Magic and Regret

In books and movies, regrets tend to center around a single decision, an instant, something that can be summed up in a sentence or frame that comes back to haunt the characters in flashback. That makes for good storytelling, but I’m not sure it reflects life all that well. When I look back at the choices I regret, most of them are little daily choices that built up like plaque, that I only realize are mistakes years later. But maybe I’m being melodramatic about all this, given that I’ve lived a safe, protected, and therefore am mostly regret-free life. Case in point, three of my top regrets from high school seem pretty petty when I write them out: not socializing enough, not reading enough on my own, and spending way too much time and money on Magic: The Gathering. 

If you haven’t spent enough time around nerdy high schoolers, Magic is the first and most popular collectable trading card game. It has a massive community; even a town as small as Grinnell has its own game story that survives mostly on Magic products and weekly Magic tournaments. The rules are so arcane that it took me a full year of regular play to figure out the most obscure of them, and the cards are so expensive that they drive otherwise worthless cardboard up to obscene prices. 

The complex rules and high prices scared me off at first, as did the general vibe of obsession that the game seemed to breed. But a few people I wanted to be friends with in middle school played, so I bought a deck and learned a passing familiarity with the rules. Middle school turned to high school and one by one my closest friends became hardcore collectors who would spend two hundred dollars on booster packs in one night. I never spent that much, but I had to spend something to maintain my collection and keep up a deck that could be competitive. I’ve never added up how much I spent, but if I did I think I’d probably be more than a little shocked at how much I’d lost.

The problem, I think, was that I was never all-in with Magic. I liked it well enough to learn the rules and play if someone had their decks out, but not enough to ever get really invested in it. Which, being surrounded by true obsessives, meant that I was always just a little bit behind, hoping that we’d find something more interesting to do or talk about. For me, Magic was just a way to make and maintain friends, but when most of what those friends did was talk about Magic, I felt a little bit lost.

An odd thing has happened to me over the last month or so: I’ve gotten back into Magic. The lore, which once seemed so dense and meaningless, now fascinates me in how overcrowded and bizarre it all was. The convoluted rules have a sort of legal elegance to them that I didn’t take the time to appreciate when I was first learning them. I have a special appreciation for how each of the colors has its own personality and philosophy, and how those interact when mixed. I’ve even considered getting back into the Magic community, even though that’s basically impossible now that social distancing has shut down all competitions. Really, I want to go back in time and choose a side. If I’d been really indifferent, then I should’ve found different friends, different interests, and built something that would’ve served me well through the rest of my life. Or I could’ve gone all-in, memorized the terms and watched the matches and learned to love it. I could’ve gotten a lot out of it. But I didn’t choose either, and now I feel like I paid the price and got nothing for it.

But, when we remember things, especially things we regret, we tend to simplify what should be complicated. The friends I made playing Magic are real friends, even if there was a consistent disconnect between us. The thrill I felt constructing my own halfway decent deck for the first time was real too. I got a lot out of it, if never quite what I wanted. And the memories that I have left over from it all aren’t just regret; there’s happiness there, real happiness that I should value.

Major World Events

One summer in middle school I volunteered as a Vacation Bible School camp councilor, but all that I remember from it is the fascinating way those kids talked about the past. They assumed that all events before they were born happened roughly simultaneously, that Jesus died on the cross at around the same time as their parents went to college, and God created the heavens and the earth back when George Washington fought off the British. In their minds, the world used to be a frightening and exciting place, where angels visited prophets and nations went to war about once every fifteen minutes. Then they were born, world events settled down and the history stopped. When I talked to them about it, they seemed relieved that they had been born into a simpler, safer world than their parents, but a little disappointed too. Scary as the past was, it would’ve been nice to hang out in that world at least long enough to see a dinosaur (which, according to them, died out sometime in the 1980’s).

