Wednesday, March 8, 2006 | by nathan

Spring…Break?

Next week is spring break. Not that it’s going to matter a sodding lot. I have two major writing projects and my internship to keep me busy, so I am going nowhere. Well, that may be a stretch. I am going forward in time, of course, and I am going to and from work. So there’s that.

When I was in college I always scheduled my classes so I could have three-day weekends. The idea was to have as much time as possible to spend at the beach, or in the mountains, or, as was more likely, studying. They did call it Work Forest, after all.

But, I live in Oklahoma, which is a wonderful place to live, but there are no beaches here. There are mountains, and gorgeous prairies, and canyons, and you have to know where to find all of this stuff, as its locations are not readily apparent. Oklahoma is not a state for lazy people. You have to be willing to make your own fun.

Although now that I think about it, I think I will take a day this next week and do something. It has been far, far too long since I took a day to head out to Red Rock Canyon to hike and pray. Or perhaps Roman Nose State Park, or the lake, if things warm up. But, I need to get ahead on Gazette work, and the nonfiction project, and the novel…geez.

After all, my car has new tires, and I am getting its oil changed tonight after work, so Calvin will be back in the saddle again in almost every way. That will be great. I love my car, folks. We’ve been together for five years now, and he has a lot more miles on him than he used to, a lot more little old-car quirks, but he’s in mostly good health and I am crazy about him.

—AAAHHHH!— a crazy influx of students into the lab. I have grown, over the course of this semester, to HATE it in here. I can’t wait until May, when I don’t work here anymore. Of course, that leaves the problem of what to do for summer employment, but it always did. I can’t write in here. And if one more sorority girl or broadcasting guy sighs loudly in my face because I tell them that only journalism students can log in, there is going to be some violence happening.

But I might be a little angry. 

Monday, March 6, 2006 | by nathan

Currents

current song: "Candy Everybody Wants" by 10,000 Maniacs

I’ve been feeling very awash today. Awash is a good word. That is how I describe it when I feel that time, and life, and the events of my existence are like this rushing river that is sweeping me along, and it’s mostly a beautiful ride but fraught with scary rapids, and of course I am not in control of the speed.

Ana was out today and so I was left to do all the classes by myself. Four productions, two broadcasting labs, lots of little problems and stresses. Had to reboot the switcher, for example. Scary. Lynn, one of the other broadcasting profs, was kind of lurking during my second lab, looking at me with this mixture of fear and condescension, like I was about to start a fire in the studio. It makes me nervous when people do things like that, and that kind of nervous insecurity makes me screw up, which intensifies the scrutiny under which I find myself. It’s a vicious cycle.

song: "Boy Cries Wolf" by Kind Of Like Spitting

So I have decided that while I could work in T.V. - I am certainly possessed of at least a minimum of the requisite experience and knowledge - I really don’t want to work in T.V. I think that broadcasting is pretty much a field for people who get off on stress, and this is so deeply not me. Twenty-five and a half years into my life, and I am far, far too tired and wrung-out to live that life. Impossible deadlines do not thrill or excite me like they do the people I know who work in television. They just make me feel weighted down and highly nervous.

song: "House Of Jealous Lovers" by The Rapture

I enjoyed making the documentary for The History Channel, because the pace of that was slower and more thoughtful. We had time to set up shots and really consider what we were doing. So I am thinking that a career in filmmaking might not suck, though it would likely require a bit more schooling, which I am honestly not interested in at this point. I was watching the Oscars last night (Felicity Huffman was ROBBED) and I started to think that I would like to write screenplays. It’s one of the few forms of writing that I have not tried very much of. And it would be a good way to bridge the gap between my love of filmmaking and my pressing need to write.  

No TV, though - nothing live, anyway. These videos that we do with the students are live to tape, and local broadcast news is live to air, and…no. Just no. I think that you have to be a certain, special kind of crazy to want to make live T.V. And I am lots of kinds of crazy, but that is just not one of them.

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t work in T.V. if the opportunity came up. I am at an early enough stage of my career where I do not have the option of turning down very many things, although I can assure you that I will never work in retail, food service, telemarketing, or murder-for-hire again. I would absolutely pick television over all of those things, but print journalism will always be my first love, followed closely by radio. Nothing like telling a story with nothing but sound. 

song: "A Road Is Just A Road" by Mary Chapin-Carpenter

Anyway, so we will see what the future holds for me, in two months when I am no longer an intern at the lovely Oklahoma Gazette and must find actual work. Have I said scary yet? Because it bears repeating: Scary.

Doing these videos all day has me wasted on stress. I find that when I get like that, all adrenalized and ready to go, it takes me a long time to come down from it, like a drug. I get kind of psychic tinnitis, where everything I think or read or see causes an emotional spike and I start to feel things much more than is probably normal. Like now, I just got real excited because the song changed and it was Coldplay, "In My Place." I got up and did a little jig. Wee-urd.

