Year One

Last night, I went to an outdoor concert in Millennium Park. Meteorologists warned of strong storms all day, but when evening came around, the weather was absolutely perfect. I excitedly stopped at Jewel for some snacks, then hopped a train into the loop. I was thinking to myself that despite the fact that I’ve been in Chicago for six years, this would be my first Millennium Park concert experience.

But as I picked out a spot, spread out my blanket, and unpacked my food, I had a strange sense of déjà vu. I realized that I had been to one of these concerts before—just once. During my first summer in Chicago, I came to an orchestral performance of Romeo and Juliet. I had spread out a blanket and food, just like I did last night. I was alone, and before the concert started, I pulled out a book and read. At some point, a chunk of potato salad came out of nowhere and landed on my blanket. It was quickly followed by the apologetic mother of the child who had thrown it. She cleaned off the potato salad and offered me some food (which I politely turned down). It made me smile to remember that night.

As I thought more about my first year in Chicago, I recalled a lot of other little episodes like that. I didn’t know a single soul in Chicago when I moved here, and so I spent a lot of time alone during the first year, especially that first summer. I used to go to Navy Pier after work, walk out to the end of it, look across the water, and pretend that I could see home. (At the time, Chicago did not feel like home—and I didn’t think it ever would.) I went to Navy Pier, voluntarily and often. Can you believe it? Navy Pier! I can’t stand that place now.

On the weekends, I spent a lot of time at the beach. One Saturday, I went up to Loyola Beach to watch the annual painting of the stone benches up there. When this proved to be less interesting than it sounded, I walked out on the pier to gaze at the skyline. A little girl walked up to me, looked at me for a moment, then seemed to decide that I was worthy of a conversation. Her opening line was, “I’m wearing a dress!” The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: “It’s a very pretty dress.”

Little girl (about 4 years old): “Is that Chicago?”

Me: “Yes, that’s downtown.”

Little girl: “My dad works there.”

Me: “I work there, too.”

Little girl: “Do you work the same place as my dad?”

Me: “I don’t think so. There are a lot of places to work downtown.”

Little girl: “You’re right. That’s a lot of buildings.”

At this point, whomever she was with came and shooed her away from me. I can remember thinking that it might be the only conversation I would have all day.

I also went to a lot of plays and movies alone. For a while, I declared Friday to be obscure play night, and I bought tickets to tiny shows in tiny theaters. I saw a series of truly bizarre plays. One started at the end and ended at the beginning (but I did not realize this until about intermission). One seemed pretty normal and easy to follow until two random, inexplicable goats showed up on stage. Obscure play night was a parade of absurdity, and consequently a lot of fun.

I also saw as much large-scale theater as I could. Every day after work for at least two months, I went to the Oriental Theater to enter the drawing for front row Wicked tickets. (It wasn’t until over a year later that I finally won.) Sometime around Christmas, I bought myself a front row ticket to see Chicago. It was kind of liberating to walk all the way down the theater aisle to the front row all by myself. Paige Davis of TLC’s Trading Spaces fame played Roxie, and she threw some fake flowers into the audience at the end. One landed in front of the man sitting next to me, and he handed it to me. I felt silly for being so grateful, but I accepted the flower with as much grace as I could manage. After leaving that show, I went to Daley Plaza and walked a lap around the giant Chicago Christmas tree. The night was clear and beautiful, and I felt so full of peace. When I got home, I put the flower on display. To this day, the flower remains part of my centerpiece. It makes me smile to look at it now.

Looking back on all of this now feels like remembering a different life. I was so alone then. I was working my way through two separate and equally terrible cases of heartbreak, as well as dealing with the full force of my social anxiety issues. It was a terrifying time for me, really. But all those issues really pushed me to fill my time with activities that did not allow me to wallow in my apartment. A “Get Up, Get Out” movement, I called it. And it left me with a series of really interesting experiences, and you can tell by the stories above.

It bothers me a little that I have not thought about these things in so long. I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that I have no one to talk about them with. No one else was there. The experiences live in my memory only.

I wouldn’t go back to that time for anything. It was a time before a really knew myself, and a time characterized by bouts of extreme unhappiness and extreme fear. Still, I think it’s good for me to remember the things I experienced that year, good, bad, funny, sad, bizarre, and hilarious.

I don’t know how to end this except to say thanks for reading, and for giving me a way to remember.

Rain jacket

I’m taking a break from the book quotes this week. The quote-as-inspiration format worked well for quite some time. However, the system has started to break down. Since I didn’t always find a quote that spoke to me once a week, I wrote quite a few posts that were about things I didn’t really care about. Consequently, I put off writing the post until the last second, and the writing wasn’t very good. Plus, I felt really pressured to finish a new book every week. And I don’t need to be stressing myself out over my pleasure reading.

I admit that I considered taking a break from blogging altogether. Over the past couple of weeks, it has felt like an extra burden with very little payoff. It was just another thing on my to-do list, and the writing I was producing was not something I was proud of. So why bother?

However, I think I’ve changed my mind on that part. Because yesterday was Father’s Day, I was reminded of a post I wrote a couple of years ago about the fix-it genes I got from my dad. I looked back in my archives to find it, and I realized that some of my best posts were written back in 2009. At that time, I wasn’t super regular about posting. I just wrote a post whenever an idea occurred to me. The results were usually good. But the problem with that was I would go for long periods of time without writing.

So, I’m trying to find a middle ground. I’m not going to try to make a quote fit every week, but I’m still going to try to post something every Monday. The quote method ended up stressing me out, so I’m going to have to look elsewhere for inspiration.

After looking through the old blog posts that I like, I think I’ve decided that my best writing tends to be about specific experiences. I’m pretty good at telling a story. I’m not so good at talking about the general state of the world. My blogs about general issues tend to come off preachy, which is rather fake since I don’t have strong convictions about much. So, instead of preaching about what I think of quotes from books, I’m going to tell my own stories. And who knows? Maybe one day I will have a book of my own.

So what story shall I tell you tonight? I once heard someone say that a surefire way to make people laugh is to tell an embarrassing story about yourself. I’ve just remembered such a story, so here goes.

Last spring, I started bike commuting a couple of days each week as a part of my marathon training plan. I am a big stickler about… well, sticking with my plan, so I was always reluctant to skip a bike commute because of rain. One morning last summer, I looked outside to see dark gray skies. However, I didn’t see any rain hitting the ground, so I decided to try biking to work. I’d wear a rain jacket. It would be fine!

When I walked outside, I discovered that it was lightly misting. But it’s not really raining, I thought to myself. And I’m wearing a rain jacket! So foolishly, I set out on my 8-mile commute, which usually takes me about 45 minutes.

I think you know what is coming. About three miles into the ride, it started to sprinkle. What do I care of sprinkling? I thought. I’m wearing a rain jacket! About three and a half miles in, it started to pour.

Needless to say, I arrived at work a half hour later completely soaked. I walked into our suite of offices and saw that one coworker had arrived before me. It seemed useless to try to hide my state from her, so I said, “It had to happen sometime, Ellen.” Her voice came out from her office. “What happened? Did you fall?”

I wish, I thought. “No. It rained.”

It’s a testament to what a genuinely nice person Ellen is that she did not laugh at me. Hair was slicked to my head in some spots and molded to the shape of my helmet in others. Mascara was smeared on my face. And I was, quite literally, dripping. All I could think was, That stupid rain jacket failed me.

Ellen asked me if I had a change of clothes. Of course, I didn’t. All I had was a ratty old zip-up sweatshirt that I wore when the air conditioning got too cold. I was determined to make it through the day somehow, though. If I didn’t, it would mean admitting that But I have a rain jacket! was a stupid reason to ride through the rain.

I spent the whole day in my wet shorts. I made the mistake of sitting on my upholstered chair for the first hour, soaking it, and I therefore spent the rest of the day sitting on the absolute front end of it. At some point I could not take the wet shirt any more, and swapped it for the ratty sweatshirt. I felt better for a bit, until I looked down and realized that my wet bra had soaked through the sweatshirt, leaving two giant wet patches on my chest. Stellar. Stupid rain jacket.

At this point, I had lost all desire to look presentable. I now had a soaking wet desk chair that I could not sit in, a soaking wet shirt over my visitor chair, and a bra hanging off the corner of my desk. (Yes, I look it off. Yes, I felt creepy doing so, but it was my best option. Shut up.) I closed my door, thanking the greater powers that I did not work in a formal office, that I had a door to close, and that no one ever, ever came to my office to talk to me.

