Starting Over

Beneficence, the unofficial mascot of my new school, Ball State. Source

And you of the tender years
   can't know the fears
   that your elders grew by.
—"Teach Your Children" Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young


School starts on Monday. It'll be my first first day of school in five years.¹

I say school, but what I really mean is class, and when I say class I do mean class rather than classes, because I'm only taking one this fall.

~   ~   ~

Since moving to Muncie, I've been looking ahead to Monday, August 18, with mixed feelings. It represents the end of an excellent summer vacation, spent with my new wife in a new home—a real, actual house, no less—but also the beginning of a new chapter in my life: graduate school.

Grad school is something I've long wanted to do, but the original plan was much different. After a semester of undergrad, I set my heart on the study of linguistics. I wanted to get a PhD and become a linguistics professor somewhere.

Maybe that was always a fantasy. Acquiring a PhD has always been a tough gig, and getting a tenure track position at a university little easier. What really convinced me it that it would be a waste of my time to try, though, was the Great Recession. However challenging it might have been to pursue my dream in the pre-2008 world, graduating in 2009 made getting into a PhD program look fiendishly difficult, as young people delayed entry into the job market by going to grad school in record numbers.

Perhaps "waste of time" is too strong a term. At any rate, I realized I was unwilling and maybe even unable to undergo the loss of time and energy, the uncertainty, and the hardship required to achieve that particular goal. I didn't want to move all over the country hunting jobs for the next several decades. I didn't want to compete in the cut-throat academic world for low pay. I didn't want to publish or perish. I wanted peace. And in the world of the post-2008 "economic recovery,"² there seems to be very little peace to go around in academia.

So I looked for something else. I did two years in AmeriCorps, which would be a great program if it actually paid people a living wage for their service to the country (like, say, military service, or literally any other public-sector job). As it was, I lived on a small stipend and foodstamps and worked my butt off five or six days a week. Afterwards, I cobbled together a meager living from teaching test prep for a for-profit education company (shudder) and teaching some friends the basics of Biblical Hebrew, and then finally got a full-time job proofing resumes for fairly low pay (still better than my previous gigs, sigh).

Life in this economy hasn't been easy for most Americans. I don't think my story is particularly unique, but it is what it is.³

~   ~   ~

Meeting Anna, getting married, and moving to Muncie has given me a chance to hit the restart button, for which I'm grateful. I'm going back to school to get certified as an elementary school teacher. It will take at least two and a half years. Even though I'm a grad student, I'm basically just getting a BA in elementary education, so it will be entirely undergrad-level classes. I don't know how much fun it's going to be being almost a decade older than my classmates. Maybe no fun at all? 

I've always loved school, though. I love learning new things, and I love teaching other people things, so learning stuff with the express intent of using it to teach others seems like it's going to be fun. Or at least entertaining enough and worthwhile enough that I'll be able to bear the awkwardness that may come with being caught between grad and undergrad. 

And maybe it won't be fun; maybe I'll just do my time and move on to do the worthwhile work out in the field. I think education in America is in a seriously bad place, though I'm not of the opinion that it's ever been all that great. The way I see it, the root of our problems is this: America's poverty levels are too high, much too high for a rich country, and we have too many impoverished students in particular. Poor students need the most intervention (read: money) in order to succeed, but tend to get the worst resources because of how schools are funded and the ability of richer students to opt out of public education. Impoverished students are increasingly segregated into schools by themselves, to the detriment of their educational performance. (Also, speaking of segregation: racial segregation in schools is on its way back.) The result of all this is a system that adequately serves the needs of middle-class and wealthy kids, and throws poor ones under the bus. 

Source

America's school troubles, in other words, can be summed up with that old chestnut, It's the economy, stupid. 

Troublingly, the "education reform" movement ignores this, and has been implementing misguided solutions like using standardized tests to determine which schools should get government funds (Surprise, kids, your whole education is now oriented around the ISATs!), as well as opening charter schools (Kids, your education is now being used to profit large corporations! Ain't that swell? Also your teachers get paid less here. And there's no evidence this school will do better on average at educating you than a traditional public school. We're much more likely to expel you to keep our numbers high, though!).

I hope to be able to do my part in building something better than what we have now. Failing that, I'll serve the kids I meet to the best of my ability for as long as I can. But first, I gotta get through grad school...with undergrads. 

~   ~   ~

If I'm not careful, I may end up at Bracken Library for the whole semester, where I often go to read books for fun. Source

Which brings me back to my opening remarks. I'm only taking one class this fall because I can't get in-state tuition rates till next year, and the difference is steep enough that it makes sense to wait till then to get started in earnest. I can't tell whether this first semester is going to be a challenge or not. I've enjoyed lots of free time this summer, but I'll start to feel guilty if I don't find something worthwhile to do with my extra time this fall. But what exactly that will be remains to be seen. I'm considering finding a job (top of the list: substitute teaching) or starting some kind of big personal project, or maybe just finding a bunch of on-campus activities to get involved in. 

Whatever it is, I recognize that it's an enormous blessing to have extra time to myself this fall, and that I would have a much bigger, more intense set of worries if not for Anna. So I'll end this post with a word of thanks to her, my beloved partner, support, and friend, for this gift: the chance to start something new.

