Trailers

There was a time when I watched movies and didn’t really bother following the story. It all just kind of washed over me, disconnected names and characters and images, and none of it made sense. I didn’t really care. Somewhere in the back of my mind there was an idea that it should be making sense, that there was a reason for why that purple lizard was kidnapping Mike Wazowski and I was probably doing a bad thing by not trying to figure it out. But the pictures on the screen looked cool and changed often enough that I didn’t get bored, so I was happy enough that comprehension didn’t bother me all that much. I think I started actually understanding stories sometime in early elementary school, but it was never something I totally mastered. Up until middle school, I think, I’d sometimes be content to let movies stay bright and pretty pictures that kept my mind moving, albeit in no particular direction.

This has been bothering me for two reasons. For one, we’re learning about dependent readers in my education class, the kinds of kid who can decipher words but can’t or won’t take the time to understand what they mean. It makes me wonder if I’m really fit to be a teacher if I’m not too far removed from being that kind of reader myself and, worse yet, that kind of movie-watcher.

The other reason is that I’ve been on a kick of watching movie trailers during study breaks these past few days, and it’s made me remember that, even back when I couldn’t decipher movies, I loved trailers. In the theater I used to keep hoping there would be one more trailer. I’d rejoice at the green “Appropriate Audiences” screen and dread the opening credits. And I think that’s because trailers gave me exactly what I wanted. There’s plot, sure, but only for maybe thirty seconds, and only the barest kind, mostly serving to hype up the disconnected moments of spectacle that follow. Even in trailers for slow and artsy movies, they make sure to show the only gun, the only half-nude shot that appears in the entire film. It’s pure awe and pleasure, disappearing before you even understand it, with a pretense of story to give it the mystique of something whole but hidden. This probably sounds like Marxist analysis of why everything in our society is barren and meaningless. If it does, I’m sorry. Because I love trailers, even though I know I really shouldn’t.

It occurred to me the other day, though, that when I visualize the ideal form of something I want to write, it doesn’t come as a novel. That’s understandable, maybe; 80,000 words can be pretty hard to visualize all at once. But it doesn’t come as a movie, either. It comes as a movie trailer. Enough set-up plot and character to justify its existence, then a barrage of high-emotion moments, orderless and simple. And, in case it’s not clear, that’s a bad thing to want if you want your writing to be taken seriously. Or if you want to take seriously yourself. Or if you want to believe what you’ve been saying all these years, about empathy for characters being an essential human function or stories revealing the complex truths of life, rather than dismissing it all as an excuse for sixty second of catharsis.

I feel like I’ve reached too far in this post for how simple the resolution is: simply that I should plot my stories out all the way before starting to write them. I go in too often with a movie-trailer mindset, that once I plot out the basics the rest will be pure and joyous flow. And as for my other fears, that I’m a dependent reader, that I’m addicted to trailers and don’t actually want to understand movies, I think that every artistically inclined person worries that they aren’t serious enough. Either that or they worry that they’re too serious (or they should be worrying that, anyway), and I think the latter is worse.

My Bad History With Pets

My history as a pet-owner was one of affectionate torture and accidental murder. First there were the pillbugs I found in the backyard when I was five, who I housed in the elaborate pillbug playground I’d made out of string, construction paper, and sticks. For a little while I was angry at them for being so ungrateful for the wonderland I’d built: most only explored it for a few seconds before freezing in place. Then I realized that I’d set them free on the playground before waiting for the glue to dry. 

Next came the fish. Micah got a whole school of tiny orange fish and I got a big one with visible organs under translucent scales. While our fish were about equal in mass (and mine was undoubtedly cooler), I was still kind of resentful that Micah still had a majority, so I was happy when mine started chasing those little orange guys. Overnight, Micah’s fish started disappearing while mine became unusually bloated and, though I think just about everyone knew what had happened, my mom still humored us by putting my fish in time out in a separate container for playing “a mean game of tag.” But, wanting to pull one over on Micah, I snuck down to the tank late one night, took my fish out of time out, and gleefully watched him gobble up the rest of Micah’s. But, as soon as he’d finished, my fish collapsed to the ground, layers of see-through skin peeling off and organs bursting out as his overstuffed gut exploded.

Finally, there are the class hamsters from fourth grade, all three of them, who died one after the other in the space of a few months. One got hypothermia after a student decided he looked dirty and gave him a cold bath in the sink, another escaped our classroom in his hamster-ball and fell down two flights of stairs, and the last escaped his cage and chewed through almost an entire pencil before succumbing to lead poisoning. We never assigned blame for these deaths, but there were only six of us in the class, so we were all guilty in a way.

The only family pet who’s lasted more than a few weeks is Micah’s lizard, who has probably only made it so long (seventeen years, I think) because I knew well enough to stay away. Back in Waco we had him by the TV and he used to look up every time it turned on, but these days he just sleeps, eats crickets, and licks his eyeballs. Mom thinks he’s depressed.

