Monday, May 19, 2008 | by nathan

Rumination

First off, let me apologize for the lack of Sam on Friday. I promise to rectify this omission soon; I could offer some half-hearted excuse as to why I didn’t get to putting up a Sam update, but the truth of the matter is I was swamped at work and just didn’t get around to it. It makes me a little sad to have left it undone, as I have some GREAT photos of The Dog to share. So we’ll get to that soon (like, maybe, after lunch).

The other strand of my thinking lately - something that has actually occupied a great deal of my thought life - has been the promise I made to myself when I finished my graduate degree (I FINALLY got my diploma last week. You know. After a year. Go Sooners!) that I would wait one year before I started thinking about whether or not I want to pursue my education further at this time.

There are so many options; the mind boggles. I have yet to decisively rule one of them out.

I work at a university, and when my employment situation becomes a bit more secure I’ll have the option of attending said university at 75% of the cost and to tailoring my work schedule around classes. This is great if I want to go to law school, but I’m just not sure I do. I think I’d relish the school part, the part where I’m challenged intellectually and get 3-4 years of fantastic instruction. I just have no desire whatsoever to practice law, or to take on any career that a law degree would open up.

I’ve sort of shaken the dust off my feet as far as journalism is concerned; I think the state of the media in this country is largely due to the state of journalism education, which I’ve decided more or less encourages every awful impulse our media has, especially the ones toward sensationalism and do-nothing, know-nothing reporting. I’m looking at you, here, broadcasting. I think that further academic study in the field of journalism would be fascinating, but it just seems like I’d be orienting myself toward a lifetime of frustration.

The most appealing option at this point is further study in my original area of academic interest, one in which I’ve excelled more than in any other: religion and philosophy. I did, after all, begin my graduate career in divinity school and despite the awfulness of that experience my passion for the field has never left me. Problem is, while the options I listed above would require very little of me in terms of geographic relocation - good law schools and journalism Ph.D. programs are available to me locally - for further religious study would require a major change of scene.

I have standing offers from former professors and mentors that would get my application serious play at some fantastic divinity schools. Problem is that none of them are here, and I’ve rather grown to like having my family and all my wonderful friends around. I’ve got a husband who loves his job and a house and a life I’m in no rush to give up. That said, I do know that the career I currently have, while good for me financially, is not something I hope to be doing 10 years from now. So I’m feeling a bit stuck and I’m beginning to chew over my options a bit. I’m trying not to feel a sense of panic or rushedness about this, but sometimes it’s hard, when contemplating the future, to not want the future to get here as fast as freaking possible. Even when the present is pretty dang fantastic, which it is.

Monday, December 17, 2007 | by nathan

The Enemy of the Electronic Media

This sign is posted on the door of one of my favorite professors from college, Dr. Lewis. I took his intro Philosophy class because everyone kept telling me, "Don’t take Dr. Lewis. He’s too hard. You’ll fail." So I took it, and I got an A-minus. More importantly, I loved the crap out of everything we studied and discussed in the class. I sat on the front row, because no one sits on the front row, as you might occasionally get asked things - gasp! - and have to answer.

It turned out that most of the people who didn’t like Dr. Lewis didn’t like him because they resented that they had to take Philosophy 111. They resented that they paid obscene amounts of money to attend college and then weren’t permitted to skate through classes they didn’t care about.

Also, his exams were a bitch: six hours of writing, divided into 3 sections: short essay, long essay, and dialogue. He’d give you three or four philosophers and you’d have to write a dialogue between them. It was hard as hell to think about, but if you studied and understood, it was insanely fun once you got started. After earning my A-minus in his intro course I decided I’d minor in philosophy, and I took two more courses with Dr. Lewis: Philosophy of Religion and Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche (commonly abbreviated HKN). They both kicked my ass; every class session was to my brain what a hard-core workout with a personal trainer would’ve been to my body. I got A-minuses in both classes, and for my entire life I will always be proud of that.

There was a cadre of good friends of mine who loved Dr. Lewis’ classes, took all of them, and, in the case of my friend Matt, stayed an extra year at Wake to get a philosophy major. When we had to take courses with other professors we were almost always disappointed. After lectures we’d spend an hour in his office, talking over minor points of the lecture or reading. I was raised by college professors, and Dr. Lewis reminds me a lot of them. When I came out, Dr. Lewis called me into his office and told me he was behind me 100%, because as he’d thought and read about it, he’d decided that the church should adopt gay-friendly theology. I’d have cried, except you don’t cry in The Office.

