1001 Reasons to Smile

   Andrew has a gigantic book of reasons to smile that I have always appreciated.  My favorite is: the tilt of your head as you eat a taco.  And while the holidays may be a winter-wonderland, cookie-smorgasbord time of enjoyment for some people, I find it inordinately stressful -- all the more reason to consider reasons to stop grinding my teeth and smile at someone. So I thought I'd make a list of things that make me smile. I had to cut it short because I thought I'd lose you, so feel free to add any that inspire the same reaction in you.

1.  Someone's face when he/she is genuinely happy to see you.

2.  Wormwood hiding in the Christmas tree, waiting to ambush the other cats/dogs. 

3.  Bing Crosby's serialized radio show.

4.  Thumbprint cookies.

5.  The word "zither." 

6.  Candles that smell like you could eat them.

7.  Newspaper cartoons.

8.  Unexpected snow days.

9.  The sled my grandfather built for me on the only unexpected snow day I've ever had.

10.  Acceptance letters.

11.  Naps in front of the Christmas tree when it's cold out.

12.  A dinner with friends that runs late.

13.  A student that has an epiphany

14.  Sangria

15.  Seeing two movies at a theatre in one day

16.  The smell of a book you loved as a kid

17.  Seals

18.  Puffins

19.  Cookbooks

20.  Poorly made Sunday-afternoon 80s movies

Second-Guessing

This blog is inspired by a phone interview I recently had with a university. It just ended and my fingers itch to pick up the cell and say, "You know, I said this, when I really should've said this."  That's right. I'm second-guessing myself. 

This is a particularly irksome thing to be doing for me because I do not second-guess myself. Most decisions I make undergo grave consideration before any action is taken. I rarely regret break-ups, or moves, or job changes for this reason.  I also believe that I am shaped by the mistakes I make. So while I don't think every decision I've made has been the right one, I still rarely second guess a decision since I know it probably happened for some unknown reason.  I'm not a Calvinist.  But you might think of me as someone who has walked by the pool of predestination and caught a bit of condensation on her cheek. I have been lightly sprinkled with its possibilities.

But these interviews do not fall in line with my faithful life pattern of little regret.  As soon as I shut off the phone, I think, of COURSE I can define transnationalism! It's the study of cross-border communities! It's the deconstruction of thinking us versus them and the recognition of the complex relationships involved between the colonizer and the colonized! It's not whatever garbage I just gave five minutes ago.  The answer I gave five minutes ago sounds now like "Words! Verbage! Transatlantic! Literature between colonies! Vomit!" Not only that but I begin to worry: can Julia Sterne be considered a theorist? Is Erving Goffman too archaic to bring up as an influence? Is Judith Butler overdone even if there is no better substitution? 

But I can take none of it back.  I've got a monkey on my back I can't shake, and I've got to learn to do that and much faster than I have because at MLA I only have 1 hour to recover from anything stupid I might have said. My momentary bouts of idiocy cannot affect each interview I undergo.  The only thing getting me through? I keep hearing over and over from gainfully employed academics that the interviews they thought were the worst resulted in the campus visits. Maybe that won't be true for me, but maybe it will help me temporarily pry this chimp from my shoulders. 

I don't have a poker face; may I borrow yours?

I'm not blogging right now because everything that's happening to me has to do with job interviews, and since blogs are public, I don't want any of the schools reading something that might jeopardize my chances of getting to work for them. But I think I finally found a neutral topic.

Sometimes, and on very very rare occasions at that, I allow myself to daydream about what happens next.  I pull up maps of the places I applied to and squeeze my eyes shut and try to picture myself walking Sierra on a beach or throwing snowballs at Andrew.  I imagine carrying reusable grocery bags on the subway or buying a convertible to cruise sunny highways with the top down.  But besides the ugliest of my ugly characteristics -- self-doubt -- there's one thing that always bursts that bubble: my lack of a poker face.

You see, all of the candidates who ever made it to a campus visit at Baylor or Ole Miss had great poker faces. I ate with them, drove them several hours to the airport and back, and none of them let me know if they would pick BU or UM if they were invited to do so.  Nor did anyone show unbridled enthusiasm or obvious disdain for the campus they were visiting. They masterfully held their cards close to their chests, undoubtedly because they didn't want to seem too eager so they could make negotiations later.  

