Outer Life

Rage

The phone rings. 

I pick it up.  Cell phone noise.  "Hello?"  No response.  "Hello?"  Nothing.  "HELLO!"  Click.

The phone rings again.  Cell phone noise.  "Hello?"

"Did Margaret call?"

I say I have to check.

She says "huh?"

In a firm clear voice I say I have to check.

She says "you'll have to speak up, I can't hear you."

In a very loud, very clear voice I say I have to check.

She says "it's really hard to hear you, please speak up."

I scream into the phone: "I'LL HAVE TO CHECK!" 

Without waiting for her response, I stomp over to her office, check her messages, stomp back to my office, pick up the phone and yell "NO!" in my loudest angriest voice, putting my all into it, really letting her have it, punishing her with one word for for all she is doing to me.

She says "I can't hear you, what did you say?"

I slam the phone down.

If I were a cartoon character, right now there'd be a bubble over my head filled with those squiggly scribbles.

It rings again.  ID says it's her.  I get up and stomp out of my office, slamming the door on her ringing.  People stare as I stomp down the hall, but I don't see them, my mental blinders focused only on finding a phoneless place to hide and lick my wounds.

Fifteen minutes later, sitting in the empty cafeteria with my head buried in my hands, my fragile inner peace shattered into thousands of jagged shards now grating against the inner walls of my head, inflicting thousands of tiny wounds that build in intensity as my head throbs with pain, the call replays over and over in my head while I shake with rage at the injustice of it all:  the casual rudeness of shifting the burden of a crappy connection to me, the futility of fighting the power, the stupidity of fighting a phone, the shame in allowing her to dictate my behavior.  And it occurs to me that there's something about rage that sends a torrent of prehistoric chemicals gushing through my body, potent and volatile, causing my face to flush, my head to throb and my blood pressure to surge into dangerous territory as my instincts prepare me for battle with an invisible enemy that, oddly enough, cannot see me or, by all accounts, hear me.

And then I realize what's going on -- I'm starting to vomit up all that stress I've been eating.  What goes in must come out.  It wasn't pretty going in and, now that I see it spewing out, I can assure you it only got uglier while bottled up inside me.  While I expel this foul stress from my system, blowing chunks of it around like shrapnel, I suggest you take cover from me and my terrible eruptions.

N.B.

Different Reentry Problems of Artist and Art-Receiver: Mainly Quantitative

It is one thing to write The Sound and the Fury, to achieve the artistic transcendence of discerning the meaning in the madness of the twentieth century, then to finish it, then to find oneself at Reed's drugstore the next morning. A major problem of reentry, not solved but anaesthetized by alcohol.

It is something else to listen to a superb performance of Mozart's Twenty-first Piano Concerto, to come to the end of it, to walk out into Columbus Circle afterwards. At best, a moderately sustained exaltation; at worst, a mild letdown.

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.

Gifted

Welcome to Shady Glen, where the women are blonde, all the men are good-looking and the children are gifted.

Your child's school isn't perfect.  That is a fact easy to acknowledge but difficult to accept.  Your child isn't perfect either.  That is a fact difficult to acknowledge and difficult to accept.

There's a crisis of confidence at Shady Glen Elementary, a real potential for a run on the bank, as concerned parents begin to pull their kids out and send them to private schools.  The cause?  The principal's refusal to institute a gifted program.

The concerned parents point to their gifted children and worry they're being held back, forced to stand by in idle boredom while the teachers work with the slower kids. 

The principal, surveying an auditorium filled with parents, responds that, by definition, most of your children can't be gifted. 

The concerned parents nod their heads collectively, each agreeing that most of the other children can't be gifted while remaining convinced that their children are gifted.

The parents who believe their children are gifted need to believe this, for they cannot accept anything less for their competition-bred children.  They need to believe the school is perfect too, for only the best will do for their perfect children, and they couldn't be seen settling for anything less than the best.  This parental perfection illusion can be surprisingly effective, convincing vast numbers of reasonably intelligent people that an obviously imperfect school is perfect, so long as the illusion is constantly reinforced by a combination of peer acceptance ("everyone goes there") and high standardized test scores (objective proof of the school's superiority). 