That was the moment that someone knocked on the door. I kept myself from beating my head on my desk only by reasoning that I better hide my bra before opening the door.

Thankfully, the knocker turned out to be a very nice coworker of mine that pretended not to notice my pathetic state.

So, anyway, lesson learned. No riding to work when it is clearly going to rain. My rain jacket will not keep me dry.

I started a new training plan yesterday, and it says that I’m supposed to ride to work tomorrow. The forecast says a chance for thunderstorms, and I will admit that despite the fact that I just told this story, I’m still telling myself that it might be okay to ride.

If I’m still feeling that way in the morning, I’ll try to remember what it felt like to ride back home wearing still-wet shorts and underwear. If that doesn’t stop me, I don’t know what will.

For the Food

“Mary Poppins thought of the raspberry-jam-cakes they always had on her Day Out, and she was just going to sigh, when she saw the Match-Man’s face. So, very cleverly, she turned the sigh into a smile—a good one with both ends turned up—and said: ‘That’s all right, Bert. Don’t you mind. I’d much rather not go to tea. A stodgy meal, I call it—really.’ And that, when you think how very much she liked raspberry-jam-cakes, was rather nice of Mary Poppins.”

--from Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

I have a confession to make: If you have ever invited me somewhere, and I accepted, chances are good that I came for the food.

Try not to be too offended. Notice that I was careful not to say that I only came for the food. However, I’d be lying if I told you that food was not a major component in my decision making process.

Want to go running on Saturday, Katie? Sure, great, we can go to brunch after! Hey, Katie, let’s go to this street fair! Okay, maybe they’ll have one of those sangria stands! Remember when we used to do that walk on St. Patrick’s Day? Oh, yeah, and my mom made that awesome crème de menthe cake. Good times.

I love food. I’m the least picky eater I know. I eat poultry, fish, and red meat. I like every kind of starch and vegetable I’ve ever tried. I have a taste for sweet things and salty things. I love going out for gourmet meals but will also happily eat fake mashed potatoes and pretty much anything that comes out of a box. There’s only one thing I can think of that I don’t like, and that is grapefruit.

I think my lack of pickiness is both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, it allows me to shop with the sales and eat cheaply. It also helps me to eat a reasonably healthy diet; I like celery and hummus just as much (maybe more) than potato chips and French onion dip. But on the other hand, it also means that I will eat pretty much whatever ends up in front of me.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately, because… well… let’s just say my clothes have been fitting differently in the past month or two. I’m sure part of the reason is that for the past few summers, I’ve been in the thick of a training plan by now. This year, I have been purposely taking a break from a structured running plan. And as my eating has not changed, there have been some consequences.

Because I am not quite ready to go back to structured training, if I want to curb my weight gain, I need to change my eating habits.

I’m not talking about dieting in the uber-restrictive sense. I’ve just been thinking to myself that maybe I need to start bypassing one or two of the things that end up in front of me. Like the piece of chocolate cake handed to me at my office’s celebration of June birthdays. Or the 400 pieces of candy I’m supposed to be saving to give to volunteers as I plan a service project. Or the stale, dried-out cheese cubes they are offering as free samples at the grocery store.

I hate it when I find myself in this place, because giving up food goes against my general life philosophy that food should not be something that is eschewed. (Chewed, yes. But not eschewed.) (Ba dum bum!) Moderate portions, yes. Stop eating when you are no longer hungry, yes. But don’t refuse food or be ashamed of eating it.

So, I don’t like the idea of restricting what I eat. I want to eat some candy if I feel like it, and not feel bad about it. However, it just seems that lately, my opportunities to eat food, and bad-for-me food especially, have abounded. Eating everything that is presented to me would mean violating some of my other food principles, like don’t eat when you’re not hungry. And my common argument of “I can do this because I don’t eat like this every day” is failing me, because I actual am eating badly almost every day.

I so admit that I need to think a bit harder about what I eat. I can’t eat like I’m training for the marathon when I’m not training for the marathon. So I’m choosing to give up some random food opportunities that don’t have a big effect on other aspects of my life. I can skip getting biscotti out of the tub in the conference room every time I walk by. I can actually leave that candy for the volunteers.

What I still refuse to do, though, is not attend any social events to avoid the food. No matter how many times I go out to dinner in a week, I won’t turn down another invitation because I had big meals for several nights before. I won’t let food restriction affect my social life.

Sometimes, I only come for the food. I admit that. But I refuse to ever not come because of the food. (There’s a double negative for you.) My jeans might be fitting tighter. But I don’t care. Life’s just too short.

Identity

“The pictures looked alive enough to speak. In each one, there was nothing except the head and shoulders of the subject against a gray background. None of them had that blank, wanted-poster look that snapshots could have produced. These pictures had a lot to say even to non-Oankali observers about who their subjects were—or who the Oankali thought they were.”

--from Dawn by Octavia Butler

I find the concept of identity fascinating. What is it that makes us who we are? Is my identity something that I choose, or am I just born with it? My thoughts on this have wavered over the years.

When I was in graduate school, I co-wrote a paper about how the experience of studying abroad changes identity. Somehow, using one researcher’s definition of identity, my group and I operationalized the concept. We coded student responses on evaluation forms according to how the students claimed their identities had changed as a result of the study abroad experience.

I can’t remember the exact result of our little study, but I do know that we made some claim about how study abroad changed the way students defined themselves. The conclusion made sense to me at the time. My study abroad experience certainly changed the way I thought of myself. Before I left, I was a homebody. When I got back, I was a world traveler.

It wasn’t the only experience that changed my definition of myself, though. In a sense, I think of my identity as a fluid list of titles. I store that list someplace in my head, and it changes all the time. Today, I think the list would go something like this: Katie. Chicagoan. Runner. Math educator. Potterhead. Reader. Editor. Musical theater aficionado. Cat owner. Shark chef. Gleek. Wannabe singer.

Next week or next year, the list would probably be different. What’s even more interesting to me is that if I asked someone else to write such a list for me, they would probably say different things. Yet this ever-changing list of titles is how I tend to define myself.

Maybe the changeability of these titles is the basis of their appeal. I know that I find it a little scary to think that there are things about my identity that I can’t change. Still, such things exist. I can remember several moments in my life when I came to accept certain things about myself that are unchangeable.

When I was in Sweden, I went to the first of a series of co-ed soccer games. I failed miserably at it—and that was when I knew that I would never be a team-sport athlete. During one particularly stressful moment at work within the last few years, I realized I was trying to rearrange my tasks and responsibilities in a way that would optimize my time—and that was when I knew that, at my core, I was a mathematician. After the umpteenth time I was asked to teach or do a volunteer project with kids, and I still felt the same sense of anxiety and dread—that was when I knew I was just never going to be as comfortable with kids in large groups as I wish I was.

There are a great number of aspects of my identity that I can and do change, but also a smaller number of things that I can’t. So which ones matter? Which ones are my true identity? Do I get to decide who I am, or is my list of titles just a blanket I use to cover up the deepest parts of my nature?

I know, I know. The answer is that they both matter. I know. Yet it was not easy for me to convince myself of that. I still go back and forth sometimes. One side of the argument says that I should pay attention to my deep-down natures, and not randomly decide to try to be a soccer player when I know I cannot be one. The other side of the argument says that to claim that I simply am what I am is cowardly. Just stating that I’ll never be good with kids is a cop-out for avoiding situations that make me uncomfortable. Which is the right thing? Do I strive to choose my own identity and make it the truth? Or to I try to identify the unchangeables and accept them?

For the answer, I turned to the ever-reliable source of pop culture. It just so happens that there is something I love on either side of the argument.

The spirit of Glee would say that I should accept and embrace the things I cannot change. (“I was born this way, hey!”) Yet one of the most famous lines in the Harry Potter series says, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

I am who I was born to be, and I am also who I choose to be. For years, the two have felt contradictory. But perhaps they are not. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

Choice

“I looked up, suddenly feeling smaller and very alone. There was no one near me. No hand was touching mine. No one stood close by. … [T]he only one I had to help me was myself.”

-- from Storm Front by Jim Butcher

Sometimes, I hate being a grown-up.

There are some advantages, of course, to being an adult rather than a child. You get to stay up later. You have beverage choices that expand beyond fruit juice and milk. You don’t have to take as many tests or ask permission to go to a friend’s house. Generally speaking, you get to run your own life. That’s the good thing about being an adult.