But I'm not like that.  If I'm lucky enough to get a campus visit, while I might have the intention to act like a normal, intelligent, reserved human being, my true self always comes out with adrenaline.  If we pull up to a campus next to the loveliest ocean I've ever seen, my tongue will surely develop a mind of its own as it blurts out, "My GOD you must wake up every day and be ecstatic to be alive, living in a place like this!!"  Or if we walk through some classic, austere New England town and pass 4 museums, 8 art galleries, and 32 specialty food stores, even though my brain might be saying "don't do it Kacy!" my arms will detach themselves from my body and grab my guide in a feverish clutch as I babble:  "THINK of the different kinds of PEPPERS I'll bet you can buy here!"  And then, of course, it's all over.  

While other people play coy, I'm completely incapable of doing that.  Take, for example, Dr. Prickett's grad class on early British literature.  While I liked Prickett, a severe Brit who belonged at Oxford and not Baylor, sometimes reading all of Darwin's Origin of Species made my mind wander a little.  We sat at a small table trying to discuss beetles and turtles and Darwin one day and no one was talking.  No one had anything to add.  It'd been 2 hours and I felt like my brain was going to explode.  I looked down at one of the pages and saw the name "Cicero."  I leaned over to my good friend and whispered, "Do you know that Cicero in Latin means chickpea? Can you imagine? All Hail the Chickpea!"  While my friend possesses that thing called the poker face, I, as I have mentioned, do not.  While Prickett did not hear my whisper, he did see my suddenly animated face in a sea of dead ones.  "Kacy! Finally, someone has something to say about Darwin. What are you thinking?"  "No, sir," I said, turning scarlet and blotching like always.  "Don't be shy Kacy. Be confident! What you have to say is most likely insightful."  "No, sir, I am ashamed to say it isn't," I said, trying to find a way to surreptitiously start a fire or crawl under my friend's chair.  Long pause.  "Oh, come on," Prickett urged. I'd been a teacher. I knew what he was going through. 2 hours of silence were brutal.  I swallowed:  "Cicero in Latin means chickpea, Dr. Prickett."  I wasn't giggling. I'm not a class clown.  It was mortifying.  He wasn't angry; he looked utterly disappointed.

You might wonder why I didn't bluff him. I'd read the book. (I always do, as a nerd.)  I should've been able to come up with something about bird beaks or barnacles.  But I don't have a poker face and I'm LOUSY at lying.  So I just -- couldn't. Not because I'm a good person but because I don't have the knack. My face always screams the truth even as my words try to cover it up. 

So if I'm ever lucky enough to get a campus interview, the school will probably know everything it wants to and most of what it doesn't after 15 minutes of talking to me.  And if I'm wholeheartedly in love with the place I've visited, even though I don't want to do it at all, I'm most likely going to tell every person I meet.  Just think Honey when she meets Anna Scott in Notting Hill:  "Oh God this is one of those key moments in life, when it's possible you can be really, genuinely cool -- and I'm going to fail a hundred percent. I absolutely and totally and utterly adore you . . . and more importantly I genuinely believe and have believed for some time now that we can be best friends.  What do you think?"

The Best Books You Probably Never Read

I don't mean to suggest you aren't well-read; I just mean these books are fairly obscure and most of them are children's books, so you might not have heard of them before. But they're worth a read even if you already have kids of your own.

The first is Briar Rose by Jane Yolen.  I read this when I was 12 years old and I've never forgotten it.  It's the story of a man in a concentration camp during World War II, but it's told alongside the original German version of Sleeping Beauty. By the way, the original is no bedtime story.  Every other chapter tells the heartache of the prisoner, and every other chapter tells the fairy tale, only the stories are intertwined.  It was the first book I ever read about World War II and concentration camps, and it was the best one, too. 

The second is my response to the Stephanie Meyer phenomenon, Twilight.  A note to all of you secret vampire-book fans -- L.J. Smith beats the pants of off Meyer anyday.  In the 1990s, she came out with a series of books called The Vampire Diaries; they're now being sold alongside Twilight at most chain stores, the trilogy repackaged as a fat black book you'll probably overlook if you ever wander into the adolescent book section (don't worry; I won't tell if you do).  It's the story of Stefan, his twin Damon, and Elena; like Twilight, it's a love story, but unlike Twilight, the main character has a spine and some intellect (sorry, Bella fans).  Stefan is the good vamp who wants to resist his nature; Damon is the bad one who wants to embrace it. And of course, as with all tween books, Elena has trouble choosing.  But unlike most tween books, the story is fantastic, the characters well-developed, and the imagination inspiring. At least, it was when I was 12. . . . OK so it's probably no Harry Potter but I loved it and still do.