Two weeks ago today Brian and I were walking around Wake’s campus, and I was knocking on doors, seeing professors and people to whom I hadn’t spoken in quite awhile. I wanted to introduce people to Brian, and show him the faces I’d been talking about for so long.

But when we got to Dr. Lewis’ door, I said, "Can I do this one alone?" I wasn’t sure why, except I just wanted to talk to him alone for a minute.

When I entered, there was a student in there. Dr. Lewis greeted me warmly and asked me to wait a moment while they finished talking; I gladly did so. The student was explaining his idea for his Philosophy of Religion paper, the topic of which, I quickly realized, was remarkably similar to the one I’d done my senior year on the theodicy of John Hick.

Yes, I’m linking to a Wikipedia article about John Hick in a post about Dr. Lewis. His students will know why I feel a bit dirty doing that. I highly recommend that you go get an actual book and read the actual words with an actual page. Be careful; you may get something called a "paper cut."

The student left and I took his seat, and Dr. Lewis and I started talking. I quickly caught him up on my life - that I’d dropped out of Yale (the school he’d encouraged me to attend and for which he’d written my recommendation letter), moved home, and decided to become this writer. I explained that I’m working on a novel about the end of the world, only it’s not the end of the world, see, and there’s all this subtle political and spiritual commentary, and as I explained it I started to feel like a giant hack, so I asked him how he’s been doing.

We talked about the state of college students today. Dr. Lewis said it was discouraging to feel that the students were learning more from the electronic media than from their classes, that between digital cable (now standard in every Wake dorm room) and the internet, the students were seeing college as less about learning and more about being handed the world, digitally. Wake students are no longer required to take Basic Problems of Philosophy, a policy change I’m going to vehemently disagree with here, on this website. (Yes, I see the irony).

"They are learning everything they think they need to know from the electronic media," he said, "and I’m the enemy of the electronic media."

I grinned wide and thought, briefly, about shutting down this website. I’m not going to, but I understood what he was talking about; people are being taught from an early age that the internet and technology can take the place of human interaction, that reading a website is as good as reading a book, that if students don’t want to have to take a class, they just shouldn’t, because they’re paying.

Dr. Lewis taught me better than that. He taught me to challenge what my culture is handing me. That television really is, for most people, the same as the shadow puppets in Plato’s cave, and that Eminem is jello and Mozart is creme brulee.

Also, how to think. The man, more than anyone else, ever, taught me how to think.

After half an hour of talking, I had to leave, and he said it was very good to see me again, and we shook hands, and I left. I felt good, and unsettled, like the mud at the bottom of the river had been stirred up and was not going to settle back down for a bit. Which is always how I felt in his classes.

Thanks, Dr. Lewis. I know you’ll never read this - or the e-mail I sent you in January 2000 saying I was sick as a dog and wasn’t going to make it to class that day (this was before I understood that you have never checked e-mail) - but thanks. The Owl of Minerva is taking flight.

Also, you’ll notice that this week’s reading is Frederick Copleston’s History of Philosophy, Vol. 1; all of Father Copleston’s volumes were much-beloved, much-required, wouldn’t-have-graduated-college-without-them texts from Lewis’ classes. Definitely recommended, and affordable.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007 | by nathan

The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round

When I was in the seventh grade we lived in a sort of ghetto-ass neighborhood off of south Shields Boulevard in Moore. My bus ride home was full of thugs and fourteen year old girls who smoked and had tattoos they’d given themselves with pens and clothespins during algebra class.

One girl in particular stands out in my mind for her decision, one afternoon, to leap from the emergency door on the back of the bus.

Her name was Linda. She looked exactly like a young Susan Sarandon, with the smirking mouth and bug eyes. Our bus driver was a red-headed Pentecostal minister named Lewis. Linda’s territory was the last seat on the bus, the hidden one, next to the emergency door. You sat there, you got pounded, as I saw more than once. Lewis was a fire and brimstone preacher, you could tell; his theology was clearly informed, at least in part, by his fiery temper.