But here’s the bad thing about being an adult: You have to run your own life. And sometimes, I just can’t take the pressure.

This week, I was faced with a grown-up decision at work. Deep down, I knew that it was a good situation to be in. It was a choice between two new positions, both of which would be a step up from the one I am currently in. Both seemed to have similar potential for producing interesting work and valuable learning opportunities. Both offers represented someone in the organization having strong beliefs in my potential – which is something I had felt was slipping away in the last month or so.

To sum up the situation, I’ll say that there really wasn’t a wrong choice. Thus, this didn’t even really qualify as a problem. It was a non-problem.

Still, I hated to choose, because each choice would have its set of repercussions. Taking advantage of either opportunity would mean giving up the other. It was a matter of choosing which opportunity I would rather let go. I found this agonizing. As I usually do, I stalled as long as I could in making a choice, as if I hoped that some clear “right” choice would appear or I’d find a way out of making the choice at all.

Honestly, Katie, I thought to myself. What do you really want to happen? Would you rather someone came along and made the choice for you? Told you what you had to do? (Actually, if it were the right person, I don’t think I would mind that. I tried to hire my friend Carla to make all my grown-up decisions for me. She said no.)

After I had run out of stalling techniques, I did finally make a choice. Although I found a way to get a little bit of both choices in the final arrangement, I did turn something down. I found the whole process utterly exhausting.

I’ve done a lot of thinking this weekend about why I hate these situations so much. Situations like this one should not be such difficult choices. No one’s life hangs in the balance. There isn’t even much potential for regret. So why do grown-up choices scare me so much?

After all my pondering, I’ve realized that the thing I don’t like about big choices is how utterly alone they make me feel. Someone asks me a question, and it feels like the whole world goes away as soon as I recognize that I’m the only person who can answer it. It’s just me, making a decision that will affect my life. It will be just me living with the consequences later. I’ll have no one to point to and no one to lean on if this goes badly. The buck stops here. And that thought makes me want to pull the covers up over my head and hide.

I hated choosing a concentration at the arts and sciences center I attended during middle and high school. I hated choosing the colleges to which I would apply. (I didn't mind choosing which college to attend, as a full ride to one and almost nothing from the others made it a non-choice.) I hated choosing a major. I hated choosing between the two jobs I was offered when I graduated. I hated choosing my first apartment in Chicago. And I hated choosing which opportunity I wanted to pursue at work this year.

Now, as I am looking at this issue objectively from the outside, it seems like a pretty ridiculous way to go through life. I’ve been struggling to find a way to change my perspective about making choices. In my musing, I remembered the end of my senior year in high school. It was a time full of these choices, all of which made me crazy because they felt like they would determine the course of the rest of my natural life. I was struggling with this exact same issue as I wrote my graduation speech. Outwardly, I was trying to act like a self-assured senior, excited about going to college. Inwardly, I was thinking, I know this is the way things have to go, but I wish things could just stay the way they are. I was afraid to move on, because whatever path I chose would be mine to deal with.

During my senior year, I was in the school play. At the end of the show, my character faced a choice between staying somewhere where she was protected and cared for, and going out into the world on her own. She knew she had to leave her haven, but was still reluctant to do it. Seeing her struggle, another character looked her in the eye and said, “The door is open for you, Mrs. Savage. Make your peace with loneliness.”

I put the line into my graduation speech. I talked about how scary it was to walk through that door, but how it was important to have the courage to do it. When I was 18, my focus was on the door.

Now, ten years later, I’m coming back to that same line, but a different piece speaks to me this time: Make your peace with loneliness. That part of the line means more to me now than it did then.

The fact of the matter is that being an adult can be a lonely business. I am not really as all-alone as I make myself feel sometimes. There are plenty of people in my life that would be more than happy to talk my choices through with me. But in the end, I am in control of my own life, and I do have to handle the consequences of the choices I make.

But the privilege of making my own choices is a freedom that I would sorely miss, if it were gone. Keeping that in mind, perhaps, is my way of making peace with the loneliness that comes with being an adult.

Snack

“They give you more snacks when you’re nine.”

--from Feed by Mira Grant

Now that many of my friends have children, I have noticed that there are certain things that all parents seem to carry with them at all times. A change of clothes, or at least an extra shirt, for when the one the child is wearing inevitably gets wet. A toy of some sort, be it some sort of electronic device or a stuffed animal or some other source of distraction. And always, always, always, parents carry snacks.

Children seem to be offered snacks a dozen times a day. I am usually jealous. I love food, and if someone offered me snacks all day long, I can pretty much guarantee that I would eat all of them. But the really fascinating part of this is that children often turn the snacks down. (I try to refrain from asking if I can eat the snacks they don’t want.)

I read an article once that claimed that we should all try to eat like young children. A two-year-old, claimed the article, only eats when s/he is hungry, pushes away the parts that don’t taste as good, and stops eating once s/he feels full. We should all relearn how to eat intuitively. Eat when you’re hungry, and stop when you are full. That makes sense, right?

There are parts of this philosophy that I agree with. I absolutely believe in the idea of only eating when you are hungry. While I am not much of a stress eater, I am very much a boredom eater. I’ve been working lately on not using food as a method of procrastination. I have been surprised to find out that simply asking myself if I am hungry really helps me manage my food intake.

On the other hand, I think that the dieters of the world often miss the flip side of this. Yes, you should only eat when you are hungry, but that also means that there is no reason to feel guilty about eating when you are hungry. Even if you get hungry many times each day.

When I was in middle and school, I often gave up eating between meals during Lent. Snacking felt like an indulgence that I could and should give up. And perhaps, at the time, it was. I don’t remember feeling hungry or anxiously waiting for meals to come around. I only remember having to turn down $1 candy bars or handfuls of fruit snacks that would have tasted good. I sometimes would go to school without breakfast, eat nothing until lunch, then go to the rest of my classes, play practice, and drumline rehearsal. I wouldn’t get home to eat dinner until 9 pm.

I think back on that schedule, and it seems unhealthy. Yet, I don’t remember feeling hungry all the time. So perhaps it was an okay schedule for me. I had no time to boredom eat.

Now, however, I can’t imagine eating so little in a day. I wake up in the morning, and though I usually force myself to work out before my mind realizes what I am doing to my body, I am usually hungry immediately afterward. I eat a bowl of oatmeal with peanut butter mixed in, a piece of fruit, a yogurt cup, and a cup of coffee at around 6 am. By the time I get to work at 8 am, I am so hungry that I will eat a granola bar. By 10 am, I am hungry again and will usually eat an apple. At that point, I usually make it to 11:30 am, when I eat a salad or sandwich for lunch.

So, on a typical day now, I am eating as much food before noon as I did in an entire day in high school. This really bothered me, at first. I tried to eat less for breakfast, or cut one of the morning snacks, thinking it couldn’t be right to eat so much in the morning. But when I did that, I was so hungry at work that it was affecting my concentration. My conscious brain was telling me not to eat. But eventually, I gave in to my grumbling stomach and ate the snacks.

Once I learned to embrace morning snacks, the rest of my eating schedule changed too. After my early lunch, I am usually good until I eat dinner around 5 pm. Then, I usually don’t get hungry for the rest of the day. The bedtime snack, which was a fixture of my childhood and adolescence, became the one I had to learn to skip. I would always think I wanted one, out of routine or boredom, but the fact is that I am rarely hungry then.

There are many reasons why it makes sense that my food needs changed, the most obvious being that I have become a morning runner in my adulthood. But the point I am trying to make is not in the physiology of the matter.

My point is this: Snacks are often thought of as being appropriate for children and not adults. I don’t agree with that. Snacks are important and even helpful. There are just two, equally important things to keep in mind. The one that everyone talks about is that you shouldn’t snack if you aren’t hungry. Kids turn snacks down when they don’t feel hungry for them, and adults should, in most instances, do the same.

The equally important flip side, though, is that there are plenty of occasions when adults do get hungry between meals and therefore shouldn’t feel guilty about snacking. Eating more in the morning, in the end, led me to eat much less in the afternoons and evenings. I’d be willing to bet that similar patterns would happen for others.

Snacking is not the devil. Still, it is harder than it sounds to only eat snacks when you are hungry. Like I said before, if I had someone offering me snacks a dozen times a day, I would probably eat them all. Lucky, I guess, that my mom is no longer constantly around with her parent survival kit.

