the loss.

Then we began walking. The weight was immense. I stared at the ground, focusing on holding my part of the weight. It was so much heavier than I thought it would be. Dust swirled at our feet as we half-stepped our way to the grave. The director instructed us how to set the casket on the rollers, and we shuffled our feet as we lifted him to the setting.

Flowers splashed the top of his blue and silver stainless steel casket. Three ribbons emerged from the flowers to tell the world what he was to us: Son, Brother, Dad.

These Walls Are Funny

2011-10-26T21:32:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's that this Fall has been warmer than usual, maybe it's that I haven't been making the time to write as much as I'd like lately, maybe it's that I've literally stopped reading books, or maybe it's that I'm in a career that I want out of. Whatever it is, I feel what can only be described as clogged. I feel it mostly in my chest, like this tight anxiety mixed with an energy that has nowhere to go.

Most of the time this feeling makes me feel like I'm about to implode or something. It's like I have all this unchanneled creative energy that doesn't go anywhere, so it just sits and ferments, becoming more potent each day and incapacitating me further.

It's strange to dislike a routine so much but slowly realize you've grown accustomed to it without realizing it: waking up at 5:30, leaving at 6:35, getting to school at 7, school starting at 8:50, teaching scripted lessons all day until 4, working after school until 6:30, getting home at 7, eating dinner, spending a little time with my wife, getting lunches ready for the next day, trying to clean the apartment a little bit, falling asleep around 10 from exhaustion, then waking up and doing it all again. It's like a subtle transition that can't be controlled. I spend so much time trying to own my schedule by trying to work my way out of it, but then my schedule ends up owning me. I've grown used to this pattern, this timetable, this schedule that I so dislike, without even realizing it.

Then what are you supposed to do?

When I feel this way (clogged), I feel creatively strained, frustrated, irritable, etc. It's like I have all these desires that I can't nail down or find the time for because by the time I'm done working my butt off in a job I want out of, I want to just sit and relax, not work my butt off at night to pursue a dream I'm not even sure will come to fruition. Part of it is fear: I worked for years to become a teacher, and I, ahem, dislike it, so what are the chances of working really hard at something else and hitting a similar wall? Part of it is exhaustion. Part of it is a loss of self-confidence. Spending all day in a system that I dislike so much makes me feel like I'm going crazy sometimes, and it fills me with self-doubt.

November is National Novel Writing Month, and I'm going to create something, no matter what. I have a couple of ideas, and I feel good about them. I have to get this energy out. It's like a gnawing dissatisfaction, a discontent that is only appeased when I'm creating something of my own design. I have to create. I have to do this, for myself, even if it means losing even more sleep than I already do. There's this quote from The Shawshank Redemption that's been haunting me all day. The character Red is talking about what it's like to spend a lifetime in prison:

"These walls are funny. First you hate 'em. Then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on 'em. That's institutionalized."

Even now, I can hear the walls starting to talk to me. They're saying, "Hey, this money's not so bad. You get paid on Thursday anyway! And think of the three-day weekend coming up. You'll be able to rest long enough to get your energy back. Taking orders from self-interested parties isn't so bad. Just do what they say to keep them off your back. Hey, just teach the crummy lessons you were given. It makes your life easier, and you can leave school earlier. It's okay to develop one or two bad habits along the way. Isn't the thirty minute drive to school kind of nice since it gives you time to think? Maybe in a few years you'll get a raise..."

I am scared of this happening to me, this becoming institutionalized. Why is it that I want so badly to just be able to live on my own terms, outside of the demands, politics, agendas, and power of institutions? Is that even possible anymore? I just want to live.

Nameless Squatter

2011-10-23T22:47:00.002-05:00

He commandeered the abandoned construction trailer when he was 62. The details aren't important. What's important is that it has been his home for five years now, and he has no intention of moving. It's not clear what the construction project actually was, but evidence suggests it was going to be related to big oil. Out here, in the heartland, that's why most of these construction trailers are here. They house the architects and managers for the nine or so months it takes to build the rigs, and then the trailers are moved to the next location and the architects and managers go home. This project was abandoned about a third of the way through.

Sitting alone in his trailer, the man looks at his kingdom. He peers out of the tattered blinds at his front yard: acres and acres of pasture, all of it flat, bushy, yellow and brown. Miles from a road, he wanted to give himself some idea of boundary, so he built a fence with the boots he had collected over the years. He had broken and placed into the ground around the trailer thirty or so twisted mesquite tree branches. He put the boots on top of the branches, upside-down. Sometimes he would stand in his little corner of the world, the sun setting on a world he had made his own, and as the sun touched the horizon his boot fence almost looked like a crowd of crooked-spined friends.

He was important once. He had played the game of getting a job, spending money, buying a house, driving (always so much of it, and always in circles it seemed). But long ago, he had given up. He looks up each day while he sits outside on his homemade front porch made from the craps of tin left over from the oil rig project. He can see the chemtrails from the planes. All those people, he thinks to himself, where are they going? So high in the sky, so far away, so many in one place, so many who don't know the person next to them, who let security guards look at their naked bodies in government scanners, who are so busy and scrambling to keep up so they can keep being busy and scrambling, who are they and where are they going and why are they going there?

He has no name, because we only have names when others call us by that name. He has no one to call him or name him, so he simply is. He is an unnamed participant in what is to him an increasingly confusing world. He exists and yet he does not exist, because to exist is to live but at the same time, to exist is to be known. He lives an unknown existence, and he is a nameless squatter who left behind life in search of freedom but forsook the search for isolation. The desperation in his isolation is present to no one because no one witnesses his isolation but himself. He is at one with the land, his little corner of the world, yet he is totally apart from it.

Still he continues to exist, out there, somewhere, in the middle of nowhere in an endless pasture. He waits on a name. He paces the pasture each day in his boots and worn jeans and one of two plaid shirts, looking at the ground and shuffling the dirt beneath his feet, contemplating how he will soon be dirt too. It will all be dirt again, he thinks to himself, that's all we become - dirt.

A Funny Thing Happened Yesterday

2011-10-20T16:57:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was district in-service for our school district. For the first half of the day, we met with every teacher in our grade level, so I met in a big room full of all the 4th grade teachers in the district.

At one point we were asked to put something we had read in our own words and share at our tables. After we had shared, a microphone was passed around the room and one person from each table shared. I shared for my table, and before I stood up I felt an old familiar feeling I haven't felt in a long time. I felt excited and nervous, like I used to feel when would publicly speak regularly. I stood up and said my one sentence in my own words.

Electricity seemed to run through me as I held the microphone, and after I said my sentence, at the risk of sounding pompous, the roomful of 100 or so teachers audibly gasped. The lady in charge asked me to repeat it and I did, and there were comments of approval all over the room - Whoa! Dang! He's so right! "Wow! That's a 10 point comment!" the lady said and followed it up with, "And he hasn't even had lunch yet!"

It sounds silly, I know, and I promise I'm not trying to make myself sound awesome, but that one moment affirmed for me something I've known for a while: not only is teaching not what I'm best at and not something I enjoy, but also that words are what I'm best at and what I do enjoy. Writing them and speaking them. That moment was the first time I have felt successful all year. Imagine not feeling successful for months, not even feeling remotely good about yourself or the work you are doing, and then suddenly this tiny moment comes along and rejuvenates you. It didn't make me want to teach more, but way, way less. I'm good at writing and speaking words, and I'm good at doing those things for and with adults. I'm good with words and I'm good with a microphone.

It was a small oasis of affirmation in the desert of misery I'm in with my career right now. It reminded me that there are things that I'm actually good at, and that those things should make me feel good. There was no stress, no hours of agonizing or writing lesson plans or dealing with bureaucratic futility. It was completely natural, completely me, completely liberating. And it was one dang sentence.

But it reminded me that I can, should, and will find a way out of this.

Fish Out Of Water

2011-10-16T23:33:00.000-05:00

I was looking through photos from the past year with MacKenzie tonight, and I noticed something. We take a lot of photos, so there's a pretty clear timeline for our life together. After the day I began teaching, there isn't one photo where I look genuinely happy. There are actually a few candid photos of me and I look the same in all of them: spacey, unhappy, maybe even a little sad.

As I looked at the photos from the last year, I realized that the times before teaching were the times when I was still building up to a goal and a dream that I had been working at for years. For the past five years of my life I have focused on teaching, learned about teaching, and gotten a degree in teaching. Now, ten weeks into school starting tomorrow, that goal and dream has all but evaporated.

I cannot stress how embarrassing, humiliating, saddening, and somewhat shameful it is to feel this way. I haven't had such low self-confidence like this since I first moved here. I was eighteen then, and I felt like I wasn't any good at anything, I felt disconnected from everything, and I felt generally bad about myself. I feel all of those things again, and I'm wondering if this isn't the start of another journey, a second act. After living here for nearly five years, I had started to feel successful because I was finding what I was good at: writing, speaking, thinking critically, listening to others, etc. And with teaching, I don't feel successful at any of what I do. I write, but what I write are lesson plans for which I feel no passion. I speak, but to children about things that I have no interest in myself. I think critically, but about how warped the school system is, how unhappy I am operating within it, and how I have no idea what to do next. I listen, but to myriad people talk about how to pass a test and how to group kids and focus on the ones who will pass the test. I feel as though none of my skills are being utilized in the right way with what I'm doing, and I'm reminded of the Albert Einstein quote:

Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

That pretty much sums up how I feel during this time of my life: like a fish out of water that is being judged by the wrong criteria. I'm just not a good fit with what I'm doing, and the constant struggle to make it happen is rapidly destroying my self-confidence and my ability to see in myself the things I'm really good at.

There was this huge space in my heart where a dream grew for years, and suddenly it has wilted and withered away. In that space now is dry, cracked land, in need of water and a new landscape. I don't even know what to focus on or dream up or hope for now that this has fallen apart. It's really hard to have spent so much time focused on something, and in the end to realize that it isn't working out. It's hard to let go of a dream, even one that doesn't even feel right anymore. Because then what? Emptiness, wandering, restless searching, waiting. And the waiting is the absolute worst part.

I was on reddit the other night and someone asked what people's life stories would be if they were summed up in one to two sentences. Reading through the comments, I was struck and disturbed by a pattern. So, so many people said things like:

I had ambition, then I gave up and settled.

I had so many big ideas, but I didn't take the time to make them a reality.

I had so many dreams, only to be sidetracked along the way into unhappiness.

I don't want to end up like that, but at the same time, my goodness, how many millions of people give up on their dreams or suppress them because the pain of not seeing them come to life is too much to bear? Maybe part of it is also the startling realization that everyone thinks that their life is going to be different, extraordinary, all of that stuff. And yet, few people's lives really fall under that category. We all live pretty similar lives, and at the same time we all want to be different.

At the grocery store this weekend, I was looking around at all the people around me. I noticed that one of the workers in the produce section was a 40-something man. I wondered what his life was like at my age. What were his dreams, and what brought him to where he is today? I don't think there's anything wrong with working in the produce section of a supermarket, but I have a hard time believing that it's many, if any, people's dream. How does that happen?

In The Brothers K, the father of the family spends his entire adult life trying to make it into major league baseball. In his forties, after spending multiple seasons in AAA teams, he gives up and says, "Well, maybe I'm just a AAA kind of guy." That is a jarring statement, really. At what point does heart give up, either because life is just too arduous or our best years are behind us, and throw in the towel?

I know I'm only 23, but I feel nervous about my future already. I don't know what direction to take anymore, or what to work toward, or how much work to put into the different talents I have. At eighteen I felt like I had all the time in the world to figure things out, but now I'm realizing I don't have all the time in the world. I'm afraid of wasting time chasing something that will lead me to this place again. I worked for five years to be in a career I want out of, so how will I know that the next thing I pursue won't turn out the same?

I'm just a fish out of water, looking for my place in the world.

The Cost Of A Soul?

2011-10-06T16:53:00.000-05:00

Last night, I went to a pre-screening of the new movie The Ides of March. I really liked it.

I won't give away too much of the plot, but what I most took away from the film is the reality that, over time, our ideas give way to the systems we work in. Over time, our hopes give way to the need to survive in a system, and true hope for change dies. Over time, we give away more and more of ourselves under the false idea of "you have to give a little to take a little", and what happens is we are unwittingly made into the image of the systems we work in. They end up owning us, directing our actions, even affecting and censoring our speech. All of this is internal, of course. In other words, over time, we lose our souls as we give away more and more with the hopes of "gaining ground". We give away more of who we really are because we hope the end will justify the means, that it will have been worth it in the end.

I'm in a particular place right now, and this movie really resonated with me. I'm a teacher, and the practice of teaching is known as pedagogy. Teachers are pedagogues, and if you trace the roots of the word back, you find its disturbing history. The pedagogues were slaves of the Roman empire, and were responsible for teaching children the ways of the empire and doing the empire's bidding.

How fitting. I feel like a slave most days - a slave to the corporate takeover of schools, a slave to the myriad agendas that squeeze out any real sense of power, a slave to the contract that binds me to this, a slave to the pressure to group children on ability (as defined by the school), and teach to pass a test. I'm a slave that does the American empire's bidding, and I do it for a meager salary that pays no overtime. I'm expected to teach children the officialized knowledge of the empire, as decided by the corporations writing curriculum and the governments imposing the "rigorous standards", which are really nothing more than enhanced sorting methods.

Yesterday in "professional development", I was told that the passing goal for the school is 50% on the test by the end of the year. We were then instructed to highlight the top 50% of our class (as defined by the same test), and to focus on those students because "they're the ones we can count on to get us to our goal." And here I am, steaming inside, full of anger at the subtle injustice being perpetrated, and I'm wondering how much longer I have in this field before I decide to leave. I just can't, can't, do some of the things they're asking me to do under the guise of "better instruction." I can't give that much of my soul away, and I can't stay in a system that will, over time, bend me to its will while patting me on the back with just enough praise to make me feel good and just enough money to keep me dependent on the position.

