Uncle George

We all have regrets. There are places we'll never visit, art we'll never see, people we'll never meet, dearly loved relatives and teachers we'll never talk with again in this world. Like that sappy old pop song says, "I always thought I'd see you again." In the case of George L. Meshke, I always figured that I'd look him up sometime when I was in Yakima.

Of course, George was the best and most challenging high school teacher I ever had, and of course I never valued him as much as I should have.

Beyond teaching us English and Drama, he provided a refuge for a group of '60s high school kids who needed somewhere to focus their energies, somewhere away from difficult home lives. George was always gentle, always thoughtful, and always demanding. He set rules and expected us to follow them, when other teachers on the same campus just hoped we would do the assignments and leave them alone. And he always opened up new vistas for us, by assigning extra work, by developing new ideas, by being willing to face up to the school board when they worried we were getting into plays that were too modern for our own good. For some reason, the board found "Marat/Sade" to be dangerous, while it beamed approval over our production of "Auntie Mame," with its drinking, smoking, and discussions of free love.

Eventually a parent in the Federal Way school district demanded that George be fired, because he was sure that George had to be gay. I wouldn't know -- George's sexuality was never any of my business. George went off to teach at Yakima Valley Community College, and to amass honors from national and international organizations. I should add that he eventually added a PhD. to his name, and that he was richly appreciated by generations of students and audiences.

The inspiring teacher we always called Uncle George died in June at University of Washington Medical Center. I hope to God he wasn't alone, and that the people who were with him cherished him more than this student knew how.

And I also hope that if you have a teacher in your past who inspired, sheltered, and challenged you, that you send him or her a card, or call, or stop by to see if they need anything. We always assume we'll have the chance to do that later -- and someday our assumptions will be wrong.

Once you've done that, go teach someone something.

Footnote City

Thanks to the Easter weekend, which works out to four days at St. Martin's University, I am almost caught up with the assignments. The Bioethics paper is in the hands of the professor and the gods, the American Dream presentation is planned, The Vicar of Wakefield and Women Beware Women are read and considered, all the class notes for the semester are sorted, the reader response for the American Dream class is written and critiqued by a professor, the poem for the American Dream presentation is written, the reading for Japanese history and the notes for the Japanese geography test are done, the summer school application is written out, and the materials for tomorrow's embryonic stem cell debate in Bioethics are printed out and ready for highlighting for use as talking points. Oh, and I bought some groceries.
So why am I telling you all this? The main idea is totally to make myself feel better about the fact that I am stuck at the very beginning of the first of two (2) papers on Renaissance plays. The short one of the two is due Thursday, I think, and it is not springing to mind the way the paper about The Vicar of Wakefield is. Not being able to come up with an argumentative thesis is no surprise, but I can't even come up with anything I want to say about anything.
Could this be writer's block? It could be. Writer's block is so unfamiliar to me that it feels like a luxury. A writer who is being paid by the hour or the story or the word, for that matter, can't really afford to be blocked up. A radio news editor once told me, "Start at the middle or at the end, but write that bastard because it's going on the air in 15 minutes!" He actually used more words than that, but I'm trying to spare your dainty sensibilities. Anyway, deadlines help, unless you stay up all night trying to meet them. Then you just write crap.
Besides being from eight to fifteen pages, this paper must also have ten sources. Why ten? Why not? When I finally make professor, I'm looking forward to setting arbitrary goals, too. I think I'll assign at least one scholarly research paper to be based on articles in the Seattle Weekly. Not the Stranger, though -- that would be easy: way too much pathology.

Think, Think, Think

This is not the right moment in the semester to make a serious decision. Today I had an exam, followed by a group presentation; I need to create an argumentative thesis for the presentation to the bioethics class; about 180 pages of reading are due tomorrow; a short paper is due Thursday; two more long papers are due on the sixth . . . you get the idea. Being this deep into the semester is like being depressed: make no permanent decisions until things return to normal, whatever that may be.
The current problem is this: I may not be able to do what I want to do, once I work my way through the bachelor's degree. if I decide to get a master's in bioethics, I'm pretty much limited to one school on the east coast. Their master's program doesn't require concurrent enrollment in an M.D. or R.N. program. A school in Europe was suggested, but I don't have the Latin, calculus, and who knows what that are typical of anyone graduating from a European baccalaureate program.
So, maybe no graduate degree in bioethics. I could go back to plan A, which is to get a master's and maybe a doctorate in some kind of English program, so I can teach English as a second language on the college level. How many colleges hire brand new Ph.D.s who are as thoroughly seasoned as I will be by the time I'm ready to look for a job?
This is pretty discouraging. My dream is to teach at the college level, and it's looking unlikely. This could be depressing.
On the other hand, the presentation this afternoon went well. We got the rest of the class to participate, including one young woman whose voice I have never heard before. The hour went by quickly, and the professors didn't look cranky afterward, so I'd say we did well.
At this point, no decisions on what to do next, besides registering for fall semester, just in case that's the right thing to do.