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1. Unless you're counting my AmeriCorps years working in schools, which did include "first day(s) of school" in a distinct sense.↩
2. In scare quotes because the gains from said recovery have overwhelmingly gone to the richest Americans while the rest of us climb over each other for the few remaining jobs at low wages. Wealth inequality is probably the economic problem of our time; possible solutions range from raising the minimum wage to creating a no-strings-attached minimum income for all Americans, with a job guarantee program lying somewhere in the middle. Sadly, thanks to the Reagan Revolution in the 80s and the Democrats' reaction to it, both major parties are apparently too far to the right to seriously propose any but the first and least radical option.↩
3. I do remember sitting out on a hot day in the park one summer not long after the economic downturn. It was a gross, humid day, and I had stripped down to a grody white undershirt, my body sweaty, my hair mussed. As fate would have it, a Japanese TV crew walked through the park just as I sat down, spotted me, and came over to interview me about, what else, the economy. It was pretty surreal. I told them that yes, the economy did indeed suck right now. I can only assume I looked perfect for the part of down-on-his-luck schmo, though whether that's an accurate description of me, a highly educated white male with a great middle-class social support system, is open for debate.↩

Manhattan, Isle of Joy

Source

The city's bustle cannot destroy
The dreams of a girl and boy—
We'll turn Manhattan
Into an isle of joy.
—"Manhattan," Ella Fitzgerald

Anna and I have been traveling a great deal this summer—a wedding in Ann Arbor, visiting friends and family in Indiana—but nothing in the way of what you might call vacation until this past weekend, when we flew out to New York to visit friends.

The friends in question were slightly nonplussed when they realized that our goal was not to ascend the Empire State Building, visit Ellis Island, or see a show on Broadway, but simply to spend time with them. We've both been to New York a couple times before (my last New York trip was the foundation on which was built several key college friendships that endure to this day), so we'd basically had the New York Experience^TM already. We had no desire to, say, see Times Square or the Statue of Liberty while we were there, because we knew that those things would not actually be fun, the way anyone who has been to Navy Pier knows that Navy Pier is not actually going to be fun.¹

Once we cleared the air on that matter, we were able to plan out a fun weekend together, doing stuff that we could all enjoy. We stayed in Upper Manhattan with two of my friends, Brinton and Matina, but also wanted to hang out with two of Anna's friends, Alicia and Alain.

~   ~   ~

Arriving late Friday night, Anna went off to bed while Brinton, Matina, and I schemed about the days to come. (Anna had worked since five that morning; I had, uh, not.) Brinton is from Minnesota and Matina is from Tajikistan, so we woke to a breakfast of mixed Minnesotan and Tajik fare, and then set out for a visit to a nearby art museum run by the Hispanic Society of America, where we saw Art.

Yeah, Art! Much of the Art was quite cool. I liked this Art the best.²

It was both fun and free, which is a great combination, plus it gave me a chance to tell the story of our first date, which is always a pleasure.³

Speaking of our first date, we next asked Brinton to bring us down to the main New York Public Library branch on 42nd street (a great research library recently rescued from a plan to turn it into a glorified internet cafe), where we took a picture that commemorated our first meeting, next to the lions at the Art Institute in Chicago:

There are people all around us in this picture.
I swear Manhattan is not a desolate wasteland.

We toured the inside of the library, which is quite lovely, including a wonderful exhibit called Why Children's Books Matter, which included dozens of old, rare, and beautiful illustrated books for children.

Alas, we didn't get to see the coolest bit, the reading room (pictured) because part of the ceiling fell off. Source

We then met up with Alicia and Alain and tooled around downtown Manhattan, stopping for 99-cent pizza slices and chilling out in Grand Central Station, where they patiently listen to me explain my leftist political views on education and the economy. They were both extremely gracious and quite fun to be around. So much so that they agreed to come with us and Brinton and Matina to the symphony at the Lincoln Center later that night.

The Lincoln Center is gorgeous, BTW. Source

I am a somewhat casual fan of classical music, so I often run into a problem when going to the symphony, which is that I can't pay attention for longer than about five minutes unless I already know the song well. If I do know the song, I can focus on the details of how it's being performed, which is a great pleasure for me as both a musician and a music listener. Somewhat unfortunately, then, I wasn't too familiar with either of the pieces being played that night, Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto and Haydn's "London" symphony, and I had a little trouble giving them my full attention. Though there are worse things than thinking about knotty political issues and the like while beautiful music plays in the background.

That said, the performances were excellent, and I really did enjoy them, apart from my wandering attention. Brinton thanked us for the opportunity to go, since he and Matina hadn't gone to the symphony since moving to Manhattan. It's a familiar feeling to me: not going out and seeing the great stuff in your city until someone comes to town who wants to see it. I was happy we'd given them reason to go.

~   ~   ~

The real adventure of our weekend came on Sunday. Brinton proposed we go see King Lear at Free Shakespeare in the Park that night, which suggestion I rejected out of hand because I know from talking to her that Anna does not like Shakespeare.⁴ Anna overturned this ruling, however, declaring her openness to Shakespeare performed live by professionals, as opposed to how she usually experiences it: read in class, seen in a movie, or performed in a high school auditorium.