This way of thinking intrigued me in part because it was so familiar. I followed a less extreme version of it even then, and would for years to come. Sure, on a conceptual level I knew that things happened as slowly in the past as they did in the present, but I definitely got the sense that the world had decided to halt major events when I came around. The obvious exception to that was 9/11, but by time I was old enough to understand it, I’d forgotten what it was like in the moment. Then there was the Obama election, but I grew up in such a conservative town with such liberal parents that I couldn’t decide how I was supposed to feel about it and ended up registering it as a mostly neutral event. The U.S. was at war through most of my childhood, but the information was so muddled and the event so distant that I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.

Because of this, for most of my life I had the distinct feeling that I was missing out on history. You could attribute this to my general disinterest in present reality, always imagining that there’s something better in the past or future or some fantasy world that never existed. (I’m still a little like that: I have trouble getting into modern space exploration, but I marvel at archiac scientists with crude telescopes who thought that there were jungles under Venus’s thick atmosphere or that Mars’s stones were red with blood from alien wars). But there is some truth to this too, I think: aside from a blip in the housing crisis, we had a fairly stable nation from 2001 to 2016. And, though it was never really on the front of my mind, I did have an idle wish that I could live in an era someone could study or write historical fiction about.

Ever since November of 2016, that wish has seemed like some kind of monkey’s paw-style curse. I forgot that, with precious few exceptions, people don’t remember major world events because everyone had a good time. Usually, it’s an event because a whole lot of people die. 

It’s impossible to deny that we’re in some sort of major world event right now. Even home in sheltered, suburban Edina, there are no cars on the highway and basic amenities are disappearing from the grocery store. My parents and brother and sister and her girlfriend and my girlfriend are all under one roof, none of us entirely sure what the next step in each of our lives will be. In a way, it feels like a gritty reboot of what I thought the past was like as a six-year-old: disaster and excitement in a chaotic mess, nothing stable for more than a couple minutes.

But in the midst of it all, there is a sense of peace that I don’t think any six-year-old could have predicted. For the first time ever, Mica is meeting my entire family and staying at my house for more than a few days. Even pandemonium isn’t what I predicted, I guess. And there’s that to be thankful for.

My Short Senior Spring

I know you’d probably love to read about something other than the COVID-19. Most likely it’s all that’s on your newsfeed. I’d love to write about something else too. But these days I can’t really think about anything else. Sorry about that.

After a few weeks of rumors, Grinnell sent out an email confirming the worst: after spring break campus will close, classes will be online, anyone who can go home will have to go home. The administration left most other details blank, leaving most students in panic for what to do next. I don’t want to moan unnecessarily, especially when I’m privileged enough to have a home to go back to, in a state with only a few confirmed cases, and a body with good odds of fighting it off. But I can’t help but feel overwhelmed. As a senior, I was putting a lot of stake in this last half of the semester: saying goodbye to friends I’ve made over these four years, running my last 10k and hoping for a personal best, finishing up my time at Grinnell with a sense of accomplishment and closure. Now, suddenly, it’s over. There might not even be a graduation ceremony. My girlfriend and I have been spending most hours of the day together for the past few months, but once we say goodbye, we won’t see each other for more than a month. Mourning sounds like an extreme word, but I can’t think of much of another way to put it.

But it needs to be done. Not everyone at the school agrees with that. There are plenty of reasons to be angry, of course: the news was abrupt, the email was vague, the decision-making process was a little opaque. Worst of all, there are more and more reports of people who absolutely need to stay on campus having their petitions denied, which is unquestionably awful. It doesn’t help that this decision is all wrapped up in corporate bureaucracy, which is an institution that specializes in dismissing something personal and valuable in favor of the broad and incoherent. 

But this decision is based on something personal and valuable, though. It’s easy to forget that, when most news stories about COVID-19 show up with photos of CGI virus cells or maps covered in numbers and deaths are discussed in incomprehensibly high statistics. But there are entire lives at stake here. Not the lives of most people displaced by this decision, COVID-19 doesn’t hit people our age that hard, but people older and younger than us will die if it hits. Grinnell isn’t ready for it to hit: they only have three respirator masks in the entire town, and only three isolation units. Sending everyone home changes a slice of our lives, a significant slice, but only a slice. Letting COVID-19 into our community could end someone’s life entirely. It’s a sacrifice, and one we need to mourn. But, overall, it’s worth it.

