Twenty Five Years

2005-03-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

"Do you want to go home now?" At the end of every revolution I had to ask this, and I held my breath every time with the sad knowledge that she would have to say "yes" eventually. But most of the time, she would smile at me and say "Let's go around again" and I would press harder on the gas pedal in case she changed her mind.

We had started doing this after one of our tutoring sessions at the nearest bookstore coffee shop. Driving back to her house, I had remarked that I didn't understand the concept of grace. It was difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that admittance into heaven only required a declaration of faith. We seemed to talk about religion a lot; perhaps it was because we were both at the age when spiritual curiousity peaks (now I understand there is another peak in mid-life). As it turned out, Sally absorbed her religion from fanatically religious grandparents, both born-again Christians who had substituted a relationship with Christ for their mutual dissatisfaction with marriage. They helped raise Sally and Samantha when the parents were learning the ropes of franchising gas stations, and their religiosity had a lasting effect on Sally as she was a regular attendee of sunday services. As a result, she always rose to the defense of Christian doctrine. It was clear, however, that she usually did not understand the concepts she defended. Whenever finer theological points came up, she resorted to some vague statement that included the words "Lord" and "love".

That particular night, she was unhappy with that usual line of argument, and so, as my car approached her house, she asked me to take another round trip to the bookstore so we could keep talking. It was, of course, exciting to spend more time with Sally, especially at night and in a car. For some unknown reason that science will perhaps never discover, a moving car after sunset makes the drab buildings and strip malls of our everyday existence appear more mystical, and any music being played becomes suddenly immersive and hypnotic. It was the right environment to start feeling the pangs of love.

But I was glad that we kept talking for another reason. Sally revealed this little gem: "Your focusing too much on grace. Grace is a wonderful thing and you should just accept that God will embrace you if you're faithful. And that's where the answer is: Faith. The thing is that saying you believe in God and Jesus Christ isn't enough. In fact, a lot of people sincerely think they believe in God, but you know, they don't really think about God when they're faced with a tough decision. Faith means believing in it deeply enough, all the way to your bones, so that it affects your every thought and action. It means being so sure there is a hell that you put aside pride, greed, convenience, and even happiness to do the right thing those few times you're tested. If you have that kind of faith, then of course the Lord , in his infinite love, will let you into the kingdom of Heaven despite some sins along the way."

So there it was. All my standard teenage cynicism about organized religion notwithstanding, I had no answer for this simple and logical assessment of the nature of faith and grace. She had even thrown in "Lord" and "love" and yet this time her words were reasonable, powerful, and even uplifting. It stirred me a bit at the time but I didn't become religious then. And now I wonder if I ever will. When things between Sally and I fell apart, I thought about whether her actions when she left me fit with her concept of faith. Did she act out of pride, greed, revenge, self-happiness, or did she act out of faith? Did she listen to the soft voice of the angel on her left shoulder, or did she give in to the devil's forked tongue on the right? I admit my prejudice but I tell you that I thought about this with a separate part of my mind than the part that was yellow, black and brown and oozing blood from her attacks. I concluded that faith did not enter her mind when she did the things she did. And if Sally couldn't be faithful when her test came, what hope is there for the rest of us? What hope is there for me?

And still, I smile when I think about those endless round-trips between her house and the bookstore. On occasion, Sarah did make me a little bit wiser with these small sermons, but our conversations were usually lighter, covering things like the movies or the latest grunge band to hit it big, and I reveled in observing little things about her, like her ability to raise just one eyebrow when I told a bad joke or the way she fiddled with the door lock when we flirted.

It makes me sad to think that I will likely never convince a career-ont to regularly go nowhere in a car with me, despite the opportunities for sharing wisdom and the heightened effects of sight, sound, and speech. And yet, most of the conts are perfectly content to run on treadmills or some variation several times a week for miles at a time, silenty sweating to their ipods. Apparently, unless calories are burning and muscles are tightening, going nowhere is considered wasting time.

My phone is ringing; I already know that it's my mother worrying about me. She was already pregnant when she was 25.

2005-03-01T14:01:00.000-08:00

Today was hard and cold. The weather, a blizzard in March, was an appropriate metaphor for how I felt. It is very strange when the rest of the world thinks you should be happy, but your own emotional apparatus doesn't.