This is the reason I don’t do drugs. It has very little to do with morality or good citizenship. It’s just that I am quite nervous enough, thank you.  

Thursday, March 2, 2006 | by nathan

I Shudder.

Here’s how I woke up this morning:

Brian: Sweetie, your car has a flat. 

Me: Fuck.

So, as a result of my new flat, which I think was God’s way of saying that a year and a half is as long as one can go with the conscious knowledge that one needs to replace the tires on his old car. So I emailed my editor and said I would be working at home and would email him my articles later in the day, which I have just finished doing.

At lunch Brian came home and slapped the spare on my car, and we drove it to the Hibdon’s in Edmond, which is close to where he works. I followed him in his car, then took him back to work, and drove myself to Panera Bread, which is where I am now, and where one of my top-four least favorite places in the world is driving me nuts.

I absolutely hate Edmond, Oklahoma. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a nice-looking town, lots to do, plenty of neat places to go. But also, it’s a town full of assholes. This is the only way I know how to describe it. It seems that everyone either drives an SUV or a luxury car - many drive luxury SUVs - and they all seem to attend megachurches, of which there are several just in this one town. There are W stickers everywhere you turn. People drive very rudely, and act generally stuck-up.

(Incidentally, my four least favorite places in the world are, in no particular order: Edmond, Oklahoma; Brindisi, Italy; Houston, Texas, and Hartford, Connecticut). 

I’m probably imagining a great deal of this. After all, I have friends who live now or have lived in Edmond, and I enjoy their company very much. But the feeling of the town - it honestly freaks me out a little bit. I just feel assaulted when I am here, the same way I feel assaulted if I watch Pat Robertson or Donald Rumsfeld. I feel scolded for being an artist, for being different, for not conforming or fitting in at all. I’ve always been pretty uncomfortable around rich people.

When I was a kid, the neighborhood where my parents had built their house, the house I grew up in, became suddenly the place where a lot of the rich people in town wanted to live, and so I grew up living around all of these people with what seemed to be obscene amounts of money. I got driven to school almost every morning in a Porsche that belonged to my neighbor, whose daughter was my age, who also had a kind of mini-Porsche of her own. Their family - a lot of the families around us - seemed to find us mildly entertaining for having less than them, like they had all joined some charity called "Let a normal middle-class family live here." We never really wanted for anything, my family, but we never had luxury, really. Our house was normal-sized, our vacations were to Colorado to camp, rather than to Europe on cruises. It’s just how we were, and I love the way I grew up.

Still, rich people tend to make me a little nervous. I am certain that this is mostly my own insecurity, but as I have grown older I have also noticed a kind of blindness on the part of people for whom money is not really an issue. Once, when I was living abroad, some very kind girls I was living with invited me to fly with them to Norway for the weekend to go skiing. "It’s only $1000 for the whole weekend!" they exclaimed excitedly, as if this was but a drop in the bucket. I was living on $350 a month that my parents sent me on top of paying my tuition and housing, and I would be lying if I said that in my insecurity, that I didn’t resent those girls a little.

Just a little. Hardly worth mentioning.

Granted, I am terrible with money, which is why I almost never have any. My brother and sister are the accountants in the family.

I’m on a tangent here. Suffice it to say, Edmond makes me uncomfortable because everywhere you look there is opulence and finery, and because every house seems to look like every other house, every luxury car like every other luxury car, every soccer mom like every other soccer mom. I have to constantly pray to remember that these people are just as beloved by God as I am. It doesn’t help when my new brightly-colored shoes, which have already broken in quite a lot, thank you, attract loathsome stares when I walk into places like this Panera Bread.

I do not want to judge an entire group of people whom I do not know, but I really, really hate this town. I can’t wait for the tire shop to call and tell me my car is done so that I can get home, where I am safe.

I am absolutely certain there is a lesson in all this. We’re still a work in progress here, people.

On the drive up here I was driving behind Brian, who was piloting my poor car, Calvin, on its crazy-looking spare tire, which seemed to flash at me like the ugly facial tic of a serial killer. I was praying like crazy that we get to the tire shop safely, and then it occurred to me that I should start thanking God for all the good things in my life. I felt a little like Tammy Faye Bakker, but I could think of no other way to pray for the safety of me, the man I love, and the piece-of-shit car I am crazy about, so I started giving thanks for specific things: a man who loves me and knows tons about cars, the rain that is probably going to come tonight and help put out these crazy wildfires, the warmer weather, my shoes, the sky. And we got to the tire shop safely.