These are common issues, I imagine, especially at schools filled with the offspring of achievement-oriented parents.  So what led to our crisis?

Last year Shady Glen Elementary's test scores dropped.  Not much of a drop, but enough to shake the parental foundation of faith in the school's perfection, leading to urgent meetings of concerned parents, resolutions that something must be done and the retention of academic consultants, resulting in the formulation of educationally-appropriate action plans to boost scores.

Standardized tests are designed to test how well the students learned the state-mandated curriculum for their grade level.  This means that a student who is not working at grade level should get a low score while a student who is working at grade level should get a high score.  Students working above grade level should generally get the same score as students working at grade level for the test only covers the curriculum for the grade level, nothing more, no extra credit. 

So if you want to boost overall test scores, you'd get the most bang for your buck working with the students who are below grade level.  You'd devote any extra time strengthening the skills of the students working at or near grade level.  You wouldn't waste any time with the students who already work above grade level, for those kids will achieve the maximum score without your help. 

You can imagine what happened once the teachers at Shady Glen Elementary rolled up their sleeves and implemented the action plan to boost test scores.  Attention was taken from the gifted kids and lavished on the slower kids, angering the parents of the gifted kids. 

Soon these angry parents started talking and organizing and complaining.  This group of angry parents, some with truly gifted offspring, attracted many more suddenly angry parents, convinced that their kids were gifted too and concerned that if they didn't join up now, their kids would be excluded from the new gifted program.  The principal's refusal to play the gifted game poured oil on the fire, immediately prompting the angriest parents to pull their kids out of the school. 

Although the early exodus was tiny, it included some truly gifted kids.  The remaining parents, convinced their children were gifted too, concerned that the gifted kids who departed were already getting ahead of the gifted kids left behind, upped the ante, petitioning the school board, dividing the faculty, dialing up the acrimony, trafficking in rumor and innuendo.   

All the while, the exodus of gifted and near-gifted  and supposedly gifted kids continues.  To leave your child in the school is to admit that your child is, well, less than gifted, a fact difficult to acknowledge and difficult to accept.  These departures will lead to further declines in test scores, which in turn will further undermine the school's status in the minds of the remaining concerned parents, which in turn will lead them to move their kids to private schools, which in turn will lead to further declines in test scores.  And so on.  Thus the crisis in confidence breeds a classic run on the bank, except in this case they're running away.

I blame the standardized tests, which upset the delicate balance needed to sustain the necessary illusion of educational perfection.  If the parents didn't measure the school by its standardized test scores, the parents wouldn't have insisted that the school damage itself by boosting the scores.  And if the school didn't respond to the parents by resolving to boost the test scores, the school wouldn't have tried to standardize the kids by teaching from the bottom up.

For our kids are all gifted, just not in a standardized way. 

Scream 'n' Ream

Early morning weekend meeting.  A low buzz of murmuring in the air, the caffeine just starting to kick in as we jolt ourselves to life as the door opens and the Big Guy fills the room.

It's a crisis we'll be a having, another delay to explain.  This time it's someone else's fault, so I sit back, frozen in composed passivity, easy to overlook as I prepare myself for a good ol' fashioned scream 'n' ream.

The Big Guy pulls a folded paper from his pocket.  He smooths it out on the table, starts reading from the top.  A prepared rant.  Boy is he pissed.  So mad he won't trust himself to riff.  Date.  Fact.  Date.  Fact.  He drones on and on, his litany of horrors neutered by his leaden style.  I wonder what Olivier would have done with this material.  No doubt he'd have us all wimpering by now.  Instead the Big Guy has anesthetized us.

It's a full house and getting fuller, late arrivals slinking in, their entry announced by the door, its pneumatic slow-shut device gently easing the door closed until, six inches from its goal, it gives up and slams the door into the jamb.

The Big Guy looks up from his script after the sixth slam and, in his best snarl, informs us that we are not to touch that fucking door!, then he looks down and returns to his recitation.