Rational and Irrational

"It must be Thursday; I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
-- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Broadcast, BBC Radio

This semester, Tuesdays and Thursdays hold four-and-a-half hours of class. The progression is from the 18th century novel to Renaissance studies, with a break in between for lunch. Then I depart the 16th century and travel across the hall in one of our campus buildings to an hour-and-a-half of rationality -- the study of bio-ethics. This final class of the day is fascinating and frustrating, since it's not as familiar as reading and analysing English literature. My mentor keeps reminding me of two things, though: he says I'm a worrier, and therefore likely to doubt my own abilities, and it's my own fault, since I couldn't resist the chance to learn more about ethics, logic and their application to real world problems, like organ donation, cloning and dividing rationality from emotional judgements.
After all this, I usually stop at a local restaurant to buy a takeout order. Tonight, though, as I was walking out of the restaurant, the chef followed me to my car and started yelling at me after I got into the car. He pulled the door of the car open and accused me of ruining his work by shaking the carryout container and not carrying it properly.
I was more than surprised -- I was stunned into not being able to respond. I finally assured him that I hadn't ruined the dinner, but he wanted to see the carryout container, which I had already placed carefully in the trunk of my car.
The poor guy didn't seem at all rational. He whirled around and went back into the restaurant, and I drove home, after locking the car doors.
Of course, one irrational act breeds another, so I threw the dinner away when I got home. As a certified and recognized worrier, I had started wondering if the chef's tantrum was preceded by another irrational act somehow involving my dinner.
From now on, I think I'll buy a sandwich at school for my dinners on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or find a frozen dinner in my freezer. It seems like the rational thing to do.

Pardon Us -- We All Have the Crud

Right now, no one on campus feels well. If it's not H1N1, it's a cold, or bronchitis, or para influenza, or mean little headaches. All the illness may be the result of the late-semester realization that we all have more papers to write than we have brains to create them with.

One friend, also an English major, has toted up his assigned pages: he needs to write 70 altogether before the middle of December. Unless I'm not aware of some surprise lurking in a syllabus, I have about 35 pages due soon -- but I'm only in my junior year.

Writing an argumentative research thesis is a heck of a lot different from writing radio or print news or magazine articles. For one thing, one actually has to take a side -- which feels totally unnatural after all those years of emulating Cronkite and Murrow at their best. It feels wrong to take a stand and argue for it out in public, without presenting the argument for the other side in its entirety. Murrow and Cronkite were most famous for the times when they spoke out and stepped away from the neutrality of the good reporter; their objections to the Viet Nam War and the McCarthy era persecutions of liberals had weight because they had been trusted neutral but watchful observers throughout their careers. Those were the reporters I wanted to emulate in my small-town way. As they say in Philosophy classes, if you must take inspiration outside yourself, emulate the highest model.

And choose a deserving target.

The Fox and the Car

On my way out to search for some breakfast this morning, I drove up on the neighborhood fox. He was crouched at the side of the road, staring through the neighbor's rail fence at something in the tall grass. Whatever it was, he appeared to have marked it down for his breakfast menu, until I interrupted him.

After a moment, the fox leaped across the ditch, and I figured he was going to run off. Instead, he turned around and walked toward my car on the other side of the fence line. Then he stared into my eyes.

Either he'd never seen a Subaru, or he was trying to figure out why I needed a huge, noisy machine to scare up a meal.

I was out tracking the elusive plain scone because my study desk is awash in Ethics. I need to write an annotated bibliography, to be followed by a research paper, for one of the English classes on a topic that fits under the general rubric of Ethics. I am also hearing warning rumblings from the Ethics professor that we will be writing a paper for his class. While one can fantasize that one paper will do for both classes, it seems that the papers will have to be written at different levels of interpretation. Right now, I'm clipping things out of newspapers and mulling over the "moral issues of alcoholism," as they say on NPR, trying to come up with an arguable thesis.

No wonder I want to go follow the fox around the neighborhood.

The Weather is Lying to Us

The sunset is fabulous: I can see the water from where I'm working this evening, and the sunlight is turning a mellow color like the skin of a pear, while the water is reflecting the blue, blue sky. Tomorrow we're supposed to have sunshine again, and on Saturday the high will be close to 90. We shouldn't be falling for this stage dressing, though. This sunny forecast is lies, all lies. The truth is sitting there on the lawn, as blatant as an Adam Sandler movie. The first toadstools of fall are popping up all over the place.

The spiders know all about this, of course. They've been congregating in my apartment. I'm refusing to sublet. As a matter of fact, I'm squishing the spiders and flushing the remains. Then, of course, I do one of those girly "Ewww -- Ick!" things where I jump up and down for a few seconds. I just so do not like the way their bodies crunch. Maybe by winter I'll have adjusted to their moving in.

Heck, by winter I may have come up with a way for them to take over the rent.

Schoolwork is running ahead, often with me running behind as fast as I can. Despite the school bookstore being unable to stock enough of the books for some classes, the reading and other assignments need to be done. By the second week of class, some of us are still scrambling to come up with copies of the various assigned books. Week 3 is coming up fast, and I don't feel inclined to be patient. Do you hear, Barnes and Noble?

Perhaps they respond better to persuasive letters. Missive #1 will be written Monday night if I can't find my English and Philosophy texts on the shelves by then.

In the meantime, I hear the seductive voice of Dr. Faustus calling from my backpack. All 154 page of him, due at 9 tomorrow morning, with discussion topics. Yep, the glamourous life of the single coed in the state capital.