So what next? I don't believe in this any more. I've seen too much, so to speak, and every day spent in it feels like I'm giving more and more of myself away. Where do I go? Unless I win the lottery or write a best-selling book, I'm stuck in something that doesn't make me happy. (I'll owe all my paid tuition back if I don't teach for four years - $96,000) I'm serious when I ask, what's next?

What do I do?

The Best And Worst Decision I've Ever Made

2011-09-29T17:03:00.001-05:00

This summer I took a month-long road trip with my wife, MacKenzie. We went to Boulder, Littleton, the San Juan Forest, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Big Sur, Monterey, San Francisco, the Redwood National Forest, and Portland.

It was the best and worst decision I've ever made.

I know many people who are certain of what they want to do in life. I've never been one of those people. I've never liked feeling labeled or stuck or certain. I prefer openness, opportunity, and freedom. This summer, on the wide open road, I was able to fully experience what I've always longed for: total freedom. No schedules, no clocks, no commitments, nothing but the beauty of the world and the excitement of adventure. Nothing but the endless moments of a journey with my love. Walking on a tree over a rushing river, finding sand dollars on an abandoned beach, getting a tattoo in Portland, looking out over a foggy Los Angeles, seeing the Grand Canyon at sunset, camping next to a river, having no idea what would happen next and living in each moment.

Freedom is a dangerous thing, because once a person experiences it, really experiences it, there is no quenching the thirst for more. And I want more of it, all the time. I want more adventures with my wife. It was the best decision I've ever made, because now I know what real freedom and real living is. It was the worst decision I've ever made, because now I know what real freedom and real living is. Driving in traffic, having your life broken up into chunks of obligation, needing coffee to produce produce produce for society and livelihood, working ridiculous hours, breathing only on the weekend - that's not freedom. But that's what life is not just for me, but most of America. We scrape by enough money in a terrible economy to feed our families and stay current in fashion, and the rest of our money goes toward paying for gas so we can perpetuate the cycle.

The thing about this past summer was that I have never felt more free in my entire life. I'm the type of person who thrives outside of structure, and I'm starved in that regard with my current situation. Teaching is a Cuisinart for our creativity; it chops it up into such tiny pieces that nothing can be done with what's left. I've tasted freedom, and I'm dying for more. The difficulty is that it's scary to admit that to yourself, because what if your dreams don't come true? I don't know, but I'm going to keep hoping that a breakthrough happens soon. Why pursue anything but freedom?

The House Built On Sand

2011-09-28T17:25:00.002-05:00

I'd like to expand on the idea that agendas corrupt natural occurrences. When I say agenda, I mean anybody, anything, any program, any group, or any system that seeks to protect its own interests through enforcing or imposing their standards on others.

For example, these are some of the agendas I'm being pressured by:

National Geographic, who write our district's scripted science curriculum

Math Investigations, a Massachusetts company that writes our districts scripted math curriculum

Evans-Newton Incorporated, who the district paid $9 million to write literacy lessons

The federal government, imposing illegal nationalized standards under the guise of "common core"

The federal government, imposing the unconstitutional AYP requirements

The state government, which enforces school takeovers, nicely renamed "reconstitution"

The school district, aiming to be a "top 10 district", which is itself an arbitrary measure

The new superintendent, imposing new monthly testing

NWEA, or Northwest Evaluation Assessment, which administers standardized tests thrice yearly

Literacy By Design, owned by Rigby, which is the district scripted literacy program

The principal, who enforces what the district demands or else loses the job

The teacher leader, who enforces the district expectations of instructional minutes

The school district, which requires the following instructional minute breakdown:

Math: 60 minutes daily, plus 10 minutes of math during a non-math time*
Reading: 30 minutes daily for read-aloud, 90 minutes daily for guided/independent reading
Science: 120 minutes a week
Writing: 30-60 minutes, 3-5 times a week

The principal, who observes and evaluates lessons

The "Specials" teachers (P.E., Art, Music, Technology), who take the kids weekly

The special-education teachers, who pull 2 of my students out daily

The speech teacher, who visits my room twice weekly

The social worker, who meets with me about two troubled students

The Student Intervention Team, who meets monthly for specific students

The custodians, who need the chairs a certain way in order to cleanly sweep

The other building teachers, who regularly attempt to tell me how to feel about things
The state, which has cut recess to 15 minutes a day, and lunch to 25 minutes a day

District cadres, made up of teachers, who write targeted, scripted lessons

The state, which enforces teacher-certification standards
My college program, which obligates me to teach four years of pay back tuition
My college program, which sends mentors to observe and make notes on our teaching

The principal, who enforces a behavior management system and assigns books to read

The librarian, who tells me which of my students talked at the "wrong time" in the cafeteria

The cafeteria personnel, who slip pink envelopes in my mailbox for students with account deficits

And on and on.

Each of these things carries specific agendas to fulfill specific purposes. The government wants to look internationally competitive, even if such measures are impossible and make no sense culturally or economically. The companies want to make money, the district personnel want national acclaim, even if its ultimately arbitrary and pointless. The building administrators are enforcing the district mandates so they can keep their jobs and maybe move to a higher paying job. The lower level employees (myself included) are doing whatever they need to keep their job at the cost of everything.

Who is at the bottom of this stress pyramid? The kids. I feel like a conduit for pain: the trickle down stress of the system forces me to do things not in kids best interest and therefore causes them pain at school, and they bring with them the pain from home and lash out at me for things that have nothing to do with me. I feel like the system's whipping boy. Suddenly, everything is at once my responsibility and, at the same time, my fault.

All of these agendas corrupt the natural flow of life. Schools are, at best, the most unnatural representations of how humans should function, and, at worst, perpetuators of dictatorial and subtly violent, oppressive, demeaning, destructive practices. All of these agendas inevitably create monstrous power imbalances, and at each level, the goal becomes to flex whatever power you have. I have come to believe that, in such an entrenched system, not one person has any real power to change anything. All power has been neutered by the influx of thousands of agendas that infiltrate schools every day. We're gridlocked and staid and we're praising ourselves the whole time because we've managed to find yet another program to implement. As if any program could substitute unfiltered, meaningful, agenda-less interaction. Where's the humanity? The honest questions without trying to push some kid toward a goal that a company or a government or a district or an administrator predetermined for them? How unfair is that? The game is rigged.

What I hated most about fundamentalist faith was that everything, literally every interaction a person had, was somehow aimed toward saving another person. The people were artificial representations of what they thought the best stance in the moment to take was in order to "reach" a person. It was all agenda and no realness, all obsession with influence and no simplicity of being. Schools do the same thing, but to the power of 10. It is the most artificial, arm-twisting, and deceptive environment I've ever worked in. It's all bureaucracy and no life. It's all agenda and no honesty. Everyone wants something from someone else, and everyone needs someone else to perform for them or fulfill something for them in some way, and everyone is faking their way through a system they don't believe in (at least I am), and I'm tired of it. It's so deeply locked into itself that there's no way to ask a meaningful question without the whole thing unraveling. So what do we do?

We move forward and hope program piled upon program will make it better. But it won't. Because the foundation is fundamentally flawed. It's a house built on sand. And when I wake up in the morning, I don't look forward to walking to this shaky house. I think about all those silent mountains, all those roads untraveled, all the beaches and glaciers and islands of the world that are beautiful but empty because we're all crammed into crappy apartments and smoggy cities and clogged roads. I think about all the places my wife and I aren't, all the places we aren't discovering and loving and gasping at because we're simply too busy.

* If you do math at a non-math time, doesn't it make that non-math time a math time?

It's Only A Matter Of Time

2011-09-28T07:48:00.001-05:00

It's early morning and I'm writing this from my desk in the classroom. I'm looking out at all the empty desks and thinking about each of the students. Each morning I write them a note on chart paper with a question on it that I want them to think about. We have a morning meeting each day, and we talk about their responses to the question.

Two weeks ago, I wrote this question: When was a time you felt successful, and why? When we had our meeting, I let each kid share, and their responses really bummed me out. Almost every single kid related their times of feeling successful to when they got a good score on a standardized test. All of them related feeling good to performing well on computerized tests, and by their responses I could tell that they now derive their sense of self-worth from the tests, too.

I was looking for things like, I built a Lego mansion, I can ride a bike with no handlebars, I wrote an awesome story and gave it away as a present, I stood up for my friend, etc. But what I got were the answers of a brainwashed collective. These children are no longer calibrated to understand success and learning outside of the test-driven paradigm. They no longer understand that learning is natural and good; they only understand that they should get high scores, and that those high scores tell them something about who they fundamentally are.

What have we done to ourselves and to the masses of children who are in a trance, hypnotized by the allure of high numbers on a pixellated screen? I'm so tired of this deception, and I'm exhausted from being surrounded by it. School has nothing to do with education. Any system that was originally created with the intent to create good workers for low-level jobs can never be transformed. I've given up hope. I don't want to participate in this. I've known this for months, since before I even graduated, but now I really know it. Standardized tests don't tell you anything about how smart you are; they only tell you how well you were taught to the test. So there are kids who are just like everyone else who think they're special because they score high, and there are kids who are just like everyone else who think they're dumb because they get low scores. And what are we asked to do? "Re-teach" the low scorers the same material, A.K.A. give them more of the material that they're "bad" at. Who wouldn't come to hate school? I am. We're creating a false society of winners and losers because competition drives the marketplace. I believe that agenda corrupts, distorts, and warps everything it touches, no matter what the agenda is. Education is rife with various agendas, all aimed at looking at students as economic assets and liabilities, and sorting them into categories that will fulfill the needs of society. It's utter, total, crap.

One of my personality traits is that I shut down when something violates my principles, and I've pretty much shut down completely. I'm still here physically, but my heart is elsewhere. I spend about 4 hours a day with my wife now, and I can't do that anymore. I for sure will not be teaching past my contract obligation of 4 years, but if I can find a way out sooner I will. I thrive when I can create things, and here I am creating nothing. I am perpetuating and maintaining, but not creating. I want to write spoken word poems and perform them, and I want to write books and novels and a love story and speak about them, and I want to talk about God, and I want to travel with my wife and get out of here. It's only a matter of time. Because this certainly isn't for me.

If anybody has an opportunity for me, please let me know.

What Am I Doing Wrong?

2011-09-18T17:27:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been keenly aware of the fact that I'm getting older. Last week I asked MacKenzie, "Am I 22 or 23?" I'm 23, and I had honestly forgotten how old I was. That was the first time I ever felt like I had "lost" time, and it freaked me out that an entire year of my life was gone.

It mainly freaked me out because I worked harder in my 22nd year than in any other year of my life. I wrote two books and published them, and relentlessly promoted them. I've sold like 8 copies total since then. Bummer.

What gets to me is the fear that I'm going to become another schmuck in America who dislikes their work but has creative dreams that are never realized. I don't like teaching, and I don't want to do it, so I've begun plotting ways to get out of it. I think I'm going to be one of those people who makes a career (and money) off their ideas and creativity, but the thought of that not coming into fruition scares me. The reason it scares me is because I'm afraid that I'll end up like so many people: living in a fantasy world/world of regret for unrealized hopes. My best time of writing last year was when I had two months off in the fall to focus on my goals. Now that I'm teaching, I have virtually no free time to pursue anything but teaching, which I dislike anyway. So what am I supposed to do when it takes time to develop creative capacities, but my situation keeps me from developing them? What will happen to those capacities, to my heart and soul, when those parts of me are starved because I'm too busy? And how many millions of other people are kept too busy to do what they love? I want to do what I love - write, speak, perform - and be able to live off that, but I don't have time to figure out how to make that happen, so I feel like the clock is ticking and I'm wasting my creativity. Again, bummer.

I don't really like listening to rap anymore; it used to be my favorite genre, but lately it feels somewhat sadistic to listen to people talk about their lavish lifestyles while I drive to work at a tiny school in Kansas. I think we all listen to rap because it makes us feel like somebody; it lets us live out our suppressed dreams for significance vicariously through the music. Rather than placate my desires for significance through rap, I'd rather make my own success story through my creations.

When I think back on the things I've created, it really gets me down that none of it has amounted to much. I wrote nine books in college, and I'm still an unknown author. I made a CD of piano-rap songs with nothing but a keyboard when I was 18, and I'm the only one who knows about it (until now). I preached and gave speeches and performed poetry, and now all those opportunities have evaporated. I guess my question, and something I'd like feedback on, is what am I doing wrong? I know we live in an era of self-marketing and self-made success, and I've taken that approach with everything I do. But why hasn't anyone noticed? Now that everyone can self-publish (6,000 books are published every day), and everyone can make music at home, there's nothing special about the act of creation anymore. Getting millions of hits on a blog or youtube used to mean you were on the cusp of achieving success, but now there's 48 hours of video downloaded to youtube every minute. So getting millions of views is the equivalent to entertaining the masses for about an hour.

How do I make it with my multi-faceted talents? I am a good speaker, writer, thinker, and creator, but I haven't found a place for me that intersects what I'm good at. I'm afraid of growing up and turning into a bitter person who always talks about what they used to do. I feel like my best days are ahead of me, but I want to know what direction to take.

In Slaughterhouse V, the Tralfmadorians are a species of aliens who can see all time as a singular entity. Moments don't exist to them because they see everything at once, like a stretch of mountains. The main character of the story, Billy Pilgrim, is loosed from the constraints of time, and can see his past and future at the same time. I'd like to be able to see where I'm headed, because I need to know that this period of creative suppression and maddening speculation will end and a better time is coming. It's hard to feel like something must be coming around the corner but not have any clue about what that is or how to attain it.

I Am Participating In A Corrupt System

2011-09-11T15:55:00.002-05:00

When I was in college, my political science professor said something in a conversation that's stuck with me. We were talking about government secrets, and he said that the problem isn't what the government is doing that we're not being told. He said the problem is what the government is doing in plain sight that's obviously wrong, but we can't see it that way because it's been so heavily spun and redefined.