Childhood Horrors

In fourth grade a friend told me that he was immortal. Claiming to be a demigod or wizard or alien in a highly realistic human suit had been a day-to-day occurrence with kids I’d known since Kindergarten, so by then I was more or less over it. At the time I hardly even listened to his rationale, though some part of it stuck with me, because I still remember it today: “My Dad hurts me so bad sometimes. Anyone else would have died over and over, but I didn’t, so there must be something special about me.”

Just before I moved to Minnesota I went to a fantasy play-acting camp with a paramilitary bent, where we learned to march in formation and fight with foam swords, while our councilors did acrobatic stunt shows fighting pretend monsters with real weapons. There was one kid I got to know pretty well who seemed to get special treatment: he got to hold a real mace once, even though he was barely strong enough to hold it, and the head-councilor let him talk to an ent in a vital scene for the plot of the summer, while the rest of us just sat around and watched. Once I asked him why he got to do all this cool stuff, and he just kicked at the dirt and said he didn’t know. I assumed he was just ashamed that his billionaire parents had bribed him into special privileges. And maybe that is really what happened. But he was bone-thin and entirely bald, so there’s another option too.

Maybe the first time I got a glimpse of this childhood horror, the kind that doesn’t really hit until you look back on it years later, was when my Dad took me to volunteer at our church’s evacuee shelter when Hurricane Ike hit Texas. But there wasn’t much a little kid like me could do to help, so instead I spent the morning playing with this boy. I don’t remember what we did, but we must have had a lot of fun, because when he went missing, I spent the entire afternoon running around looking for him. Eventually I found him in the quarters where the evacuees slept: a dim room full of snoring men and slowly leaking airbeds. The boy spoke to a man, probably his father, in hushed and worried Spanish. I knew I shouldn’t be there, so I left before they could see me. 

That was the only one of these examples in which I noticed the real despair of the situation in the moment. I didn’t put the pieces together just then, didn’t realize that their home might have been destroyed or they might have lost a family member in the storm. But I knew that something sad had happened, more sad than I could really comprehend, so I ran away scared.

For the most part, though, I was an oblivious kid. I thought child abuse meant spanking, couldn’t imagine someone my own age could get cancer, and assumed that all the families staying at our church would have somewhere else to live once the storm blew past. Probably that’s a good thing: the vast majority of my childhood life I was so far from tragedy that when I did see it, I didn’t recognize it. But I still can’t help but feel guilty. What really gets me is my friend who thought he was immortal: if I’d really listened to him and asked a few questions, I could’ve told an adult, and maybe they could’ve helped somehow. I’m not so sure I could’ve helped the other two, cancer and hurricanes are beyond my power to stop, and their problems are a little bit more ambiguous. Maybe the kid at camp just happened to be bald, skinny, and rich. Maybe the kid at the shelter’s Dad was talking to him about something different, and really they were safe and fine and well-insured. But at least I could’ve been a little bit more observant, and offered whatever sympathy and comfort a kid can.

But maybe I picked up on more than I’m giving myself credit for. From what I’ve seen, kids notice a lot more than most adults believe; they just can’t explain what they see, or choose not to. I could see myself seeing the darkness in all three of these stories, but ignoring it, then intentionally forgetting, because I wasn’t ready for it. After all, there was never a revelation moment when I exclaimed to myself, “Oh wow, that kid must have been going through so much!” It feels like I’ve always known, which means either I came to terms with it subconsciously, or I really did always know.

For the most part, I don’t beat myself up for not doing more. However I feel about it, though, they’re all in the past now, there’s nothing to be done. But even though I was never a kid to notice pain in my peers and heal it, that’s not impossible, and it’s beautiful when it happens. At my job working with second graders last summer, I saw kids hugging and comforting each other the day after some tragedy hit. I’m not saying that we should leave it up to kids to be each others’ therapists, or expect them to always know how to help one another. But it does happen sometimes, and it’s beautiful.