All this is to say that I’ve never had much luck with pets and I’ve never understood people who do. I’m so scared of dogs that the sight or sound of one makes me tense up visibly, which I know is socially inappropriate but I’ve never been able to hide very well. I avoid cats too, considering them smaller, calmer dogs who could nevertheless do a lot of damage if I let them. Birds used to be okay, but they’ve terrified me ever since some breed vicious in its nesting season started chasing me around Grinnell over the summer, and bunnies are the enemy of my mom’s garden, so I’ve never trusted them either. Most people who learn about my fear of animals assume it comes from some childhood trauma, and while I think they’re right, I don’t think it’s the sort they’re thinking of. So many kids movies are about animals talking, thinking animals with inner lives well-developed enough to hold grudges. Around second grade I realized, if they ever share not on what I’ve done, I’m far past due for payback.

Despite my fears, though, there’s always been something appealing about the idea of a pet: to live with something not human, but that recognizes you and communicates with you and cares about you all the same. Part of what scares me about animals is that they operate on a different level of logic, that they could bite or claw me for some threat I didn’t know I was making. But that inhumanness is also what makes keeping a pet so fascinating. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of being around humans, but living on a planet with such wonderful biodiversity, it seems like a waste to go my whole life only ever interacting with the same sort of species.

This week, my girlfriend Mica said she might keep a flying squirrel in her dorm next year. The idea seemed absurd to me at first: squirrels are okay in my books since they so rarely reach out to humans, but I wouldn’t want to see what one would do if you got it trapped in a cage. Flying squirrels, though, are apparently docile, happy in captivity, and form close bonds with their owners (they’re also super cute, by the way). I’ll have graduated by the time she gets it, but I’ll visit her so often that I’m sure I’ll get close to her new pet. And maybe this can be where my bad luck with animal care turns around.

The Conference Meet: An Extended Boast

Here’s a story: Except for illness, injury, Nordic ski season, a couple ennui-riddled winter months in middle school, and very few other exceptions, I’ve run every single day for the past ten years. From the start it was just a way to make friends and kill time and maybe get a little ego boost when I made a personal best, so no real team commitment. The uncomplicated individualism was part of the sport’s draw, actually: it was everyone for themself, whatever colors you wore were incidental. Things changed when I came to Grinnell, when the team table became my home base in the dining hall and the cross country house was my relief from campus-bound stress every weekend. Slowly, the score we got as a group began to matter to me. At around the same time, I became a potential person to change that score: first as a spare part if someone more competent fell back, then as one of the scorers myself. Going into the end of my first decade of running, I knew I could make a difference, and I knew that it really mattered this time. Will and Evelyn Freeman were retiring from their forty year tenure as the men’s and women’s cross country coaches, with a thirty year winning streak at the conference championship on the men’s side, nearly unbroken save for the past two years. Will claimed that it didn’t matter, but I knew that another loss would end things bitterly, that he left the team in decline. Fear for conference had been a nearly constant background whine since the summer, adding urgency to my recovery when I got hurt and adding stress whenever I didn’t have anything better to worry about. But in the week leading up to it, it rose to nearly consume my life. I couldn’t sleep well the night before, I couldn’t breath evenly, I couldn’t help from shaking. We all knew that the race would be a fiasco:  a good layer of snow had collected over the past few days. It had mostly melted by race time, but that just left the ground swampy, with wide, ice floe-filled puddles. To make it worse, the wind was cold, and strong enough to push you off your feet if you didn’t have both of them on the ground (which you rarely do when running). But once the gun went off I hardly felt the wind, and running through puddles didn’t feel much different than solid ground. Adrenaline took over, I guess, replacing logic with a blind impulse to pass as many people as I could before my legs gave out. They gave out in the last kilometer, but by then I was in tenth place, and I only fell back one spot. As soon as I stopped moving I collapsed, immobilized by how cold I just realized I was. Luckily my parents and girlfriend were right there and offered me spare coats and snowpants as I shuffled off to the golf club, which had a strict no-runners policy, but they seemed okay looking the other way when they realized how hypothermic I was. Once inside, I asked my parents if we’d won, and they said they didn’t know. We had a tight top four, but a long gap after that. Worry heated me up again, as I realized that we might just lose by a single point, a point I could’ve caught if I’d held on a little while longer. But, when I was unfrozen and steady enough on my feet to go back outside and watch the women’s race, I asked the first teammate I saw who won, and learned that we did. Content, I watched the women demolish the competition much more handily than the men had.

I planned on writing about disappointment, on how victory passes so quickly and then you need to move on to the next shiny hope. But, writing this, I don’t think that’s really true anymore. Yes, I was struck with an intense “Now what?” feeling as soon as I heard we’d won, a feeling of drifting pointlessness now that we’d gotten what we’d wanted. But, writing those 619 words above, I don’t think I need to philosophize about what to do after winning. It’s fine just to enjoy it, even to gloat a little bit, and to rest up. Of course, I can’t rest just yet, we’ve still got regionals, which we’d be on track to win if this were really a story worth bragging about, but we don’t have a prayer. Which I guess is the real truth of these sports stories: neither victory or success are really lasting, and neither do the glory or shame that come with them. But you can feel these things and perseverate on them, for a time. Not necessary, but highly encouraged.