Triskaidekaphobia

In my last post I noted that this was looking like a very writerly summer, even though I wasn’t actually doing very much writing. Well, it looks like a little triskaidekaphobia was all I needed to start writing again, because I’ve been way more productive ever since starting my thirteenth creative writing notebook last week. It’s not because I actually have ideas for things to write; most of it is just sub-par flash fiction or daily anecdotes that really don’t deserve being put to print. But ever since starting that journal, I’ve been living through cursed time, and it’ll only end when I fill up that notebook and move onto my fourteenth. Nothing too unlucky has actually happened yet; it’s been a perfectly decent week all things considered. But, to my OCD-riddled mind, always unraveling a vast mathematic conspiracy that doesn’t exist, evidence is a vestigial concern when compared to the evil of the number thirteen.

I became triskaidekaphobic* when my family moved from Texas to Minnesota on my thirteenth birthday. I don’t entirely remember if I legitimately thought we moved because I turned thirteen or if it was some really weird and ineffective form of protest, but either way, it stuck around long past its usefulness (if it ever had any to begin with). And it’s not just the number thirteen itself either; there’s a whole host of family of unlucky numbers that all tie back to thirteen somehow. If I’m reading a book, say, then I’ll never stop reading on page twenty-six because, of course, twenty-six divided by two is thirteen. If I’m on a run, I’ll never go six miles on a main route and then add on an extra mile to make it seven, since six plus seven equals thirteen. Six and a half miles is also off the table, because if you double that, you get thirteen**. This makes reading and running and keeping a calendar and a whole host of other things pretty difficult, especially when you get into the three and four digits and there are just too many hidden links to keep track of. I’ve often said that I’m not really a math person, but that’s not true, I guess. I’m just really, really good at a kind of math that doesn’t matter to anyone but me, and doesn’t ever help me at all.

To be clear, I’m not a slave to my fear of thirteen, more of an employee. I’ll slack off on my duties if I have a good reason, but then try to do something to make up for it later, and feel guilty the whole time. I would intentionally make mistakes to avoid an unlucky answer on high school math homework, but I’d usually pull it together for quizzes or tests. I always knew that the fear was imaginary, and that good grades were worth whatever stress writing the forbidden numbers would put me under. But, imaginary as it was, the fear was always there, and I could never be entirely at ease until it was neutralized. Reading over those last two sentences, I realize that I probably came off as crazier than I meant to, writing something that no one with a totally healthy mind could ever really understand. I guess that’s because I don’t have a totally healthy mind: I’ve got clinical OCD, and fear of thirteen is one of my less stressful but more noticeable symptoms.

The few times that I’ve tried explaining this fear to someone, they’ve usually proposed a test: read a book to its thirteenth page (or something like that), leave it for a whole day, and see if anything bad happens. But there’s just too much stimulus in a day, and I can always find something that goes wrong and claim to myself that it was all the thirteen’s fault. I’ve even made thirteen into something of a character in my mind to explain these discrepancies: a tempter who offers a couple pleasant days, maybe even a spot or two of unusually good luck, then strikes when you look away, and when you realize your mistake, it’s been on you too long and left a stain too large to clean simply by flipping to the fourteenth page***.

I’m not sure if any of this is at all interesting to anyone but me. All these conflicts are so deep in my own mind that I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t translate well to anyone else’s. This is still a blog post, though, so I feel like I need some kind of a conclusion. It’d be nice to say that I’m still fighting it, that I won’t surrender to the illogical disease in my brain. But, even at my best, I’m not a terribly logical person, and don’t want to be one either. And as far as OCD symptoms go, this is a pretty innocuous one. Maybe it’s all just striving for some kind of control, the result of a faulty survival instinct finding a pattern where there isn’t one. If that’s the case, then I’m fine living with the illusion. 

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* In case you haven’t caught on, yes, someone took the time to designate a seventeen-letter, seven-syllable word for people who fear the number thirteen. Either there are a disturbing number of people who share my superstition or lexicographers just have too much time on their hands.

** Fun fact: in my personal numerology, one hundred and thirty nine is the absolute worst number. The first two digits on their own make thirteen, the last two digits on their own are three times thirteen, and all the digits added together make up thirteen.