Long Races

There were a lot of interesting characters at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, among them a power-lifter and hammer-thrower from Princeton, who explained one night, after the visiting poet’s reading, that weight lifting was the greatest sport there is. People don’t make these kinds of unqualified claims anymore; they make timider arguments, like that weight lifting is a very good sport, or that weight lifting offers something special to certain people. But, being the sort of the bold person you’d expect a Princeton power lifter to be, she went all in and explained why lifting was unequivocally the greatest of all athletic competitions. Apparently, it’s all about how in one simple movement, one single moment, your muscles endure a level of pain and expel a level of energy that they can’t and won’t anywhere else There’s no strategy, no fanfare, nothing but strength presented as simply as possible.

As you might expect, I didn’t like hearing that the apotheosis of all athleticism was something I could hardly do. (At the time, my squat record was 60 pounds. My all-time max now is 100, which is hardly a warmup for her.) Especially as a track athlete, where running 100 meters can score you as many points as running 10,000, I’ve always believed in a certain equality of athletics, that people tend to develop what they’re naturally good at and ignore what they’re not. Some sports take different kinds of effort than others, some offer more acclaim, but they all pose similar challenges, and what you do is more a matter of biology than choice. Now that I think of it, though, this sort of thinking might be more of a cop-out than anything else. People often treat me as something of a masochist when I tell them my favorite race is the 10k, but when they ask me why, I always say that it’s simply what I’m built for, that I don’t have the fast-twitch muscles you need for shorter races. I do well in it so I like it. Simple as that.

But maybe I could use some of the Princeton hammer-thrower’s uncut confidence. Maybe I should argue that the longest race is always the best; not the one that I’m built for or the one I find least offensive, but objectively the best. Because in two days I’ll be racing the 5k for the indoor conference championship, and the 3k the day after that, the two longest races in indoors, and more than anything, it’s because I love them.

When the gun goes off in any short race, every nerve in your body has to scream “Go!” That’s a thrill, I guess, but there’s a different, more interesting feeling at the start of the long race. You still have that primal urge to surge ahead, but instead of obeying it you have to wrangle it, use it, keep it under control. To race well, the front spot has to be something you desperately want, but can’t take, even though it’s open. Because anyone could take that spot. Just about everyone has, sometime in middle school, before you’d learned the unwritten rules of human endurance. That time in middle school you probably dropped out of the race, maybe cried, definitely threw up. So you have to stay restrained and keep the pace, hoping that everyone in front of you has made a mistake and gone out too fast, and that you’ll be rewarded later. And you will, if you keep running the same pace even as your body fails, even as each straightaway stretches longer than the one before. People will wear out and fall behind if you keep a consistent pace. But it takes a long time for that to happen (a 10k takes about half an hour to finish), so, unlike most other races, you have time to think. You have time to get used to your opponents’ backsides, memorize their tattoos and analyze their stride and wonder how long it’ll be before they break and you pass them. Sometimes they pass you back, and it goes back and forth like that, maybe for the entire race, so by the end of it you feel like you have a sort of grudging respect for one another, even though you haven’t exchanged a single word (unless sharp breaths and exhausted groans count). That can’t happen in other races, they just go too fast. But the long races aren’t really races at all; they’re more like wars of attrition, and the best you can do is keep up the pace and wait for everyone else to shut down. At least, until the second or third lap from the end, when everyone forgets about pacing or waiting and burns energy they don’t have trying to get ahead. It becomes sort of like a cruel mirror of the first lap: you feel like you should be able to take the lead, everyone is screaming for you to do just that, but all the power between your bones is sucked dry and all you can do is keep flailing forward, hoping that maybe a second wind will catch you. 