One of the most difficult parts of being a teacher, for me, is being a government employee. Teachers are employed by the state, so we are technically government employees. I never, ever, would have thought I'd be a government employee. When most people think of teaching, they probably think that teaching is a creative career. Many creative people (myself included), flock to the field because we think it will be liberating to unleash, foster, and facilitate the creativity of young people.

Nah.

My wife is also a teacher, so we share many similar experiences. She teaches middle school math and I teach elementary. We work in the same district, and so many of the stories I tell will be blends of both of our experiences.

Since the policy of No Child Left Behind was put into place (a policy that has continued under a different name under the Obama administration), schools have been required to meet something called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). This means that schools must have a certain percentage of students pass the standardized exams at the end of each year. When the policy was put into effect, the AYP required percentage was relatively low, but each year the percentage has increased.

What has happened is that, as more and more schools fail to meet the rising percentages, they are labeled as failing by the press and the government. Failing by what standard, you may ask? By the standard of the standardized test. If you fail to meet AYP for three years in a row, your school is placed on "improvement", which means you are given Title I funds to pay for school-wide "tutoring" for students who haven't passed the tests. Who ends up tutoring the kids? The same teachers, teaching the same teach-to-the-test drill-and-kill content. Only they are getting paid out of the Title I funds, up to $60 and hour on top of their salary. If you still fail to meet AYP, your school is then placed in "reconstitution" mode, which is a fancy way of saying the government takes over your school, fires the staff, and hires staff that they think will be able to raise test scores (read: drill instructors).

So what schools have done in response to this crisis is break the student body up into sub-groups based on race. If there are enough of a certain race of students to make up a sub-group, then they are put into that schools system. Last year, a school in my district didn't make AYP because the sub-group of white students failed. How many in that sub-group? Two students. Since the school is now under the watch of the state and could be placed on improvement, the administration is in a panic about how to keep the white sub-group from failing again. So what do they do? They hold meetings about how to "provide the best instruction possible for our white sub-group."

Yes, you read that right. Essentially, segregation is happening. I already knew that our schools are more segregated now than they were in 1964, but this is a new level of depravity. This year, 49% of all children born are historical minorities. Instead of adapting to the needs of a changing population, those in power enforce legislation and laws that label the rising populations as "failing", thus ensuring that they remain at the bottom of the system.

On top of that, we must also ask what higher test scores really mean, and who stands to benefit from them. The students certainly don't, since they are drilled relentlessly with rote memorization and test-taking strategies. The tests don't measure understanding so much as they measure how well you can decode the shitty language of the test itself. And suffice it so say, the tests imply to the students that there is always a black-and-white answer to every situation. What also happens is that potential test-failers are seen as literal economic liabilities to the schools, so the school is divided into an invisible but oh-so-perceived (by staff and students) caste system of assets and liabilities. Instead of schools working for students, the students now work for the livelihood of the school. The children are the ones who are taking the tests which decide what funding schools will get or if schools will get taken over, so the students are carrying the weight of the entire school bureaucracy on their backs.

The education-industrial complex is overwhelming. Our district paid a consulting firm $6 million to write "lesson plans" that "align to the assessed standards" - a fancy way of saying scripted teaching for test-drilling content. Scholastic has a monopoly on not just the children's book world, but also instructional content.

What I've never understood about all this is why it even matters. If American schools suck, what's the glory in being at the top of that list? And if they are great, what's the shame in being at the bottom? Well, we live in a global society now, so what's happening is that we are being kept in the dark about how bad the economic situation has become in America. This brings me back to what I said about being a government employee. I am part of the government that does horrible things right in front of you and redefines them so they look like good things. The education system is touting these new systems as "differentiation for all", "standards-based teaching", "a race to the top", "preparation for colleges and careers", but none of it is true. I could get in trouble for saying this, but the truth is that we are participating in a system-wide effort to sort and track all of America's children into pre-molded economic slots to perpetuate a scaffolding of injustice. That is where we are headed, and that is the larger goal. The test scores have become the alpha and omega, the deciding factor of what kind of life you will be allowed to live. Those who score well will move on to get into good colleges and be the producers of society. Those who don't score well will move on to fill the other, lower-class careers and be the consumers of society. This is what I am asked to participate in every day. It is a race to the bottom that is being disguised as a race to the top. We're in a plane that's flying toward the ground, and the pilots are saying we're soaring toward the stars. They call it No Child Left Behind because it sounds nice, when it's really the most destructive, anti-education legislation in history. They call is the Patriot Act because it sounds supportive of national values, when really it's the most corrupt, invasive, inhumane legislation to effect the American people. They call them terrorists, when really they're just people defending the land we invaded. It makes moving forward with the agenda easier.

In times of economic strife, civil rights take a backseat to property rights. Right now, our country is failing on a systemic scale. The working poor now make up the majority of the population, and that's because we're all getting poorer incrementally. As the other nations rise, we're being kept in the dark about how great the other global economies are because, if we knew the truth, we would see how downward we've spiraled. Since our country is in economic turmoil, our civil rights have become less important as property rights - the protection of the land and not the people - takes over. That's why schools are not about growing creative minds, but about boosting scores to protect the actual school building. That's why schools like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) can rise, because they value none of the arts, only the basic essentials needed to boost test scores. Oddly enough, the proponents of these schools are the super rich, who would almost certainly never place their children in such militaristic schools. It's not about the comfort of the citizens, it's about the survival of the system. When times are good, then there's less stress and also enough money to value the humans making up the system, but when times are bad, all that matters to the masters of the system is that the system that rewards them survives.

And it will survive. And right now, I feel like we're all just cogs in it, doing our job and getting paid just enough to forget about the limitations surrounding us. It's a pyramid scheme.

"Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in." - Bill Hicks

This is from 1911:

The Passage Of Time (Part I)

2011-09-10T20:36:00.000-05:00

Two women and an average-size man pull up to a liquor store at night. They are dressed up for a party. As they get out of the car, two large men walk out of the store carrying cases of beer. One of the large men smiles at the other, and the other large man nods back knowingly.

“Well, what do we have here?” says the large smiling man as he approaches the two women and the average-size man. The two large men circle them.

The average-size man and the two women look at the large men guardedly, confused, and try to push by the large smiling man. The large smiling man pushes his pointer finger into the average-size man’s chest. “And where do you think you’re going?”

The average-size man says, “Look man, we’re just here to get some beer. Leave us alone.” The average-size man looks into the liquor store and sees three more large men leaving the store, each carrying two cases of beer. The windows of the store are shattered, and there is blood pooling next to a fallen hand peeking out from an aisle. The average-size man feels an object pushing into his back as the two women scream. A crow bar.

The large smiling man nods to the three large men carrying cases of beer. They circle the two women and the average-size man.

The large smiling man says, “How funny. We’re here for beer too.” He spits in the average-size man’s face. The entire group of large men laughs.

Suddenly the man with the crow bar hits the average-size man in the back, sending him to his knees and shrieking in pain. The large men carrying the cases of beer set them down and pull back the two screaming women by holding their hands behind their backs, covering their mouths, and pushing them against the car.

“Stand up!” shouts the large smiling man. The large man with the crow bar waits, twirling the weapon in his hands.

The average-size man arches his back and gasps in pain. He slowly staggers to his feet. The man with the crow bar circles to the front side of the average-size man, and stands beside the large smiling man.

The large smiling man nods and shrugs. “Cap him.”

The crow bar slams into the knees of the average-size man, knocking his knee caps backward and sending the man to the ground, writhing in silent pain with wide eyes. The women, hysterical now, close their eyes and scream into the hands of the large men holding them in place.

The smiling man takes out a set of car keys and pushes down a button that pops up the trunk of a car near where they are standing. The average-size man on the ground is screaming as the large man with the crow bar picks up his mangled body and tosses it into the trunk. The man’s legs flail loosely as his body is thrown in. The women scream.

I gasp and suddenly I’m awake. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. My heart is racing. I look around the room and grab for something, anything, to give me context. A pillow. A ceiling fan spinning above me. The clock, in bright red, reads 3:23. I've only been asleep for four minutes. Shit. Another dream. I lay awake, waiting for the smiling man and his crowbar-wielding accomplice to come for me, but they never do. A few minutes pass and by now I know it wasn’t real, but this is the sixth night in a row I’ve had these hyper-violent dreams. I stagger out of bed and into the kitchen. I flick on the light and the bulb flickers on. Too bright. I flick it off and walk to the stove and turn on the softer, lower-watted stove light. Empty beer bottles litter the kitchen counter, along with various childhood delights: Fruit Roll-Up wrappers, Lucky Charms boxes, Capri Sun pouches. I open the skinny cabinet next to the fridge and dig around until I hear the rattle of an aspirin bottle. I feel for the two little triangles and line them up, pop the lid off, and pour four aspirin in my hand. I walk to the faucet, turn it on, turn my head sideways, drink from the stream, then pop the pills into my mouth. I walk to the window of my apartment and open the blinds slowly. After a dream like that, everything seems so much more sinister than it really is. I expect to see some distorted, evil face staring back in my window. I expect to see the smiling man holding a crowbar. But all I see is the skyline of my city, and then my life comes more into focus. I walk to the window and press my forehead against the glass, looking down thirty six floors at the city below. Seven years I’ve lived here, and still every time I look down at the city streets I ask myself the same questions. Who are all these people? Where are they going? Where am I going? What is the passage of time?

I pull away from the glass and look at the grease mark my forehead leaves. It looks almost like a heart. I turn around and walk to the couch to sit down. I grab the remote and flip through the channels. I settle on some infomercial by an eccentric guy selling a SlapChop. The colors of the TV bounce around the apartment and reflect off the glass. Just as I am beginning to wonder if any planes passing at night can see what I’m watching, the glow from the TV illuminates an envelope in front of my door, just under the mail drop box. It wasn’t there when I went to bed.

The Multi-Faceted Complexity of Teaching

2011-09-08T17:45:00.000-05:00

I've been teaching for about a month. The first day of school was on August 11th. That was also the last morning I can remember being genuinely hopeful and happy since. I realize that such a statement sounds extreme, but let me elaborate.

On my third day of teaching, one of my students had to be forcibly removed by the custodians because she was running around the room hitting other students and flipping over chairs. As she was taken out of the room, her face was blood-red and she was kicking and screaming NO! as loudly as she could. After she was out of the room, most of the students were traumatized. One girl cried. That night, I sat on my kitchen floor and balled my eyes out. What have I gotten myself into?

I will not say the reasons, but I know things about this girl's life that clarify her actions. She has been through hell. To see so clearly why a child is acting the way they are, and to feel trapped because there are expectations put upon me by the school, to be unable to keep her from feeling the pain of her wounds, is maddening. She is hurt, so she hurts others, and sometimes it feels like there's nothing I can do about it. So I chug forward, carrying all the expectations for what I should do as a teacher.

Last week, the same girl and another girl in my class tried to run away together, and once they were stopped, they began hitting, slapping, and biting in an attempt to get away. They were escorted away from the building by police. To see their futile efforts to purge the pain from their lives is heartbreaking. They really thought biting the principal would get them what they wanted. The other girl's family moved away, and she just wants to be with them. How do I communicate the complexity of life to a nine year-old? I don't know. All I know is that they were suspended.

And here's the kicker. Teaching was easier when they were away. Their disruptive actions were killing my classroom community. And I hate that it was easier, because where are they supposed to go? But the truth is, it was easier. Today was their first day back, and there was virtually no teaching today because I spent the majority of the time putting out fires before the flames engulfed the room. I feel bad for these kids who are out of control because their lives are out of control, but I also feel bad for the kids in the room who are disappointed that things are constantly getting derailed.

And then there's me. I'm in the middle of it. The hardest part about teaching is realizing that you are the biggest influence in the classroom tone. Your choices can make or break a lesson; what you choose to pay attention to, what you choose to ignore, what you choose to accentuate. I find myself engaging with issues that I don't actually care about, but I don't know what else to do in the moment when regaining control of the classroom seems to be my only option. I feel like I'm being pressured to maintain the culture of the school - walking in a line, testing, grouping, curriculum, whatever else that's in place. I'm not myself when I'm at school, and it's hard to not feel like yourself for 11-12 hours a day. I spend so much time trying to figure out what it is that's exactly expected of me that I forget who I am in the process, and then I find sentences and tones coming out of my mouth that I never thought I would say.

I was a fourth grader thirteen years ago. When I get resources from other teachers, some of the sheets are the exact same as when I was a fourth grader. School doesn't change. It just doesn't, and you know what? That's shitty. I went to college and all we talked about was being "change agents", but then I was thrown into the middle of a system that represents none of what I value. I do not care about walking in a line. I do not care about multiples and factors. I do not care about the author's purpose for a text. Sometimes, I think, how did I spend four years in college and never really have a clue about what this was going to be like? Sometimes, I wonder why I am here. This morning, I had to chant to myself over and over, today will be a good day, today will be a good day, today will be a good day, today will be a good day. And it still wasn't a good day. I've had so many bad days in a row that I've forgotten what it's like to have a string of successes. People need to feel like they're successful at what they do, and I haven't felt successful at what I'm doing since I started.

I try to remember who I am, and it's getting fuzzier by the day. I wake up in the middle of the night, always around 3am. I'm woken up by stress, by dreams about my students fighting, by mental reminders of everything I need to do in just four hours from then. I'm woken up by the reality that I'm not doing what I thought I would be doing, that this isn't at all what I thought it would be, and that I'm contractually obligated to stick with this for four years. If I do not, then I owe my program $96,000 at 12% interest. I look at the signature on my contract sometimes and see that date - 06/02/07 - and I wonder who that naive person was. I wish I could feel free, but it's hard when you aren't enjoying what you're doing and you know you'll be punished for leaving. I've never been in debt, and I don't want to start now. So I teach for four years and feel like this all the time? For four years? I can't comprehend how that would happen. I just want to live in Colorado with my lovely wife.