Five minutes later he's done.  That wasn't so bad.  He asks a question, he gets an answer, he asks another, he gets another.  This is going well.  Productive, even.  I relax just as the Big Guy turns to me, defensively burrowed into my chair at the other end of the table, and asks me a question.  A question about last year's delay, the delay that we did have something to do with.  A loaded question packed with enough powder to blast me to pieces in front of this suddenly hostile crowd.  He doesn't wait for my answer, he's finally found the part he was born to play that day, and he's not going to let my answer take it away, so he leans forward and begins to flay.

I assume my best punching bag posture, absorbing his verbal blows without flinching, resisting the urge to avert my eyes from his wrath, focusing instead on the trajectories traced by the tiny bits of spittle shooting from his raging lips. 

I sense the shock in the room, the potent mixture joy and fear:  joy that someone else is the target of the scream 'n' ream and fear that you'll be next.

Now I should point out at this point that it wasn't my fault.  In fact, until a few weeks ago I had nothing to do with this project.  I'm just a stress-eater, a hot seat sitter, the guy who shows up when it blows up.  No responsibility or authority, I'm armed only with bland assurances and a power tie, getting by with a nod of the head, an earnest expression and a determination to take it like a Stoic.

Where were we?  Ah, yes, the rant.  The Big Guy conveys his unhappiness in a few well-chosen words, and at least a thousand ill-chosen words, dramatically building to a crescendo as he stands up, gestures at the door and orders me to leave.  Grateful for this unexpected Get Out of Jail Free card, I gather up my sheaf of untouched papers and, steering well clear of the Big Guy at the head of table, make it out in one piece, my freedom punctuated with a satisfying bang as the door slams into the jamb.

A flunky escorts me out, all friendly and familiar, his soothing words intended to salve my supposedly-singed psyche.  He doesn't realize I'm a professional.  Even so, I'm dizzy, the tension constricting the blood flow to my brain when it isn't pounding my cranial walls with a repetitively dull throb.  I stop, reach down for the Advil in my attache and realize I left the attache in the room.

The flunky refuses to retrieve it.  "The Big Guy ordered us not to touch the door!  You'll have to wait until the meeting's over."  Nothing doing.  I'm a professional.  I don't sit and wait where I'm not wanted.  It's the weekend and I'm not going to waste it cooling my heels in a well-appointed lobby.  Besides, after you've been on the receiving end of a spleen venting, how much worse could it get?  It's liberating, in a way.

I hand the flunky my papers, freeing both hands in case the Big Guy tries his haymaker on me.  Before the flunky objects, I open the door and survey the room.  I see the Big Guy's back hunched over another of his scripted rants, so I saunter into the room all casual-like as every head turns to follow me, no doubt hoping I've come for revenge, a revenge that will have the incidental effect of saving them from the Big Guy's wrath.  But no, I head for the attache and, in one fluid motion, I grab it, spin and head for the open door, the Big Guy just now noticing me as my purposeful but studiously unhurried gait takes me through the doorway without pause, the flunky eases the door shut and we hear this loud crack!   I turn and see coffee dripping off the flunky's balding head, dark splotches on his shirt, and I realize how close I came to receiving the Big Guy's parting gift. 

As I drive home, my nerves shot, my head pounding, my cramped muscles unable to release the residual tension, it occurs to me that I've exceeded my recommended daily allowance of stress, probably my recommended lifetime allowance too.  I'm getting too old for this.

Just the Ticket

So I'm waiting for this meeting to start and this guy sitting next to me starts talking about his new car.

He just bought an AMG S55, the big Benz with the 500 hp engine, and took it to the interstate late one night to see what it could do.  He's cruising on one of the flattest, straightest stretches of highway you'll ever see, pushing the needle up beyond 100, then 110 and so on until he's zipping along near 150, marveling at the smooth ride while blasting Green Day's American Idiot.  Pure bliss. 

Then he sees the flashing lights in his rear view.

It takes him a while to slow down enough to pull over, all the while he's cursing, hitting his steering wheel, certain he'll be tagged for reckless driving, which at a minimum means you spend a night in jail and they take away your license for six months.  And just try to get car insurance with that on your record.