Free Shakespeare in the Park was completely new to me, but it is evidently a robust and well-loved New York tradition, stretching back five decades and featuring a wide variety of well-known actors, including this year's John Lithgow and Annette Benning (not to mention Clarke Peters, seen below, who I had a hard time recognizing outside his role as The Wire's Lester Freamon). It takes place throughout the summer each year, and the performances are held in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

How did John Lithgow get so old? Source

Typtically, the intersection of Free and Popular features either Long Lines or Luck; Free Shakespeare features both, in that you can get tickets either by showing up at around 7 am and waiting in line till noon, or by entering a lottery. We opted for the certainty (and tedium) of the line, at which we arrived early enough to guarantee ourselves some tickets, but late enough that there were already hundreds of people ahead of us, the morning's rain not having done much to dissuade folks: 

The view forward from our spot in line.

I brought a book (China Mieville's The Scar, which is brilliant and a great deal of fun, by the by), sheltered it and myself under an umbrella, and took periodic walks around Central Park to keep myself spry. The line is so big, long-lasting, and well-known that an entire cottage industry of service to people waiting in it has sprung up, of people selling food, chairs, umbrellas, and the like to folks in the line, who aren't allowed to leave for more than 20 minutes. This also makes them a captive audience for, say, street musicians, or people advertising things, like a new Shakespeare app for iPhone.

Legs aching, feet sore, we finally got our tickets at 12:30, having suffered most recently through the musical stylings of a street saxophonist who arrived after the rain to work the line for tips. We went home, rested, ate, and left for Central Park again that evening.

As Anna knows well, live Shakespeare, done poorly, can be pretty heinous. His plays do not work on their own regardless of talent, and though this is true of many playwrights, it is perhaps especially true of Shakespeare. At any rate, his are the plays you're most likely to see performed badly, of anyone's in the English language.

But live Shakespeare done well is always a joy. In particular, I love it when actors and directors know their stuff well enough to make the meaning come through in spite of the age of the language. Watching King Lear that night was like this. Though I'd read the play before, seeing it staged brought a wealth of connections and resonances that I'd never noticed in reading (or, for that matter, in watching Ran, Akira Kurosawa's Japanese-language adaptation, which I love). Layered on top of my joy at seeing a great work of art performed well, was the pleasant, bewildered astonishment of seeing it performed by, um, really famous people, in Central Park, for free. Free Shakespeare in the Park is a fantastic, brilliant idea, and it is justly loved by the people of New York. The guy who created it sounds like he had a good head on his shoulders:

In the feature-length documentary Joe Papp in Five Acts, Papp, the founder of New York City’s Free Shakespeare in the Park, recounts what he hoped to achieve when he started producing outdoor performances on the Lower East Side in 1956. Until his death in 1991, Papp brought more theater to more people than any other producer in history. In his eyes, art was for everyone, not just a privileged few. “We have public libraries,” he would argue, “Why not public theaters?”

“I believe that great art is for everyone — not just the rich or the middle class,” said Papp, who grew up in a poor neighborhood of Brooklyn. “When I go into East Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant and see the kids who come to see our shows, I see nothing so clearly as myself.” (Source)

~   ~   ~

The only thing of note that happened on Monday was the violation of the familial book buying ban, which was laid down by Anna after we went on a book buying spree earlier this summer and she declared we couldn't buy any more books till we'd finished what we had. (Note that this ban had already been violated, in the buying of the ESV Reader's Bible that I reviewed last week, but I was given a pass because it was, after all, the Bible.)

The occasion for the violation of the ban was that we were in New York City, doggone it, and I really wanted to go to The Strand. The Strand is a famous and famously good bookstore in Manhattan, where one's options range from browsing the $1 used book cart outside to visiting the rare book room on the third floor. I wanted to go in order to, yes, buy books, but also simply for the experience, and especially the chance to forge a link with my last trip that I remember so fondly.

Source

I ended up finding a couple of books by two of my favorite Jewish Bible scholars (Jacob Neusner's Invitation to the Talmud, a new find, and Jon D. Levenson's Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel, which I've wanted to read/own for almost a decade now). I also came across a whole shelf full of Aubrey-Maturin novels, a personal favorite series of mine, which I've been slowly attempting to acquire in its entirety for the last few years.⁵ I ended up buying two, which represented some very serious restraint on my part:

Behold, outlined in red, the transgression of the book buying ban

The remainder of Monday was spent resting, enjoying the remaining time with friends, and traveling back to Muncie. We arrived home pretty exhausted, but quite exhilarated at the fun we'd had. Having gone so far and had such fun, with such lovely people, felt deeply satisfying, not least because it is an accomplishment to go on a vacation this successful. At all events, it was a truly great first vacation for us both, I think, and I look forward to many more to come.