*** I’ve actually made up a whole cast of characters for the numbers to explain their odd interactions: one and three are toddlers, innocent but with infected blood, doomed to grow up into the demonic numbers. Six and seven are brother and sister (six is the girl and seven is the boy, of course), who are each okay on their own, but when you put them together they begin to resemble their evil aunt thirteen. They relentlessly bully number five, by the way, who is the put-upon middle child of the single-digit family. As I said, I’m decent at the parts of math that don’t actually solve problems, like character-development.

Adventures in Quilt Appraisal

I feel like I’m having a very writerly summer. Not that I’m actually putting a whole lot of words on the page this summer (my productivity, compared to the past four summers, is actually at an all time low), but there’s something that seems vaguely but powerfully literary about my schedule. I get up early in the morning, spend eight hours navigating the byzantine social structures of second graders, come home starving and make myself too much pasta, and spend the evening reading and phoning my girlfriend and wasting time on Minecraft and trying to write. It seems like the kind of summer a successful novelist would reflect on years later in a long and rambling memoir, or the groundwork for a novel that’s bound to turn interesting once my character discovers a dead body or finds a portal to another world or something. I’m not sure what exactly is writerly about it; maybe the work, or the independence, or the loneliness. At any rate, a key element of my writerly summer seems to be that I do a lot of wandering, and last week that wandering brought me to investigate the Faulkner Art Gallery, where I found that some consortium of Midwest quilters were having their annual exhibition. That seemed like the natural place for a writer-type to have a wandering, so I went in and looked around.

Writerly pretensions aside, I’ve honestly really wanted to go to a quilt exhibit ever since my Art History professor made the case that quilters found beauty in abstraction centuries before the official art scene experimented with new kinds of representation, though the art of quilting wasn’t recognized by scholars until very recently for the obvious sexist reasons. I’ve also been interested in visual arts for a while, ever since my girlfriend told me how her composing figures on a background in a painting gave her the idea for a beautiful short story.

Wandering around a museum and assessing art is harder than it looks, though. I’d only ever really tried it for a couple Art History assignments, and then I had the terms and tools for analysis laid out ahead of time. Focusing on the quilts beyond a glance felt unnatural, like forcing magnets together at matching poles. It makes sense, I guess; I’ve spent basically my whole life paying attention to whatever visual stimulus is immediately interesting or useful and discarding the rest. Looking at the quilts mounted around the gallery, I couldn’t help but wonder what I was supposed to be thinking about these things that I’d hardly glance at if they were laid out on a bedspread. 

So, as a frustrated college student is wont to do, I jumped through a half dozen academic frameworks and arrived at no conclusion. I got some decent Feminist-Marxist analysis out of a quilt full of half-naked women, cut off at odd angles and spiraling in floral patterns, as something about the commodification of bodies, in line with Hannah Höch’s work in the early twentieth century. But then I read the artist’s statement on the side of the quilt, which read something like, “When I saw all the pretty girls on this fabric, I just knew I had to make a quilt out of it!” So, unless the artist was going for some deep death-of-the-author type crap, my analysis was bust. Next I tried looking at the quilts as the creators would, but it was clear from the start that it was a world unto itself: every artists’ statement referenced different teachers and styles and schools that I had never heard of. Assessing the quality as something objective was impossible too (I had no idea why the quilts that won awards were better than any others), as was simply appreciating the time and effort that went into the art (because I just had no clue what it took to make them). 

The best I could come away with were a couple personal feelings, no more than whim and memory: a collection of brown and grey patches that reminded me of a snowless and cloudy winter day in Minnesota, an elegant pattern of warm colors on a black background like fire at night, a collage of rose designs that faded from black to red to pink to white. But there was no epiphany, nothing but a couple quilts I thought were pretty.

Which scares me, sometimes. I don’t like the idea that there’s a whole world of richness and beauty that I could only ever unearth if I spent the next five years studying quilts. I’ve always imagined that the beauty of visual art is available to anyone willing to lend their eyes to a picture for a little while. Which is reductive, I realize; people study art for a reason, and for many of the same reasons why I study literature. Probably all this wasted thought comes from my impulse to make myself writerly, to be the kind of mustache-stroking intellectual who can stare at a painting and recognize its worth, even if I also think those kinds of people are insufferable a lot of time. I found some beauty in something I’d never seen before. Maybe that should be enough.