Anyways, the officer pulls in behind him, walks around the car, asks this guy how fast he thinks he was going.  This guy doesn't know what to say, should he admit he was driving that fast?  Before he can say anything, the officer starts lecturing him  on the dangers of driving fast, especially at night, do you know what would happen if you hit an animal at that speed?  It could kill you!  You should see what I see on this road.  I'm sorry but I'm going to have to ticket you. 

The officer writes up a ticket and this guy signs it, grateful he's not being cuffed, and after the officer drives away the guy just sits there for a while, shaking.  Then he looks at the ticket and notices the "85" written in the speed box.

Now here's where it gets interesting.  This guy is a member of an invitation-only foundation set up to assist the families of disabled or dead officers.  In addition to the good feelings one gets from giving to a worthy cause, the foundation offers its donors a special license plate frame that announces their membership in the foundation.  This license plate frame just happened to be on this guy's new car that night, so the officer who stopped him must have known that he supported families of fallen officers.

I ask him how much it costs to join the foundation.  He tells me a couple grand and he offers to sponsor me for membership.

Thus I find myself on the horns of a dilemma.

On the one hand, who wouldn't want to help the families of injured or killed officers?  I spend much of my life within the jurisdiction of these officers, commuting on their highways and occasionally indulging in some power weaving while wending my way to and from home.  I respect the work they do so long as they leave me alone.  Maybe I should add this good cause to my preferred list of charities.  At least it isn't one of those infernal shakedown operations.

On the other hand, it feels like graft, impure and simple.  If I buy a membership, my foundation license plate frame would be a constant reminder of my complicity in corruption.  It may be perfectly legal, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, but the whole license plate frame thing just screams out something I don't think I want to hear.

I suppose I could buy a membership and then throw out the license plate frame, but what would be the point of that? 

I told him I'd think about it.  If cost weren't an issue, would you join?

Descent

How does everyone know that you have a famous ancestor? 

It’s not like we figured this out on our own.  Your surnames are different.  You don’t look anything like him.  His picture doesn’t hang on your wall.  He lived so long ago, your name isn’t in any of his biographies.  And, by the way, I’ve never seen any of those biographies in your house.

Yet everyone knows.  How?  I suppose someone in your family could’ve told us, if we knew anyone in your family, but we don’t, so that’s not it.  No, it must’ve been you.  You must have told us.

But why?  Do you think your connection is the sort of thing we’d find interesting?  I suppose it is interesting, in a trivial way, and I can understand reluctantly divulging it to a close friend or a committed partner, sharing it with an embarrassed shrug designed to convey your deep indifference to the connection, your abhorrence at the notion that anyone would think more (or less) of you just because you happen to be descended from a famous ancestor.  That is a limited disclosure, a secret among friends, the sort that binds the recipient to an oath of silence, the last sort of disclosure one would expect to lead to everyone knowing that you have a famous ancestor. 

No, it’s hard to conclude from the evidence that you’ve done anything other than spread the word of your connection far and wide, shouting it from the rooftops for all to hear, determined that no one who knows you will fail to know that you have a famous ancestor. 

You puzzle me.  What do you hope to gain by this?  Are you under the impression that having a famous ancestor, by itself, entitles you to our esteem and elevates you over those of us with lowlier ancestry?  Exactly how does that hereditary principle work?  Does it decline over time, as lowlier genes intervene to dilute your famous ancestor’s genes?  Come to think of it, what exactly did you inherit from that famous ancestor, other than the fact of your descent?  Help me with this, I’m having a hard time understanding the significance of this whole ancestry thing once we stop talking about kings and queens and thoroughbred horses and pure breed dogs, but I’m just the seed of a bunch of forgotten nobodies so what do I know.