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1. Zing, Navy Pier. Zing. Also, sorry if you're really into Navy Pier; I know it has a nice garden.↩
2. And now I've written Art so much that I'm experiencing semantic decay and Art sounds like a made-up nonsense word.↩
3. Short version: Anna and I met at the Art Institute of Chicago, where we walked around and looked at Art and Anna thought I was a humorless fuddy-duddy because I was being all serious and Arty. I later redeemed myself by taking her out for falafel, but it was a close call, there, folks.↩
4. Marriage, y'all. We like, talk and stuff.↩
5. The story of that is probably even more boring than the rest of this post, so it's going in a footnote. I saw Master and Commander: Far Side of the World when it came out in 2003. I was in high school; I liked it a lot. For Christmas that year, dad got me two of the books in the series, Master and Commander (book 1) and The Far Side of the World (book 10). The trouble was, the books are written in early 19th-century period style; though the author lived in the 20th and 21st centuries, the books sound like they were written by Jane Austen's seafaring cousin. I had trouble reading at that level for pleasure in high school, so I put them aside. Fast forward to a couple years ago: I picked up the first book and found that, not only was I able to read it, I actually thoroughly enjoyed it. I went to the library and burned through the first 18 of the 20-book series in a few months. Along the way, I decided that I had a marked preference for one of the printings of the books over the others, which feature a single large naval painting across the spines, matte covers, clear fonts, crisp off-white paper, and general loveliness all around. I find that I really loathe finishing series of things, and occasionally I've found myself refusing to do so; this was a case in point. Rather than read books 19 and 20 and be done with it, I resolved to wait until I'd acquired all the books, used when possible, in the printed edition that I liked best, and only then read them all from start to finish. As you can see in the picture above, I'm a little over a quarter of the way there; I'm not sure what I'll do with the three books that aren't the favored edition, especially given that two of them were gifts from my father.↩

Wedding Post

Someday, we'll build a home
On a hilltop high, you and I,
Shiny and new, a cottage that two can fill,
And we'll be pleased to be called
The folks who live on the hill. 
—"The Folks Who Live On The Hill," Oscar Hammerstein III [Spotify link]

A little less than a month ago, I got married. I haven't been blogging much as a result.

Anna and I had the enormous privilege of getting to plan our wedding with little interference from relatives. When we told our parents what we were planning on doing—a quick ceremony with a modest guest list, and a potluck reception afterward—they were like "You kids do you," which was a real relief, since we'd heard many peers' stories of parental demands for blah blah from friends.

We both wanted the ceremony to be relatively simple and reflect the things we actually like about weddings. (Unfortunately, I suffer from a tendency to get a little judgy at weddings, as if my particular tastes were what mattered at all.) Some things we decided to do without:

• Anna is not a fan of being the center of attention, especially for a crowd of people, as it makes her feel scrutinized and judged. So we didn't have a processional or a recessional. 
• I have a knee-jerk reaction to cliches, so we did not have the love chapter from 1st Corinthians read, nor did anyone play "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." 
• We didn't want everything to be focused exclusively on us, so we avoided anything where the two of us would have been doing something on our own and facing away from the congregation. There was no communion off to one side or couples prayer time with our backs to the crowd. (The vows and the rings were the only thing we were even up front for; we sat in the pews the rest of the time.) 

Our officiant, the wonderful campus ministry pastor at the church I've been attending for the past few years, pointed out in her wedding homily what we were trying to do instead of these things: 

Anna and James, more than any other couple I have ever married, understand the reality that the meaning of this celebratory day is not about looking beautiful or spending thousands of dollars on cake and flowers or giving out the perfect favors. In fact, as we planned the wedding ceremony, they insisted on downplaying all of the theatrical elements that some brides and grooms love. If you look in the liturgy book for today, you’ll see phrases like these: “As the prelude ends, Anna and James enter unceremoniously and quietly sit in the front pew” and “immediately following the benediction, James and Anna sneak out through the side door.” They didn’t want this church service to be about them: they wanted it simply to be a church service where God’s everlasting love for all people is evident, a church service where they happen to get married in front of those people who they most love and rely upon for support—all of you.

Instead of going hard for all things traditional, we leaned heavily on the wedding elements we really cared about. In particular, music. We both love organ music, and my church has a lovely organ and a great organist, so we asked him to play a bunch of our favorite organ tunes. We also selected some hymn tunes from each of our musical traditions to be played as preludes; I particularly enjoyed friends' reactions when they realized "Joy in the Salvation Army" was coming out of the pipes in a Lutheran space! Together we chose several hymns to sing that we felt fit the occasion ("Gather Us In," "What Is This Place," and "Borning Cry"). These were not about marriage specifically so much as the process of coming together for celebration and fellowship, and the presence of God in all the stages of human life. I cried a little during "Borning Cry," but I think a lot of people did.

We also had scripture readings. Anna's chosen reading was from Proverbs. Most translations render it as being about "the wife of your youth," but Anna decided to use the Inclusive Bible translation—I gave her an Inclusive Bible for Christmas when I found out she wanted a translation that referred to God in gender-neutral terms—so the reading talked about "spouse" rather than wife, and could nicely be taken to apply to both of us rather than just me. I chose a reading from Jeremiah that spoke of celebration after a time of trouble—hope for the future. I asked that this be read in the Geneva Bible translation, which I love both for its beautiful language (the KJV translators drew heavily on it for their own translation a few decades later) and for its politically subversive footnotes (the translators had fled religious and political persecution in England, and they tended to note anti-monarchic sentiments when they showed up in scripture). Inadvertently, we both chose passages heavy in fertility imagery, which the pastor helpfully pointed out to the congregation in her homily. We do want kids, though, so whatever! 

As a result of cutting some traditional elements, the ceremony was pretty short; about 20 minutes. Afterward, Anna and I escaped to go be by ourselves for a few minutes and cool down from all the excitement and stress. 