It's difficult for me to even talk to others about teaching. How do you explain what it's like to be the only fourth grade teacher at your school? How do you explain all the complexities of expectation that are placed upon you? How do you explain the rollercoaster of emotion that occurs when 23 souls are together in a room for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week? How do you explain how it feels to be failing all the time? It's hard for me, because I've had writer's block for three months, and I don't speak publicly anymore, so I feel like I'm floating. I'm getting exhausted by all the dread I feel each day, but I don't know what to do. I'm in the middle of a structure I didn't create, being pressured to preserve everything and conform.

My kids took a standardized test today. Two passed. Now, I don't give a damn about standardized tests. I think they're the stupidest thing in education, and I think they destroy the soul of what teaching can be. But that's what the schools will judge the kids on, and what the schools will judge me based on: whether or not kids can click the right bubble on a computerized test. That's all that matters anymore, and now it suddenly has to matter to me. But what if it doesn't? If I don't care about these tests, and don't teach to them, and the kids fail, newspapers and families and other teachers and principals and everyone else will see it as failure. But if the kids laughed at the book The Stinky Cheese Man? No one cares. I am being asked to teach to a test and group kids based on how much they suck at taking tests. The kids who suck at taking tests are given even more teaching-to-the-test content. Who doesn't want that?! Oh, and we take these tests every four and a half weeks. Teachers compare data after each one, so the mood in the schools becomes increasingly competitive. Since I'm the only fourth grade teacher, I am the person solely responsible for an entire grade level passing a standardized test. The four and a half weeks tests are barometers for how they'll do on the tests at the end of the year, so kids consistently failing the four and a half week tests are targeted and pumped full of drilling. All of this will be touted as learning gains by the press, and everyone will talk about what growth we are making. But they are not learning gains. They are testing gains, and those evaporate. That's why kids are getting to seventh grade with great tests scores, yet they strangely can't read. I see the strings, I know the truth, I know what little it means in the long run, and still tomorrow I will wake up, and try to make it work, and live it all over again. Tomorrow will be a good day, tomorrow will be a good day, tomorrow will be a good day, tomorrow will be a good day...

"Life tearing at the seams

I don't ever wanna be here

Like punching in a dream

Breathing life into the nightmare."

- The Naked And Famous

It's All Weird

2011-09-03T13:24:00.003-05:00

Schools are essentially secular churches. The traditions in schools stretch back for centuries, and many are still carried on without much reason. Walking in a line in the hallways? A holdover from the days when kids were prepared for working on factory lines - no longer meaningful, but still practiced.

There are many different threads of belief about what education should look like. Dewey, Rousseau, Malthus, Canada, Kozol, Haberman, Marzano. While all distinct, in the world of education, these beliefs have all blended together to form a complex tapestry that's difficult to navigate. All the beliefs intertwine and pull from each other, like Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Congregationalists, and Anglicans. It's all very confusing and fuzzy after a while.

However, the only ones who get most of the attention in education are the extremists, the ones who paint the world in black and white. This is the right way to do things. This is definitely how we should move forward. This is what success means. These people are the ones who dominate the education conversation, and they are also the ones who happen to land in the most influential jobs. The higher you go, the more you are pressured to eschew ambiguity in favor of a concrete plan of action. But the world of the classroom is so very confusing, and the authors that acknowledge and wrestle with this openly sell far fewer books than consultants who speak confidently about which direction to take. There are so many cultures, beliefs, life stories, moods, levels of hunger, language differences, learning differences, etc. We are pressured to compress it all into one amalgam of definitive belief about where to go. Like pastors, teachers are inherently pressured never to utter the phrase, What the hell is going on here? even though we're all thinking it. We're never allowed to acknowledge that reality isn't singular and is in fact very confusing. Life is undefined yet we're pressured to define it in concrete terms.

There are statements of belief in each school, much like denominational beliefs. They're all pretty similar, and they all seem to say the same thing in different ways. Like churches believe people should love God and each other, schools believe kids should learn and grow. It's the idea of what that should look like that separates everybody.

Also, like the statements of church beliefs, there are "standards" that each school expects the kids to come to know. Like the statements of belief, though, they are informed by a changing world, so what confuses me is that, someone far away who has never even been to this community created these unimaginative standards out of thin air because, supposedly, these things are what it takes to move forward in the world. But what if what it takes to move forward in the world changes, as it inevitably will? So I should care a whole whole lot about teaching kids the main idea of a passage (whatever that is), even though next year people far away may decide that the main idea isn't so important, but instead something else? And then I'll need to care a whole whole lot about that too, as if that's really what's important?

Similar to churches, this is a decision of what's official and what's not. If it's not considered "officially" important, then it doesn't matter, at least until the people far away decide it is. It's the same as issues that come up in church: suddenly, being intentional is what's really important, so let's stop talking about being authentic and start talking about being intentional.

And then you start to think, wait, what's the difference? That's what the language does: it over-complicates things. At school, we're pressured to talk about text connections: text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world. Like, what is that? All it really is is thinking about what you're reading, which is something that you already do. Yet, by trying to be so meta, it becomes so confusing and delegitimizes what we already do by making us think that what we already do isn't legitimate unless we think about it in the officialized terms. This is similar to how churches can make it seem like serving a meal or going to a small group or whatnot is accomplishing an official mission based on a statement - To be missional and intentional in serving the multicultural world. Oh, I just thought I was going to this group to talk about life with my friends. This obsession with academizing the language makes us doubt our already-natural tendencies.

Also, any sort of experience outside the institutions of schools and churches are usually far more authentic, but not considered legitimate unless filtered through the institution. Learning happens like spiritual experience happens, and the truth is that it usually happens outside the institutional walls. Yet the walls are still considered the best places to facilitate what happens naturally anyway. Teachers and pastors are both gifts to their communities, but we still need to have a humility that we aren't the gateways to anything. Sadly, we usually act more like gatekeepers.

Like churches, schools are also the community scapegoats. When things are good economically, nobody thinks about the teachers or thanks them. But when things are bad, all eyes are on the teachers, and the nation is furious that we "are failing the kids." Whenever things start to go south for the nation, it's always education's fault, as if we were the ones participating in predatory lending or betting on defaulting sub-prime mortgages. Riiiight, the crisis in our country has everything to do with multiplication facts and nothing to do with a society that values being in debt. Well, it seems that my students are smarter than the government, because they know that 0 x 0 = 0. You can't get something from nothing, yet multiple wars are my fault. Yup.

It's the same thing for churches and pastors: whenever tragedy strikes, suddenly they are expected to explain in theological terms exactly what's happening, and why God would do this. Wha? Why am I suddenly on the chopping block for something that has nothing much to do with me? Why is everything my responsibility when things beyond my control happen?

It's all so very, very weird.

There Is No Story Line

2011-08-02T21:25:00.005-05:00

"What do you mean, 'there is no story line'?" Taylor asked.

"I mean exactly what I said. There is no story line. All story lines are an invention. There is no arch, there is no larger story, there is no singular anything." Adam stirred his iced coffee with intense focus as he spoke.

Taylor frowned. "To be honest, Adam, that just sounds like some college-liberal-yuppie shit you learned in an ethics class."

The barista glanced over as she pulled an espresso shot.

"See," Adam said, "that's exactly what I mean. What I'm saying fits into a story line that's assigned to a certain belief. All beliefs fall along an invisible spectrum that we all unwittingly and inescapably play a part in."

"Right," Taylor said in between sips of his coffee, "but if there's no escape from the spectrum, why on earth spend all this time obsessing about a framework? Why not just enjoy living inside the framework?"

"Good point. I don't know really. It's just something to think about." Adam stared deeply into his cup as he stirred the coffee with his straw.

"Well, can you give me an example of what you mean? It's just hard for me to visualize what you mean exactly when you speak in such broad terms."

"Sure." Adam thought for a second. "Okay. Think about a couple of years ago when 50 Cent and Kanye West were supposedly 'beefing' about who would have the better album sales. Rolling Stone covered the 'battle', but the thing is it was all invented in order to drive album sales. They don't dislike each other, really. They're millionaires in the same business, for crying out loud. They use the same producers, they go to the same parties, they're entirely on the same team. It's just that, in order for the albums to generate interest, a story line of conflict needed to be invented in order to get attention."

"Hm," Taylor said as he looked at the parking lot and scratched his whiskers. "So, would politics follow the same story line, you think?"

Adam's eyes widened. "Oh, absolutely. You really think Republicans and Democrats are enemies? Those guys play golf together on the weekends. Theater is what fans the flames of bases, and bases are who elect leaders any way. They're all method actors, even Ron Paul. People think he's this revolutionary outsider, but the truth is that he's a career politician with private jets. Yet he sends out mailers to people that talk about how he 'grows his own tomatoes and lives off the land.' He's a millionaire! What millionaire lives off the land? But he's found his base, mostly in older fed-up Republicans, and the ennui of suburban kids who want a battle to give their lives some meaning." Adam sighed.

Taylor leaned back in his chair and his eyes turned to slits as he sipped his coffee.

"But what about religion?" Taylor asked tensely.

Adam paused, and exhaled deeply, not from frustration, but from not knowing where to begin.

"Religion...religion. Well, here's the thing. Nothing I'm about to tell you hasn't been said before. That's the frustrating thing, because after a while all this talk starts to feel meaningless and a waste. Why try to understand it, you know? Anyways...religion. Religion is not God."

Taylor frowned. "Right, duh. I get that. But religion seems to mediate God to others."

"That's exactly what I mean! All story lines are essentially mediations of our existence. Religion is perhaps the biggest story line of conflict. Maybe that's where all the other, the music and politics and stuff, get their inspiration. It's deeply intriguing to feel caught up in a cosmic battle between the devil and God, to feel pursued on such a level."

"So," Taylor said slowly, watching his words, "are you implying that neither God nor the devil exists?"

Adam sipped his coffee and waved his hand dismissively. "No no no, not at all. I believe in God, with all that is within me, at the core of my being. I believe God made all this and that it's a miracle and that it was made with love. I just think it's easier for us to blame our reptilian brains that react out of self-preservation, or our selfishness, or the undesirable parts of ourselves, as externalized pressures from dun dun dun...the devil!"

"So you think, what exactly?" Taylor shrugged at the ambiguity of the statement.

Adam continued. "I'm saying that all story lines, even the religious ones, are written from the perspectives of the people living them. And the truth is, we all want to define ourselves in terms that flatter us. So instead of owning all our impulses and mistakes and desires, all that stuff, we place it on external actors, and with religion, all God becomes is what we want to be and the devil becomes the stuff we don't want to be. We almost become empty vessels in the process, incapable of taking responsibility for anything, good or bad, because we've lost the capacity the think for ourselves."

"Yeah," Taylor sighed, "I guess that makes sense. I mean, even looking at a newspaper, the story line is apparent. No matter what, America is always in the right. An invasion is never an invasion, it's a rescue operation to restore democracy. Anytime you hear news from China, U.S. outlets are sure to make sure to call it 'State-Controlled Media', but really, isn't that the same thing here? And the Cold War, that was just an invented conflict. There never really was a Cold War, or the threat of a nuclear winter. It was just an invention conjured up to drive an agenda, sold to the masses and powered entirely by fear. I can think of more. Weapons of Mass Destruction, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, the list of potential conflict story lines goes on and on."

Adam nodded. "Exactly."

"What gets me is that if these story lines were honest and came clean, we'd be better off for it. If the government had instead talked about how we needed to occupy Iraq for oil, then at least there'd be clarity about the purpose of the mission. I still wouldn't have supported it, but now it's become so muddled by these story lines that never existed." Taylor took a deep breath.

"Yeah," Adam said, "it sucks. Remember when Henry Louis Gates was arrested by that white police officer, and Obama called the officer stupid, and then Obama apologized and they held a 'beer summit' at the White House as a photo-op to talk about race issues?"

Taylor squinted. "Um, vaguely, yeah."

Adam nodded. "Well, at the White House before the 'summit', Henry Louis Gates gave the arresting officer James Crowley a copy of his book on race, and wrote a note to him. In it, he said, 'To officer James Crowley, two characters in a drama we did not write.' What Gates understood is that, all events are essentially hijacked by a story line, whether we intend for it to happen or not." Adam took a long sip from his straw while Taylor picked up the line of thought.

"That's very true. It's impossible for us not to moralize. We turn every and any event into a moral encounter that we force into a narrative account. We can't even tell stories without moralizing them into a right vs. wrong paradigm."

"Right," Adam said. "It's like the 50 Cent vs. Kanye West thing. How interesting would that be if they just said, hey, we like and respect each other as artists, so please buy our albums where we talk about how we're so much better than you."

Taylor laughed. "It wouldn't be as interesting as the story line they sold, but it'd at least be honest! And that is funny about rap. The only reason those guys are rich is because we buy their albums and concert tickets so we can hear them talk about how much more money they have than us."

"Haha, yeah," Adam agreed, "and what's interesting is that it's mostly just suburban white guys who listen to rap anyway."

"Why is that interesting?" Taylor asked.

"I think it's interesting because, statistically, white men have the easiest lives of anybody in America, though that is slowly changing. What I'm saying is, it's interesting that the group of people with the least amount of conflict in their lives, institutionally speaking, are drawn to music that is driven by struggle and conflict." Adam reached over and drew the shades low since the sun was blinding his eyes.

"Well, why?" Taylor asked. "Why do we invent these story lines, why are we drawn to conflict, to right vs. wrong, left vs. right, rich vs. poor? Why, in moments of comfort, do we crave struggle? Why, in our wealth, do we desire poverty? Why aren't we content with all we have? Why do we need the story line? I mean, it seems that it's built into the fabric of who we are."

Adam thought for a moment. "Honestly, Taylor, I don't know. I wouldn't say it's built into the fabric of who we are. I think it may be for some, but I think that the desire for a solid story line is something that fades with increased wisdom. I think, over time and if we're paying attention, our comfort with the ambiguity of all this grows. We become transcendent."

