In my sweet, little suburban hometown of Bountiful, Utah the only thing people don't do religiously is lock their doors. My family once came home from a week-long vacation to find that we had been cooling the outdoors with our ostentatiously open front-door for probably the entire week. An overview of the house reassured us that nothing had been taken and our faith in our little town remained intact. This faith, however, did find exception in my childhood friend's home where the front door is always dead-bolted to ensure that no one is, as my friend's mother puts it "raped and robbed." Every UPS delivery person and slimy solicitor must wait those few extra and awkward seconds for the homeowner to unlock both the door-knob and the dead-bolt. Those of us familiar with the family know it is best to announce our intended visit well in advance and to use the side door. Despite my friend's mother's precaution, I always thought it a silly one in our land of milk and honey. I had always considered myself blessed to live in such a safe and trustworthy town, until I came to the land that rivaled it for nectar and ambrosia.
In the even smaller, rural Southern town of Lexington, Virginia where I make my residence nine months out of the year the residents don't just leave their doors unlocked, they leave them open for you. This spirit of trust grows from Honor System at the university that comprises half the town. This student-run and upheld system maintains that no student will lie, cheat, or steal. There is one consequence for engaging in any and all of these actions: immediate expulsion from the university. The Honor System is so effective that students, including myself, often leave their books, laptops, iPods, cellphones, designer bags, etc. unattended in the common areas of the university for hours and even days without incident. The respect for the belongings of others and the reverence in which we hold the Honor System is such that dollar bills have been left untouched on the ground for days until someone claims them. This sense of honor extends to and is supported by the town surrounding the university. My friend once witnessed a gentleman park his car on the street and exit his vehicle leaving the keys still in the ignition and the car running with the door wide open while he ran into Wal-Mart.
The freedom and ease with which one moves about the town is like nothing I had ever experienced in Bountiful and I became so accustomed to leaving my things wherever it pleased me, that I had trouble NOT leaving my bag in the open air when I returned to Bountiful for holiday. I soon realized that Lexington, Virginia is not the real world and an airport is not Lexington. If it weren't for the annoying lady over the PA in the airport telling patrons to not leave their bags unattended or accept anyone else's bags, I would be under interrogation for terrorism right now. Every time I had to leave my gate in the terminal to get a spot to eat or powder my nose (actually, I didn't have powder for fear it would be mistaken for anthrax) I was forced to pack up my books and laptop and strap my bag to my body like a suicide-bomber on a mission (oh the irony) in a cumbersome and tedious act of compliance with real-world rules. By the end of my traveling, I was beginning to think it would have been worth it to stay in Lexington just to save myself the backache of having my heavy carry-on permanently strapped to my back like a papoose.
I naively believed that once I had arrived back at Bountiful that I could return to my old habits, but alas, even the land of milk and honey seemed like the sketchiest streets of Chicago compared to the place from where I had just come. I had to lock my car and keep a close claw on my purse. I didn't care if that Mormon mother with seven children looked as if she walked around with a clap-on, clap-off halo on her head. More likely one of its lights was burned out and she had copious amounts of Prozac coursing through her veins, making her capable of any type of misconduct that one would only do under the influence or in a state of extremely ill mental health, or both. I couldn't even leave my laptop in the family room of my own home without someone messing with it until it threatened to self-destruct. It was then that I realized how good I really had it and how twisted the real-world actually was. An innocent effort to keep up on the news revealed enough wrong-doing in the world to snap me back into reality. In real time, people are dishonest and untrustworthy. They hate each other and think of clever ways to kill each other. In the real world, the nicest person you meet could also be the most perverted; and above all, there is always the chance that you could be raped and robbed.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Inhale, but don't exhale.
When I was in high school, I wrote a paper on the children's novel The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. While the book was sickly sweet at best, it was well written; and I wrote fondly of it as if it was worthy to share shelf-space with the works of Austen, Dickens, and many other great authors. Abounding in alliteration, replete with hyphenated adjectives, and tastefully garnished with figurative language (all literary devices employed by authors of the classics, including the aforementioned,) this essay exemplified the very best of my literary style. I felt that, with this essay, I had arrived as a writer.