We then proceeded to the reception, which was a blast. There was music from my friends in Families, a keg of root beer, and a pair of lovely toasts from two of our best friends. We walked around a greeted and sat with our friends, to catch up and celebrate together. I kept my bowtie on throughout, because it was a beautiful, 70-degree spring day. We'd worried a little over whether people would bring enough food, but folks brought so much that we had to ask them to take their leftovers home, since the church had far too little fridge space to store any of it. 

In other words, it was a good, good, day, blessed by God and celebrated by many. We came away pleased, honored, thankful, and 100% married! 

 

Moving In

Our kitchen! Left: as it was before we moved in. Right: as it is now. 

Gonna move away from here
You can find me if you wanna go there
I'm gonna move away from here
You can find me if you wanna go there.
—"Gonna Move," Les Dudek Band

A few weeks back I wrote about our excitement at finding a house in Muncie to rent; as of today, we've been living in said house for about two weeks, so I figured I'd post an update about the moving process.

Anna moved on May 2nd, as her apartment lease in Terre Haute ended on May 1st. She and her parents loaded the U-Haul, drove across the state (her dad drove the truck), and arrived to find the house in a state of disarray. There was no one home, but the back door was unlocked, and when they let themselves in, they discovered a home without usable toilets, a missing shower head, and new tile and carpet not yet fully installed. Anna called me, dismayed; we agreed that the house was not currently livable, and that if it didn't have at least a functioning toilet and shower by the next day, we would look for somewhere else to live.

When the landlord arrived, he explained that a family emergency had come up and prevented him and his wife from finishing the needed repairs on the house. Anna and her parents went to go stay in a hotel for the night, somewhat discouraged. Thankfully, by the end of the next day, there were both usable toilets and a functional shower head, so Anna and I agreed that we would move in and deal with whatever came after.

And we're really glad we made that choice. The homeowners are, in fact, really lovely people. Not only have they done a great deal quite quickly to make sure the house is in working order, they're just generally pleasant to be around. The husband is an elementary school principal, an extremely genial, gentle, and warm man whose worst fault, if it can be called that, is that in a fit of frustration he has been known to exclaim, "Oh, poopypants!" He and his wife have several daughters, some of whom Anna has met, though I have not.

Our front door. Left: then. Right: now.

A week later, on May 9th, Anna's dad took the train in to Chicago from Goshen, picked up a U-Haul truck, and drove it to my apartment, where my roommates and I were waiting. One roommate and I stood out in the rain, guarding the parking spot in front of our building with our bodies. Anna's dad pulled the truck into the spot, right into a puddle several inches deep and several feet wide. The ground immediately next to the truck's rear was very muddy. Needless to say, things got messy.

But for all that, the process was quick, almost embarrassingly so. Loading the truck took about 45 minutes, perhaps mainly because I moved relatively little furniture, though probably also in part because I made an effort to slim down my possessions to manageable levels (sigh, so many books left behind, though I probably never would have read most of them). The truck ended up being about three times bigger than what I needed, which was amusing in light of the fact that I'd been worried about having too much stuff to fit. Afterward, we ate a breakfast of donuts and scrambled eggs, then spent some time cleaning up the copious quantities of mud we'd tracked onto the stairs and floorboards and carpet.

The Franklin heating stove area in our living room. Left: old and busted. Right: new hotness.

My future father-in-law and I then set off on the four-hour trip to Muncie; he was the truck driver once again. I was worried about sustaining conversation with Anna's dad for that length of time, but that turned out to be a breeze; the only real trouble we faced was some really heavy storm conditions that rattled us both a bit on exiting the city. He and I share quite a few common interests (e.g., theology, politics, literature), and we were both able to pick up conversational threads and start new ones with relative comfort, so the drive was a pleasant one.

We arrived and unloaded, and Anna and I's life in Muncie together began. It's been a fun first week, and we're both very pleased with our new home. Check out a guided tour I put together this morning, in the video below.

New House! And It's A House House!

Safe home, safe home in port!
Rent cordage, shattered deck,
Torn sails, provisions short,
And only not a wreck:
But, oh! the joy, upon the shore,
To tell our voyage perils o'er.
—"Safe Home, Safe Home in Port," Traditional (performed by ListenListen in the link)

It's only been a month since my last personal update post, but things have been moving quickly since then.

As I mentioned at the end of that post, immediately after the end of Match Day ceremonies, Anna and I set out for Muncie, Indiana, which we'd just discovered was going to be our home for the next three years. We ended up spending much of the weekend driving slowly around different neighborhoods, parking in odd spots, and getting out to go look at houses with "For Rent" signs in the front yard. It was fun bonding time!*

At one point, we passed a truly gorgeous little blue house with a sign in its yard but, alas, the sign was a "For Sale" sign and we were pretty bummed about it for a moment. We decided to get out and look at it anyway, and once we did we were completely smitten, which was a terrible feeling to have about a house that is for sale when you are only looking to rent.**

So good was this house, that we changed our minds and decided to consider the possibility of buying a place. How bad could it be? Other people in our situation were doing it, and with a mortgage the cost would be about the same as renting. We started to get excited about the possibilities; it was a giddy time.