Scotland

"He was so promising as a student that the priests whose school he attended sent him to Spain with a nobleman whom they knew, so that he might learn still more from travel."

--from Number Stories of Long Ago by David Eugene Smith

Some years ago, I read about the battle of Culloden in a book called Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon. I knew that Bonnie Prince Charlie gathered an army of Scottish highlanders and tried to reclaim the crown of Scotland for the Stuart dynasty. I knew that he had a great many successes in his campaign, leading up to the battle of Culloden. I knew he made some foolish choices on the eve of that battle, and that in the end, the highlanders suffered a bitter defeat that changed the course of history in Scotland. I knew all that.

But then again, I didn’t know.

Last week, I spent seven days on a tour of Scotland that took me into the Scottish highlands and to the Culloden battlefield. I can say without a doubt that my understanding and appreciation of the story of the story of the Jacobite rebellion of 1746 has changed and deepened in ways I could not have imagined.

We arrived in the highlands on a misty morning. We got off the bus and looked out on the beautiful shores of Loch Lomond. The sight was breathtaking. Light fog hung over the mountains. A light rain fell occasionally, making all the vegetation lush and green. The water was still and blue from afar, yet dark and brooding up close. The whole place had an air of mystery and majesty that I can hardly explain.

That was only the beginning of our trip through the highlands. For the next four days, we drove through amazing scenery, through narrow passes, down winding mountain roads, and by misty, glistening lochs. We listened to our tour guide tell us dozens of stories of the legends and history of the region. And I must confess that I completely lost my heart to the Scottish highlands.

I can’t claim to know Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s full motivation for launching his campaign to take back Scotland from the English. But I understand now why so many highlanders chose to follow him. If the Scottish highlands were my home, I would fight to get them back, too. I felt a deep connection to the land after a few days of seeing it through a bus window. These men not only lived there, but also depended on the land for their livelihood. How could they do anything else but try to keep it?

Yet having that new appreciation of the highlanders’ connection to their home made the story of Culloden all that more heartbreaking. We walked out onto Culloden Moor and stood at the location of the front lines of the highland forces. I gazed out across the field and saw in the distance the mountains that had already so captured my heart and imagination. These men stood there looking out on their home.

Then came the order to attack. The battle was lost in less than an hour. A great many highlanders died that day on the field. The rest were hunted down, imprisoned, and massacred for years to come. The ones that survived were not allowed to wear their clan tartans, which were a proud symbol of their heritage.

The entirety of their lives changed that day. I thought I understood that before I went to Scotland. But it wasn’t until I stood on that front line that I really understood.

If I had stood on Culloden Moor without knowing everything I did about the Jacobite rebellion and the highlanders, I don’t think I would have appreciated the magnitude of what happened there that fateful day in 1746. If I had only read about the battle but never seen what the highlanders saw when they stood on the front lines, I never would have been able to really imagine what it was like for them. But the two experiences together made for a heartbreaking, soul-changing moment that will stay with me for a long time.

Nine months ago, when I sat in a piano bar discussing a possible trip abroad with my mother, I started throwing out random destinations – anywhere I had not yet been. Poland, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Turkey. I was willing to go anywhere, sight unseen. But I’m so glad that, in the end, we settled on going to Scotland. Not only did the stories of Outlander come alive for me, but the history behind the stories became real.

At the end of our trip, half of our tour group continued on to do a weeklong tour of Ireland. While a piece of me envied them, another piece of me knew that I would not appreciate Ireland the way I appreciated Scotland. I cried when we left the highlands, and I cried again when we left the country altogether. I had seen what I had come to see, but it was still hard to say goodbye. And I think it would have been, no matter where I had been going next.

I hope I take many trips in my lifetime that give me the kind of experience that Scotland did. There are so many places in the world to go, and who knows which others I will feel compelled to see as my life goes on. For now, I plan to continue to read historical fiction until I feel inspired to go somewhere else. There is much to be learned from travel. But like any teacher, travel will teach you more when you come prepared. 

But no matter where else I go, I hope that someday I return to bonnie, bonnie Scotland.

Pretty

** I am posting one day early to make up for the post being one day late last week. Enjoy. **

“Not for nothing, it also helps to know that feeling bad about your looks is apparently such a universal thing that even little girls who live in isolated Wisconsin cabins (as far as one can get from fashion magazines) can experience it.”

--from The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure

I was lucky enough to grow up in a magnet-school bubble that protected me from adolescent-girl meanness. I never wore fancy clothes or carried name-brand accessories, and for the most part, I wasn’t picked on for it. I may have been jealous of my friend’s Trapper-Keeper or slap bracelet, but I was never made to feel like less of a person for not having one. I never felt ashamed of my clothes or general appearance – at least not as a result of what my peers have said to me.

That being said, I would be blatantly lying if I said that I never struggle with my looks. It’s a rare day when I look in the mirror and I feel more confident for it.

My hair is flat, boring color so nondescript that I’m never sure whether to list my hair color as blond or brown. It’s not quite straight but not quite wavy, which basically means that it looks like a hot mess if I let it air dry or leave it down when I’ll be outside for long periods of time. 

I’ve often wished that I could trade in the entirety of my skin for a new model. I’ve never been able to rid my face entirely of the acne that appeared at age 12. The skin on my nose is permanently 3 shades redder than the skin on the rest of my face, and consequently my nose often shows up bright red in photographs and I’m asked whether I’m sunburned when I haven’t seen the sun for weeks. Exercise makes ugly, rash-like bumps appear on my upper arms. And I have more moles than I’ve ever cared to count. They look ugly when exposed. They leave visible bumps under form-fitting clothes. And they’ve also left me covered with scars of various sizes, shapes, and colors, due to the need to remove at least one a year for precautionary skin-cancer screenings.

I do like the color of my eyes. They are hazel, showing some green, some brown, some gold, and even a thin ring of blue. However, my eyes are chronically dry, so the pretty irises are ringed by nasty red veins that almost never fade.

I could go on, but I won’t. I realize that everything I just wrote puts the worst possible spin on my features. But I was not trying to be objective; I was trying to write an honest account of the things that go through my mind when I look in the mirror. While I’ve never felt self-conscious enough to make me not leave the house, it is a rare occasion when I feel pretty.

I have made some efforts in recent years to feel better about my appearance. I stopped settling for whatever clothes I can get on, and starting putting in the effort to find clothes that fit well and learn which colors and cuts look best on me. I started forcing myself to wear bigger and more colorful accessories, despite the fact that I often feel like they are over the top. I have made periodic attempts at wearing makeup (but that’s one thing I have yet to master, so I’ve never stuck with it for long).  Whenever I get my hair cut, I talk myself into cutting it too short to tie back, so I’m forced to fuss with it and learn what looks nice on me.

These steps have helped in some ways. At the very least, I’ve learned that people who look coordinated and put together aren’t able to do it without some effort. I feel a little more grown up and a lot less guilty about buying things for myself. I’m more confident, and maybe even happier. But as far as feeling prettier? Forget it. I still feel like I’m just doing the best I can with the mediocre hand that I was dealt.

I am quite sure that I am not alone in this. Far from it. But I don’t find that thought very comforting. Actually, it makes me a little sad to think that there are women everywhere who struggle to feel pretty. That idea has led me to think back on the moments when I have felt pretty. Surprise, surprise, I’ve noticed that these moments have something in common. I feel pretty when someone tells me I look pretty.

The fact of the matter is that it is next to impossible to be objective about your own looks. It’s much easier to believe that you look pretty if someone else tells you so. Before all the feminists object, let me say that I don’t think it has to be a significant other. After all, I’ve never had a significant other, and this has worked for me in the past. I never had any kind of romantic entanglement with my late friend Stephen, yet he made me feel pretty all the time. My cousin Kim has a way of complimenting my hair and clothes in ways that sometimes make me feel like I look pretty. Even some stranger on the train complimenting my shoes can make me feel pretty.

While some part of me hates the idea of other people controlling any part of my self-worth, I think there is an alternative way of interpreting this. Maybe the lesson is that it is so, so important to tell someone they look nice when you think it. Make it a point to compliment someone every day. Maybe if we all hear it enough, those feelings of prettiness will have a better chance of becoming intrinsic.

It’s just another way to pay it forward.

Robot

“Sometimes, your eyes see something your brain doesn’t. You pick up a newspaper and your head gives you a phrase that you didn’t consciously read yet. You walk into a room and you realize something’s out of place before you’ve bothered to properly look.”