Taylor stared at his coffee cup. "Are you saying the story line are created by immature people? That it's unwise to take too much stock in all the stuff we're told because it's driven by insecure people with an agenda of self-preservation?"

Adam smiled. "Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying."

The Words Dried Up

2011-07-21T15:40:00.002-05:00

On the day the words dried up, there was no panic. It had been coming for a while, and the event was welcomed. He poured the words out of himself at a consistent pace for over a year. Pages, every day, in the hopes of unraveling some larger mystery. He did it to understand where he came from and where he was and where he wanted to go, but at some point he got lost in all the words. He began to know what he was going to think before he even thought it. He began to think in narration, always hearing things from a third-person point of view. He began to feel like there was nothing new to discover. Immersed in the rivers of his mind, his soul macerated, he became over-saturated with self-consciousness. Life lost its mystery as he became a critic of the story instead of a character in the story itself. While he was glad to have gone through a transformational process, he found himself bored with it all. Suddenly everything became typical: typical hipsters and their eagerness to differentiate themselves in inevitably shallow ways; typical religion following their predictable story lines; typical institutions and their shameless self-preservation; typical world affairs following prescribed narratives; he found himself typical in his arrogant over-educated awareness of it all, paralyzed by the potent mixture of apathy, cynicism, privilege, and knowledge. He would lay awake at night, thinking to himself, How dare I - who do I think I am to try to understand the mystery of all this? The river of words he once proudly immersed himself in overcame him, and he drowned. Over the course of a week, all the words and thinking and analysis slowed to a trickle and then finally ceased, leaving his body in the mud. He awoke, resurrected, in the desert. He welcomed the silence, as well as his sudden awareness of his small place in a larger story. Maybe one day the words will flow again, but for now the drought is a relief from the directionless raging river of youthful passion he drowned in. Dusting himself off, he sets off toward the horizon. He sees colors in the sky he hadn't noticed before, and he has no interest in trying to understand it.

Give Us This Day

2011-05-25T07:52:00.004-05:00

The present isn't immediately accessible to us, strange as that sounds. If we aren't consistently intentional in our awareness of the life we're living, it will slip beyond us. We can easily get so caught up in our own plans that we begin to see the everyday happenings of life as impediments to our end goals. The inability to see, embrace, and appreciate the gifts of right now is a subtle tragedy. Life loses its flavor.

I'm reminded of Garrison Keillor's line, "My ambition took me a long way, but once I got there, I wondered who I was."

Also, baseball player Tony Gwynn's line, "Once you're where you think you want to be, you're not there anymore."

We're never satisfied as humans partly because our reptilian brains are constantly telling us to destroy threats by expanding our empires, and since we don't really have empires, the only threats we destroy are looking uncool by expanding our shoe collection with one more pair of swooshes. But also, people with a personality like mine experience that dissatisfaction more acutely than others may. We're always looking to innovate, push the envelope, think think think do do do work work work. Our desires take us a long way, but they also risk isolating us from ourselves and the world around us. I say us because I know many people like myself.

The best way I can think to describe this dissatisfaction is through the following idea:

You are standing on a street corner in a busy intersection of town. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a five-year-old girl meander into traffic. Stunned, but unable to help from the opposite side of the street, you begin shouting. The girl runs through traffic and makes it to the other curb unscathed. You see her standing next to you, scold her for running into traffic, and look for her mother. Later that evening after the debacle is over, you are still haunted by a confusing feeling. You still feel like that girl is standing in the middle of traffic. You know that's not true, but you still feel like you need to help even after you've done all you can do to help, and things are okay.

That's what the discontent feels like, like no matter what, there's this switch flipped on in my brain that never lets me relax because I always feel like I could be doing more. Do you ever feel that way? It makes leisure time less enjoyable, and it makes the present moment a hindrance to the future. It's ultimately destructive, because where's the line? When is all the work ever enough? It can quickly become a black hole that we're unable to get out of.

I'm encouraged and troubled by Jesus' words, "Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes."

The reason for feeling encouraged is obvious, but the reason for being troubled comes from a deep experience of life's pain. As we grow up and face hard times, - death, heartbreak, brokenness - we wonder why we were never protected by God from tragedy because we misunderstood the nature of relationship. All relationships are easy when things are good, the question is if we still have trust during and after the hard times. God didn't do this to us; life happened and God was with us the whole time.

The Lord's prayer is interesting in that it covers all tenses - past, present, and future. It asks for forgiveness for the past, sustenance for the present, and hope for the future. It acknowledges that all three tenses exist and gives proper emphasis to all.

So today, my prayer is that God would not just give us this day our daily bread but that we would also be aware that life is really happening in all its forms, so we don't miss out.

"You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided." - Kafka

Canary In The Mine

2011-05-24T11:49:00.001-05:00

My good friend Owen Middleton just wrote a stunning new book called Canary In The Mine: Reflections on the Struggles of Student Teaching. While it's written from the viewpoint of a student teacher, it's vast in its scope of education issues. This isn't just a book for student teachers; this is a book for anyone wanting to know what's happening to education in the U.S.

Here's the book summary:

"Student teaching is a professional journey unlike any other, yet no first-hand accounts exist to chronicle the experience. Until now. In this breakout pedagogical masterpiece, Owen Middleton sheds light on the exhilarating, challenging, and life-altering struggles of student teaching. With raw honesty, bold prose, and unmistakable style, this personal narrative delves into fully experiencing for the first time the realities of the school and classroom. This book will shock, inspire, and provoke deep questions about what it means to be a twenty-first century educator."

The book is currently available online, and even though it's 333 pages, it is really affordable at $8. I encourage everyone - teachers, parents, people curious about education - to read this book.

You can buy it here, and enter the coupon code MAYBOOK at checkout to get 20% off.

Or you can buy it here for the Kindle. If you don't have a Kindle, you can download the free software for your computer.

Stay Vigilant In Your Pursuit Of Yourself

2011-05-23T08:46:00.005-05:00

To me, some of the most confusing bible verses are Jesus' words in Matthew 12:43-45, noted below.

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, "I will return to the house I left." When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worst than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.

These verses confuse me for many reasons, but I'm foremost perplexed by the idea that Jesus proposes: To get better is to risk getting worse. To me, this doesn't represent the healing, reconciliatory nature of Jesus. I'm thinking, okay, so what's the motivation for someone to get better if they think that getting better will only lead to them ultimately falling harder than before? How can anybody ever feel hopeful about life change without being hypervigilant to the return of darkness?

When I take a step back from my questions, I have an inclination that this is a tale of what relapse is like. We've all experienced relapse in one way or another from addictions big and small. Whether we've been addicted to gossip or alcohol, relapse happens. We realize we've been living destructively, and we decide to clean house. Once our house is clean, we let our guard down, and maybe get a little self-righteous or cocky. Suddenly we feel like we're strong enough to do the same things again with different results, so we dabble in it again. And then, sadly, the same things, from wasting time on Internet games to doing drugs, get their hooks in us and we're in a worse place than before because we assumed we were stronger than we really were.

Has that ever happened to you?

The best image to describe this process might be Biore Nasal Strips, those terribly painful padded pieces of duct tape you rip off your nose to remove blackheads. They work by pulling blackheads out of the pore, but there's a problem with the method. That suddenly empty space in the pore, if not taken care of, is just an open hole welcoming more dirt, oil, etc. into your face than before. The strips take out the initial problem, but the removal leaves the cleaned out space more vulnerable.

The expulsion of the problem is not enough. It must be filled with something else.

A common problem among new teachers is the dissonance between belief and action. Coming fresh from university settings where we were encouraged to explore alternative methods of teaching than the traditional pedagogy, we come to know exactly what we don't want to be. But the problem is, when we aren't fully developed in who we want to be, when we're in the classroom and things come up that we don't know how to handle, we immediately revert back to the ways we were taught because it's the only methodology we experienced in such situations. This phenomenon also relates to physical violence. Men who witnessed physical violence against women as children are actually more likely to become violent against women as adults. It's the only model that anger was dealt with, and therefore it's the unwitting default setting.

That doesn't, however, mean that all is hopeless. Cycles are broken every day and new defaults are created. But that doesn't happen without conscious action. The new science of epigenetics looks at how genetic traits like obesity are passed down through the generations, and how one person in a generation acting differently literally rewrites their genetic story. Even biologically, we can break the cycle by living differently.

I think, if there were to be a sequel to the verse at the beginning of this post, it would be found in Ephesians 4:28, noted below.

Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, so that they may have something to share with those in need.

This is a brilliant line, because the writer knows it's not enough to simply stop doing something, or to know what we don't want to be. It's important to have a positive goal to move toward, to have an idea of who we want to be, to use what was once harmful for good. We can be new, we can be renewed, and I think that the words of Jesus, when understood through this lens, inspire hope and not fear. To me, his words seem to be saying, Stay vigilant in your pursuit of yourself, and be careful to be a starter and not just a stopper.

We often live in fear of having our internal house occupied by unwanted guests, but again and again I find myself coming back to Rumi's poem The Guest House:

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably.
They may be clearing you out
For some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing,
And invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.

Risk Everything At Least Once

2011-05-12T07:29:00.000-05:00

One day while I was working at an oil refinery four and a half years ago, I wrote a note to myself:

"As I write this, I am sitting upstairs at Valero in row 4Q, and I have come to find that it is the perfect place to get away for a few minutes without being bothered. I'm going to Missouri on Saturday morning, and I'm scared, excited, alive, concerned, ecstatic. So Alex, whenever you read this, I hope you smile and tell yourself not to be scared anymore."

I moved here with a one-way ticket, a duffel bag full of clothes, and a backpack full of books. I went all-in on the opportunities I found here for education, change, and above all, love. And the craziest thing is that it worked out. I got a full ride to college and married the girl of my dreams. I graduated on Saturday, turned my tassel to signify the moment, and now my wife and I both have degrees, an uncommon feat among young married couples.

I want to be clear about what I'm about to say. I'm not going to talk about the following accomplishments because I want you to think I'm awesome. I'm going to say these things because I want you, whoever you are, to be encouraged to take risks too. When you step outside your self-imposed box of limitations, entire worlds will open up to you.

I've written nine books in five years. I've preached to hundreds of people. I've dined with prestigious community members and chatted with some of my favorite bands. Last month I raised enough money to buy 100 copies of my latest book to distribute as I see fit. Three weeks ago we bought a new car, debt-free. On Saturday I graduated with a final tuition balance of $0.00. Today I expect to get a copy in the mail of a new book I've written (more to come on that later). This August I will most likely be helping to start what will be the most progressive school in the city. And this is all just the beginning of my story.

Yesterday I went to a job interview at a school. Over a year ago, I spent one day a week at this school for a semester. As I toured the school with the principal, I peeked in each classroom. When I peeked in one classroom, kids started swarming me and shouting Mr. Gamble! Hey Mr. Gamble! They remembered me from over a year ago, one day a week. It was overwhelming.

You will never know the impact you will have on this world until you let go of all preconceived notions of what your life should look like. One of my friends in Dallas told me years ago, Stay open. I will repeat that advice to you. Stay open.

I must also offer a caveat. I have suffered tremendously during this journey as well. I fell very ill when I first moved here. It took me two years to start making friends. My dad committed suicide. My wife and I came back from our honeymoon to find our apartment in ashes. When you open yourself up in vulnerability to the world, you will get hurt. There's no way around it. Bad things will happen along the way, things you couldn't have anticipated or braced yourself for. There will be times when you'll have the wind knocked out of you. Stay open and keep going, because the struggle is never the end of the story.

One of my friends, who is also co-author to a book we wrote coming out in July, recently moved to L.A. He's an editing wizard, and he has a gifted understanding of visual aesthetic. Before he moved, he was living with his parents, staying up late, toying with editing software. But it wasn't until he moved, it wasn't until he stepped out and took the risk of staying open, that all the pieces began to fit. Since moving just a few months ago, he's edited work for famous pop stars, he's had his favorite musical artist in his living room to talk about a music video, and he's just started work on an indie movie. He risked everything and left the world he knew, and now he is living into the dream, the life, the story he's always wanted.

As am I. And as can you, if only you will stay open and risk everything, at least once.

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing everything. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision, mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it despite rejection and the worst odds, and it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods and the nights will flame with fire. Do it, do it, do it. Do it. All the way. All the way. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter; it's the only good fight there is."

- Charles Bukowski, Roll of the Dice

The Wayward Empire

2011-05-05T08:04:00.005-05:00

I've been genuinely shocked by the outpouring of spite, malice, blood lust, and vengefulness that America has displayed in reaction to Osama Bin Laden's murder. The Daily News ran the headline Rot In Hell. In another article, a syndicated columnist wrote, "If anybody deserved a bullet in the head, it was Osama." Jon Stewart fantasized what the moment looked like when Bin Laden was killed. A comment on an online article said, "Not even the bottom-feeders of the sea will eat your satanic corpse."

We desire shared experiences, and patriotism most quickly and easily provides us with the illusion of community. How else would throngs of people stand outside the White House chanting our country's name after the news was announced? Patriotism is an instant plug-in that makes us feel like we're a part of something that matters.

Patriotism is also convenient in that it has no memory. After hearing Bin Laden was executed, suddenly everyone was acting as if they'd been carrying around an unbearable weight of grief for 9/11. It was like we were all back in 2001, and even the President's speech hearkened back to the day's events, seemingly in an attempt to retroactively justify the previous decade's slog of war. I find it hard to believe that the events of 9/11 were even on most people's radar until the news of Bin Laden broke, but suddenly afterward everyone was acting as if, as a nation, we were conquering some decade-long victimization.

What we forget, though, is that since the Middle Eastern wars began, over 66,000 innocent civilians have been killed in Iraq. That's equivalent to over 22 World Trade Center attacks. Most of these deaths have been the result of the soldiers of the United States - drones shooting up funerals, journalists, and kids playing in the street; soldiers shooting first and asking questions later; on and on the blood has poured. Our country has invaded another country, and named those who fight against the invasion of their homeland insurgents, terrorists, and extremists.