I took a year off from medical school to work on a masters in epidemiology. There was no real reason for this decision, other than a deep desire to slow down. Just slow down. The point was not even to find myself or re-evaluate my values or anything else that would be beneficial to me. In fact, if there had to be a point, it would be to avoid things that would be beneficial to me; I'm tired of every decision, every summer job, every contact, every breath being judged under the litmus test of whether it will make me look better, sound better, work better, earn better, and be better. Very tired. So this year, I'm slowing down and wasting time, and thinking; I need more time and space to think. That's the point of making a good living, right? To be unproductive, comfortable, and thoughtful in retirement. So why not start now? And why should I justify it to anyone (or myself)? Yet here I am hiding my true purposes under the guise of earning a masters in epidemiology. Old habits die hard.

Samantha

2005-03-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

Noone would have believed that Samantha and Sally had grown up under the same roof, with the same parents, and the same advantages that wealth brings. Despite Sally's occasional meanness, she was kind and generous at the core; as soon as we got to know each other better, she had no problem casting off the prejudices she had borrowed from others and embracing me as a friend, and eventually as someone to love. Samantha, however, was a different story.

It was a perpetual irony that she was the first daughter and yet was destined to live under Sally's shadow. She was not as beautiful, intelligent, or charming as her sister. And while her sister inspired real affection from her friends, Samantha's associations were loose and fueled by expensive gifts. In fact, it was not an exaggeration to say that all of her so-called friends despised her secretly, as most hired entourages do. Her worst quality, which seemed to me like an incurable congenital defect, was her painfully obnoxious voice and the outrageous things she said with it. If anatomists and neuroscientists ever discover a region of the brain that filters annoying utterances from everyday speech, Samantha would surely lack it. She had a complete inability to be modest or graceful when it came to the riches she had the fortune of being born into. It was not an unusual thing for her to squeal in her shrill voice how she preferred Prada over Gucci because of some pointless subtlety in the stitching of the fabric. Or she might casually giggle that she had burnt out the engine in her Mercedes because she had forgotten to get her oil changed at the dealership (tee hee!). Or my favorite, she always spoke with disdain about any homeless person she happened to come across, wondering aloud why they couldn't just be millionaires like her dad.

Noone could figure out whether she was just an entitled bitch rubbing everyone's nose in her wealth, or whether she truly and sincerely didn't realize that the her speech was repulsive. It was even difficult to decide which scenario was more terrible. The sad thing is that neither of these was probably right. My own theory was that she was deeply insecure, and that her constant references to wealth and money were her attempts to sublimate financial worth into self-worth.

Her strategy eventually changed; at some point it must have become clear to her that she could never be as loved as Sally. So instead of transforming into her sister, Samantha put herself to the task of accomplishing the reverse. After all, it is much easier to pull someone down from a height than to climb it yourself.

2005-02-27T19:13:00.000-08:00

"Can you help me with my calculus homework?"

I remember the tenor of her voice and its barely audible quiver when she asked me that. I remember the time (about eight PM), the place (the computer room in our high school), and why we were there (our school was hosting a debate tournament and we were assigned to tabulate the scores).

We define the crossroads of our lives as those moments when we choose which school to attend, which course of study to pursue, or which city to live in. These moments are sterile and packaged, arriving without surprise at pre-determined intervals and are accompanied with all the pageantry--parties, ceremonies, costumes, and hors d'oeuvres--that we think a major turning point deserves. However, if we look back honestly and consider which decisions actually made a difference, really shaped the men and women we grow into, I contend that it is comical how far off we are. Would it really have made a difference whether I had gone to a public university instead of private, or whether I'd lived in New York instead of Boston, or whether my major was sociology instead of philosophy? In retrospect there's nothing that makes me think that these decisions deserve the gravity and anxiety that they inspire in millions of the young across the world.

This simple question by Sally, and my simple choice of responding "yes" or "no", defined the only meaningful crossroad I can think of in my life. It is a practical joke constructed by God himself that the decisions that do matter, that change us and change everything we care about, are disguised so innocently, so nakedly, in such plain language in an even plainer context. Maybe God's intentions are to keep secret the weight of these important choices so He can see how we act and choose when we are ourselves, uncoached and unprepared.

The request came my junior year of high school. It was clear that Sally was choking on pride as she said it. I wondered what sorts of internal arguments had taken place in her mind just prior to the moment she worked up the nerve to ask me. Truthfully, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to go to her home, sit beside her, and look over her shoulder as she wrote her equations with bubbly hand-writing, so inappropriate for the austere work of calculus.

