That song from The Lion King

I have always (read: for the past year or so) said that teaching is one of those things that goes largely unnoticed for several years.  Meaning that students don't really know the impact you had or the importance of what they learned for many years after school ends.  The same, I think, can be said for the reverse.  This is the story of an occasion in which a student caused my life to come full circle -- and in this example, in only took a few months.

There was this one high school Math class that I subbed in quite a few times last year.  The teacher was also a firsty, like me (only she had a real job for herself), and her kids were mostly fun.  At the very least nothing caught on fire, nobody beat anybody's face in, and the kids usually did (or pretended to do) their work.  Most of the time.  Most of the kids.

There was this one kid that I really enjoyed having.  He always did his work, didn't cheat with the other guys (Even though he was friends with them - somehow he seemed to be able to rise above them without seeming "above" them.  It was cool).  He was in band, and he seemed the kind of guy I would have been friends with in school.  Us artsy fartsy types tend to flock to each other, as if we had some kind of radar.  I was reading a Percy Jackson book one of the days I was in his class, and when he asked why, I told him I liked to read what my students were reading.  This applied more to middle school, as Percy is not quite as popular among high schoolers, but the point is that I read a lot of young adult literature.

"You should read Will Grayson, Will Grayson," he said.  "It's amazing."

"Sure, maybe sometime I'll check it out."  I wrote the name down, but didn't ask him how to spell it or who the author was.  I figured I could get the rest when it was needed, or that the clerk at Borders could help me (Borders was still a thing the day I was in his class).

At about that same time, I got really ridiculously in to Pinterest.  My friend Sarah and I would have frequent Pinterest binges, which involved pasting long URLs into Skype, so many links that mine blended with hers and I forgot which ones I'd been to already.  It was a mix of recipes, wedding dresses, quotes, and cute kittens and puppies.  Somewhere in the mix of Sarah-posts was this:

"YES!" I probably said out loud, or if not out loud then definitely really, really loudly in my head.  "This is so perfect!  Whoever that John Green guy is, he's got it goin' on!"  I probably didn't say "He's got it goin' on."  I'm fairly certain nobody says that anymore.  The point is that this quote was awesome (at the risk of sounding like a vapid girl listening to a song in a bar), so me, and I didn't know who the author was.  I don't think Sarah did either, although Sarah if you're reading this, feel free to correct me on that.

Now, a smart person would have looked him up.  Now that I know who he is, I know that a google search would have been really successful.  But that's not what I did.  I just forgot about him and kept the quote in the front of my mind, referencing it every now and then, in that way I have of referencing inside jokes with myself and totally isolating everyone else involved in the conversation.  I should stop doing that.

If I had researched John Green, I wouldn't be able to fully appreciate the random full-circle story that was being written around me.  The next chapter in the story was written at a local coffee shop, where I met to tutor a student for the SAT and occasionally share substituting war stories with Mallory, a fellow sub and former college roommate. 

I'd just told what was no doubt a hilarious and terrible story about the middle schoolers I shared space with on a daily basis.  I say "shared space," because as a long-term sub they pretty much view anything you teach them and any work they do for you as meaningless.  So I guess I "taught" them, and I'm sure there were some who listened.  But for most, I was just that young-looking girl who shared space with them for a few weeks.  Anyway, Mallory said this: "You know what your students need?  I think they need some Brothers 2.0.  I think they'd like some of the videos."  

My first thought was of a robot.  "Hel-lo.  I am Broth-er 2.0 and this is my broth-er 2.0 as well.  We are Broth-ers from the fu-ture."  But they are not robots.  Mallory told me a little about John and Hank, how John is a writer but Hank writes songs, and she was team John but Patricia from college was team Hank, and that maybe my students would find some of their posts interesting.  She said they do videos on anything from the economy to literature to how to load a dishwasher and that I should definitely watch their videos.  I think she might have shown me a video there in the coffee house.  At any rate, it wasn't long before I'd spent hours in front of youtube, thumbing through their videos and subscribing to their channels.  

A few weeks ago I was preparing a lesson plan for an interview.  I wanted to do Catcher in the Rye, which is one of my very favorites ever, but I was afraid that some parents might object to Holden's language, drinking, and renting of a hooker for a little while -- even if it was just because he was lonely and wanted to talk for a minute.  I posted on facebook to see if any of my bookish friends had an alternative to Catcher that I could use -- not to fully plan a new lesson, just to show that I was aware of the potential issues and had prepared a backup.  The responses cam in droves -- The Bell Jar, The Graveyard Book, Look Me in the Eye, and many, many more.  Two suggestions from friends were Looking for Alaska and Will Grayson, Will Grayson.  I did an amazon check on the books that were suggested.  Most of them seemed a little too inappropriate to be an appropriate alternative to Catcher, but at the very least my already huge amazon wish list grew tenfold.  And those two books, they were so familiar.  So.  Familiar.....

