After A Break

After a break there's the rust, but the real problem is anxiety. You remember doing these things, but that was then. There's no telling whether you can do them again. Well, of course you'll be able to do them, but it feels impossible. Nothing's working and there really is some rust. Muscle memory has been lost along with muscle. Things feel all wrong. What do you do?

I haven't written for anyone else in two weeks. Life has been busier than usual and I've felt anxious and lost. Writing can balance that busy-ness and anxiety. It can ground ms on the map of my life. I know this but find reasons to avoid the page. Even when I come to the page or screen, I leave them blank and instead turn on the television. That's the story of the past two weeks.

Coming back to the keyboard I have twenty minutes before students arrive for classes. I tell myself to sit, open the editor, sip coffee, and go. I start with something simple: what's happening in my life? Deciding I must create a poem or write a story is too much. A little pressure breaks the rust and gets things moving. Too much pressure and I break down.

The time boundary helps too. I can't compose genius in twenty minutes. All I can do is get a few words down and see how my fingers react to typing once again. It applies gentle pressure — hurry, there are only a few minutes left before I have to do my job.

Mostly it comes down to deciding to do the thing. It's like running or cleaning the house. There's an inertia to overcome and the first step is telling myself, okay, get to it. That telling doesn't always work, that's why the screen and page stayed blank these past two weeks, but the telling is always first even when I don't notice myself saying anything at all.

Why decide to write, though? What good is it? Where does it go and who will read it? It's best I avoid that sort of questioning especially after a break. There are no good answers to who will read and where it goes or what good it might do. My only answer as to why write is this: I need to.

What do you need to do? Write, read, cook, swim, run, dance, take photographs, or something else? Name it and, if you can, say why you need to do it. I could use some help figuring this stuff out.

Fast Food

Seventeen years ago I stopped eating fast food. I had a quarter pounder with cheese, super-size fries and Coke for dinner with my mother-in-law. My wife was in the hospital with our four-day-old daughter. I was tired and in no mood to cook. McDonalds seemed the right choice. We ate at the restaurant that used to be on the university hill near the hospital, visited my wife and baby, and went home to sleep. By eight o'clock I knew something was wrong. By ten I was camped on the bathroom floor.

At about 1:30 on the morning of the 29th I told myself, "I will never eat fast food again." By three or four I was able to shower and sleep a few hours before returning to the hospital where they discharged my wife but kept our daughter one more day. Leaving our daughter was even worse than food poisoning. I was still recovering from that and remembering what I had told myself.

It's no surprise I would swear off fast food when I was on the bathroom floor unable to move six feet away from a toilet. The surprise is that I've never gone back to McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, or Wendy's. Not even for a french fry or Shamrock Shake. I stopped cold and I don't miss it.

I'd like to tell you I'm super-healthy now but I try not to lie here. I'm still twenty pounds overweight, still likely to finish a bag of chips once I open them, still drinking more alcohol than I should, still eating too much sugar. I'm no paragon of virtue. I've just quit fast food for so long I can't imagine eating it again.

Years ago I bought Twinkies, not having had one in years and remembering how I had loved them. I bit into the first one and chewed a couple of times before it registered: this thing is terrible. I swallowed that bite with a question mark on my face and took another. I couldn't remember ever having not finished a Twinkie. My school lunch bag always held knock-off snacks. When I got hold of real Twinkies, I damn well ate them. But the second bite was disgusting too. It wasn't stale or moldy — I doubt Twinkies can grow mold. It simply didn't taste like food. I spit out that second bite and threw the second Twinkie away still wrapped in its package. I've no desire to try again.

After seventeen years, it's the same with fast food. I just don't want it any more.

I need to figure out what day I dropped Facebook. My guess is that seventeen years from now I'll have little taste left for social media. I hope that I'm healthier for it. I really thought I'd shed a few pounds without all those quarter pounders, super size fries, and super size Coca-Cola. Damn.

Reading In The Schools

“Thus my efforts throughout this book to dissociate reading from academic life, not just because teachers and professors make reading so much more dutiful and good-for-you than it ought to be but also because the whole environment of school is simply alien to what longer form reading has been for almost all of its history.”

— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction,, 109

In the first class of the day I became anxious that management might look in the door and wonder what the hell I was doing.

The students sat, some on the heater, one on the floor, a few at desks. Each was reading a book for the most part. Occasionally one checked a phone but got back to reading pretty well given that I teach at-risk kids who have been bounced from their regular schools and most of whom come to me admitting that they hate to read.

I wasn't anxious the about the students. I worried management would take me to task.

I was sitting at a student desk, one leg crossed over the other, a book in hand, and had been reading for fifteen minutes, ever since I had helped Frank understand the word agape which had come up in his book. I had read ten pages of Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction, looking up after each paragraph to scan for kids having or making trouble. There was none of that, so I had kept reading until anxiety interrupted me.

I haven't had the best relationship with management during my tenure. Imagining some manager looking in, I could hear them asking why wasn't I moving about the room checking in with kids. How could I know what they were doing if I wasn't teaching?

I almost wasn't teaching, but that was because I had set the structure of the class and was allowing them to learn. I got them into books today and over the last three months. Once they start reading, my job is to just keep things going. The only teaching left to do was to be a reader too.

It's a safe bet that management would see things in another way. That's the way it goes in schools. Management is paying me to do something and there I was looking like I was doing nothing much at all. Observing a class for a few minutes is no way to understand what is really going on. It takes understanding all that we have been doing in that classroom since September. The room full of silent readers doesn't just happen. Kids aren't wired for that. None of us are. It's a learned behavior, one that I've worked to help them learn, and from this they learn more than I could ever teach.

I tamped down the anxiety by remembering that I would hear the beeper on the outside door should any managers come by. Then I could get up and act like I was doing something management would appreciate. Or maybe I would stick to what I know is true and let the kids read. I scanned the room again, saw that everyone was still reading, and went back to my book. We all have so much left to learn and so little time to read.

Reading List

Alan Jacobs, in The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction makes a case against reading goals, speed-reading, and the rush to have read. I nodded reading all that but also thinking about my reading list and why I keep and post it publicly.

I keep a reading list in part because my memory is all too fallible. I've read books twice because seeing the book again I've found it terribly interesting I dig in, dogged by a feeling of familiarity, but not giving into it for a few hundred pages in. This doesn't happen often, but more than once is enough.

Often, I half recall some idea, character, scene, or some such and want to revisit it. This happened this summer when I remembered a cogent argument about unions but couldn't remember where it was from. Going over my list, I found Richard Russo's The Identity Thief and remembered him discussing summer work alongside his father. I found the book, reread that section, and felt all kinds of better.

Beyond memory, I like knowing how many books I've read in a year though I have no goal. The number simply pushes me toward a habit of mind, a habit of reading. I'm on my fifty-ninth book of the year, a number meaningless on any scale, but useful to me. It's not objective since two of those books were single essays packaged as books, two were graphic novels, and seven or eight were young-adult books. Someone else's fifty-nine books would be more or fewer pages and that couldn't matter less.

But why publish the list on the web?

As a kid I was hooked on end-of-the-year TV shows that rewound the news, songs, movies, and deaths of the year. I didn't care about the ball drop but I was all over the year in review. There aren't enough of those kinds of shows any more. There are, however, plenty of reading lists marking the turn of the calendar. Major news outlets and magazines come out with best-of-the-year lists, but I'm more into the blogs on which individuals list their favorite books, the ones they are still thinking about. I eat those lists up and so I wanted one of my own. I hope that it proves interesting to someone.

My list is nothing spectacular save for one thing: it is my reading list and a peak inside my brain. This is where I'm back to Alan Jacobs's "commitment to one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim" (Pleasures, 15). I read what interests me and one thing leads to another. There's a lot of nonfiction on my list because that's what I tend to favor. There is nocourse of study there because I don't read to elevate myself though I like to read things from which I will learn. Luckily, I can learn from just about any book.

I'm a better man when I'm reading and keeping a reading list. It's the act of reading that does it. Reading helps me reflect, consider others, and find solitude. I've been known to take the solitude too far, withdrawing from family and work in favor of some written world, but more often than not reading makes me a better person.

What have you been reading? Leave a comment below with your reading list, top five, or current book. Other than a book, I can't think of anything I would rather read.