It was bound to happen.

One day Linda was wearing a hippie-hoodie, one of those striped Mexican jobbies like you see Woody Harrelson in all the time. The song on the radio was "Free Your Mind" by En Vogue; it was 1993.

She was dancing around in the very back to the song, flicking her cigarette, which I’m sure she thought she’d carefully concealed, out the window. Lewis yelled at her to sit down. Again, and again.

Eventually Linda wrapped the hood of that sweatshirt around the top of her head real tight, so that the top was sticking up in a perfect point. She looked ridiculous. She began bobbing her head back and forth, calling out in a loud, high-pitched voice:

"Lewis!"

"Lewis!"

She’d bob her head back and forth each time; between that and the hood sticking up in a point on the top of her head, she looked like some kind of maniacal sock puppet. The buggy Sarandon eyes only added to the effect.

Lewis’s face grew red; I was in the middle of the bus. As a short, unathletic nerd, I’d long before learned better than to sit anywhere but the middle, and that I should always keep my head down, down, down, and avoid eye contact even with people who were my friends at school.

"I’m writing you up, Linda!" Lewis screamed. He spit when he yelled; by now the bus had grown silent, and everyone was suppressing laughter.

"You can’t write when you’re driving, Lewwwwwwwisssss!" she sang.

And then, bam. Lewis stopped the bus cold on a residential street in a ghetto-ass Moore, Oklahoma neighborhood. He slammed on the brakes, turned off the bus, and stood, facing Linda, fire burning in his eyes, little foamy triangles of spit at the corners of his mouth.

"Get up here, Linda!" he shouted. He knew her by her first name because of how many times he’d already written her up for smoking.

"No, Lewwwwwwwisssss!" she sang back. He took a couple steps toward her, and, like a flash, her hand was on the emergency door handle.

"If you open that you’re going to be expelled!" Lewis’s face was as red as an apple now.

"You can’t expel me!" she hissed at him. Then, like a flash, she threw the door open and leapt out the back door, running up the street. God knows if we were even anywhere near her house.

"Everybody just stay right where you are!" Lewis shouted, digging around in her now-vacated seat for - evidence? A scent?

Lewis returned after a moment to stand in front of all of us, then began barking out a lecture about how things were going to change on "his" bus. No more disrespect on "my" bus, he said, no sir, you’re all going to sit quietly from the moment you get on until the moment you get off. You’re all going to have assigned seats on the bus. I run a tight, tight ship, he said, and I’m through with all this foolishness.

Then, he sat down in the driver’s seat and STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD for probably five minutes. Looking back on it now, the kind of neighborhood it was, the kind of kids we were, all ghetto and dirty and adolescent, I like to think that perhaps Lewis was stroking a Glock, wondering how many of us - if any - would be able to take him down once the shooting started.

But, having worked with junior high kids - and been fired after only a single day on the job - I realize that he was probably catching his breath. Finally, tired of waiting for him to collect himself, my only friend, Will, and I followed Linda’s lead and began moving toward the still-open emergency door. At this point everyone on the bus was either afraid or angry, and there was a line toward that open door like the bus was on fire.

Which, in a sense, it was.

I never saw Linda on the bus - or at school - again. But I got back on the bus the next day. Lewis’s eyes didn’t meet mine as I boarded, or as I got off that afternoon. He only drove the bus a couple more months, and then - weird coincidence - the guy who replaced him had been my bus driver in Weatherford, before we’d moved to the city. But I never forgot Lewis’s red, spitty face, or that hoodie, and every time I drive through the intersection of NW 27th and Shields in Moore, I find myself compelled to start screaming, "Lewis! Lewis!" So, I make it a practice to avoid that intersection altogether.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007 | by nathan

GREat

My friend Jonathan is fiddin’ to take the GRE soon. Stop by his blog, read the post and the wonderful discussion, and send him good thoughts, prayers, etc. Standardized testing is of the devil.

Monday, August 20, 2007 | by nathan

?

I’m not a huge fan of the Greek system. It worked well at Wake Forest, where no one was allowed to rush a frat or sorority until spring of their freshman year. By that time, everyone already had friends, and when you found out someone had joined a particular house, it was like, "Oh? Really? Hm." Not that interesting.