And then I got it.  Looking for Alaska was by John Green.  And so were Paper Towns and An Abundance of Katherines, two books I'd heard of and had mentally added to my "Judging a book by its title and these sound cool" list.  And The Fault in our Stars, which he talked about in recent videos, and which I had also mentally added to my to-read list.  And Will Grayson, Will Grayson (Which he co-wrote with David Levithan, who also deserves credit and praise and happy thoughts, because his half was really good too).  That book that one kid had told me about that one time.

So thank you, to that kid.  Thank you for being awesome and for introducing me to what is so far a really cool book written by a really cool guy, who said something really cool that Sarah pinned on Pinterest and pasted into Skype.  And thanks, Mallory for telling me about Brothers 2.0 who aren't robots, but who help me pass a lot of time while I'm doing my sitting-around thing while Michael is at work.  And thanks to life for being not quite as random as it seems.

(That song from The Lion King is "Circle of Life."  And it moves us all.)

Edit. I forgot to mention the time in between the brilliant quote and the coffee shop visit.  Someone posted a video of this guy delivering what I felt to be really valid points on a political issue about which I get really fired up.  I reposted the video, having no idea who the guy was, and wondering who this "Hank" was that he kept addressing.

Driving with Fear

I know I’ve already written about this once before, but as I don’t really have any more job-related stories for the time being, I’m going to dive back into fear again.

Last night, I drove home from my friend Heather’s house with only a vague idea of where I was going.  This was only the second time I have ever driven in this direction from her house, since the approximately one million other times, I was driving toward my parents’ house.  This time I was equipped with a broken GPS, no paper directions, little light, and uncertain thoughts of “Have I seen this before?  Was I supposed to go the other way?  Is this another name for 138…” and so on.  Michael was on the phone, but he didn’t exactly have a satellite image of where I was, and his phone died mid-sentence anyway.

After Michael’s phone rudely cut us off, I called back a few (three) times to make sure it wasn’t just a momentary lapse of signal on one of our ends.  Three straight-to-voicemail calls later, I counted his phone as dead and assessed my situation.

I was alone.  I was very probably lost.  It was dark.  I had no GPS and no desire to stop and ask for directions.  The only sound was my iPod playing the first three seconds of songs I’ve grown tired of and immediately skipped.

As I drove, I became increasingly more aware of the reflective properties of my windows.  I tried my hardest not to look too long in either direction, because I remembered that moment in The Grudge when the woman looks out the car (train?) window and sees the reflection of the stringy-haired ghost spirit thing.  Six years later and that image is still burned into my memory, always smoldering like an unattended fire, waiting for the right moment when I fan the flames again.  It always happens unintentionally, but when it does, it is so hard to shake. 

I drove on, forcing my eyes to look ahead of me only, foot pressing harder and harder on the gas and praying there were no cops around.  “Sorry officer, I was speeding because I was afraid of that thing from The Grudge” would probably not get me a warning.  If anything, it would get me dragged out of the car and forced to walk a straight line, something I can’t do very well sober.  I decided that, if questioned, I would lie and say something was chasing me.  “I saw someone come out of the bushes and run after my car.”  Yes, that would work.  How could they prove nothing was there?  “Why didn’t I check to see if I’d lost it yet? Well, uhh… I was really concentrating more on escaping the thing that was chasing me than making sure it wasn’t still chasing me.”  Maybe that would work.  But then there was the question of why would I, a rational human being, would think someone would be capable of chasing a car traveling 60+ miles per hour?  To that I had no answer.  My foot pressed harder on the gas, and I turned up the iPod.

Rufus Wainwright’s version of “Hallelujah” (you’ll remember it from the first Shrek movie) started.  I tried to sing along, furrowed my brow like I do when I sing passionately to Journey songs.  The logic was that if I pretended to be singing passionately, maybe I could let the music and my own private concert distract me from the feeling that my windows were creeping closer and closer.  Eventually I would have to look at them; they were closing in, forcing me to face that terrifying creature, her blue-tinted skin and red eyes slightly covered by her stringy, matted hair.  I took a deep, shaky breath.  “I know this room, I’ve walked this floor…”  What room?  What floor?  What I had once imagined as an opulent, glittering marble floor with a grand staircase extending from it had now transformed into an abandoned house, creaky staircase, and dirty blood-stained floor.  Don’t look at the windows.  Just keep driving. 

“She tied you to the kitchen chair.  She broke your throne and she cut your hair.”  Then she cut off your head and it rolled across the floor, leaving a trail of blood behind it.  The expression you had right before being decapitated would stay on your face forever, frozen as if someone had hit the pause button right before she sliced you.  Just keep driving.  Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look.  Eyes on the road.  Straight ahead.