--from Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

I often feel like I exist in the gray area, career-wise. I work in education, but I am not a teacher. I work in publishing, but I don’t work for a publisher. I don’t work in corporate America, but I’m also not quite in academia. Honestly, I really enjoy this ambiguity. It allows me to dip my toes in several different career ponds without feeling like I am stuck in any of them.

One of the weirdest things about my job, I think, is the way my skills are somewhat divorced from my education. My background is in mathematics and learning sciences, and I do believe that is critically important to being able to do my job well. But my marketable skill set is in editorial. I think of education and editorial as the two, rather separate hats I have to wear in while completing my day-to-day work tasks.

I will freely admit that I wasn’t very good at either aspect of my job when I started. I’ve been able to really refine and develop my ability to think like a mathematics educator through graduate school, attendance at conferences, and simply talking with my colleagues (who happen to be among the best in the field). Almost every day at my job is a professional development opportunity in that sense, and I’m lucky that way.

Appropriate editorial professional development opportunities are harder to come by. There are certification programs I could go through to show that I am proficient with the Chicago Manual of Style, but because I work on materials intended for young children, we mostly work from our own specialized style guide. I am as familiar with the CMS as I need to be. I honestly could not tell you if there are editorial conferences, but even if they are, I doubt that I would find them very useful. The materials that I edit just have too many unusual characteristics about them.

Thus, I have not made much conscious effort to develop my editorial skills over the years. Lucky for me, these skills seem to have developed quite nicely on their own through years of practice.

Most days, I feel like my subconscious does most of the work for me. The kinds of information that I can pick up from a glance at a page of one of our books is really kind of fascinating. Sometimes, I can glance at a page and my eyes are immediately drawn to an error. Other times, I take a quick glance and know that somewhere, there is a hyphen missing, but I have to look again carefully to find where it is. Still other times, I can look at a page and just know that something is not right, though it often takes me some time to figure out what it is.

This phenomenon fascinates me. I have so many questions about it. I’m sure it’s a skill that develops through practice, but did I do something specific to help it along? Is it some sort of photographic memory? Do I actually pick up so much information with a glance at a page that my working memory can’t hold the location of the missing hyphen along with everything else? Why can I instantly see errors on the pages of math textbooks when I can read my own writing ten times and still miss blatant typos?

On a different track, here is another question. How much of it is just a basic survival instinct? The feeling I get when I know something is wrong with a page is similar to the feeling I get when I walk into my apartment and know someone has been there in my absence (or my cat has knocked something down). I can’t always see it right away, but I know that something has been disturbed or moved. It’s the same sense of not-right-ness.

Getting back to the idea of professional development, is this something that could be taught? Familiarity with the thing you are editing is important, of course. Someone who has never seen one of our math books would never be able to sense that something is wrong with a page the way I do. But is the skill generalizable?

Despite how little I know about my ability to sense missing hyphens and incorrect fonts, I am grateful for it. It removes a lot of the tedium from my job. I think of it as my own version of the Lost in Space robot, except instead of saying, “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!” it says, “Error, editor Katie, error!”

My error robot is awesome. I’ve come to think of the Lego robot on my desk as a sort of portrait of him. He’s a great defender of mathematical accuracy and a fierce opponent of bad grammar. I think Stephen would be proud.

Laugh

“A broad, soundless laugh now appeared on his face and no longer left it.”

-- from “In the Penal Colony” in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

While I am generally happy and satisfied with my life, I admit that I am prone to occasional attacks of listlessness. Now and again, I have a bad day or endure a series of small frustrations, and I just can’t shake the blues. I end up sitting in my apartment, staring at a wall, wondering why my life isn’t what I thought it would be by now.

Last Thursday was one of those days. I was sad and lonely for no particular reason, and as I sat on my couch waiting for an appropriate time to go to bed, all I could think was that I wanted, very badly, to laugh.

I’ve always believed that laughter is one of the world’s greatest healers. A good bout of laughing really makes the rest of the world go away. The physical exertion of laughing hard forces the restless feelings out of me. The emotional release of laughing shifts my focus away from the negativity. Laughter is a never-fail, lasting cure for the blues, and the harder and longer I laugh, the better I feel.

So, on Thursday, I was really wishing for a laughing fit. My mind drifted to episodes in my past that left me unable to stop laughing. I hoped that the memory of one of these occasions would trigger me to laugh myself out of my funk.

I thought of the rehearsal for the play during my senior year in high school when we first started using props. One of the characters carried around a doll, believe it to be her dead son. The first time I saw the doll was during a run of the scene when my character was introduced to the doll as if it were a 5-year-old boy. My castmate walked on stage, said, “Mrs. Savage, this is my son,” and held out a doll of Steve from Blues Clues. The giant head, ugly shirt, and buckle shoes were too much for me, and I broke out laughing. The other cast member started to laugh too, and soon enough we were so far gone that the director sent us home. It was not my proudest moment, yet I remember feeling that comforting sense of exhaustion and release that a good laugh brings. (It’s very unlikely that she will ever read this, but I would bet that Disa still remembers this, too.)

I thought of the Easter weekend of my senior year in college, when a friend and I were making a whole chicken for dinner. We were rinsing the chicken in the sink to help thaw it out when, quite suddenly, the giblets came flying out and slid up the side of the sink fast enough to rise to eye level before landing back in the sink with a loud, metallic thump. My friend and I had a complete laughing meltdown that lasted for hours. (You remember, don’t you, Candace?)

I thought of the hayride I went on as an undergrad that unfortunately, occurred on a rainy, windy, cold evening. My friends and I sat hunched under our hoods, feeling the rain soak us through to our skins, hating life, and muttering complaints under our breath. Finally, one unforgettable person, determined to lighten the mood, yelled, “We are having a good time! Everybody just shut up!” The entire wagon dissolved into laughter even as we choked on the rain being blown into our faces. We continued laughing about that moment for years. (I miss you so much, Stephen.)

I thought of the time, shortly after moving to Chicago, that I came home from a bachelorette party feeling more than a little tipsy. One of my roommates was with me and stayed out in the front yard talking on the phone as I walked into the apartment. My other roommate had apparently been doing yoga while we were gone, as there was a large yoga ball sitting in our living room. In my state of inebriation, I apparently could not quite work out what the yoga ball was or why it was there, so I carried it out to the porch and rolled it down the stairs to my roommate, saying, “Look!” We both laughed until tears were rolling down our cheeks.

It was easy to remember plenty of fits of laughter, but the memories didn’t have the effect I was hoping for. I remembered the feelings of euphoria and release, but all I could do was smile or sometimes let out a small chuckle. The real laugh felt somehow trapped inside me, unable to really get out.

It’s been about four days now, and I still haven’t really laughed the way I want to. I’ve tried calling up more memories; that hasn’t done it. I’ve tried forcing myself to laugh harder at things that are only moderately funny; that hasn’t worked either. Perhaps true, gut-wrenching, blues-healing laughter can’t be manufactured. I’m just going to have to wait.

There are other ways to shake off my blues. I can work on the various projects that are laying around my apartment. I can play with my cat. I can get out into the fleeting sunshine, when the sun makes an appearance. I can hold onto that silent laugh trapped inside me and hope that when I do dissolve into laughter again, the experience will leave me contented and worry-less for a while.

I bet it will. And I bet I won’t see it coming. (Look at me! I’m being optimistic!) In the meantime, thanks to all of you who have laughed with me over the years. I remember those moments with a clarity and sentiment I can hardly explain, and I wish you all plenty more moments of suffocating laughter.

Million Billion Trillion

“Instead of thinking about the monkeys I think about all the kids in the world, how they’re not TV they’re real, they eat and sleep and pee and poo like me. If I had something sharp and pricked them they’d bleed, if I tickled them they’d laugh. I’d like to see them but it makes me dizzy that there’s so many and I’m only one.”

--from Room by Emma Donoghue

In my five years of working in the education field, I have learned that most mathematical concepts can be placed on a continuum from easy to teach and learn, to tremendously difficult to teach and learn. The basics of three-dimensional objects, for example, are pretty easy since there are so many good models of three-dimensional solids in the real world. A shoebox is a model of a rectangular prism, a soup can is a model of a cylinder, and so on.

Two-dimensional geometry moves a little way down the continuum toward hard. There are many real-world models of two-dimensional figures, but they all have small problems with them. A piece of notebook paper is a pretty good model of rectangular region, but the paper does have some thickness, whereas a true rectangular region does not. The rails of train tracks are a decent model of parallel lines, but they are never perfectly straight and don’t continue forever. Plus, train tracks appear to get closer together as they move off into the distance, and explaining perspective to a child is not an easy thing to do.