Is that a reason why long races are the best? I don’t know. It doesn’t have a thesis statement like the Princeton hammer thrower did, and I don’t have her succinctness either, so in a lot of ways this blog post is worse than her off-the-cuff comment three years ago. But I hope that at least I described that they mean something. Maybe I don't have the confidence to say that they're the best, but they're at least my favorite.

Heavenly Boredom

Today my girlfriend and I were watching an episode of The Good Place and she noticed me suddenly tense up at a seemingly innocuous scene. I won’t go into the details since the show is very easily spoiled, but since the entire series is about the afterlife, I think it’s reasonable to reveal that this episode was about a basic problem with heaven: wouldn’t it get boring after a while? I mean, with an infinite amount of time and a finite human imagination or attention span, it would have to get old eventually. The promise that there will be no pain, no fear, no uncertainty basically erases any reason to care about the world. It’s a problem that’s been bugging me since third grade, when I waited so long for summer vacation, then a week after it started I woke up with all the time in the world and nothing to do with it. It probably seems reductive to compare the infinite glory of God’s Almighty Kingdom to an elementary schooler getting bored of summer break, but I’ve never really been able to separate the two.

This complaint about heaven is historically rather new, actually. Last year, when I was visiting my sister in New York, we went to the Met museum, where we found a medieval painting of heaven and hell (pictured above). I said that hell looked a whole lot cooler than heaven, thinking that I was making a very original insight. I mean, yes, hell was mostly comprised of naked corpses being skewered by demons, while everyone in heaven had fully clothed and intact bodies. But at least hell had emotion and color, while heaven was just a couple dozen bearded men in robes, standing with perfect posture and blank expressions. My sister explained that she’d actually read a paper on the subject (which I’d name-drop here, if I remembered it) about how heaven was so much more appealing in the past because people back then valued order and stability so much more than we do now. After all, back then even the kings and queens couldn’t stop disease or miscarriages from claiming their children, while most of the population suffered daily toil and drudgery. A world with no work or pain seemed like an improvement, and they saw no reason to see past that. Meanwhile, us affluent people have running water, heat and cooling, light at any time of the day, and so much entertainment that our biggest problem is usually there being too much to keep up with. We’ve made what most people throughout history would call a heaven, and we still want something more.

In The Good Place, the characters decide that, just like life on earth is meaningful because it ends, an ideal heaven must end, that bliss has no meaning if it’s eternal. That’s why this episode got me so scared: they’d laid out so many of the same worries I’d had about heaven, then answered them by saying that the afterlife can’t really be a full afterlife, that even it needs death to be worthwhile. And, as I’ve said before on this blog, I’m terrified of any kind of permanent death. The idea that I won’t be able to escape it, that I can’t be happy without it looming over me, is enough to tighten every muscle in my body just upon hearing.

The Good Place misdiagnosis the problem with heaven, though. Actions on earth don’t have meaning because one day we’ll die forever. Whenever I try thinking that way it makes it seem as though nothing we do on earth is meaningful because it will all come to nothing in thousands of years. Actions have meaning because we don’t know if we’ll succeed or fail, if our lives and accomplishments will endure or not. Faith, or the lack thereof, is nothing but a hope or theory; no matter what we claim, I think deep down everyone is some shade of agnostic. Looking at it this way, eternal life and permanent death seem almost identical: an eternity of certainty.

All of this probably sounds very anti-Christian, and sometimes I question if that’s still a good descriptor of me, given my doubts. But one thing I love about the Episcopal church is how it embraces these contradictions and paradoxes and makes them part of our very creed. A key tenant is the mystery of faith: that God is ultimately unknowable, no matter how deep your faith. I can’t speak with certainty, but I think that after we die, we won’t understand or know everything. We won’t escape pain or worry. We won’t even know for sure that this lasts forever. But we’ll maintain the same faith that we had on earth, and hope to hell that it does.

Love

(Pictured above: My girlfriend Mica, a very talented artist, drew a profile view of me, which turned out pretty damn great. Then she asked me to do the same. I only ever draw stick figures and monsters, so my version of her came out a little bit as both. In real life she’s beautiful.)