The final book is not a kid's book: Phantom by Susan Kay.  I'm completely biased on this one for two reasons -- 1. I have always loved the story of Phantom of the Opera and 2. It's the catalyst for my life's devotion to literature.  Phantom is Kay's retelling of the Phantom of the Opera story, with much more emphasis on Christine's relationship with the famous masked man living in the catacombs of Paris's opera house.  It's a romance, and a complicated one, since Christine is engaged to (Pierre?).  I read it when I was 12 (I see a pattern developing here) as part of an AR reading program.  My history teacher interviewed each child and asked him/her questions about the book they selected, in part to see if the child read it, but in part to see if he/she interacted with it.  My history teacher, who was amazing, heard me babble for weeks about the book,  picked one up for herself, and read it.  So, when it was time for my interview, she knew enough about it to ask the meaty questions.  The end of the book (this gives nothing away) is undecided; Christine enters a room to be with the ailing Phantom, but the author doesn't take us there with her.  She just describes Christine as she exits.  The suggestion is that Christine finally gave the Phantom what he wanted, but nothing is overt.  Mrs. Jones asked, (and it was an appropriate question, given the scene), "What do you think happened at the end?"  

Well, I'd never been asked a question like that before.  I had always been told what happened in a book. I'd learned to take notes, write down themes, regurgitate answers on exams, but I'd never been asked my opinion about something unclear in a book before.  I answered her, and she gave her idea of what she thought, and we went on our way. It was a really small moment but it changed everything.  Books were not pages of facts but stories with endless possibilities.  Everyone has to know about this, I thought.  

And so, here I am today.  An innumerable amount of books later, I have a completed dissertation, set a defense date, and I'm one good committee's nod away from getting a chance to work at what Mrs. Jones only started.  So here's to optimism, good teachers, memorable books, and the holidays to read (or reread) as much as possible.

Youth and Hate

Yesterday, I was saddened to learn that students at my alma mater, Baylor University, strung up a noose and burned Obama memorabilia upon learning the results of the November 4th election.  I don't like to think of myself as naive, but perhaps I was, thinking that the Obama supporters might get a brief (say, 1 day?) grace period to breathe.  Apparently, I was wrong. 

It turns out Baylor's was not an isolated event.  Two of my friends have posted blogs about encountering hate first-hand; one, Lisa, whose post can be found in my blog roll, said one of her students posted the following status update upon hearing of Obama's victory:  "The white house is called the white house for a reason!!!!!"  Her school is now in arms.  Another, Claire, said she'd been accosted on facebook immediately after mentioning the election day.  Her "friend" asked her what reason she could possibly have for celebrating the downfall of our nation.  My own acquaintances have not been so openly bigoted, though some have posted that they now feel free to "have all the babies they want so that someone else can care for them."  

The problem, for me, isn't that these people were hateful.  This world is so big and the thinking often so small that I don't wonder that sexism, racism, and classism still exist. No, the truly disturbing characteristic that all these stories share is that every one of the slurs I mentioned were made by someone young.  

It's not that the youth were supposed to be pro-Obama; it's that the youth are supposed to be forward-thinking.  They're the people who have grown up attending integrated schools.  They have been friends with children who have homosexual parents.  They are the most technologically connected generation the world has ever known, which means that what they don't know or understand, they can research in the time it takes to ride the subway or wait for a fast-food order to be filled.  In other words, they should know better.  They can't claim ignorance.  They can't say "well, the world has always been divided by sex or race" because it hasn't, for them.  Their opens minds are supposed to take us one step closer to erasing sexual and racial barriers.  But if the youth are the ones stringing up the rope, what are we supposed to do? If the youth burn hope in bonfires and yearn for a more violent time, how will change come?

   

Last-Minute Thoughts on Election Day

It's election day, but this post isn't about  who I think you should support.  It's just a few last-minute thoughts that have been running around in my head in the past few weeks. It'll be the last post on politics for a while -- at least, as far as I can predict. =)

1.  Democrats do, in fact, have moral values.

2.  The word "liberal" is not dirty.  It just indicates a belief in the idea that the government shouldn't get to tell you whom you can marry or what you can do with your body.

3.  People who say "Let's put God back in America again" (as the billboard down the street from my house pleads) are suggesting the Constitutional framers put him there in the first place.  The framers were pretty freaked out by government-regulated religion, so this is misleading. 

4.  The founding fathers, while admirable in some regard, were not the keepers of Christianity or virtue.  Ben Franklin was a man-whore.  Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves. At one point, John Adams was more fond of a monarchy than a republic.  Very few were Christians; some were Deists, if they claimed a religious belief. None of them wanted equal rights for women or other marginalized figures. The 18th century really isn't the most idyllic time, so wanting to restore its "values" doesn't really make much sense. 