I resented that I was twisting what I have always thought to be such a beautiful song.  The more I thought about the evil ghost that was almost definitely staring in at me from outside the window, the faster my heart pounded against my ribcage.  I could hear it beating, feel it pumping my blood, feel my adrenaline rising.  Which reminded me of senior year, and made the terrifying drive into the darkness with the evil spirit outside the window even more horrible.

Senior year, I went through a pretty tremendously bad breakup.  It wouldn’t be the last time I went through almost this exact same breakup, but eighteen-year-old me didn’t know that at the time.  Eighteen-year-old me did a lot of late-night writing of bad poetry and crying pointless tears into the pages of the cutest baby blue journal adorned with cartoon animals.  This was a scene that replayed almost nightly for a really long time, this sad, heartbroken girl sitting up on the top bunk of her bed at 1:00AM, ignoring the clock blinking, flashing “GO TO BED” in neon green imaginary letters.  Eighteen-year-old me couldn’t go to sleep, because eighteen-year-old me kept herself awake until the fatigue was strong enough to drag her down on the spot and force into near-comatose slumber.  Lying awake made me think, analyze, pick apart every conversation, every glance, every movement – and look for an answer.  There was no answer, and that made me anxious.  Coupled with the exhaustion, both physical and mental, somehow that anxiety turned into what I perceived to be nausea.  Since about the age of six, I have had this ridiculous, unexplainable, nearly life-controlling fear of throwing up.  And what happens when your anxiety turns into nausea?  Your adrenaline kicks in, augmenting the feeling to a degree you really aren’t prepared to deal with.  And so it went, nearly every night the second half of senior year, eighteen-year-old me stayed up until 2:00 or 3:00, trying to find a distraction that would get rid of the terrible feeling of fear rising in her throat.  For the record, those nights always ended in me drifting off at some point, sleeping a good three or so hours, and that stupid godforsaken alarm jolting me rudely awake.  But it still happens sometimes that when I get afraid, I get nauseous.  Then I get more afraid.  And so on.

And so, with the ghost outside and the dark, reflective windows caving in on me, whispering “Look at me,” in the same way that clown from IT did in the dream I had at age eight, after seeing it for the first (and let’s hope only) time – the nagging nauseous feeling that I so often associate with fear and anxiety kicked in.  “This is stupid,” I said to myself.  “I’m not sick.  I haven’t been sick.  There is no reason to feel this way.”  And my brain searched for a distraction.  I waited for the song to be over, hoping a more jam-worthy song would take its place.  My foot pressed on, and I tried to keep my speed around 60, but with my heart pounding in my ears and the windows daring me to look at them, all I could really concentrate on was getting home.  Now.  Faster.

After what felt like hours, but was more realistically only a few minutes, I started to see familiar landscapes.  I took turns I make on a regular basis and knew that soon I’d be passing the Burma Shave signs with their cutesy sayings.  I breathed a little easier, relaxed my deathgrip on the steering wheel.  The lights from the town penetrated my windows and made them considerably less reflective.  The sick feeling that had come out of nowhere subsided.  The whole ordeal felt like a summer storm – the kind that comes quickly, last a few minutes, then blow away leaving everything a little wetter and shinier than before.  I’d survived the imagined terrors, and finally I was home.

Fear is a strange thing.  I’m afraid of a lot more things than I probably shouldn’t be: the dark, that thing from The Grudge, the clown from IT, serial killers, attics, basements, dying, loved ones dying, having kids because so much can go wrong with babies, throwing up, looking stupid, not getting a job, not getting my contract renewed after I finally do get a job, people lying to me, not knowing something everyone else knows, chairs that are facing me at night, other drivers on the road, this tick bite giving me lyme disease, cockroaches, not being liked, rejection, failure, strangers at night, and gaining a lot of weight, to name just a few. But not heights.  I freaking love heights.

I’m not sure what to do about these fears.  I know some of them are normal things that regular people are afraid of, but some of them kind of seem like I just pointed at a book of things and said, “That.  I’m going to be afraid of that.” 

Michael and I like to play this game with Ferris called “Make Ferris Uncomfortable.”  Our cat spends most of his life teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, so when he’s lying down comfortably we like to remind him that his world could change at any minute.  We pick up random ordinary things and simply place them near him.  He immediately gets on edge, sniffs the intruding object, bristles at the tail, and sometimes leaves before we have a chance to put another thing next to him.  Okay, we’ve only actually done this twice.  And I guess it’s probably a little cruel of us.  But Ferris and I are alike in that we both spend most of our time worrying about something.  And I guess If I lived in a house with giants I would get pretty uncomfortable if they started boxing me in with their random crap too.  If I did live in a house with giants of another species, my list of fears would be amended to add things like: being stepped on, those giant jerks not feeding me, being pushed outside into the vast unknown, being put in a box and forgotten about, being eaten, and finally, those giant jerks putting their random crap next to me for no reason.