The Sorrows of Being a Male English Major

Over the past couple of years I’ve had to get used to being the only guy in the room. Last year at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute I was in a fiction class of eighteen with only one other male, and was one of the few guys working for Cow Tipping Press. Every summer before I was one of the only boy employees at Kiddywampus (and the only one willing to work Princess-Fairy Camp when needed), with babysitting jobs on the side. And now I just finished up my training as an Americorps Service Member for an elementary school literacy program which, predictably, was also mostly women. A look at my resume, and you’d probably give three-to-one odds that I was female. That’s the life of an English/education major, I guess.

I should be clear that this isn’t some kind of men’s rights screed against the oppression of the matriarchy. At worst, my position as a straight, white, middle-class, Christian male gets me moderately uncomfortable sometimes, and even that’s rare. Mostly it’s a non-issue, which I know is far from the story a woman entering a male-dominated field would tell. And God knows that I’m much happier working at a toy store or school than, say, in the axe body spray-filled university-sized locker room that I imagine business school is. 

Still, there are times when I’ve felt left out. It’s a small problem, but it still hurts, and I think it’s worth writing about all the same.

There was this book that circulated through my family during our last year in Waco called Pick Me Up, which was basically a huge collection of infographics and random facts on topics the authors must’ve chosen by throwing darts at a college course catalogue. I still remember that page 87 described the evolutionary and biological features of masculinity, dating back to hunter-gatherer societies, while page 127 described the same thing for femininity. One column explained how men operated on a “fight or flight” reflex in times of scarcity, while some scholars theorized that women alternatively used a “tend and befriend” framework. Another claimed that, even in the most socially-constructed view of gender, men are still angrier and more prone to violence than women. A couple other fun fact sheets I found as a kid, along with a lot of explicit instructions, told the same story: girls had their world of creativity and caring, while boys got to fight over who gets to be leader. As a boy who never had much of a shot at being the alpha male and didn’t see much in it in this first place, it’s probably not much of a surprise that I spent most of my time in elementary school hanging out with girls.

Again, this isn’t something that bothers me much these days. But sometimes it does. Sometimes I come across a character that makes fun of less-than-manly men as lazy, weak, naive, spoiled, pretentious, arrogant, or, at best, as a soul too pure for this world who can only hope to inspire the real heroes with their inevitable death. And I can’t help seeing myself in them.

But, for all the thinking I’ve been doing about it, I think the best answer is just not to think about it. Kids don’t care if you’re a boy or girl when you’re reading them a storybook, so long as you use funny voices and make sure they can all see the pictures. Your characters don’t know what your gender is, to them you’re the omnipotent God charting the plot of their lives at your whim, and anyway they’re probably less concerned with your gender is than why you’re making their lives so goddamn difficult. So screw it. That’s easier said than done, but if what I love doing is what I love doing, then the gender demographics of it isn’t going to change what I love about it.

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* If anything, it makes ingrained sexism even more apparent (if the publishing industry reflected the actual number of people writing, men would be lucky to have a couple feet of shelf space in any bookstore). 

Journaling

As if keeping a blog where I talk exclusively about my own thoughts, feelings, and experiences wasn’t enough of a tip-off that I’m way too concerned with myself, I’ve also been keeping a journal since August 11, 2013. I’ve updated it every single day in the six years since, covering my entire high school experience and three quarters of college. That’s a little over two thousand entries, spanning a collection of six full tattered spiral-bound and composition, with a seventh in progress. And I doubt anyone will ever read it, not even me.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe after I die some family members might page through it, or some historian might use it as a footnote in some argument about politics that haven’t happened yet (though I doubt it; historians of the future won’t exactly be hard-pressed for personal information about out generation). And I’ve glanced over it, once in a while, though I’ve never read it through all the way and probably never will. Because doing so would mean trudging through pages of entries from uneventful chapters of my life, like Saturday, February 7, 2015: “Slept it pretty late. Saw a terrible movie. Pretty warm outside for once.” I mean, seriously, how could that be interesting to anyone at all?

So why do I do it? On August 11, 2013 I probably had grand ideas about preserving my life for posterity’s sake, but nowadays these seven notebooks are mostly one of the less harmful products of my clinical OCD. I know that I won’t sleep be able to fall asleep if I don’t write something, even if it is nothing more than the thirteen useless words from February 7, 2015. If there is a deeper reason that’s been driving me, it’s probably a fear that the days of my life will all blend together into one mass of memory, and that I’ll eventually forget everything that mattered to me. But, if that’s the problem, then three not-quite sentences the state of sleep, weather, and cinema on February 7, 2015 don’t really do much to preserve the importance of my life. If anything, they raise questions of whether I’m doing anything worth remembering. 