We forget that there are still untold thousands being tortured at this very moment in U.S. secret prisons, some as young as 12 years old. We forget that these prisoners have been denied the right to defend themselves, and we forget that many of them are held without any charges. They're just there, in cages, forever stuck in limbo and assumed dead by their families.

Through the use of excessive force, the United States government has managed to finagle their authority as final and their morality as pure. We've defined the storyline of the world for so long, and we think we're exceptional. We are not exceptional. When American journalists are imprisoned, we see it as an affront to our humanity, yet Guantanamo Bay is a blip on our moral radar. When presidential effigies are burned in the streets of foreign countries, we discount it as barbarism, yet our citizens burn Korans and effigies of Bin Laden. A non-American leader killing people makes them a madman, but an American leader sanctioning wars that lead to the same outcome is always perceived as morally just and for the eventual rise of "freedom and democracy". The difference between Osama Bin Laden and the United States government is that the United States government gets to hide its actions behind the shroud of bureaucracy, and in that way everyone escapes responsibility. History will show the United States to be the most aggressively murderous empire in the history of the world.

The day after the news aired, Jon Stewart said "We're back, baby!" A country whose national well-being depends on one man seems incredibly weak to me, and even more so, a country whose national pride depends on the annihilation of enemies. Whatever really happened in that compound, I see this as an indication of the total loss in the minds of the American people of any real sense of justice. Violence will always, always, always beget more violence, and anything else that declares otherwise indicates a moral slip-n-slide into the bowels of barbarism. We seem to be enjoying the ride.

My Philosophy of Education

2011-04-27T23:31:00.000-05:00

The Relentless Pursuit of More (or, Shredding the Fence)

“Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.” – Dallas Willard

The most important paper I have ever written was about how to make a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich. The paper, which I wrote my sophomore year of high school, was the first writing assignment I ever took seriously. I was scrupulously meticulous in my instructions in an attempt to be humorous (Step one: let brain synapses fire to create the desire for a sandwich). Expecting to be reprimanded for taking the assignment too far, my English teacher instead told me the idea was brilliant. I became a writer. The experience was instrumental in my decision to teach, because as I have reflected back on that how-to paper over the years, something has become clearer to me: teachers have the enormous responsibility and possibility to create new futures while inhabiting the present. Had my teacher reprimanded me for being cheeky, I may have never written again; instead, she graciously revealed to me an identity I was unaware I even possessed, and my life has never been the same.

But that is a singular positive experience, like a speck of gold found while sifting through the mud of memory. The more negative experiences, sadly, outweigh those brief moments of affirmation. Almost all of my school years were spent in a regurgitative fog, as I spent each day reciting prepackaged information back to my monotone-voiced teachers. My movement was restricted, worksheets were abundant, punitive measures always lingered in tandem with shallow rewards. As a young boy, I was constantly chided for speaking out of turn, for throwing pea gravel on the playground, for not fitting into the seemingly untouchable methods of traditional education. Shame was the weapon of choice for keeping us in line, and we were reminded daily that, should we violate the invisible boundaries of the normal, we would suffer the consequences.

Throughout my four years at the university, I have undergone the process of deconstructing the methods, ideologies, and hidden agendas that inevitably attached themselves to my heart during my previous twelve years of schooling. At times this painful process has felt like my world was collapsing in on itself, but pushing forward with each new insight into our human nature has always proved liberating. I have come to realize that, more often than not, the reason children are not engaged in classroom settings is because schools do not appropriately meet the needs of children. Rather than blaming the child for being bored and needlessly escalating minor issues into puffed-up problems, a more humble, realistic response would be to question our own methods. Children need to move, to use their hands, to ask countless questions, to create things based on their own interests. And they need to do it without fear of failure or retribution. Children are inherently equitable and see fewer walls than adults; it is the art of developing this equitability instead of constructing more walls that is so urgently needed in the classroom.

That being said, it is obvious that this rarely happens in today’s (or yesterday’s, or last decade’s, or last century’s) schools. Schools are more segregated than ever. The largest special education population is African-American boys. Thousands of children are suspended from school each day. Though I fail at times, I strive to constantly ask myself, “How can I make it better?” Injustice often hides in plain sight, functioning in far-subtler ways than we are aware of. For this reason, I choose to teach. If teachers have the daily opportunity to create new futures and break the cycles of generational oppression, we must take the opportunity seriously. What I speak of is not a grandiose plan to overhaul the current system with a wrecking ball, but rather the simple hope of a seed planted in the ground. It is the day-to-day, intentional act of showing up and interacting in a meaningful way with children that matters most. The small relational snippets are the things we remember.

The relationship between schooling and education is similar to the relationship between fish and the ocean. In one sense, the fish contains the ocean within itself as the water passes through its gills, but in a much larger sense the fish is contained in the ocean. If education is the ocean, then schooling is the small fish meandering in its waters. There is always the possibility that school can, in a sense, contain education, but the larger truth will always be that education contains schooling. Education can live without schooling, but schooling cannot live without education. Sadly, schooling actively works against education as it preoccupies itself with behavior modification, testing strategies, and sorting methods. Rather than see school as the place where education happens, I choose to see education as occurring at all times and in all places, and the school’s responsibility being to intentionally choose to participate.

However, due to the fish-out-of-water nature of schooling that threatens to kill education, I anticipate that subversion of the system will be an everyday occurrence in my classroom. Burnout occurs from constant, irreconcilable dissonance between belief and action, so I will need to take extreme care to work daily through the muck of the system in order to reconcile the reality of the inequities of school to my hopes of equitable education. I fully expect the pressures of the workload to be a siren call which beckons me to forego the difficulty of creativity for the easiness of rote pablum. I expect to be constantly blasted by faculty gossip about students, heinous district mandates, and unconstitutional federal testing requirements. I expect to constantly face the desire to succumb to the competitive nature of data which would force me to see each struggling student as a liability and which would turn learning into winning. I expect to struggle against the privatization craze that is rapidly winning public favor as the demonization of public schooling becomes an increasingly popular trend. I expect to be chronically in need of more time, more sleep, and more depth.

I choose to see behavior as a geyser – it is always indicative of something that is happening deep beneath the surface. The temptation that occurs most often when dealing with a roomful of thirty or so geysers is the desire to simply plug them up when outbursts occur. This only exacerbates issues and can create a hostile classroom. Urban teachers serve areas that are in dire need of a gentle approach to teaching, and one of the most helpful things teachers can do is to create norms for an emotionally nurturing environment that seeks to relieve the pent-up pressure of these tiny geysers who so often don’t know how to channel their hurts and hopes into constructive mediums.

However, the reality of schools often opposes these sorts of endeavors. “You owe me recess for that” is the statement I have heard more than any other as I have traveled from school to school over the years. Behaviorism is the most prevalent means of dealing with our nature in not just school but society in general. We lock people up for life for nonviolent crimes, and we take recess away from children for nonviolent disturbances. It’s all the same. The message being communicated is essentially, “shut up and do as you’re told.” It is my belief that much of the “taking” done by teachers results from unchanneled frustration toward the faceless hierarchy that persistently exercises control over the classroom. I believe the “taking game” loses its power as the classroom teacher takes greater ownership of the classroom.

In order to create community, I will have to forego many of the reward/punishment systems in place at a school and strive to give the children a chance to figure interaction out on their own with myself serving as facilitator, or else they will internalize a learned helplessness that will malnourish their creative capacities. The school environment often fails to meet cultural needs of urban areas since the school mirrors dominant cultural values. This subtle tyranny is something I will continually need to address in order to protect my students from becoming jaded and burnt out from testing demands, behavior bias, and societal assumptions.

I have had the opportunity to practice my beliefs in other teachers’ classrooms. The dissonance between what is and what can be is still potent every time I enter the classroom. What has surprised me most is that, when I am in the environment, I have found myself doing things which I am fully aware are not in the students’ interest. I have created mindless worksheets that address only state-assessed indicators. I have asked students who are drawing to put their pencils away so they can better listen to me. I have kept in place grouping structures which are at best flawed and at worst creating a permanent underclass. In other words, I have failed. It has been said that admitting the problem is the first step.

I do not blame the students. What astounds me is that these little children show up every single day to school, hoping to be wowed but expecting to be bored. They wake up early, stand in the cold at the bus stop, five days a week, eight hours a day, for thirteen years. I feel a sense of shame that what I have created for their expectant hearts is, lo and behold, a worksheet. It drives me to be better. I am disturbed by the feeling that what I am being asked to do for urban children is train them for jobs and nothing more. The irony is that questioning this mentality is often looked upon, in the words of the famously coined phrase in support of No Child Left Behind, “soft bigotry.”

I choose to believe that kids are bored because they have a reason to be bored, and not because they are lazy or deprived. When activities I have planned do not engage the students like I imagined, I see their boredom as an indictment on how I somehow failed to pique their interest. Conversely, trying to always have a joyous environment that allows students to do whatever they want isn’t realistic either. What is required is a balance of what we want to do and what we have to do. That way, they can approach the things we have to do with a sense of clarity about the matter. Allowing students to have choice after clarifying what constitutes a good decision is a successful example of this. Creating hands-on activites instead of worksheets, or at least in tandem with worksheets, has also proved successful. In the end though, the arc of teaching should be away from, not toward, worksheets.

The world has changed, and as we move into our multicultural society, the need is urgent for schools to match the needs of a variety cultures. I believe we need to work toward a social reconstruction of the schooling environment to better suit the needs of twenty-first century students. The factory model of schooling has, is, and will continue to fail students until we intervene and do the work necessary to create activities, environments, and staff that are aware of the overhaul schools need to embrace. School used to be the place to receive information, but now the Internet has made information prevalent and accessible to all. A recent study shows that 80% of children under the age of five use the Internet. The modus operandi of a twenty-first century teacher should be to help children make sense of the information so they can be as successful as possible in the globalized economy. I want to educate children, not merely train them.

The school has long been unable to meet the needs of a multicultural world, and it is not lost on me that the largest percentage of teachers is still white women. While I am not a woman, I am white, and while I still strive to truly understand other cultures, I am aware that when we look at the sweeping arc of history, my position as a white man in society has positioned me as an oppressor instead of a liberator. As I move forward into the career of a young teacher, I see the need to bring in community leaders, workers, and families to enrich my classroom. I refuse to be the sole filter that the children’s experience flows through. Beyond that, the children need to learn the history of their culture as well as how their culture has contributed to the progress of humanity. Taking it a step further, my classroom will focus on how to reconstruct the failures of the hegemonic culture. In this way, my students will become not just aware of their own culture, but also of the injustices of an institutionalized power structure and how to slowly remake it. A changing society needs change agents, and I want to instill in my students a keen awareness of where we have been, where we are, so we can see clearly where we need go.

What I long for as a teacher, and what I sense my students long for, is more. There’s so much more that we could be doing, so much more I have to learn, so much more we have to give up for something better. There is so much more we can give our students to be proud of than test scores. We can teach kids more than drilling them in their lowest content areas; as Chris Lehmann says, “It’s only making sure you don’t suck quite so much at the things you’re bad at.” Is that the best we can do? No, it is not. We can do better, and I will relentlessly pursue how to do it better. What I long for, and what the children long for, is to do interesting things - activities that stir joy and passion and allow critical thinking. It is my goal to make this vision a reality. I will not stop until the fence posts of false scarcity are moved so far back that all can enter. Then, on that day, we will shred the oppressive wood in the chipper of multicultural education.

What's It For?

2011-04-15T23:57:00.004-05:00

Sometimes all this - blogging, writing, promoting, whatever etc. - feels like kingdom building. I feel like I lead a double life sometimes, the teacher and the self-promoting author. I spend all day with 8 year-olds and then promote a book for twentysomethings.

In the quiet moments at the end of the day when I'm exhausted, I think to myself, What am I working for? What's all this stress for? To raise money so I can then promote a book I wrote so others will then see me as a good writer so I could then maybe get published professionally so I could then write more books and speak about the books I wrote so more people will buy books and so on? Sometimes, if I'm honest, I feel like I'm building a kingdom about myself so I can be king.

This is a good year. It's a year of fruition. But all this producing isn't the only rhythm life was meant to follow. Working this much, teaching all day and writing in the evenings, is ultimately unhealthy and unsustainable. This has been an exhausting and productive year, but I can see how easily it is to tie our entire identity to what we create.

Maybe I'm just in an Ecclesiastical mood - "It's all vanity and spitting in the wind." The internet is vapid and books are just dead paper. I haven't blogged much because my most popular post ever was a satirical piece about Rebecca Black. If writing cotton candy is what it takes to make it as a writer I don't want that. The Rebecca Black post was an experiment more than anything, and it confirmed what I read in The Brothers K earlier this year:

"A leader out to galvanize thousands of zealous followers must consistently shun complexity, even at the loss of lucidity and truth."

I'm disenchanted with where we're at right now. I've for the most part always been aware that shallowness wins out over depth, but Snooki was paid more to speak at a college than a Nobel Laureate? And my Rebecca Black post was viewed four times as much as the second most viewed post, a piece about how God is shaped like a black hole? Wha?

What's got to me the most lately is realizing that if I unplugged, for the most part no one would notice. They'd just find a new blogger to read that entertained them. The saying "absence makes the heart grow fonder" doesn't apply anymore because no one is ever really absent, and if they truly are then everyone else can just find someone else to fill their shoes. Everything is disposable online, even if it's meaningful writing. Even if it's my writing.

I have a feeling that I may stop publicly writing for a while after this summer is over. All this living life on display for others to read is starting to get on my nerves. It's like we're all spending so much time trying to appear interesting instead of just being interesting. Our entire existence is mediated. We're dying to be affirmed by Word Of Mouse.

And what's it for?

Coiled Up Ready To Soar

2011-04-06T19:50:00.007-05:00

I watched one of my favorite movies, Good Will Hunting, last night. One of my favorite scenes is when Sean asks Will what we wants to do with his life. Will is really good at bullshitting his way through conversations and questions but he can't answer the simple question. It's not lost on me that the character's name is Will.