There are ways to overcome these minor difficulties, though. For one thing, children don’t necessarily need to understand all these fine distinctions right away. The real thorns in my side are the concepts that are all the way at the hard end of continuum. One of these concepts is large numbers.

Learning to read and write large numbers is one thing. Once you get past the teens, our numeration system has a predictable pattern. But really understanding what the large numbers mean is much harder.

Instincts about large numbers are not something we are born with. When I was six or seven, I had a Dr. Seuss book called My Book About Me. Each page had blanks to fill in. My name is _______. I am _____ years old. I am _____ feet _____ inches tall. I happily filled in all these blanks, and eventually came to a page that asked me to count the number of steps from my room to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the door, from the door to the mailbox, and from the mailbox to the store. I counted the steps in the first three trips, then stopped. I'm not sure if I just didn't want to walk all the way to the store (which was about a mile down the road) or I thought my mother wouldn't let me, but I didn’t go. Instead, I simply wrote 100 in the blank, assuming that it couldn’t possibly be more than 100 steps. After all, 100 was a huge number.

I eventually learned a better sense of 100. There are many ways to visually compare 1 with 100. There are 100 pennies in two rolls, 100 squares in a 10-by-10 grid, and 100 paper clips in a box. If kids are exposed to comparisons like this (one penny versus two rolls of pennies), they will eventually gain a sense of how much 100 is, and come to understand that maybe 100 is not such a huge number after all. Lord knows that, as an adult, I have learned that $100 is not the fortune it seemed like when I was 7.

There are similar ways to help children gain a sense of 1,000. But what about 10,000? What about 100,000? What about a million? When is the last time you’ve seen that many of anything? I think part of the problem is that even when you do see collections that big, our brains have a hard time processing the individual pieces. There are photographs of crowds of 100,000 people, but when I look at such photos, I don’t see individual people. I see one mass of people. I don’t know if that is true of everyone, but I imagine that it is a common difficulty.

I openly admit that despite the fact that I am 28 years old and I have degrees in mathematics and learning sciences, I still struggle to really understand large numbers. My undergraduate alma mater recently received a $100 million gift. Many alumni were very excited about this, but I have to admit that my response was a blank stare. I don’t really understand what this means for the university. I know that they are going to use the money to open a medical school, but will the $100 cover the whole start-up cost? Will there have to me more fundraisers just to erect the buildings? Will it only take $50 million to first open it, so the rest can be used to sustain the school until it becomes profitable? I haven’t the faintest idea what $100 million will buy.

I also don’t have a clue about the population of the United States or the planet. I have heard the numbers before, of course, but they never stick because I really have no idea what they mean. Before I google it, here are my wild stabs at these populations: There are 3 million people in the United States and 2 billion in the world.

Here are the true populations, according to the census bureau: There are 311 million people in the United States and almost 7 billion on the planet. I guarantee that I will forget these numbers tomorrow, because at the moment my brain is struggling to really understand the difference between my guesses and the truth.

While I understand that my own personal anecdotes are not proof of anything, I relate them to illustrate the kinds of struggles that kids (and the adults they become) will face if they don’t develop a good sense of large numbers. This is, in fact, the kind of math that is used in everyday life, and I wish I had learned it better. And that returns me to my original point: This is a hard thing to teach.

There are some curricula and books out there that make a very good start, but I’m always on the lookout for inspiration for ways we could teach a better sense of large numbers. I often count my steps while I’m running, so maybe I will see how long it takes me to run a million steps (not all in one day, of course). I’m not particularly interested in finding out how long it takes me, but I am interested in finding out if it helps me understand just how much 1,000,000 is.

And if any of you would like to donate $100 million to the cause so that I can see what it takes to spend that kind of money, that would be great too. Thanks.

Canadian

“The restaurant downstairs was still cheap, if you didn’t mind the difference between francs and euros. Three-franc wine was now three euros, which was more than fifteen francs, but Harris was not interested in such mathematical calculations.”

--from “Belons” in Edible Stories: A Novel in Sixteen Parts by Mark Kurlansky

In general, I was a rather tame college student. I didn’t drink at all until I was 21, and even after that my bouts of heavy drinking were few and far between. My Friday and Saturday nights consisted mostly of lounging around my dorm or apartment. I just wasn’t interested in the frat party scene or the bar scene.

But there was one aspect of the college stereotype I was interested in: SPRING BREAK! It wasn’t so much that I wanted to go to Panama Beach and wear a bikini and get trashed, but I did want to get the hell out of town and go on a trip with my friends. I spent the spring break of my freshman year at home with my parents, but after that I was determined to go somewhere for the remaining spring breaks.

This was one goal I actually ended up achieving. However, none of the trips really turned out the way I expected.

When I was a sophomore, six of us piled into my friend Stephen’s dilapidated minivan and made our way down to Myrtle Beach, SC. We had high hopes for beaches and sunshine, and the memories of the drive down there are some of the best of my life. But two things happened when we got there that really put a wrench in the trip. First, turns out that Myrtle Beach is not warm and sunny during the first week of March. The week was rainy, windy, and cold. We got so frustrated that we actually got back in the van and drove to Florida one day. Second, during our first full day there, I caught some kind of Godzilla virus that made me cough until I choked, and most of the time I was barely able to keep my eyes open. While now, looking back, I would not trade my memories of that trip for the world, at the time it was a big let down. I wish I would have enjoyed it more. As it turned out, it was the only trip I would ever take with that group of friends.

When I was a junior, I was studying abroad during spring break. When my friends were on spring break back home, I was in Rome, walking until my feet felt like they would fall off and spending a night in an airport with some random guy doing tai chi. During my own spring break of sorts, I was in Russia, eating last night’s moldy desserts for breakfast and getting ushered into Russian Orthodox Easter services by armed military personnel. Again, I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything now, but they were their own kind of bizarre and not the kind of spring break I had imagined.

So, my senior year came around, and I really wanted to go on a trip. It was complicated, because some of my friends had different spring breaks than me because they were doing teaching internships at the time, and others just couldn’t be away for other reasons. I would not be deterred, though, and I begged three of my available friends to go somewhere, anywhere with me. Somehow, I talked them into driving to Toronto.

I don’t remember a lot of details about what we did in Toronto. The only thing I remember clearly is how much we were annoyed with the process of converting prices from American dollars to Canadian dollars and back. Most places accepted American money, but it was hard to tell if you were getting the right amount of change back. Some places would give you change as if you had paid in Canadian dollars, and since the American dollar was worth more at the time, that was a total gyp. So, it was a constant mathematical battle, and it turned into a running gag.

Every time one of us said something about money, another made a point to say, “Canadian or American?” even if the context made it completely clear what we meant. Then we started asking the same question about any number at all. One person would say, “They said it was a 20-minute wait for a table.” Another would answer, “Canadian minutes or American minutes?” Someone would point out that the next attraction was 10 blocks away, and another would ask if they were Canadian blocks or American blocks. It sounds lame, but it was all extremely funny.

Being college students, stayed at a cheap, dingy hotel. We spent some time in the pool, and we were always the only four people there. The pool was pretty large, and if two people were in the water at one end and the other two were talking on deck at the other end, we had to shout to hear each other. Yet, on the wall, there was a sign saying that the maximum capacity of the pool area was 15 people.

This made no sense, of course. It could clearly fit many more than 15 people with room to spare. So what was the deal? I don’t remember which one of us said it, but I should have known it would come out eventually. “That must mean 15 Canadian people.” And the rest of us answered, “Oh, yes, Canadian.” And we cracked up.

Like I said, I know it’s a stupid joke. Yet, it’s what I remember from the last of the spring break trips I so coveted. It was odd and untraditional the way my other spring breaks trip were, but it created a joke that no one but the people who were there will find as funny as I do. In that sense, I have to believe that the true essence of spring break-ing was accomplished. We got the hell out of town and came back with a gem of an inside joke.

I went on one more spring break trip while I was in grad school. We went to New York City for a day, then on to Montreal. Oddly, I don’t remember any difficulties with conversions on that trip to Canada. Maybe in Montreal, all the numbers were in French Canadian, and that’s why I didn’t notice.

Shut up. I think that joke is hilarious. But I only expect Candace, Matt, and Carl to understand.