But, of course, the entries aren’t always like that. Some are truly bizarre, made even stranger by the lack of context supporting them, like September 11, 2013: “Guy from the Thespian Club running around acting weird and slapping people. He came after me, so I ran and hid in the Euro room.” Was the Thespian Club doing some experimental recruitment strategy at the activities fair, or was it a rouge member unleashing thespianism upon Edina High School? Did he actually pose a credible threat to me, or was I just a weak-willed sophomore who saw danger everywhere? (I can actually guess the answer to that one, but I’d rather not dwell on it.) No matter what, the more interesting sections of my journals are disturbing in their own right. Clearly I imagined that the Thespian Club incident was important enough to get a reserved spot in my mind for all time, and all I’d need was a couple lines to retrieve the anecdote from memory storeage. But it didn’t work; it’s all gone, and the only hint that any of it ever happened are two sentences that might’ve been hyperbole, or straight-up lies. (Maybe it’s a bad sign that I don’t even trust my past self to tell me the truth.)

And then, of course, there’s the problem of what my journals don’t capture. The entries are never exhaustive or emotional (with a couple comically melodramatic exceptions where I lapse into purple prose and end sentences with multiple exclamation points). As my dad often notes in his sermons, life isn’t like the end of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, where everyone immediately recognizes the important things you’ve done, throws a parade in your honor, and gives you a giant glowing orb for your troubles. The small moments: the thoughts that occur to you on walks between classes and seem incidental at the time, only to grow, or the friendships that start with a passing comment, none of that makes it onto the page. Keeping a journal really wrecks the realism of any epistolary story because, read as a narrative, my journal is absolutely terrible: names appear with no introduction and the main character makes random (and often really, really bad) choices for no apparent reason. 

So yeah, don’t expect a lot from journaling, especially if you aren’t about to invest a whole lot of time into it. Half of it is boring, half of it is completely indecipherable, and most of the real story is missing. But at most it’s only three minutes a night. It’s a light investment, and I think it’s worth it for a fast and loose, incomplete and incoherent account of my life.

A Beginner's Guide to Roohood and Beastdom

Just sharing some quick mandatory reading for all incoming first years on the cross country team.

You could probably fill a library with all of the Grinnell cross country team’s inside jokes and esoteric lore, and another with all the information on proper running form and racing tips, and yet another on how to be a good student-athlete. But instead of a city block’s worth of libraries that would be of interest to almost no one, we just have team knowledge, passed down through the generations. There’s no way that I include all that I know about being a good and upright Purple Roo or Beast, but I hope that this primer will serve our incoming first-years well as they discover the fascinating new world of Roohood and Beastdom!