The reason I like this scene a lot is because I don't think the will always knows what it wants. More often than not, the will rarely knows what it wants. We just don't know. We think we want one thing, but then we think we want another.

Lately I feel like I don't know how to answer this question. I know what I'm doing right now: teaching, living in an apartment, finishing up college. But I don't know exactly what I want. I'm still learning what I'm good at, and how that relates to who I am.

Many teachers go into it because they have a deep-seated desire to be the sage on the stage. That doesn't end up serving the students well, because education needs to be about the kids above all. What usually happens in situations where the teacher makes the classroom about their unrealized desires for stage time is nothing short of subtle catastrophe and megalomania. I've had it happen to me as a student, I've seen it happen in classrooms with other teachers, and I'm noticing the desire rise in myself from time to time.

So when I think about what I want, I'm not sure how to answer. I'm good at writing and public speaking and creating community. All those things are inherently about creation, and the creative aspects of those parts of myself will serve me well in teaching. But in the back of my mind I often think about how I don't think I'm going to be a lifelong teacher. You'd be surprise how creativity is actively discouraged in the teaching profession. I have too much energy that wants to go too many places, at least for the time being, and at times the creates restriction feels like a waste of time. Most days I feel like a coiled spring ready to be let go so I can soar, and I'm keenly aware that if I don't allow myself to spring, that energy will turn into Thoreau's "quiet desperation" that so many carry around.

The ideas I have about the future vary: starting a church once I turn 30, writing books and going on speaking tours, designing things, performing in theater, stand-up comedy. One of my former co-workers told me that when she watched me preach, it was apparent to her that I was meant to be in front of people. I agree; I feel like my work, whatever it is, will be done in front of people. Those are the moments when I'm in my flow and I feel the most alive. I just don't think that, ethically, I can make kids be an audience for me to work out the gifts I have. Education needs to be about them, not me, and I'm concerned that I'll make the classroom about serving my desires and the pursuit of identity instead of the kids' desires and development of their indentities. I may be too young to think as selflessly as great teachers do; Martin Haberman believes people under 30 aren't developmentally ready to be teachers. I see his point.

Those past few sentences are strange in light of the fact that I'm getting a degree in elementary education. I'm going to be a teacher for at least four years in return for getting my school paid for. It's a pretty sweet deal since my wife and I both went through the program and thus have zero debt in our life so far. So my plan is to save as much as possible these next four years, to work as hard as possible to touch kids' lives, and to make as many moves as possible on the side to create a post-teacher lifestyle that I can channel my myriad energies into. It's not that I already want out before I start, it's that I know it's probably not what I'm going to do with my entire life. I'm hungry with ambition, and that may be a mixture of my gifts and the arrogance of youth. Either way, at this point, I don't know if teaching will be enough to sate me.

Everyone Is A Student

2011-03-28T18:15:00.002-05:00

Both of the men in this video were at some point students in a teacher's class. As I look at the difference between the two, I think to myself, What happened?

It's a question that keeps popping up in my life lately. There's this billboard I drive by every day on the way home from school with a picture of a man accused of murder, along with a tip hotline to call. That man was someone's student. What would his past teachers do if they saw that sign? Or, what would that do to me if I saw that one of my past students was accused of murder?

I don't predict the futures of the kids I work with. I know a lot of teachers who do. I don't, because I know that we come to expect what we think they'll end up being, and actually create that reality - self-fulfilling prophecy. So when I see the man yelling on the subway, or the man on the billboard accused of murder, I see students. And when I see those students, I wonder what happened along the way in the classroom that reinforced the way they've become. After all, teachers spend as much if not more time with the kids than family and friends.

What are we doing with that time?

There are, obviously, structural issues at play, societal limitations and difficulties we must wade through (institutional racism, systemic poverty, generational abuse, etc.). We can't look at kids like they're something to save or like they have a deficit we need to help fix. But we can help them become responsible, independent, autonomous, critical thinkers.

But when I look at the man reading the book, calmly restraining himself, and the man yelling obscenities, talking about inciting violence, all I can think is:

What happened?

Hard To Admit And Harder To Escape

2011-03-23T17:52:00.006-05:00

I'm working with a third grade class right now, and we're talking about inferencing. I brought in some short stories from the Mcsweeney's collection One Hundred Forty-Five Stories In A Small Box, and read the stories aloud with them. The point was to show them that we are inferring all the time, especially in instances when we don't have all the information. Those instances make up most of life, so the beauty of reading is that you get to decide what the movie in your mind looks like, and you can create meaning that's different from someone else's meaning because you are the one reading. You bring yourself to the story, and you are exactly what the story needs to come to life.

There was one story by Sarah Manguso I found when reading through the collection that struck me. Here it is:

"The entire morning passes but I'm already tired of all the old themes. In the afternoon, still we love and are unloved, still we understand no one, still we and our love will die, still reality is hard to admit and harder to escape, still the essential moments are unexpected yet nothing is new, still we were wrong about the past but the future is about to begin, still things make sense."

This encapsulates so much of what I'm experiencing right now. Sometimes I get tired of the themes. Sometimes I feel like nothing has ever changed. We're always pretty much the same: we still need ample sleep, feel insecure, get cranky when we're hungry, let pain wind up inside us and spring out at different times, feel anxious when visiting family, laugh and argue, have difficulty expressing ourselves, and wish to be something other than ourselves. The news never changes: powerful countries colonize differently-minded ones, politicians are corrupt, pilots falling asleep in cockpits, fighting over laws, celebrities divorcing, churches splitting, the rich getting everything they want and the poor getting nothing. The seasons stir the same feelings every time: hope in the spring, freedom in the summer, anticipation in the fall, brooding in the winter.

I don't feel hopeless. I actually feel somewhat embarrassed. I read a quote once, and I've been searching for it for months but haven't been able to find it. The quote essentially said: what a wonderful arrogance youth is, thinking we're discovering everything for the first time.

These days, I think I may be coming to terms with the inertia of life. When I was eighteen I felt like I could definitively rewrite history no matter what. There's something about youth that makes us feel like we're outside of it all. Lately I've been coping with the reality that I'm just as much a part of this as everyone else is. It's hard. I want to be more than the world around me, not necessarily better than it, but at least able to navigate it with a clear sense of direction.

Revolution is a word that used to inspire, motivate, and encourage me. Most of the time when I see that word now, it just makes me feel like whoever is encouraging the revolution hasn't lived much life yet. Jesus was murdered, after all. Maybe I'm just getting impatient.

Because life definitely has inertia, and reality is hard to admit and harder to escape. I want something new, something fresh, something inventive, something more.

Leaving Eden Now Available

2011-03-18T18:05:00.006-05:00

I'm thrilled to announce I've released a new book called Leaving Eden: a twentysomething manifesto. Until Monday, you can buy it for just $10 with FREE SHIPPING by entering GROUND at checkout. It's 170 pages, 42 essays and some fiction. Here's the book description:

"We all have our own Eden. And we all at some point in our life must leave that Eden. Leaving your hometown, moving out of your parent's, graduating from high school, graduating from college. They don't have to be situational Edens either. Sometimes the Eden is ideological, and requires us to mature. It can be learning to accept a group of people you don't understand, letting go of the voice that says you aren't very good at much, learning to love parts of yourself that are messy, letting go of beliefs learned in childhood that have become limiting. 42 Essays on theology, patriotism, finances, system design theory, doubt, peace, education, movies, and more, plus original fiction for good measure. A manifesto for the twentysomething post-everything generation. A book about growing up, waking up, getting out, and living into ourselves, Leaving Eden will provoke, inspire, challenge, and comfort."

Purchase the paperback version for $10 here.

OR Purchase the Kindle ebook version for $0.99 and download/read it instantly. You don't need a Kindle to buy this version, just the free Kindle software.

Free Kindle software
$0.99 Kindle version

The Vulnerable and Naked Pain Of Creation

2011-03-17T00:18:00.005-05:00

On Monday I released a new book called Leaving Eden: a twentysomething manifesto. I published it to Kindle as well for $0.99. I've been publicizing it nonstop for the past three days via Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and email. And guess what?

Three people bought it.

I am so thankful for the three who purchased my book, and I know them all personally and appreciate their support. But I have to be honest about something. I wish more people bought my books, and it frustrates me that more people don't.

This is the 7th book I've written. I may be 22, but I've been writing books and short stories since I was 18. People tell me not to worry about it since I'm so young. They tell me I show promise as a writer, and that my ambition is going to take me places. But I'm here now, and it's depressing sometimes to think about all the countless hours I've spent thinking about, writing, editing, and formatting a book only to have it sucked down the memory hole of the Internet within hours. It's hard to feel like no one cares about the deeply personal work I've created. I was talking with a friend of mine yesterday who's a potter and we both agreed: one of an artist's worst fears is creating something no one cares about. As I've searched my heart these past few days, I realize I want more than the control I have over what I create; I also want to control people's reactions to it as well, and I can't and sometimes it drives me bonkers.

What we create is deeply, and oftentimes unhealthily, tied to our sense of self-worth. I find it ironic that I wrote a book about becoming an independent, un-codependent person, and here I find myself waiting on others to tell me whether or not my work is worth something. I'm working through these feelings because I know attention and sales are never going to sate any insecurities I have about my talents.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing is feeling like, yes, I am young, and yes, what message do I really have to add to the world being so young? There's a reason Jesus didn't start the church until 30, and there's a reason why most authors don't publish their first book until after they're 30. The age of 30 seems to be the time in a person's life when understanding, experience, and talent come together to form a potent mixture of creation. But what do I do in the meantime? I need to get this stuff out, to write my blogs and books and so on. I don't think it's possible for me to stay silent for eight years until I'm 30 to begin drawing from a deeper well of experience. Two of my favorite authors, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, wrote best-sellers in their early twenties. I'd be lying if I said I don't want the same for myself.

Every time I've written a book the same pattern has occurred. I stay up into the early morning formatting, converting files, and designing book covers. I self-publish it late into the night and then begin publicizing it the next day. When I began this process for my newest book, for the first time I felt a weariness, sort of a "here we go again" mentality. People don't realize how hard it is just to write, and it's so much harder to self-publish. It takes a lot of work, and in the back of my head I've had this image of success as a writer: my books on shelves and best-seller lists, signing copies, speaking at conferences. I'm being really honest about my hopes and dreams here.

I guess what I'm saying is, how long must I continue toiling away in obscurity, creating works virtually no one reads, before I break through to a larger audience? Because self-publishing, doing all the work myself, is making me tired. I don't want to give up, but I also want to feel like my work is at least leading somewhere. And honestly, right now I feel like it's not really going anywhere. I've been writing blogs and books for almost five years now, and the only people who read my work are still friends and family.

Tomorrow Never Dies, But We Do

2011-03-08T18:09:00.006-06:00

A few years ago I watched 12 second animated short called Race to End. A gunshot signals the beginning of a race as a baby is born. The baby boy immediately starts running and aging at the same time, flying through grade school, middle school, high school, college, a wedding, a job, a family, old age. At the finish line is a coffin and the man dives in as he crosses the ticker tape.

I can't find the video or I would show you. It's jarring, and I've thought of it often over these past few years. I'm 22 now, married, about to graduate college. My wife and I each have our own car. We have two cats. I have two bookshelves full of books. I've written six books and I have more in the oven.

What's on my mind lately is the thought that each day, I live life as if the good life is just beyond my reach, tomorrow or next week or in May or in four years when I'm no longer contractually obligated to stay in Kansas City. It's been said that humans are unable to 1) understand things while they're happening and 2) appreciate the present moment. We're cognitively incapable of grasping the full complexity, the multi-faceted nature, the infinite perspectives of the present moment, so we assume that the future and the future alone holds the keys to self-depth, gratitude, and happiness. We're never satisfied. Enough is not in our vocabulary most of the time.

These days I've started to feel like my life is slipping through my fingers. Older people I know say that life goes faster the older you get. I have a friend who is twice my age, and her theory about this phenomenon is that each year is a smaller percentage of your life. When you're five, your age is one-fifth of your life. When you're forty five, your age is one-forty-fifth of your life. Her theory fascinates me.

I'd like to add to it, though. Part of the reason why life seems to speed up as we get older is because we get so used to life. If we're lucky enough to have a stable job and home, we drive the same roads every day, see the same faces every day, sit in the same places, walk the same streets and hallways, make the same small talk, etc. Our brains dull almost everything we do because we're in a life that doesn't require us to pay much attention because we're so good at the routine. We basically live life with these words resonating in our hearts: been there, done that; seen it all.

When we live life in an accelerated mode, always looking to the future, a strange thing happens when we stop moving if only for a moment. Life catches up with us. I don't mean in a negative sense like all your mistakes eventually come back to you, because I don't believe that. Let me illustrate what I mean.

Four years ago I went to Mexico. I didn't bring any music with me. What I found was that, when I stopped taking in all new kinds of music all the time, I had a tremendous mental catalog of songs. For the duration of the trip, I had different songs playing in my head constantly.

When we stop moving through life like it's a race to the coffin, when we hold still for just a moment, it's like our shadow catches up to us and fwoom, we realize so much about ourselves. I was sick a few weeks ago, and I stayed in bed for two days. In and out of sleep, I dreamt constantly of my own life. I remembered the most mundane things from growing up in Texas. I had time to genuinely reflect. A strange sense of peace washed over me as I realized things about myself that I wasn't aware of because I was spending so much time thinking about tomorrow. I saw myself at age five, age eleven, as a senior, and on and on. I realized everything, and I mean everything, has, is, and will work out, and I felt relaxed about things for the first time in months.

Insight like that is rare, especially in this brave new world we live in. I cherish it, and something in me has changed. It's hard to articulate, and even harder to intentionally replicate, so I'll just appreciate the mystery of it for now instead of trying too hard to moralize it.