I read a study once that something like 98% of American movies are about romance, or at least have some sort of sub-plot. It makes sense, then, that I’ve been looking forward to falling in love for as long as I can remember. Love seemed like something inevitable that would happen later on when I was a kid, like getting a job or dying. I never really explored dating in elementary school, mostly because I was with the same group of seven kids from Kindergarten through sixth grade, so we were all practically siblings. Part of why I looked forward to moving to a larger middle school in seventh grade was that I might finally have a chance to get a girlfriend. But middle school passed by, then high school, and most of college without anything more serious than asking someone to a dance. As I saw my friends pair up and profess love, I felt profoundly left out. There were so many milestones I hadn’t passed, not so much sexual stuff (I’d learned that “virgin” was something other than an epithet for Mary, Mother of Christ as recently as eighth grade, so even in my high school I wasn’t really in that mindset*), but so many cultural markers of what it meant to become and adult and form a real, powerful relationship with another person.

Things changed when I went to Florida with the track team last year. It felt like one of those books where a kid gets thrown into a new world: when I fell asleep on the bus there was snow on the ground, and when I woke up it was eighty degrees and the roads were lined with jungle plants I thought only existed in prehistoric times. In that different world, the bad luck I’d been locked into changed in an instant: Mica, a young woman on the team who I’d always thought was pretty but never had the courage to talk to, sat down next to me and started talking to me. As soon as we found out we were both writers, we started talking about our work and were nearly inseparable for the rest of the trip**. We went to a bookstore together and walked up and down the shelves, pointing out different things we’d read. On the bus ride back she sang selections from Les Miserables with some friends on the women’s team for me and I called a number on a billboard asking “Want to Talk About God?” and asked the guy on the other end of the line if I could have 800 concubines like King Solomon to prove to her that I wasn’t a fundamentalist. She was (and is) witty and incisive, brilliant and inventive, beautiful, graceful, bold enough to challenge me when I’m wrong but kind and supportive all the same. Less than a month after getting back we were dating.

I’d daydreamed about the stages of a relationship since middle school: first time holding hands, first kiss, first dance at a party, first date, changing your Facebook relationship status.

Through high school and into college, as they seemed less likely to ever happen, these milestones haunted me even as I fantasized about them. Once I met Mica, they all passed so quickly and seemed nearly weightless. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them, but they didn’t have the same force I thought they would. It wasn’t the benchmark that mattered anymore, but who I was doing it with. I didn’t love Mica because she bumped up my score on some life-goal tally. I loved her (and love her) because she laughs when I overpronounce my T’s and gives me honest sentence-by-sentence feedback on all my stories and makes a big deal about using her special wash on my face to get the dead skin off and sometimes breaks out singing something I can’t understand in Spanish and hundreds or thousands or countless other things, little and big, that make her Mica, my beloved.

Sometimes I can’t believe how much time I wasted, desperately wanting something that didn’t turn out to be important. When I thought of myself with a girlfriend, I didn’t see her as a person so much as a solution to my loneliness and anxiety and feeling of failure. But love is so much more than just a solution: it’s its own being, its own creation, something beautiful and indescribable and unique to everyone who feels it. So much of life would have been so much easier if I could’ve assured my past self not to worry, that it would all turn out okay eventually. But my past self probably wouldn’t’ve believed me, at least not until he met Mica.

____________________

* Of course, I heard about non-Mary people referred to as virgins before, but I always thought it designated them as Mary like: kind, devout, and courageous. In middle school some boys, who I only later realized were bullying me, asked me if I was a virgin and I said, “I hope to be some day, but I don’t think I’m there yet.” At some point I saw a poster for the movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and decided that it was a raunchy, iconoclastic comedy in which Steve Carrel played a middle-aged atheist whose life is turned upside down when he finds himself pregnant with Jesus for the Second Coming. In conclusion, my childhood was defined by both misinformation and boundless unwarranted confidence that I had everything figured out.

** She actually got to know me pretty well from reading this very blog! Pretty meta, huh?