1. Beware of dogs: I’m probably not the most qualified person to talk about this one, since I tense up at the sound of a jingling collar and can’t seem to shake the belief that a dog’s only function on earth is to solve overpopulation. Most people go through all four years of Grinnell cross country and never once get bitten, and most people who do get bitten were reportedly engaging in dumb-assery at the time and had it coming. Still, we run out in the country where there are a lot of poorly secured dogs, and even non-dumb-asses have had close calls, so take precautions. Always run in a group, since a dog’s feral instinct will only trigger once they see easy, isolated prey. Always make sure that there is at least one person slower than you in the group, since feral instinct also leads dogs to attack stragglers. Also, don’t panic (though I generally have trouble following that one).
2. Choose your own scene: From friends at other colleges, I know that a lot of sports teams have a monolithic culture, generally centering around a wild (and frankly dangerous) party scene. The great thing about Grinnell cross country, though, is that there are any number of scenes. Sure, there are parties most weekends, but we also have game-nights most weekends too, and honestly, those seem to get wilder than the parties half the time. I was scared most of my first year that I wouldn’t fit in with the team if I didn’t go to all of the parties, only to find a milder, nerdier enclave within the team that fit me better later on.
3. Pretend to know what The Minus Two Book is: At one of my first cross country parties, I heard someone say, “We’d better get The Minus Two Book out for that one!” I asked what The Minus Two Book was, and was immediately informed that I had my name down in The Minus Two Book for not knowing what The Minus Two Book was. I’m not going to spell out what exactly The Minus Two Book is (because, honestly, I’m not entirely sure), but if you don’t know, you damn well better not let on that you don’t!
4. Basically anyone can give a speech before a race: I always assumed that there was some sort of initiation process or test you had to go through. There’s not; just go into the center of the circle when the team is huddled up and start shouting something. That’s what I finally got the guts to try my second year, and it worked out fine.
5. The distinction between the men’s and women’s teams: There isn’t one. The whole gender issue is foggy from the start because we’ve had trans women on the men’s team and trans men on the women’s team. And yeah, we generally do different practices and there are other odd little quirks, like that the men’s team has a deep interest in The Digimon Movie’s soundtrack, while that interest is somewhat diminished in the women’s team. But we often go on runs together, we eat together, we party together, we survive twenty-hour bus rides to Florida together, and so on and so on. Maybe this should be obvious, but at my high school the boy’s and girl’s teams had a puritanical gender divide, so rest assured that Grinnell is much more willing to be sinful in the eye of God on this issue (as with most other things).
6. Pace yourself: It’s hard to give advice here, because there’s no one way to run right. Some first years go in thinking they need to rise to the top immediately and shoulder more mileage than they can ever complete without injuring themselves. I, like many others, assumed that there was a year-long waiting period before you were allowed to be good at running and kept my mileage and performance mid-to-low to fly under the radar (and still managed to injure myself, somehow). Just stay sane. Never get too comfortable in underachieving or overachieving. 
7. Invest in a sturdy writing chair: This doesn’t have anything to do with cross country, but the chair I was sitting on just collapsed, so it seems important. It’s my own fault for trusting some shoddy piece of crap from a Hungarian club in a burnt-out Detroit suburb. Seriously, if a guy as puny as me can destroy a chair, we all need to be on our toes.
8. Ask clarifying questions to ascertain who does and does not exist: My first year, I was always hearing about two alumni runners with silly names: Mo Facke and Salty. Mo Facke was apparently the best runner ever to grace this team (a 2:00 mile!), whereas Salty was also a pretty good runner, known for earning his nickname by berating the entire team on his prospective-student visit and making an entire electronic music album in a week with no prior experience. When I heard that Mo Facke had never actually existed, I logically assumed that the much more far-fetched character Salty could never have existed either. So, when he showed up at track conference that year, I was deeply confused as to how this non-existing person could be standing right in front of me. I still half-doubt that he exists, and this mild form of Capgras syndrome has sparked more than one existential crisis. Don’t make the same mistakes I did: find out who exists and who doesn’t.
9. Racing isn’t entirely a game of skill: Yes, practice matters in cross country, and someone who has trained hard will always beat someone who hasn’t. But, unlike the precise input-output system of track races, cross country courses always involve some element of luck. It might be so hot you get heat exhaustion, or so cold you get hypothermia, or so wet that the mud sucks away people’s shoes. Or you might have to ford a small river. Or the course might go through an active soccer field. Or you might approach railroard tracks during the race, knowing that you have a non-zero chance that a train will come through and you’ll just have to wait for it to pass before you can run the last half mile. (And yes, all of these have happened to me.) Some people are better at running in states of heat or cold or mud or train-anxiety then others, so the game is never entirely fair. But there’s always another race, and it always averages out in the end.
10. Disaster management: I had to call 911 during runs twice last year. Once I found a guy passed out on a river bank; I woke him up and asked him if he needed anything and he said that he could probably use an ambulance, if it wasn’t too much trouble. The other time I found a downed power lines in the woods and the Saratoga Springs Fire Department had to send out All-Terrain Vehicles to find and fix them. The guy on the riverbank clearly needed help, while the power lines turned out to be just telephone wires, so I accidentally wasted hundreds of dollars in taxpayer money getting the ATVs out there. But calling when there’s no real problem gets you, at worst, embarrassment, while doing nothing if there is a real problem could get someone hurt or killed. It’s best to do something.
11. Miscellaneous: Stay hydrated. Attend practice. Shoes tend to be important. Run. And so on! I’m not going to rattle off the three-library’s worth of information about all this. Besides, if I did, then you’d have nothing to learn and no reason to come here, and since we’re in pretty deep debt for that new humanities building, we really need that tuition money.