Growing up is hard. My wife and I feel pulled in a lot of possible directions. We want to enjoy the life we have but we're also afraid of settling down too early and missing out on other possible adventures. It's a weird tension that's never really resolved. But one thing I'm learning is that everything will be okay. We'll figure it out. All of us are figuring it out all the time. Life isn't a race to see who can be the fastest to get to the end. As Joe Dirt says, "Shit'll buff out."

The All-Consuming Pursuit Of Power

2011-03-04T17:46:00.006-06:00

I don't really like thinking about the world in terms of power. It makes me uncomfortable for a couple reasons: I don't like the idea that one force dominates human interaction, and I feel like talking/thinking/writing about power is really unoriginal. It's all been said before, and the power paradigm has been a dead horse being beaten again and again for thousands of years.

What's made me start thinking more about power lately has been my interactions with people in the day-to-day work environment. For the first time in my life, I'm working with both adults and children all day, every day. If it's one thing I've noticed about all the interactions between adults and adults, adults and children, and children and children it's this: the pursuit of power drives all interaction.

I realize this sounds bleak, but let me elaborate.

Adults and Adults

In watching the adults interact with one another, I've noticed that so much of our talking to each other is driven by either attempting to dominate or avoid domination. This is done in a variety of ways, some subtle, some overt, but almost every interaction throughout the day carries a tone of I'm better than you and here's why or I won't let you think you're better than me and here's how I'll do it. I've seen groups formed in order to reinforce both of these. The groups serve as a way to feel better than others and to avoid domination by having a core group that will back you up. The adults often scheme against one another, especially when offended by the comment or action of another adult, and the main tactic used to exercise power in those instances is character assassination.

Adults and Children

Perhaps the most common phrase said to children, from what I have seen, is "No." The mindset behind so much teacher language is that children are ours to dominate and tell what to do. In becoming a teacher, I've often worried that the children don't see me as a teacher only to ask myself, "What does that even mean?" When I'm honest with myself, it usually means they do what I want them to do, they listen when I want them to listen, and they see me as a person of authority. Essentially, when you unpack all the assumptions behind it, the idea of being seen as a teacher means being seen as someone who can freely and without much resistance exercise power and influence over children.

Children and Children

This is the most obvious of the interactions that demonstrates the forces of power. As adults, we've learned how to conceal and dole out in subtle ways all the things children do overtly. Children make friends based on how another person benefits them, they isolate those who pose a threat through appearing too perfect or too flawed, and they viciously attack those they are currently upset with. The groups are fluid, just like the adults' groups. Unlike most adults, however, they haven't yet figured out how to scheme against one another and spread seeds of character destabilization, so they say whatever they are thinking whenever they're thinking it.

I say all this to illustrate my point. Perhaps I'm becoming jaded about the realities of human interaction, but I've become disturbed by the idea that at our core, we desire nothing more than power. We thirst for it. I don't know if I believe that people are inherently selfish, because I've also seen moments of selfless beauty, but those are only in the moment when the adults or children aren't consciously thinking about ways to expand their locus of control.

Dallas Willard says that everyone was meant to have dominion since we are co-creators with God in all this. I would agree, since research shows that the worse kind of stress is the stress that leaves us feeling hopeless to change our circumstances. People come alive when given the chance to exercise autonomy and control and even power. We were born with a need for power, and we wilt without it.

But what's got me thinking is the idea that even a denial of power can be a way to reinforce power, or an attempt to create a different looking kind of power that will eclipse the dominant power structure in place. Take humility, for instance. Humility can, in many instances, be used as a way to gain clout through controlling others' perceptions of yourself as well as making them feel indebted to you for your service. This could all be operating on a subconscious level.

Or the rejection of the empire's ways, for instance. Shane Claiborne is well-known for this. Yet, in his pursuit to totally reject the ways of the empire, he has gained a certain amount of clout for his actions. He has book deals, an organization, and a regular speaking schedule. Business people do that too, so does it really make a difference if the message is different even if the medium is the same? A few years back he also held a festival where no money was allowed, but a special cloth was traded as currency for goods in the handmade "marketplace." Isn't that the same as a regular marketplace and regular money, only made in the image of what he thinks it should be?

I guess what I'm struggling with right now is the overall idea that empires exist because we built them, and they continue to pop up because we create them. No matter what, whether it be the kingdom of God, a new education initiative, or an interaction between two children, the driving motive is for one thing to dominate, for one thing to replace another, for one thing, idea, or person to be exalted and the other expelled.

Perhaps that's why the charter school movement is booming - they aren't so much about innovation as they are about control and the chance to have power and influence. It's no different than denominational splits: they happen because one group thinks they can do it better, or one group thinks they can gain more power by branching out, so they break from one another.

It also helped me understand why some theological branches consume themselves with the afterlife and who gets to go. If their theology demands they exercise humility - something admittedly difficult to do intentionally - then perhaps their energies and desires for power, control, and influence are being misdirected into being the bookkeepers of heaven. But I'll take it a step further. The new upcoming book Love Wins is also about heaven, and as I write this the title strikes me as peculiar for the first time. Is it possible that, even in a small way, this is another attempt to replace or dominate a theology of exclusion with a theology of inclusion? I'd appreciate your thoughts.

I've been wrestling with these ideas. Is the pursuit of power what drives us all? And if we deny that, do we not make things worse by convincing ourselves that we are different, when we are really blind to our own primal motivations? Are we bound to tribes and groups and cliques and alliances? If that's so, and there's no way to escape it, should we then learn how to play the game that lives inside all of us?

"This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to based on war and games." - William S. Burrough

How To Teach Kids To Hate Learning and Themselves

2011-03-01T16:59:00.005-06:00

I finally figured out how to make kids hate learning and, in the process, learn to see themselves as worthless. This insight has come from my experiences with student teaching thus far. Having an awareness into how to neuter a person's total creativity is a powerful tool, and one I think you should be aware of.

1.) Start with something interesting.

The point isn't to start with things that are boring. No, the lure must be glowing like an angler fish's bait. Start with an interesting book, like The Adventures of Huck Finn for instance.

2.) Chop every bit of it into pieces.

In order to teach people to hate learning, you have to serve the function of a Cuisinart. You must spread the work out over a course of weeks so that the pace is set.

3.) Slow the pace to that of a snail's.

They must never, ever be able to set their own pace, because they may move faster through it than you'd like, which would mean you'd have to find more work. Setting the pace slowly ensures that you can drag the learning out for weeks which makes your job easier. The point is to make them over-analyze things to the point that their energy goes less and less into thinking critically and more and more into how to BS and pull things out of thin air that don't exist. Forcing them to do this will ensure that they never forget that genuinely challenging tasks are a threat to their comfort, because you will teach them to expect as little challenge as possible.

4.) Create as much busywork as possible.

Nothing makes people realize something is pointless than a worksheet (especially one with bad clip art on it). So, hop online and find multiple worksheets for whatever it is you're doing. Just Google it. By now they may start to feel stressed out by the thing they once loved. They may want to just talk about it with each other, but don't give in to this temptation, because talking about it may remind them why they liked something in the first place. The point is that they work harder, not better. The point is that they work harder, not smarter. Keep them busy, and you will starve their intellectual curiosity. Keep them too busy to think.

5.) Grade, grade, grade.

But remember, you aren't trying to foster a collectivist attitude (Communism!). You're trying to foster a competitive spirit, so that they see each other as potential obstacles to their own success. This will work on two levels: it will first ensure that their true motivation for doing something - because they loved it - has been totally replaced by the desire to beat each other; it will secondly ensure that they only see the potential impact on their grade and not the actual virtue of the activity.

6.) Test them on it, over and over again.

The greatest way to destroy the joy of learning is to remind the students over and over again that they aren't learning what they're learning because it's fun, good, or satisfying to simply know now, today, in this moment. No, to do that would threaten all your previous efforts to crush their souls! Instead, constantly remind them that they need to know things for the sole purpose of passing a test at the end of the year. By repeatedly reminding them of this, they will begin to see that life isn't about learning at all, but doing the bare minimum. You can use other excuses too - you'll need it for a job someday, you need it for a grade, we have to teach it so that's why you have to learn it.

7.) Group them based on their grades.

By grouping them, you create a false sense of hierarchy. Nevermind that learning can't really be quantified or clearly identified, you've got a society to create! If we admitted to nuance and complexity of learning and life, we'd have an entire society of successful people, and our whole pyramid-scheme empire would collapse. Yes, yes, yes, the idea that there are three groups of people - high, medium, and low - was invented, but just...just pretend you don't know that. This will allow a false scarcity of intelligence to take hold on their hearts, so the ones who aren't at the top can learn that's the way things were meant to be, and the ones on the middle and top can find comfort in knowing they aren't on the bottom. That will be enough for the middle and upper classes, which will mean all groups have successfully given up the idea that learning is joyful.

8.) Remind them that learning is never the goal.

If you do all these things, you will have successfully helped students internalize that learning is about winning, getting ahead, and doing the bare minimum. If you are consistent, they will also learn to fear themselves and the possibility of failure, and any failure will not be seen as a chance to learn but as an opportunity for shame and self-loathing. If at all possible, dangle rewards and punishments in front of them at all times so their motivation is on avoiding something bad or getting something good. You could pay them to come to tutoring, give them bracelets for doing things they should be doing anyway, or just a smiley face sticker will do the trick in a pinch. The point is that they learn that the best way to move through life is to wait to be forced to do what they already know to do. This way they won't risk seeing us as what we are: adults scared of losing control.

9.) Let the cycle continue.

Now that you have taught kids that teaching to joy, passion, or even interest doesn't matter, give yourself a pat on the back. You have successfully jumped through all the administrative and legal hoops to meet the bare minimum. Could it be that you do that because you were raised in the same system that taught you to hate learning? Why, that's a ridiculous idea! You did it all for the kids. In the moments when you feel a dissonance between what you're doing and what you feel, just remind yourself: if you make too many waves you threaten your position in the institution. Even if you and the kids know what you're doing is misery-inducing and asinine, you must meet the requirements if you hope to continue on.

And now that you've met those requirements, you got to keep your job so you can do it all again next year.

Here's to teaching!

The Everythingness Of Life

2011-02-17T21:22:00.007-06:00

This week we've had really nice weather, in the 60s and 70s.

Spring is around the corner, and dangling in the air. As I walk out to my car each morning, I feel like all is right with the world. Spring reminds me of so many good things.

Yet, this week, I feel like the weather has brought something nearly unspeakable to light. The weather, with its simultaneous warmth and chill, captures so much about life. Spring is strange in that it isn't really one thing or the other. It may be warm in the sun but it's also cold in the shade. You need a jacket but you also need short sleeves. Spring leaves us in constant limbo.

Maybe that's why spring is my and many others' favorite season. It holds all the unspeakabilities about life. Spring is opportunity realized and not-yet-realized. It's warm and frigid. It's here and not-here. It's the epitome of bitter-sweet.

I read a book with some 3rd graders called Because of Winn-Dixie. I love that book, and in the weeks since we finished it my mind keeps wandering back to it again and again. It's this wonderful piece of literature about loneliness and sadness and friendship and forgiveness and acceptance. One of the characters in the book had a father who used to own a factory that made hard candy. The father had lost everything in the Civil War and, when he returned home to find his home burned and his family dead, he decides to pour all the sweetness and sadness of the world into a candy called a Littmus Lozenge. The magic of the candy is that when you taste it, it reminds you of sad things. It makes you realize things about yourself that you weren't aware were even there.

I think spring is kind of like that. I feel invigorated by spring and also emptied, like my mind and heart are suddenly found vacuous and full at the same time.

Something you might not know about me is that I lost my dad to suicide. He died in the fall, but I know that a lot of suicides happen in the spring, too. A lot of people say that it's because spring never is what we think it will be, at least not at first. It's usually a little colder than we thought, a little more rainy than we remembered, so I guess the thinking is that all the chilliness and thunderstorms push depressed people over the edge.

Maybe that's true. But lately I've been wondering if maybe it's that all those hurting people who are already on the edge and feel like they can't take life anymore, maybe spring reminds them of the paradox of life, how, like the Littmus Lozenge, the sweet and sad are all mixed up. I think most of us, hurting people especially so, are looking for a singular answer to things, a blanket universal truth to cover everything. Maybe it's that the truth spring brings about life being all mixed up and messy and wonderful and painful is too much for hurting people to take. Sometimes I think that's what happened with my dad. The everythingness of life is too painful for some to bear.

In the end of the movie Forrest Gump, Forrest is standing at his wife's grave. He says, "I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze. But I think maybe it's both, maybe both happening at the same time."

Yes, yes, yes. I resonate with this. I feel the tug, especially in springtime. I think we spend so much time thinking we're working toward some sort of final answer or pinnacle moment, then a season like spring comes along and reminds us that there is no singularity. There is spring, but there is also summer and fall and winter. There will be nice days and blizzard days, but neither will dominate and neither will last forever (at least in the Midwest). There's just life, which is purposeful and meaningless at the same time.

I feel the tug more these days, to just embrace everything as connected as well as isolated from everything else. I believe in God's plan and I also believe there is no God. God is both the knife that cuts and the bandage that heals, and sometimes I feel like God knows just what to do with me but I have no idea what to do with God. I feel like God is in everything and nothing at the same time. I feel like a temple and a wrecking ball. I feel like I'm an eternal wisp.

And don't we all feel this way, live in this tension, feel tugged toward this warm/cold season? No one fits into anything 100% of the time. The whole of it all is the 100%, not the fitting in. Life is one big venn diagram, and we're on the sides and in the middle. Life is all things at once, sweet and sad, always.

Sam Beam, AKA Iron & Wine, recently came out with a new album. The last five minutes on the album capture beautifully what I'm trying to say. Here are some of my favorite lines:

Become the fruit and the fall,
Become the glory and the guilt,
Become allegiance and doubt,
Become the whisper and the shout,
Become the hammer and the nail,
Become both now and then,
Become again and again,
We will, we will become.