Later that evening, though, after much discussion, Anna stated flatly: "James, I don't want to buy a house." And I was like, cool, cool.

So instead we contacted the realtor for pretty little blue house and asked if the owners would rent it to us. No, he said, they would not—they'd just sold it! He pointed us toward some renters who had several properties in the area, though. We contacted one, and arranged a viewing of one of their properties the following weekend. We couldn't actually be there ourselves, so we asked my uncle and aunt who live nearby to go see it in our place. 

Anyway, long story short: we're renting a house! And it's a house house, not like an apartment house or something.† This is what it looks like:

Google Maps

I haven't lived in a house since, I wanna say 2003? It'll be interesting not having downstairs neighbors, or people that we can hear/can hear us through walls/ceilings/floors. And having a garage. And a washing machine (eventually; we gotta go buy one first). And this kitchen:

I'll finally have an office space to work in. And my home will finally have a spare bedroom for guests. These are things I've looked forward to for a while, and it's weird that they're suddenly so close! Anna's moving in in less than a week, and I'm moving my stuff not long thereafter, though I'll technically be living in Chicago until the wedding at the end of May.

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*We also spent some time this weekend doing the thing where Anna took a nap in the car and I took a self-directed tour of the Ball Stat campus. I found but did not enter the orchid greenhouse, and attempted to go to but was turned away from a show at the planetarium (it was full). I spent the rest of Anna's nap browsing the library, where I discovered that my Ball State ID number will already allow me to log into the computers, even though I'm not enrolled in any classes.
**Real talk: word on the street is that, if you buy a house in Muncie, you are unlikely to be able to sell it in a timely manner.
†House house is an example of contrastive focus reduplication, the most common example of which is probably "Do you like him, or do you like like him?" Here are some other examples:

• I’ll make the tuna salad, and you make the salad salad.
• I’m up, I’m just not up up.
• My car isn’t mine mine; it’s my parents’.
• Oh, we’re not living together living together.

Match Day

While still alive they did divide
Their favorites from the throng,
Yet how to pick the worthy ones
When they were dead and gone?
'Twas Gryffindor who found the way,
He whipped me off his head
The founders put some brains in me
So I could choose instead!
Now slip me snug around your ears,
I've never yet been wrong,
I'll have alook inside your mind
And tell where you belong!"
—"Sorting Hat Song," JK Rowling

Last Friday I didn't write a post because it was Match Day. This Friday, I'm writing a post about Match Day.

Match Day is a sort of annual anti-holiday for people in the American medical school system. Each year on Match Day, medical students—just a few months shy of graduating into full-fledged doctors—gather together to find out whether their immediate futures will be great, terrible, or somewhere in between. On Match Day, they are placed by a sort of techno-dystopian version of the sorting hat into their various medical residency programs, which will last for the next three years of their life and which are required for all doctors entering the profession.

While the sorting hat in the Harry Potter universe gives students no say in whether they will be stuck in Hufflepuff for the duration of their time at Hogwarts, medical students do have an opportunity to influence the matching algorithm that automatically sorts them into their residency programs, insofar as they rank the programs they would like to go to. But medical students have just as little ability to change the sorting hat's mind after it's made its decision: all matches are final.

Match Day is also pretty public. In past years at Anna's school, the annual ritual has been that students are called onto the stage in small groups, where they receive envelopes with their placements and are encouraged to open them and read the results to an audience of hundreds (or thousands, counting the webcast audience). Someone once asked my fiancee why Match Day is done this way. "Because they do not care about students' mental health," she said.

Match Day at Anna's medical school this year started bright and early with an 8:30 session for students with medical school loans. I was present at this event, and it was fantastic, by which I mean tolerable. Much of the session was dedicated to helping students learn how to jump through loopholes in the federal government's student loan policy—loopholes designed expressly to help people entering much less lucrative fields, but which apparently medical students have been more than happy to find out about and take advantage of. As a bonus, there was also some very excellent whining from people worried about the Obama administration's plan to tighten some of these loopholes, which was pretty rich coming from people who will make well upwards of $100,000 a year for the duration of their careers.

With the taste of that in our mouths, Anna and I moved on to the auditorium where the Match ceremony was being held. In a saner universe, everyone might have been patiently waiting with their loved ones and chatting over refreshments, or leaving and going out for lunch and coming back at noon to get their envelopes (note: no one is allowed to know their match before noon—NO ONE—or the medical school may lose its right to participate in match). In our reality, however, students were partitioned off from their family and friends in a giant hall, and an announcer at the front stalled for almost an hour and a half by laboriously calling up each student, one at a time, to get their envelope. I kept myself sane by updating Facebook:

The bedpan full of money is supposed to compensate whoever gets called last.

I found out later that Anna was staying sane by sharing my updates with her fellow students on the other side of the partition. We are pretty cute, she and I.

After noon arrived—complete with, I kid you not, a New Year's Eve-style countdown—the students and their families rushed together across the partition and madly tore open their envelopes. Meanwhile, Anna and I left the auditorium to open our envelope somewhere calm and private. Happily, we got our first choice, the Ball Memorial Hospital program in Muncie, Indiana. We'd ranked it number one because (a) it's a great program, (b) it's next to a good place for me to go to grad school, and (c) it's near where my Dad's side of the family is from, so we'll have a support network already pretty well in place. We were very, very relieved and happy.