Alien

“They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive.”

--from The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

When I was in middle school and high school, I had a science teacher by the name of Mr. Barker. Because I went to an arts and sciences center, I was lucky enough to have three classes with Mr. Barker: earth science in eighth grade, biology in ninth grade, and advanced biology in twelfth grade. I say this makes me lucky because as a teacher, Mr. Barker was truly extraordinary.

His classroom was full of amazing things. There was a tank of hissing cockroaches that we were allowed to pick up and handle any time. There were pipettes of every size and measuring scale and kits for making gels that separated out strands of DNA. There was a polygraph machine and a seismograph and a weather station. Because of his elaborate set-up, Mr. Barker was often on the news talking about some random scientific phenomenon. He was labeled everything from “Local Science Teacher” to “Seismology Expert” when he gave his sound bites. Everywhere around him, there was science, because Mr. Barker was, at his very core, a scientist.

He was also a skeptic; in fact, he was the most emphatic skeptic I have ever known. He took significant amounts of time out of his classes to show us videos that debunked psychics and mind readers. He had us measure the various parts of a pair of scissors and manipulate the measurements until we found patterns, just to see how easy it is to find them. (He made us promise not to be astounded and go off and start a scissors cult.) On his wall was a larger poster of Occum’s Razor: “When you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think of horses before you think of zebras.” It was his mantra.

I quite vividly remember one of the times he got worked up about alien abduction stories. To begin with, he hated, hated, how movies all show aliens to be these greenish, humanoid forms with big heads and big eyes. “Those aren’t that different from us!” he said. (Of course I am paraphrasing here.) “People think these silly descriptions of aliens are so otherworldly and different. So if I described something that had legs that bent in different directions, tasted through its feet, and breathed through its butt, people would say it’s an alien for sure, right? Well guess what? That’s not an alien. That’s an insect!”

If life on other planets exists, he argued, surely we have not begun to imagine the forms it could take. There’s no evidence to suggest such life exists elsewhere in the universe. “But even if it did,” he said, “why would the aliens go to Nowhere, Iowa, beam up Bubba, leave depressions in the crops, and leave?” He did not believe in alien abductions, and he made it quite difficult for his students to believe, either. I haven’t known anyone to be so passionate about anything, before or since.

Mr. Barker’s purpose in all of this, I think, was not so much to make sure that we did not believe in aliens. What he really wanted was for us to use science, not hearsay, to draw conclusions about the world around us. Or, more simply put, he wanted to make sure we thought for ourselves. Once we did that, he was pretty confident that we would discover that he was right about everything else.

Those stories give you an idea of what Mr. Barker was like as a person. Above all else, he was a scientist and a skeptic. Those are the things I immediately remembered when the quote above reminded me of him. Ten years ago, if someone had asked me why I thought that Mr. Barker was a truly extraordinary teacher, I probably would have listed those same things. I do still think his passion for science and truth made me sit up and pay attention, and that’s no small thing. But now that I’ve been a professional in the education field for a few years, I find myself thinking of different ways in which Mr. Barker was different. Three new things renew my belief that he was a world-class teacher.

First, Mr. Barker’s tests were hard. Every student in my math/science program lived in fear of his tests. In fact, the difficulty of the tests turned some students away from his classes altogether. You couldn’t cram for a Barker test. You had to start getting ready for them as soon as you started a new unit. I’m not sure I really understood this at the time, but now I realize that Mr. Barker’s tests were hard because doing well on his tests required not only knowing the material, but understanding it. The questions required some significant thought and problem solving. Nothing was simply regurgitated, and there were definitely never any multiple-choice questions. Mr. Barker taught us things, and then he expected us to apply them. That expectation alone raised the bar and caused me to learn more in his classes than in most others.

(As an aside, I’ll also note that he drew pictures on the board during his tests. They were cartoons meant to depict some person or thing associated with the material on the test. If we could guess what they meant, we got extra credit. I remember him drawing a picture of a large toe and a large letter O, each with faces, handbags, and necklaces. Off to the side, a speech bubble proclaimed that someone’s sisters had arrived. The answer (did you guess?) was my-oh-sis and my-toe-sis, or meiosis and mitosis. Mr. Barker’s ability to come up with these on the fly was a sure sign of his brilliance.)

Second, Mr. Barker did not teach to standardized tests. His advanced biology course was considered Advanced Placement, but the curriculum was heavily focused toward genetics, as this was Mr. Barker’s particular interest, and the lab equipment at the center allowed us to do some pretty amazing things with DNA. Finally, about two weeks before the date of the AP test, he did briefly go over some other topics that would be on the test, but he made it very clear that it would take a lot of outside studying for us to do well. He knew he didn’t prepare us to pass the test, but he didn’t apologize for it. It simply wasn’t important to him—and he didn’t think it should be all that important to us, either. I wish teachers today had the luxury of expressing that attitude to their students.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Mr. Barker treated me the same as any other student. I don’t mean that other teachers pushed me back; I mean quite the opposite. I was an academic star for most of my school life, and almost every teacher I had put me up on some sort of pedestal. I was always the favorite, the one who knew all the answers, the never-do-wrong class pet. But to Mr. Barker, I was just one among many. Being smart and having my homework done were not things to be rewarded. They were just expected.

I studied my butt off for Mr. Barker’s tests. I usually did well, and when I didn’t, I knew it was my fault for slacking. I also studied for the AP biology test, and I managed to barely scrape a passing grade. But even if I hadn’t passed, I would not have traded Mr. Barker’s class for a better score. And I always checked my attitude at the door when I entered Mr. Barker’s classroom, forgetting the pedestal I was usually perched on elsewhere. It wasn’t a conscious choice so much as a necessity. My feet had to be solidly on the ground if I was going to do well.

Now, looking back, I know that these are the things that set Mr. Barker apart as a teacher. He was brilliant, passionate, and dedicated; those things made him an exceptional scientist. But it was his high expectations of everyone and his refusal to be driven by outside forces like school boards and the Advanced Placement tests that made him an exceptional teacher.

Mr. Barker retired the year I graduated high school. He absolutely deserved the rest, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the students who came after me. Still, I know there are other teachers out there to are great the way Mr. Barker was great. Someday, if I have children, I hope they have teachers like Mr. Barker.  He was an alien of his own sort, and I’m grateful that I got to be one of the Bubbas that Mr. Barker beamed up.

Twenty-eight

“I lay back down on the bed and crossed my arms behind my head, staring at the ceiling as if I expected it have all the answers. Not surprisingly, the ceiling refused to divulge any hints, although I became convinced that it was simply being selfish and keeping them to itself.”

--from “Alpha Team Alpha” by Stephen Hentchel

Dear Stephen,

Happy birthday! I wanted you to know that I was thinking of you on your birthday, even though… well, I won’t even say it. I’ll always be thinking of you on your birthday.

I wasn’t sure of the best way to let you know that. I considered driving to Battle Creek to see you, but it just didn’t feel right. Instead, I spent the weekend doing things that remind me of you. I went to the zoo. I drank a Smirnoff Ice while watching a DVD with the commentary on. (They seem to have stopped making the black cherry Smirnoff, which makes me really sad. I got the new passion fruit kind instead. It’s not as good.) I even went to the Bittersweet bakery. You know, the one you wanted to go to on New Year’s Day that time? It’s pretty awesome in there. Sorry we didn’t go when you wanted to.

I also went for a long run outside, hoping you would come to visit me like you did back in January. I think I might have felt you again on that stretch of the path between Balbo and Monroe. Was it you? Why do you like that spot in particular? I can’t blame you, I suppose, especially on a bright sunny day. The lake sparkles and there are no trees to block the sun.

It was so, so windy while I was running, though. I have to ask: was that your doing? I don’t know why, but I feel like you have some control over the weather. I still think you are responsible for that torrential downpour that V and I drove through on the way to your funeral. I wouldn’t be surprised if that icy, ever gusting wind was your handiwork as well. I know you would find my suffering hilarious. It was you, wasn’t it? Jackass.

I don’t know; maybe thinking you control the weather is my coping mechanism. Maybe it’s not you at all. Maybe it’s just me being a tiny bit crazy. I’m still trying to figure this whole thing out. I don’t really understand where you are. You’re still so real and alive and vibrant in my mind and heart that my brain can’t comprehend the idea that you are not anywhere. You have to be somewhere. I tend to think that the somewhere is above me, in a general sense. I look up to talk to you. And I look to the sky for the weather. So you controlling the weather is something that makes sense to my troubled mind.