My teacher praised my essay excessively to the entire class, announcing to my peers that they should all read my paper to see how good writers wrote. Faulkner once said that, "[The writer] has supreme vanity," and I was no exception. My pen was my most precious possession. My writing came from many painstaking hours during which, like Gene Fowler, I would "[stare] at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form[ed] on my head." I fashioned my lines from the sinews of my heart, gave them marrow from my own bones, and breathed the dust of my whole soul into their nostrils. I found the greatest expression of myself in words. I vainly wanted the whole world to read and admire my writing, but at the same time, thought it too sacred to share.
For my first real writing assignment at university, I chose a challenging but interesting topic, daring to take a risk. I wrote draft after draft, becoming intimate with the wastebasket and the great large "x" that expunged my many failed ideas. When I finally felt that I had arrived at something close to a final draft, I took the essay to the University Writing Center to be reviewed by one of my peers. After pouring over it for some time, the reader stabbed me in the heart with her red correcting pen. She told me that my sentences were too long (unfortunate, as one of my favorite paragraphs in literary history comes from a little known author named Charles Dickens and is a single sentence long,) my aptly used alliteration was distracting, and my metaphors were irrelevant if not superfluous. In the readers words, it had the "potential" to be a really good paper.
I broken-heartedly made the suggested changes (actually, much of the alliteration stayed as I couldn't bear to see it go) and took my paper to my professor for her critique. While she did not critique my style, she did set fire to a number of my ideas with which she "disagreed." The fact that I removed these ideas from my paper attested to the high regard in which I held this professor and her opinions, but it hurt nevertheless. With bruised ego, I composed my final draft and submitted it. The B+ I received on the paper sat like a stain on my soul and left a hole in my heart.
This experience only served as precursor to the startling and unfortunate truth about college: While university life may have been meant to foster learning and elevated thought, I found it as a community meant to stifle creativity. I no longer find pleasure in thinking about my studies, now that I know I must think as my professor does. I cannot design my own box and instead must fit into the too-tiny box that has been prescribed for me by my professors, often at the expense of a hand or foot or some other part of myself that must be sacrificed upon the altar of their expectations. If I expect to please my professors, I must submit my mind as clay in their hands to be stretched and pounded into something that they want me to become.
Thus, my worry comes when I consider that I may lose my identity at the expense of my so called "academic success." Must I sacrifice one part of myself for another part of myself? Is there a way to reconcile the two? I have yet to find a way to successfully link my creativity to academia. Perhaps, when all is said and done, I will have found that this was only a refiner's fire meant to prepare me to be bent into a new way of thinking and come out a fine new work of art. In that case, I suppose I will have to put up with stifling university life. I must inhale their thoughts, words, opinions; but exhaling my own is strickly prohibited. Who needs to breathe anyway?
And to Flannery O'Connor who said "Everywhere I go i'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher," I say that no one remembers you or what you wrote. Apparently, her teachers weren't good enough.
My teacher praised my essay excessively to the entire class, announcing to my peers that they should all read my paper to see how good writers wrote. Faulkner once said that, "[The writer] has supreme vanity," and I was no exception. My pen was my most precious possession. My writing came from many painstaking hours during which, like Gene Fowler, I would "[stare] at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form[ed] on my head." I fashioned my lines from the sinews of my heart, gave them marrow from my own bones, and breathed the dust of my whole soul into their nostrils. I found the greatest expression of myself in words. I vainly wanted the whole world to read and admire my writing, but at the same time, thought it too sacred to share.
For my first real writing assignment at university, I chose a challenging but interesting topic, daring to take a risk. I wrote draft after draft, becoming intimate with the wastebasket and the great large "x" that expunged my many failed ideas. When I finally felt that I had arrived at something close to a final draft, I took the essay to the University Writing Center to be reviewed by one of my peers. After pouring over it for some time, the reader stabbed me in the heart with her red correcting pen. She told me that my sentences were too long (unfortunate, as one of my favorite paragraphs in literary history comes from a little known author named Charles Dickens and is a single sentence long,) my aptly used alliteration was distracting, and my metaphors were irrelevant if not superfluous. In the readers words, it had the "potential" to be a really good paper.
I broken-heartedly made the suggested changes (actually, much of the alliteration stayed as I couldn't bear to see it go) and took my paper to my professor for her critique. While she did not critique my style, she did set fire to a number of my ideas with which she "disagreed." The fact that I removed these ideas from my paper attested to the high regard in which I held this professor and her opinions, but it hurt nevertheless. With bruised ego, I composed my final draft and submitted it. The B+ I received on the paper sat like a stain on my soul and left a hole in my heart.