She offered to pay me quite a bit for my help. Her father was rich, and he had made his fortune by franchising a series of Texaco gas stations throughout our city. He was never around, waking up before dawn and shuttling between the stations to hire, fire, oversee, underwrite, develop, shut down, scale up, scale down, and otherwise administrate his miniature petroleum empire. Sally, her sister, and mother were the only ones who actually benefitted from all this spent energy, living lavishly and entertaining themselves with Vuitton bags and Saks cashmere sweaters. He himself was content to come home to a fifteen year old twelve-inch television sitting askew in front of a twenty year old cloth armchair. The television didn't work very well and there was a noticeable layer of static in front of the image. I really admired that for all the years I knew him, as he accumulated more millions, he never replaced that television.

But, it was not his world that I was entering, it was Sally's, her sister Samantha's, and her mother Serena's. I drove up to their mini-mansion in my grey Honda Civic, which by then was as old as her father's tv, wondering whether its presence would upset the neighbors. I had told Sally that I would be happy to help her out without payment; I never had had much use for money then, and I still believed with naivete that charging someone for a service was somehow crude and indecent. And then suddenly, the contrast between my car and her neighborhood, her house, her racks of designer clothes, changed me just a bit.

I've mentioned in a previous post that there are certain indicators we use to judge people because they are convenient to measure and align with the values of the times. This was the point at which I, like millions before me, started thinking about money in those terms. And it encouraged me, on some subconscious level, to believe that this is what everyone else did, that Sally's world was the real world for which I had been searching. It was lost on me that Sally's father did not inhabit her world, and yet, he was the only fully real person in the family.

Sally

2005-02-26T15:18:00.000-08:00

Sally and I first became aware of each other my freshman year in high school. She was shy but she extracted confidence from her small group of friends, a mean little bunch with whom I did not along. The reason for our mutual hostility was simply that they were academic gunners just like me. And in those days, getting into a good college (the best college) was the penultimate prize around which all of our efforts revolved. All of us were stupid enough to think that this competition was all or nothing, Harvard or community college, and so we competed fiercely, under the delusion that being number one was the way to future riches and happiness, the only way.

Sally did not have strong feelings about me at the beginning, but as her friends ridiculed me and spewed their collective venom, she couldn't help but be caught up in their practically ritualistic Shawn-bashing. I remember sitting in English classroom one day that October watching Mel Gibson's version of Hamlet, and suddenly hearing her sing, without any provocation, just loud enough for me to hear, "I hate Sha-awn, I hate Sha-awn." By this point, my skin had become thick to these attacks and my mind was well practiced in sublimating any hurt into doubled-up efforts to become the top student in the state. So her words did not sting, and I didn't care. And anyway, I couldn't hate her back because I thought she was beautiful with all the intensity of pubescent infatuation.

She had long black hair that rolled past her soft brow and green eyes and fell just past her clavicles to settle in the slopes of her chest. Her teeth were straight and her smile was asymmetric, with a sharp corner on one side and a more rounded upslope on the other. There was in her a consummate girliness, a femininity that broke through despite a body that was still growing and whose parts were different distances from the finish line. Despite these awkward proportions, it was clear that she was destined to be sublimely attractive. Her shyness only magnified this beauty, like a soft halo accenting a fragile form. So she hated me. So what? She was my angel even then.

Beginnings

2005-02-24T07:23:00.000-08:00

I remember being made fun of a lot in elementary and middle school because I was smart and foreign. That is to say, I remember being unhappy about being left out of what I envisioned to be a very exciting world of fun and socializing. What the kids actually called me or did to me, I can't remember; likely, simply being ignored was the worst of it. My parents did not help the situation as I was never enrolled in a summer camp or a sports team; instead, I was given violin lessons and private math tutorials. I did enjoy both, but they left me with an unquenchable curiousity about what the other kids were doing while I pored over sheet music and equations. My defense mechanisms became denial and imagination. At times, I convinced myself that I was living about the same as everyone else, and at other times, I would imagine everyone else was living like me. Neither fantasy convinced me that I dwelled in the same space as my classmates.

On the surface, my life seems full and interesting now, but the consequences of my childhood experience have been deep. I carry a quiet though ever-present sense of dissatisfaction with me, as though behind every corner there are people, my tormentors grown up, who live a real life, while I still wade through an artificial approximation, a cheap knock-off I create and know is inauthentic. They say life happens, but not for me; for me, life is constructed.