5.  People who vote for Barack Obama are not anti-America, or insane, or morally defunct. People who vote for John McCain aren't gun-waving Bible-thumping idiots.  Most people have given a lot of thought to the candidate they're supporting. Maybe I don't agree with McCain's policies, but I can still respect voters who disagree with me.  

6.  People who wear flags (in any form), live in small towns, or enlist in the military are no more American than I am.  We are equally American, whatever that means.

7.  There is no real America and fake America.  There's no "America."  All nations are constructed. Most are stolen from someone else. 

8.  All people who run for president are, to a degree, elite.  It's not a bad thing. I want the person running the country to be better than I am.

9.  Just because the media talks about how volatile John McCain's election has been doesn't mean it is "in the tank" for Obama.  Reporting the facts, just because they're upsetting to one political party, does not indicate bias.  So invoking the phrase "liberal media" doesn't mean that the news organization in question is making up information, just because that information happens to be unfavorable.  

10.  None of us is red or blue.  We're all just people, living in the same country, together, no matter who wins or who loses.  

11.  Fear is no reason to vote for or against a candidate.  If Barack Obama becomes president, we are not going to become an Islamic socialist anarchy.  If John McCain becomes president, we are not going to turn into a theocracy.  People who resort to politics of fear are relying on an argument ad metum fallacy to sway your vote, which is, by its definition, faulty logic.

On Halloween, Granddaddy, and I.P. Freely

For some, Halloween is a time for children.  It's a chance to watch them wear their imaginations on the outside and to eat so much candy that they become sticky all over.  For others, it flirts with reveling in all things unholy -- satan, poltergeists, demons.  But for me, it's more special than Christmas, and it's all because of one man: my grandfather.

My grandfather loved Halloween in an over-the-top way.  He didn't just kind of enjoy passing out candy; he turned his entire home into a haunted freak-show, and he let me help.  The first thing we did to ready the house was set up the trick coffin.  My grandfather would rig a pulley to a man-sized stuffed dummy, who would be concealed.  He would make his own gravestones to put around the grizzly scene -- most of them had really inappropriate names carved on them (like I.P. Freely), his signature crude humor.  Then, he would set up a soundsystem that would blare scratchy records of Halloween sound effects: screaming witches, yowling cats, howling wolves, creaking doors.  It could be heard all over the neighborhood, echoing off the pine trees.  It would have made Vincent Price proud.  The last step was to position my grandmother at the front door with a bowl full of candy, and to wait for dark. 

I would rush through trick-or-treating so that I could get back to grandfather's sound room (aka the guest bedroom facing the street) as soon as I could.  From where we sat, with the lights off, we could see the trick-or-treaters, but the trick-or-treaters couldn't see us.  It was a great way to view the prank.  As soon as the children decided they were brave enough to pass the ominous coffin to get to the candy they so desired, they would try to run for the door, where my grandmother stood with the bowl.  Their sprint never saved them. As soon as the children passed the coffin, granddaddy would yank the pulley and the life-sized dummy would stand straight up, face-to-face with the kid or parent.  Only adding to the terror, granddaddy had rigged the dummy with a microphone; as soon as the kid looked into the face of the gigantic dead guy, he (granddaddy/the dead guy) would growl in his lowest voice, "GIMME SOME CANNNNNNDY."  This would cause a frenzy of screaming, almost ALWAYS from the parents.  Most ran away.  Some punched the dummy in the face.  Many swore.  A couple just fell out.  Grandaddy and I would mute the microphone and laugh until we couldn't breathe.  

Those who were brave enough earned their sweet tooth that night. You might think people would avoid his house out of terror, but that isn't so.  We had lines and lines of people wrapped around the block.  My grandmother always -- always -- ran out of candy.  The night usually ended with a recruited friend, my grandmother, and I popping popcorn and stuffing mini treat bags with it so we could continue feeding all the people at the door.  (This was a small town and a time predating seals on food.)  

Eventually, when we ran out of all food for the crowd, we'd have to turn out the lights, lock the door, and huddle near the fire as we waited for people to stop coming.  I usually fell asleep in that year's outrageous costume, terrified from that night's ghost stories but exhausted.  

My grandfather died twelve years ago.  I do not mourn him at Christmas, or on his birthday. I don't cast a glance anymore at his empty chair at Thanksgiving.  But the first time I smell burning leaves, pumpkin pie, and the cold, clean air that signals October in the South, I think of him.  Now when I wait in the dark, out of candy,  near my own fire, in my own house, I know he's nearby.  And it's as if no time at all has passed.