Here’s a question that’s really bugging me.  Don’t take this the wrong way – I’m genuinely curious, don’t mean to imply anything negative about you personally – but don’t you fear being dwarfed by your famous ancestor?  It’s hard to avoid the comparison and, well, let’s be frank, it doesn’t flatter you.  And how could it?  I mean, he is a famous ancestor after all and it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever be a famous ancestor, let alone a known ancestor.  That sounded harsh, and I didn't mean for it to sound that way, but it's the first thing I thought after learning of your connection with your famous ancestor.  Let’s face it, you have “descended” from the famous ancestor in both senses of that word. 

So do you really want everyone to know that you have a famous ancestor?

P.S. Michael Gilleland of the always wise Laudator Temporis Acti offers some ancient wisdom on descent at "Stemmata Quid Faciunt?"

Found Music

I don't remember much about the wedding. And that's a good thing. A poorly planned affair, it was thrown together at the last minute by a couple with bad aim. As we waited outside in the hundred degree heat for the minister to show up, the quaint little chapel offering everything for your wedding needs except ventilation, the kids got crazy, perhaps from the heat, but more likely from the prospect of chasing each other up and down the grass-covered hills while wearing their wedding best. When the minister finally made it, lamely blaming the directions, we rounded up the kids, all stained, sweaty and crazed, and herded them into the hothouse chapel.

While we wilted, the kids revolted. I don't blame them. If I could've cried my way out of that stunningly realistic simulation of hell, I would've wailed too.

During the service, a skirmish broke out in the second pew, three sisters kicking the wooden divider with their patent leather pumps while lamenting the heat in loud stage whispers. A particularly scruffy lot to begin with, these three girls were a posse unto themselves, wreaking havoc on the green fields with malicious abandon, pushing the smaller kids and throwing rocks at the chapel, perhaps in an admirable but wayward attempt to punch some air holes in that insufferable building. They were wild, the sort of kids who've never been tamed, a feral pack beyond redemption. While the minister hastily escorted the bride and groom to wedded bliss, the twisted sisters resisted all attempts to quell their kicking and shush their whining, distracting us from the nuptials and even, at after one particularly piercing shriek, drawing glares from the wedding party, momentarily popping their bubble of serenity on that god-forsaken afternoon.

The rest is all a blur, a gratefully repressed memory, except one moment I'll never forget. It was during the reception, a raucous affair mixing the aforementioned crazed kids with the now-crazed adults, their dehydrated bodies rapidly filling with gallons of freely flowing chilled jug wine, as I was checking for the nearest exit while gauging the temperature of the room, trying to time my exit for just before the fist fights started, when the sisters began to sing.

Their first notes, in perfect three-part harmony, silenced the room. They stood in a row, their heads back and eyes closed, three perfect angelic voices emanating from the mouths of devils. Transfixed, we stared, drinking in their sounds of innocence, basking in its pure tone as their voices elevated us out of the sty and into the clouds, our frazzled inner fibers soothed for the first time that day. I don't remember how long they sang, for time stood still while they held the stage. Nor do I remember what they sang, for their song bypassed my brain and went straight to my soul. Although the rest of the day was a blur, as I've said, I distinctly recall it being a satisfying blur, the music replaying in our minds, dulling our sharp edges and casting a mellow glow over the proceedings.

Great music transcends, taking us places we never expected to go. The sisters' music was great music, perhaps the greatest I've ever heard, for it transcended the vilest circumstances, tamed the wildest beasts, dragooning us most unwittingly to a higher and much better place than we had any reason to expect. Sure I've heard more skilled singers singer better songs accompanied by finer music played by superior musicians, but I expected to hear all that when I heard it. It's the unexpected that made the sisters' performance so memorable, a quality that's very difficult to reproduce in a world-famous concert hall with a world-renowned orchestra playing world-famous classics.

The sisters' moment is an example what I think of as "found music," great music that sneaks up on us when we least expect it. One rarely encounters found music these days, surrounded as we are by a cacaphonous din of canned sounds and jingles desperately trying to grab our short attention spans with three seconds of empty catchiness, while our greatest music is preserved in specially-built hermetically-sealed acoustically-perfect listening palaces safely isolated from the world, where even the greatest performances merely elicit a nod of the head and a polite clap of the hands from expressionless faces, their suitably high expectations met but, sadly, rarely surpassed.