What else can you do? Can you internet surf? I hope you’ve been reading your facebook wall. There are so many people that love and miss you, Stephen. The best I can hope is for you to somehow know that. So, I believe you can control the weather, and I’m also choosing to believe that you can read your facebook wall. If that makes me a little crazy, so be it.

I wanted to watch My Fair Lady this weekend. We watched it on VHS that time, and sadly I got rid of all my VHS tapes last summer. So, I had to go looking for the DVD. No luck at Target, no luck at Borders, and no luck at the first Best Buy I visited. What is wrong with these stores? Don’t they know that My Fair Lady is a classic? After some online searching I found a copy at a different Best Buy across town. When I went to pick it up, I found the cutest little coffee shop! So thanks for getting me out into a new neighborhood. I will always think of you when I go into Peet’s Coffee. (Guess what else? The My Fair Lady DVD has an audio commentary! I haven’t watched it yet, but I’ll let you know if it’s good.)

I also put together a badass Lego robot this weekend. It’s no Yoda, but he’ll go on my desk at work and remind me of you every day. He’ll stand right next to my Lego model of Lucius Malfoy accidentally giving Dobby a sock. (Yes, I have one of those. Shut up.) Check him out:

I wish I could call you to wish you a happy birthday. I think I’ve done that every year since the WMU days. I’m trying to remember all your birthdays past, now. The memory of your 20th birthday is a great one. If I’m not mistaken, that’s when we went to see The Core. Surely you remember how we bonded over that movie? “Augh! One is not a prime number! AUUUUGHHH!” Nothing has ever brought us together like bad math.

Well, I take that back. Bad English also brought us together. It was my bad grammar that led to our last phone call. Remember? You just had to point out that I should have said “Me, neither” instead of “Me, either.” I’m glad you did, though. It was so great to talk to you that day. Thank you so, so much for being so impressed that I had run 20 miles that morning and that I would be running a marathon three weeks later. So many people congratulated me, but something about your reaction was so genuine that I will never forget it. You were truly impressed. It won’t be this year, and it may not even be next year, but I promise that someday I’m going to run another for you. And it’ll probably hurt just as badly, so you better damn well be with me every step of the way. I know you will be.

So how do birthdays work, where you are? I bet that you’ve been thinking to yourself this weekend how awesome it is that you get to eternally remain your devastatingly handsome, in-Navy-shape, 27-year-old self. Well, let me just burst that bubble right now. I don’t care what reason and logic say. To me, today you turn 28. And each year on your birthday, I will close my eyes and picture how you would look a year older. Be good, and I promise that you will age gracefully. But if I feel you laughing at me too many times, you may be a candidate for premature baldness and liver spots. You’ve been warned.

I feel like I could talk to you forever, Stephen, but some piece of my heart is telling me that it’s time to end this. Tears are coming to my eyes. So much about this is unfair. You should be celebrating today, feeling what it is like to be 28. You’re 28 on the 28th today. You should be on the phone with everyone you know, gloating over your golden birthday, and insisting that you get to celebrate when it’s your birthday in any time zone. Instead you are… somewhere else. I don’t know where. But somewhere.

I wanted to get you something. I can’t send you the Lego robot, unfortunately, so I thought I’d write you something. I’ve never been much good at fiction (and I wouldn’t want to steal your forte anyway), so I’m trying something different. Here is your birthday Haiku:

Ode to Stephen

Stephen Hentchel was a guy
who I met at Western Mich.
He was a jackass.

Still, he was a friend,
always good for a laugh and
loyal to a fault.

We fought sometimes, too.
Oft in jest, but oft for real,
though never lasting long.

He sat with one knee up,
slept with his head on his arm,
and drove a minivan.

He loved bare necklines.
He made me feel so pretty
like no one else has.

He hugged me so tight
when I saw him the last time.
I’m so grateful now.

Hearts broke when he died
and today we feel his loss
all over again.

Still I am quite sure
that wherever he is now
he is milking this.

And he is with me.
Now and then I feel him laugh.
I love you, Stephen.

I will always be thinking of you, Stephen. Not just on your birthday. You are everywhere I look, and you remain so alive in my memories that most days I have a hard time remembering that you are gone. You are somewhere. I know it. And I’ll never stop wondering where that is and how you are.

I miss you madly, love you deeply, and am with you always.

Also, I hate you. So much.

Hugs, Stephen. Happy birthday. Give ‘em hell, for me.

Katie

Spirit of Law

“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? … Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit?”

-- from “A Plea for Captain John Brown” in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau

I am not a politically minded person. While I do my best to stay abreast of what is going on in the world and in my local community, I outwardly admit that most conversations about politics go completely over my head. I am aware that there are nuances and details and jargon related to politics that I don’t understand. I also know that I could understand better, if I put in a little effort. Yet I don’t usually bother.

In many cases, my reasons for not bothering are simple lack of interest or laziness. But part of the problem is also that when I do put in the effort to understand what is going on, I am left repeating Thoreau’s lament above. He says, “Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit?” I say (somewhat less eloquently), “Wait, seriously?”

A recent and perfect example of this was Rahm Emmanuel’s effort to persuade the courts that he met the residency requirements to become mayor of Chicago. The basics of the situation were as follows: Rahm Emmanuel was a long-time resident of the city of Chicago. When Obama was elected president, Rahm accepted an appointment to be Obama’s chief of staff. He and his family moved to Washington D.C. He later left the chief of staff post so that he could run for Chicago mayor, and moved back to Chicago a few months before the election. While he was in Washington, he rented out his house in Chicago.

There is a Chicago law that states a residency requirement for those who wish to run for mayor. The law says that a mayoral candidate must have lived in the city of Chicago for at least one year leading up to the election. The only exception stated in the law is for active duty military personnel; if an active member of the military resides in Chicago before service, then lives elsewhere on military service, then immediately returns to Chicago after service, the time spent elsewhere still counts toward the residency requirement.

It seems cut and dried, at first glance. Rahm did not live in Chicago for a full year leading up to the election, and he is not a member of the military. So, no mayoral bid for Rahm, right? Not exactly. Two things made the situation more sticky.

First, Rahm argued that while he was not an active member of the military, he left Chicago for the sole purpose of serving his country, with every intention of returning afterward. He still owned a home here. He left possessions in his house. He’s said for years that he wanted to run for mayor. He never left the city for good.

Second, there is the question of the definition of being a resident. While I can’t find anything official that gives a definition, the general idea being spouted by the news was that you just have to have a legal address here. No need to actually live at the address. If that’s true, it seems that Rahm could have indeed met the requirements, given that he owns a home within the city limits. But, he rented out said home, and thus the address was not legally his.

This is the point where I got really annoyed with this situation. This was the major point of contention? The fact that he rented out his house? Everything would be ok if he was not collecting rent from someone? Wait, seriously?

I really wanted people to get out of the word by word text of the law and try to think about the reasons it was made a law in the first place. The idea, I would think, was to make sure that all the mayoral candidates knew the city and were committed to Chicago. I believe that is true of Rahm Emmanuel. Even his opponents would be hard pressed to argue that he doesn’t have a long-standing connection to this city.

And what’s more, the writers of the law even took into account that there are service-related reasons that could pull someone away from the city temporarily. The most common of these reasons would be military service, and I imagine that is why the law reads the way it does. Should the writers of the law have taken into account the remote possibility that a potential mayoral candidate would serve as the one-and-only chief of staff to the president? I guess, maybe. But I have to believe that the spirit of the law was to make exceptions for those who leave to serve the country.

The question of Rahm’s residency went through court after court after court. He was approved to go on the ballot, then the decision was overturned, then he was approved again. Rahm ended up on the ballot. Regardless of my opinions of Rahm’s agenda, which I won’t even bring up here, I think this was the right choice. It followed the spirit of the law, if not the exact words.

I return now to the fact that I am not all that politically minded, so I am aware that there may be some flaws in my arguments above. But my point was not really to argue for Rahm Emmanuel. All I’m saying is that I’m with Thoreau. I’d like to hear some more common sense coming out of the mouths of lawyers and politicians. While I understand that the laws are all that we have to go on, I also think it’s important to remember that law-makers won’t always be able to anticipate every situation to which the laws might apply in the future.

I would also like to say, for the record, that I think the editorial style guide that we use at work should be interpreted with the same flexibility and common sense. But that’s another story, for another blog.