So maybe I should do that now, and pray in the meantime for a Spirit of reconciliation, because I feel that a lot of what I loathe in these Edmond people is a lot of what I loathe, or don’t know the place of, in myself, my own life: a lifestyle that is relatively comfortable and the tendency to take that for granted, the fortune to be born middle-class and American, a deep fear of the ones that this world counts as nothing, the ones that Jesus is all about taking care of the most.

Okay, the tire’s ready. Gonna sign off here and drive out of this loathsome town on a set of tires that I am incredibly, incredibly fortunate to have. 

Wednesday, March 1, 2006 | by nathan

The Vista

So yesterday I went to Shoe Gypsy, because I had just had a fat wad of cash stuck into my bank account (okay, that’s an exaggeration. I got paid, and it will be enough for the month, as always, by necessity). Anyway, I went, because there was this fabulous pair of chartruse and flourescent-green shoes on sale, and I haven’t bought new shoes for myself since 2003. The shoes I work out and run in are five years old, although with the help of the merest bit of duct tape, they hold together just fine.

God, am I turning in to my father? He had this car where the door was held on by duct tape for years. 

Anyway, I had seen the shoes a couple weeks earlier and was agonizing about spending $40 on shoes, but I did. Put ‘em on, and damn if they didn’t just cut the back of my feet to shreds. I understand now why Achilles’ weak spot was back there, because they just hurt like a bitch.

But I went down to OU on Tuesday afternoon to run my shift in the lab, and everyone was super excited about my shoes, because they looked like they might glow in the dark, or have super powers. By the time I got off work, lived through the first half of Novel class, then cut out to go meet Todd at Dr. Kimball’s lecture, I was completely beating myself up. Here I’d dropped money on an unnecessarily fabulous pair of shoes and they were the so painful that I might as well be looking at foot-binding next.

Todd offered me a ride to my car afterward, but on the walk to his car, we got to talking about Kimball’s lecture, about the problem of evil in general, and the next thing I knew we were in downtown Norman at a restaurant on the sixth floor of this building. The place is called the Vista. I had two pints of Moosehead and a Ruben sandwich with homemade potato chips, and Todd and I talked for probably two hours.

Mine and Todd’s relationship is complicated. We became friends in the summer of 1998 when my best friend Eric was the lifeguard at the pool in Todd’s parents’ neighborhood. Todd would come down there to hang out, and Eric and I would be there, and we would all start talking theology, philosophy, great music. It was the first time I had ever smoked a cigar, or realized that there were cool places in Oklahoma City, which I was getting ready to leave for North Carolina.

So we would hang out at Todd’s over the years, always talking good stuff. He’s a lawyer by training, but he and his father run an environmental engineering firm together. He lives in the building next to their office, right off of SW 89th street. You would never know that someone lived there exactly, as the house was once an office itself. I always say that the house, and especially the back porch, look remarkably like the inside of Todd’s brain, all strewn about with interesting things, all of which have a story, and yet none of which seem to be in any kind of recognizable order. There is an old Model-A back there, and a few rusting-out hunks of other old cars, and Jayson’s old boat. Sometimes the grass gets so high that you cannot see in front of you. Also, Todd has one of the few dogs I am not afraid of.

There is a tree back there that Todd wired up with a phone - you kind of have to see that - and a table where we would sit over beers until four and five in the morning, talking, all through my college career.

Todd was one of the very first people I came out to in 2001, when he and I had taken his boat down to Lake Texoma for a day. I remember us skimming across the waters - this was a fabulous June morning - listening to Robert Miles’ Dreamland album, which is perfect boat music. We talked about sexuality, and all of that, and he came out to me then, too. We realized at some point that we were attracted to one another.

The relationship never really went anywhere, which is probably for the best, as I still had another year at Wake, and wasn’t sure that I would ever be back in Oklahoma for more than a holiday. Now Todd has Steve, and they’ve been together for three and a half years now, in a relationship that I admire and love and wouldn’t change for anything. Steve has the best smile of anybody, and is wild and hilarious and sarcastic, and I like that in a guy.

Todd is smart and boisterous and curious, which I also like. He never stops asking the big questions, he is never afraid to feel something even when it is bad, and he always knows which restaurant or bar to go to, even at four in the morning.

Todd’s my friend, my dear, dear friend, and I love him deeply. Last night was wonderful, because we do not always have time to talk like we used to, and to have nighttime Oklahoma spread out beneath us, Norman coming and going all around the building atop which we were perched, made it kind of more special, and I was really, really grateful that I live where I do.

Today it was about 90 degrees - how do you like that? Two weeks ago it was snowing and frigid. That’s Oklahoma weather for you - and I put bandaids over my heels, and wore bright red cashmere socks, and my new shoes, so that from the knees down I could have been a clown. My heels didn’t hurt so much anymore, so I think maybe the shoes just need to be broken in, just like anything new.

One of the best prayers ever? Yeah, say it with me:

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.