Lovely

I love you, baby.

I love your Jennifer hair, Chanel smell, Bottega Veneta box clutch, Helmut Lang molded alligator cuff, Lynn Ban brooch, Pucci print sun hat, Dior Motard sunglasses, Hermès scarf, YSL Rive Gauche by Tom Ford jacket, Daslu tank top, Armstrong wristband, Prada belt, Lucky jeans, Manolo shoes and Tara 'tude.

I love you, baby.

I love the highlights in your hair, the surprised arc of your sculpted brows, the placidity of your botoxed forehead, the depths of your darkly shadowed eyes, the puffy pout of your collagenned ruby red lips, the blinding reflection of your capped pearly-whites, the perky tilt of your new nose, the inviting bulge of your silicon chest, the elegance of your tipped nails and the daring of the barbed wire tattoo running round your right ankle.

Baby, I love you!

N.B.

I felt that I had been mistaken in the way I'd been going about trying to write novels. I would start with a hero who was in a certain setting, and then the plot would crank into motion. All of a sudden, all the things that I was interested in would be marginalized. Eventually I gave up on the plot part. I just had him go through his lunch hour because that seemed the most efficient way to say the things I had saved up to say. The plot has to be very tiny for me to pay any attention to it for some reason. As soon as my narrators focus on something, they seem to lose track of the fact that they're supposed to be part of some momentous chain of events.

-- Nicholson Baker discussing The Mezzanine with Alexander Laurence and David Strauss at The Write Stuff.

Human Shields

Kids can be a great crutch for the socially-awkward, especially at parties.

When they're babes they're magnets, the center of attention, drawing a crowd without any effort on your part. You just sit with the baby in your lap and occasionally confirm for the curious that, yes, you aren't getting much sleep and, yes, she sure is cute. Once you tire of company you can take the baby in for a diaper change or spend a little time rocking her upstairs, shushing away any wandering partiers with a stern and firm "she needs to rest!" Instead of dismissing you as the cold fish you are, they'll say you're such a great father, taking care of the baby while mom enjoys the party.

Once your kid starts walking, you can no longer just sit there. You have to get up and follow her around. This requires a little more effort on your part, but with practice you will become adept at maneuvering the little one into out-of-the-way sanctuaries of peace and quiet free of intrusive interrupters. If your toddler is up to the task, take her for a walk around the block. If all else fails, play the diaper change gambit. Even if she's potty-trained. They won't know. Instead of dismissing you as the cold fish you are, they'll say you're such a great father, taking care of the toddler while mom enjoys the party.

Savor this happy situation while you can for soon the day will come when, upon arrival at a party, your youngest will run off to join the other kids, leaving you to face your fellow party guests alone, without the protection of your security blanket.

I recently found myself in this sad situation, a social cripple deprived of his crutch at a large Superbowl party swarming with strangers. After years of using my kids as human shields, my guest avoidance skills had atrophied. My aimless-walk-that-appears-purposeful maneuver failed. I'd forgotten to vary my route and my pace, making it painfully obvious that I was just walking in circles to avoid human contact. I adjusted on the fly, adopting an I'm-looking-for-someone-where-is-she expression, but the pity and disdain on their faces revealed that they'd already seen through my act. I fell back on Plan B, the serial group glom, but the huddled circles of party goers tightened their perimeters upon my approach, effectively preventing me from penetrating their defenses with my patented silent-but-knowing-while-signaling-that-I-care nod. By this point I was resigned to Plan C -- planting myself in the middle of the crowd in front of the bar for the rest of the party -- but our party hosts had thoughtfully provided two bars, clearing the crowd and with it my chance of spending the afternoon unnoticed.

With no other plans left up my sleeve, it had to be Plan D then: watch the game. It was a Superbowl party after all. But by then the game had already started, every seat was taken, even the standing room was occupied, so I stood alone outside, watching the game and the party through the sliding glass doors, shivering in the cold ocean breeze while thinking what a fitting scene this was, a rare melding of the figurative and the literal, as I saw my reflection in the glass, a shadow of a man on the outside looking in.