At the University of Oklahoma, where I earned my graduate degree, the Greek system is out of control, but also has a freakish hold on the operations of the school. I found this out when I arrived there in January 2005. That fall, a freshman had died of alcohol poisoning during Rush Week. As the University scrambled to deal with this tragedy, suggestions began floating around as to a possible restructuring of the whole system. One of the options that was discussed was switching to spring rush so that incoming freshmen wouldn’t feel the need to join a Greek organization if they didn’t want to.

You’d have thought someone suggested that they ban football. There was a major uproar from the Greek community and its alumni, and though it seemed to me, a more or less outside observer, that spring rush might have been the sanest solution - I came from a university where it had worked beautifully, after all, where the Greek system was alive, active and healthy but no one’s self-esteem depended on it, as far as I could tell - it never happened. The University folded to pressure from its students and alumni, as often happens.

*****

This morning I pulled up to my usual parking space. I refuse to pay a zillion dollars every semester to park on campus, when the closest parking lot to my building is next to the baseball stadium, with signs everywhere letting me know how it is: If my car gets smashed by a baseball - or eight or nine - the University is not to blame. There’s no tall fence or any kind of barrier, and so if a stray pop fly comes down on my windshield, that’s just my own cross to bear.

During the summer they let us park on campus for free, and I took advantage. Now that classes have started up again I have retreated to my usual parking space, one street over from my building, on a residential street on the edge of campus, in front of a fraternity house.

Today I pulled up and noticed that, for the first time in over a year of parking here, there was another car parked in front of the house. Oh, and how charming! It had a set of those plastic testicles hanging off its trailer hitch. I won’t post a picture; if you live anywhere in Oklahoma, Texas, the south, you’ve probably seen them, or you will. 

So I get out of the car, and up walks a dude carrying a pizza. At 8:15 a.m. I’m not even sure where you get a pizza at 8:15 a.m.

"Hey, sir?" he calls.

Do I look like a sir? Twenty-seven years old, but babyfaced, and short, and I’m "sir?"

"Yeah?" I ask.

"You can’t park there."

"It’s a public street."

"No, that’s parking for the brothers. This is a fraternity house."

"There’s no sign."

"Our sign got stolen. But if you park there, we’ll have to have you towed."

"Why? No one has ever parked here as long as I’ve worked here."

"Can you not just park on campus?"

"Can’t you?"

"That’s parking for the fraternity brothers."

"The fraternity brothers aren’t using it. They never use it. There’s no sign."

"You’re gonna have to move your car."

"Fine." So, I get in my car, and move it across the street. I literally pulled a 3-point turnaround and parked on the other side, across from the fraternity house. The dude watched me, and I could tell he was getting ready to come out and say something, but I beat him to it. I climbed out of the car, shouldered my bag, and said:

"I’m parking right here. There’s no sign on this side of the street. If you have a problem with me parking here, you can come find me. I work in the law school."

His eyes got wide, and he shot me a scathing look, but turned and took his pizza inside. I felt at once oddly satisfied with myself and also deeply irritated, because I knew he was lying. They’d never had a sign, and they’d never had the right to declare a public street as reserved parking. Tow me, douche bags. I triple dog dare you. I promise, you’ll live to regret it. 

Wednesday, May 9, 2007 | by nathan

summer: go!

Summer is upon us, in the academic sense. On Monday I proctored my last exam, turned in my last assignment and posted my final grades. Grad school - for the moment - is over.

Now, it’s warm, and because it’s Oklahoma in May there are a lot of storms, which I find wonderfully refreshing and exciting, even if they’ve scared Sam to the point that he’s taken to hiding under the table on the sun porch even when it’s sunny outside.

I had to take him to the vet on Tuesday. His breathing has been off, like he swallowed a rattle, and he hasn’t been eating much. The doctor said he has gained too much weight, and as he said this it seemed - to me, at least, and my tiny little mental illness - that he was judging me for this, like I was force-feeding the dog wedding cake. I told him that since Sam had all kinds of worms and was malnourished when we got him six months ago that I figured the weight gain was a good sign. Turns out it’s not, so much.