Sally was a victim of this world-view, an obstacle she could never see or understand but which made her just another illusion in my virtual reality. It silently and insidiously knocked down everything she tried to build for us. It knocked her down too.

Devil on One Shoulder

2005-02-23T09:28:00.000-08:00

I majored in philosophy in college because I wanted to know how to live life right. Naive? You bet. I've since realized that to determine whether a person is living the "right" way, you first need a way to measure "rightness". You need a variable that correlates roughly with how right a person's life is.

Unfortunately, there's no easy tool for this measurement. The favorite way for us Americans to judge each other is through the amount of cash we've accumulated (or are in a position to accumulate in the future). Sexual conquests is another popular option, and one that is becoming increasingly trendy with the ladies, for whom virginity used to be the gold-standard. Other figures in a person's numerical inventory that are often used as rightness indicators include number of contacts in cell phone, letters after name on business card, circumference of biceps at rest, and mixed drinks sampled by palette.

To me, none of these ever seemed satisfactory because the grizzled authors of my dusty philosophy books had a preoccupation with rightness defined as, not surprisingly, doin' the right thing. This is usually the point at which the stoner in the back of the class would say, "What exactly is the right thing?" Well, Hashish, I would bet that when you're cheating on your girlfriend, you know--in fact you are positively certain--that on some moral landscape you are doing something wrong with every thrust. And when you insider trade stocks from your dad's pharmaceutical company, you also feel kind of guilty that you've just fucked some guy with a family in Toledo to cover your gain. And despite all the wonderful uses the international space station has for hemp, you know it was wrong to drive to school today high on the chronic you're now coming down from to ask your question.

Whether or not some philosopher has tacked it down to a precise and satisfying definition, I am certain that we all have a sense of right and wrong. The bigger question for me is whether doing the right thing matters. The problem is that there's no space on the score-card to record when you've done the right thing. And likewise, there's nothing to subtract from when you do the absolute wrong thing. In fact, I would guess that doing the right thing will usually decrease and doing the absolute wrong thing will usually increase at least five of the aforementioned indicators. And these days, we can rationalize just about everything to at least give the appearance of rightness.

So why actually go through the trouble of doing the right thing? The devil on my shoulder is so much more persuasive than the angel. He wears Sean John sweats, politely stops the conversation at times to enter some messages into his blueberry, and smiles with just the corner of the left side of his mouth. The angel, well, kind of sucks; he's just bitch bitch bitch and has the annoying habit of bringing up "Super Size Me" whenever I eat fast food.

I'm looking at my score-card, and I'm not scoring high in any category...

Starting from the middle

2005-02-22T19:44:00.000-08:00

There is a moment they say in his forties or fifties when a person wakes up and realizes that half of his life is over and the next half is going to involve a lot more physical pain. Panic ensues and this person hyperventilates and then does arbitrary things like buying a new sports car or divorcing his wife. They call this a crisis.

I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but when I think about crisis, this sort of picture doesn't spring to mind. I think about impending nuclear holocaust or a missing vial of anthrax, and usually a countdown of some sort is involved. "Crisis" seems too strong a word for some dude shitting himself because he's afraid of the moment that a nurse will shove an IV needle into his forearm and miss the vein, thus assuring his demise.

But, for argument's sake, let's say that this can in fact constitute some sort of crisis, albeit an impotent and smug one. Then I have something to tell the forty year old; while he waxes semi-philosophically in his jacuzzi about all the things he didn't do, all the books he didn't read, all the kids he didn't go to Africa and adopt, I contemplate whether my cynicism will ever allow me to have job satisfaction, whether I can tear my subconscious from a media filled to the brim with breasts and ass long enough to hold a conversation with a woman's eyes, and whether I can find a decent mate in the pool of abrasive, obnoxious career-onts* that now constitutes the opposite sex. See, while the forty year old's "crisis" is a regretful yearning for things he didn't do, there is comfort in the fact that his opportunities have passed. Game over, losing sucks, but now have a lemonade, brush your teeth, and go to bed. But for me, these decisions are impending; there are lots of loud voices suggesting this road and that path. The game has just gotten interesting, the space invaders are coming, and the clock is ticking...10...9...8...

My name is Shawn, I'm twenty five years old, and this is my crisis.

*career-oriented; aka "conts"