This experience only served as precursor to the startling and unfortunate truth about college: While university life may have been meant to foster learning and elevated thought, I found it as a community meant to stifle creativity. I no longer find pleasure in thinking about my studies, now that I know I must think as my professor does. I cannot design my own box and instead must fit into the too-tiny box that has been prescribed for me by my professors, often at the expense of a hand or foot or some other part of myself that must be sacrificed upon the altar of their expectations. If I expect to please my professors, I must submit my mind as clay in their hands to be stretched and pounded into something that they want me to become.
Thus, my worry comes when I consider that I may lose my identity at the expense of my so called "academic success." Must I sacrifice one part of myself for another part of myself? Is there a way to reconcile the two? I have yet to find a way to successfully link my creativity to academia. Perhaps, when all is said and done, I will have found that this was only a refiner's fire meant to prepare me to be bent into a new way of thinking and come out a fine new work of art. In that case, I suppose I will have to put up with stifling university life. I must inhale their thoughts, words, opinions; but exhaling my own is strickly prohibited. Who needs to breathe anyway?
And to Flannery O'Connor who said "Everywhere I go i'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher," I say that no one remembers you or what you wrote. Apparently, her teachers weren't good enough.
Friday, March 7, 2008
I can explain.
When I was a sophmore in Honors English, my first writing assignment required me to write about my name: what it meant, if I liked it, how I got it, etc. After the teacher, Mrs. Van Brunt, told the class the assignment, a vision lighted on my mind. It was a vision of how I received my name. I imagined my father, the one who chose my name, sitting as an eighth-grader in an English class not unlike the one in which I then sat. Sitting skinny in his seat, elbow on the desk and his head tilted to one side in his hand, he stared off with eyes slightly glazed, his thick dark hair falling across his brow. Just then, a small piece of pocket lint floated into his line of sight and he sat up suddenly in his seat, reached forth his hand with swift reflexes and snatched the piece of lint from the air. As his hand closed tighlty around the tiny ball of cotton a name popped suddenly into his head: Paige. It came as quickly as the lint that interrupted his daydream, but at that moment, my father decided that this name would be the one after which his first daughter would be called. And so my name is Pocket Lint. I am Pocket Lint.
From that day I have thought of my name and therefore of myself as Pocket Lint. I have thought of many other things in my life as being lint. My laughter, my sneeze, my smile, my more peculiar habits--all remind me of lint for one reason or another. Of all the things I consider lint-like, I especially consider my thoughts to be among those things about myself that qualify as lint. They lay quietly, unassumingly for weeks where one might occasionally place their hand during an uncomfortable moment, during a bout of boredom, or during a conversation to mull over and perhaps leave for another day. However, the time must come for the lint to be extracted from its place in the jacket pocket (and yes, these are the kind that live in a jacket pocket, meaning they can be hung up and out of the way for some time before being taken out again.) Whether extracted through the hand of the owner or through the lint-trap that is everyday life and experience to meet some unknown and careless fate in the waste-basket, the lint often finds its way from my pocket out into the world--if only for a brief moment--before being discarded. However, I have come to grow fond of many of these tiny thoughts and consider them to have more worth than a fate dooming them to eventual death and burial in the waste-land of thoughts. So, I present, for my satisfaction and I hope for yours, my pocket lint.
From that day I have thought of my name and therefore of myself as Pocket Lint. I have thought of many other things in my life as being lint. My laughter, my sneeze, my smile, my more peculiar habits--all remind me of lint for one reason or another. Of all the things I consider lint-like, I especially consider my thoughts to be among those things about myself that qualify as lint. They lay quietly, unassumingly for weeks where one might occasionally place their hand during an uncomfortable moment, during a bout of boredom, or during a conversation to mull over and perhaps leave for another day. However, the time must come for the lint to be extracted from its place in the jacket pocket (and yes, these are the kind that live in a jacket pocket, meaning they can be hung up and out of the way for some time before being taken out again.) Whether extracted through the hand of the owner or through the lint-trap that is everyday life and experience to meet some unknown and careless fate in the waste-basket, the lint often finds its way from my pocket out into the world--if only for a brief moment--before being discarded. However, I have come to grow fond of many of these tiny thoughts and consider them to have more worth than a fate dooming them to eventual death and burial in the waste-land of thoughts. So, I present, for my satisfaction and I hope for yours, my pocket lint.
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