Also, Sam has a problem with his heart. He has heart worms, of course, but it also seems that he has a murmur, that one of his heart valves is leaking. They’ve put him on a ten-day prescription and I have to take him back in a week from tomorrow. My poor dog can’t catch a break. Sitting there with him in the vet’s office I realized how much I love him, how much he’s added to our home and our lives, and I realized - fully, fully conceptualized - that he is going to die someday, and that on that day, I will be fucked unto the Lord, because I love him so much. So I prayed like mad that that day is really, really far off.

But the news isn’t all bad. I’m done with grad school. This week I took a proposal to my boss at my day job and he seemed very excited by it, which I think means that I’m going to have a job for the immediate future. So that’s great. Summer is here, and things really seem to be shaping up for us to have a great time, so for now I’m just going to go with it, and when the streets flood after a thunderstorm, I’ll hike up my pant legs and wade on in.

Thursday, May 3, 2007 | by nathan

master

I passed my thesis defense. It was difficult, and scary, and I was sweating like a stuck pig the whole way through it, and it hasn’t even really sunk in yet to the point that I can celebrate, but I did, in fact, pass my thesis defense. Thanks to everyone who prayed, and called to encourage me, and I’m not really done yet because I have exams to proctor, papers to finish grading and a 100-page assignment to turn in, but it’s all downhill from here.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007 | by nathan

barely remembering to breathe…

I need encouragement, people.

Let me tell you about the last two weeks of my life.

Last Friday, April 20, I got up at 6 (early for me) to go work at an event we were having for my day job. I was in downtown Oklahoma City from around 7:30 until after 6 p.m. The next day, Saturday, I burned through a bunch of what I had left on my thesis until it was time to get ready for the big gala day-job event, which was that night. I arrived back in downtown OKC at a very swank, very new hotel for this big gala, at which I was working until around 11 p.m. Yes, part of this work included having a very nice meal and a few very good glasses of wine, but it was work. I went home and crashed.

I got up Sunday and worked on my thesis some more, late, late into the night. When I finally did crawl in bed I couldn’t sleep, so I got back up and worked some more until I could. I got about 30 minutes, all told. Monday I worked on it all day, and into the night in my office in Norman, then came home and worked some more. Same deal Tuesday. Brian was out of town on business Tuesday night, and I took Sam to Kinko’s at 2 in the morning to print the thing. I gave it one last read-through and found several critical errors, which I corrected. Once again, I did not sleep. I was on campus in Norman on Wednesday morning at about 7 a.m. to hand the thing in, but printer problems delayed that until 9 a.m.

It was handed in. I didn’t go to day job, choosing instead to hang out on campus and try to get more work done, at which I was only mildly successful. After teaching my classes that night I went straight home and fell into bed, but slept nervously.

The weekend was fine. Friday night my dad came into town and we had dinner with him. Saturday we all drove up to Eischen’s for chicken, then Brian and I hung out at home, playing games and watching movies. Sunday our good friends the Flynns invited us over for sushi, which they hand-made, which was delicious. The whole weekend, however, I had a nagging headache that wouldn’t go away. It started Friday, continued through Saturday, and by Sunday was throbbing constantly.

Well.

Sunday night/Monday morning I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and in a great deal of pain. I went downstairs to take some Advil and lay on the couch, watching the Simpsons on TiVo, trying to will the pain to stop. Instead, what I got was a night of throwing up into the toilet, for hours, then getting a couple hours’ sleep on the couch.

I didn’t go to work Monday. Mom came by and brought me some medicine to ease the pain and nausea. That helped. I didn’t go to campus, but I rarely go to campus on Mondays, which is fine, except yesterday, between the throwing up and the routine, I completely forgot that I’d promised my students that I’d be available to them for exam review. Completely forgot. I’m the worst teaching assistant ever. Have you ever almost dropped a baby? That’s about how I feel, only worse, like maybe the baby was Jesus, and I almost-dropped him in a pit of lava-eating snakes, or something.

By evening I was feeling good enough to let Brian take me out to dinner for our two-year anniversary. He made a reservation at Deep Fork Grill, one of the best places in the city, and when we got there we were told they were having a wine tasting! With dinner! So, we got to celebrate our anniversary with several glasses of wine and one of the best meals I’ve had in a really, really long time. I got progressively more and more tired, however, and was too exhausted to watch Heroes by the time we got home. Last night was the first time I really slept well in a very, very long time, and that was mostly thanks to the drugs.