We pretty immediately packed our bags and hit the road for Muncie, on the prowl for a place to live. We found out some things and had a good time, but I'll save housing adventures for a future post.

On Being a Future Doctor's Future Spouse

Doctor, doctor give me the news,
I've got a bad case of lovin' you!
No pill's gonna cure my ill,
I've got a bad case of lovin' you!
—"Bad Case of Loving You," Robert Palmer

December was a harrowing month for me and my fiancée, Anna. We had the stresses of holiday travel and socializing to deal with, sure, but everyone has that. Layered on top of it though, like a thick frustration frosting on the cake of exhaustion, was Medical Residency Interview Season.

Let me start by saying that, however stressed I may have gotten during this time, it was much more difficult for my fiancée, which will become abundantly clear as soon as I start talking about it. (Forgive me, it's just that she reads this blog and I need to get out in front of whatever raised eyebrows may be coming my way if I imply that the burden was primarily mine. I love you, dear.)

Anyway, Anna is almost done with medical school, and that means it's time to find a residency program. To the uninitiated: residency means you're a doctor, but you're not cool enough yet to really do all the doctor stuff on your own, so you have to let other doctors be the boss of you until you're totally cool. Residents achieve total coolitude after three years. And those three years are pretty intense; you end up working on the order of 80 hours a week. On the plus side, you get paid, which is more than you can say for medical school!

Finding the right residency program means looking at the info for a ton of programs, picking ones that you like, asking nicely if you can get an interview at those programs, scheduling the interviews for the programs that are willing to have you, traveling to the programs you need to interview at, actually doing the interviews, meeting the residents and faculty, asking lots of questions so you sound interested and engaged, and then traveling home once you're done so you can get back to your school work the next day. It's just, super, super fun.

And that's just the beginning. It's what occupied Anna, and to a lesser extent me, throughout late November and most of December. We spent our weekends, and sometimes our weekdays, hauling ourselves all over Indiana and a little over Chicago. (Anna was the sole driver on these trips, as I cannot drive stick, and she has a manual-transmission automobile. So really, she hauled ourselves all over Indiana and a little over Chicago. But I digress.) Anna's job was interviewing, being charming, etc., while mine was to assess my willingness to live in the various places we visited and to not come off as a boob at the various dinners she and I attended with programs' residents. We met at said dinners our fair share of bros and lady-bros, but there were cool people, too. (Boom, bros! Boom. If you can't handle these sick burns, consider not being such a bro.)

So when we crawled back home after a month of that, and holiday travel to boot, we were relieved that the whole process was complete and we would never have to do anything else with regard to this matter again. Wrong-O! It was time for round two: the second looks! These are the more "fun" events that candidates like Anna are invited to come to, indicating that the program is interested in having them back to meet more people in the program and socialize with them and the faculty. "Fun" is in scare quotes because sometimes the "fun" is more theoretical than anything. What with all the bros. (BOOM.) But also, not all the activities are necessarily appealing,* and the additional travel and socialization weigh heavily—even when talking with people we like, we're introverts, so it takes its toll. But, it's a good opportunity to assess programs we're really interested in more thoroughly; not just the people, but also the locations they're situated in. So we picked our top three programs, and we've been going to those. Our last one is this weekend!

The next step will be ranking the programs. The way residency works is, all the candidates rank their programs, number one through however many they want to list, and all the programs rank the candidates who have applied. Then a computer sorts all the candidates into programs, in a way that favors the the candidates over the programs; if you rank a program at number one, you get it, unless it's already full (of candidates who also ranked it number one but were ranked higher than the program), and then you get your number two, unless it's already full, and so forth. If my explanation was confusing, then I'm sure you'll love the one on Wikipedia.

Successfully getting into a program is called "matching," and you find out which program you matched with on something called Match Day. In the case of Anna's school, it's a ceremony that seems designed for high potential for public humiliation: students and their friends and families are gathered into a large auditorium. The students are called up to the stage in small groups, handed envelopes with their matched programs, and encouraged to read the results into a microphone, regardless of whether the audience will hear joy or disappointment in their voice. The only saving grace is that those who haven't matched aren't invited at all, and so all are spared the possibility of opening an envelope with a rejection letter. Note, though, that all of this is also streamed live for the benefit of anyone with an internet connection.

I am not a huge fan of this process, but I am a huge fan of Anna and I respect and admire her choice of profession, so I am happy to be a part of deciding with her, with all that it entails. I'm especially excited for what will come when the process is done, and we can move on with our lives together.

---

* We were invited to one second look event which included a "hipster themed" party, at which, I kid you not, doctors and future doctors were expected to attend "dressed like hipsters," whatever that means. I am inclined to read it as "Hey, current and future members of the upper middle class, come dress up as poor people for a laugh," but that may be uncharitable of me. At all events, we did not go to that one.

Engaged

But you, you're a rock with a heart,
Like a socket I can plug into at will,
And will you guess when I come around next?
I hope your open sign is blinking still.
—"Marry Me," St. Vincent

My relationship with my fiancée, Anna, is characterized by a refusal to conform to social conventions we don't actually like. In fact, this is characteristic of us both individually; putting us together has simply allowed for mutual reinforcement on the matter. As a team, we can back each other up on, say, the decision to [gasp] not have wedding colors or [lolwut?] not change any names when we get married.