My thesis defense is tomorrow at 4:30. To say I’m feeling stressed is like saying that Cher has had a bit of work done. A better word might be panicked. I’m panicked about letting my students down yesterday, and about tomorrow’s thesis defense, and in general my skin is crawling, my heart is racing, and if I can just live through the next 36 hours of my life, I’ll be feeling really good. If I could also manage to pass my defense and get caught up on everything else while not having any major nervous breakdowns, that will be just icing on the cake at this point.

So. Pray. Pray pray pray pray pray pray pray.  

Sunday, April 15, 2007 | by nathan

standardized testing

So you know this thing I have going on where I kinda hate grad school? And where I’ve promised myself not to think about what - if any - school I might want to do in the future? Well.

I’ve been thinking about it. Not on purpose! But I do work at a law school, where I have a lot of opportunities to attend really cool events where people talk about the law and how rewarding its practice is. So, I decided something small. I’m going to take the LSAT sometime in the next year. That’s all. Just gonna take it, see how I do. Nothing more. Just to see.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 | by nathan

Hey, Big Spender

When I was a senior in college, I wrote a rather long honors thesis for my religion major about sexual theology, and homosexuality in particular. As part of my research I conducted a semester-long Bible study on campus about these issues that, while not particularly successful, fed my thesis so perfectly that I felt as if most of the work had been done for me.

I could not have been more wrong, of course, and I realized this when it got to be April 13-ish and I realized I HADN’T WRITTEN A SINGLE DAMN WORD. Yes, I had researched, and made notes, and prepared for the study, etc. etc. But I had not written a single page of the 40+ pages I was expected to have for my thesis. This on top of having both papers AND finals in every class I was taking, which was a lot. It was the single most rigorous semester I had at Wake Forest - or, one of them, anyway - and here I hadn’t done a single damn thing to get the honors for which I had applied and which, because of the credits I still needed to graduate, was now required for me to receive a degree.

So, I wrote the thing. In four days. That’s ten pages a day, plus editing, footnotes, end notes, and additional research I had not completed. Four days.

That same semester I was nominated for Senior Colloquium. This is a program at Wake where seniors are nominated by members of the faculty to write end-of-the-year speeches. These are submitted to a faculty panel, then narrowed down to 15 or so. These 15 students attend a dinner at the President’s house and give their speeches to a group of trustees, faculty, and the President and his wife. From there the students are whittled down to three, each of whom speaks as part of graduation activities. It’s a great honor. I was nominated by one of my favorite people at Wake Forest, Chaplain Ed Christman. It was an honor, but I was so busy procrastinating on my honors thesis that I didn’t bother to write my speech until the day it was due.

It took me 15 minutes. I was selected to attend the President’s dinner, and then selected as one of the three who would give his speech at the colloquium in May. For a speech that I wrote in 15 minutes and did not edit. I reread that speech recently, as I included it in a portfolio I submitted for a job application (look! I can write speeches!). Upon reviewing the work I thought it fairly well written, but it was so riddled with typos and amateur mistakes that not only was I shocked that I was chosen to give my speech at President Hearn’s house, I’m kinda surprised I wasn’t expelled from Wake Forest, or shot.

Now, here I am in my last semester of graduate school. I have three huge projects coming up: most important is my thesis novel, which must be 50,000 words, all of publishable quality (read: not a rough draft like in every class I’ve taken, but hey, thanks for teaching me ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT EDITING). The second is a marketing plan, submission packet and first 50 or so pages of a nonfiction book. I haven’t started this. The third is a large set of revisions to a novel I wrote last year. These are all required for my graduation. 

I’ve got 7,500 words of my thesis novel written. I decided to stay in my cozy, creativity-inspiring little office on campus and work instead of going home, where I would be distracted by my deep need to cuddle with my husband on our incredibly comfy sofa and play with the dog and the Wii. I thought, "It’ll be okay. I’ll get it out."

What have I been doing instead? Watching every single one of these. The second one’s my favorite. 

I am so screwed. You think I can pull off another miracle like I did as an undergraduate? Five years, two inches on my waist and two metric tons of alcohol separate me from that time in my life, but I’ll see what I can do.