I know, I know, we're so hardcore. In a perfect world, of course, there would be no pressure to conform to such standards, but in our experience, there is no limit to people's ability to be offended about decisions that have no direct impact on them. C'est la vie.

~   ~   ~

From the very first, Anna was frank with me that she was not into (1) engagement rings or (2) elaborate public proposals at restaurants, basketball stadiums, monster truck rallies, etc. And I was frank with her that I was not into them either.

So when the time came to actually get engaged, it went like this instead:

First, understand that, in general, Anna and I are good about talking about our thoughts and feelings. But when it came time for some engaging, we had a sudden, unexpected, and unusual misunderstanding.

When had talked seriously about engagement for a while (like, we were circling around it and thinking about it and even starting to wonder aloud what a wedding might be like), but we had made no formal decision to get engaged, we had a conversation in which Anna was like "So we're practically engaged already," and I was like "Nuh-uh, we have to actually sit down in person and say we're engaged" and she was like "But that's just a formality, right?" and I was like "No, I'm pretty sure I want to think about it a little bit before we do it."

While this was a misunderstanding, most of the blame for it falls on me. It turns out, talking about a wedding with your significant other will, in fact, tend to lead them to believe that you are really interested in getting marriaged and that actual engagementing is just a formality. But how could I have known?! With my mind is how.

At all events, I did my last little bit of soul-searching, realized what I knew all along—that Anna totally ruled and that marrying her would seriously rule—and then I set to work crafting my combination apology/proposal.

The preparations were as follows:
Step 1: Set in motion a chain of events whereby, after the passage of a small amount of time, Anna would come to my apartment in Chicago.
Step 2: Sometime immediately before the arrival of said hopefully-soon-to-be-erstwhile-girlfriend, clean the apartment. This would, if done properly, cause her to experience feelings of happiness upon her arrival, both because cleanliness is a thing that she likes and because knowing that things have been cleaned in preparation of her arrival is a thing that she also likes.
Step 3: Acquire at the local Aldi a tub of Anna's favorite ice cream, mint chocolate chip, coincidentally also my favorite ice cream, but during said acquisition discover that they actually have mint chocolate chip moose tracks ice cream and purchase this superior ice cream variety instead.
Step 4: Return to the apartment and prepare a meal of pasta. Set the table.
Step 5: Wait.

When Anna arrived, she was indeed pleased at the cleanliness of my abode, and sat and ate with me the meal of pasta that I had provided. We moved to the couch, where I held her close, and asked if I could interest her in getting married sometime. She answered yes and started to cry happy, relieved tears.

I hugged her, and once she was ready, I went to the kitchen and returned with two bowls of mint chocolate chip moose tracks ice cream, which we ate together, newly fiancée and fiancé. We were both very happy together, and we remain so to this day.

This is our engagement photo, taken the next day by a friend.

Why So Emcerious?: On Emceeing A Wedding Reception

I see in this picture a man nervous about speaking in public. Or maybe it's just a crooning Elvis and I'm weird.

Don't take any lip, stay in line, 
Everybody's talking at the same time. 
—"Everybody's Talking at the Same Time," Tom Waits

A couple months back, I went to a friend's wedding. The wedding itself was a slightly loopy affair, taking place in two languages (English and Spanish), with original content in both and little translation from one to the other. My favorite part: the Spanish-only duet from the bride's aunt and mother, sung entirely in unison and with earth-shaking intensity. Seriously, it was nuts. Also: two separate wedding sermons and two sets of vows. Whoa.^*

The real spectacle, though, was the reception. It was a many-tabled affair, a vast and frenetic smorgasbord, packed with hungry and talkative people, and Jarritos and bags of coffee on every table.** Yet it was all being run like a well-oiled machine by one man: the bride's brother, who served as the reception's emcee.^† This man was not only keeping the ceremonies moving, but he was also doing it with style, tossing off little jokes and comments at appropriate moments and with just the right tone, engaging people's interest but still staying out of the way of their good time. "Wow," I thought at one point that evening, "I never gave it much thought before, but being an emcee at a big wedding reception seems really tough. I would probably suck at that."

This guy looks pretty capable. He's got suspenders.

So a few weeks later, when a friend struck up a conversation with me by saying, "Hey James, would you be the emcee at my wedding?" my natural response was "Of course I will, man! I'd love to do that. I'm sure I would do a great job. WAIT, I'm sorry, are you being serious?" I had such a boundlessly low opinion of my ability to perform this critical wedding function that I naturally assumed my friend was joking when he suggested I perform it. But technically I had already said yes, so when I found out he was serious, I agreed to do it anyway. 

Flash forward to the week of the wedding: I'd largely forgotten about my impending emceeing responsibilities, and suddenly I got a Facebook message listing them out, complete with numbers and sub-headings. It started with the following:

1. Dress to impress.
    a. Duh!
    b. You got that under control 
2. You will do a welcome
3. Lead in table games
    a. mad lib
    b. activity...

Regarding "dress to impress:" I have it under control sometimes. And sometimes I look like a sloppy goof.

It got more involved after that, but you get the idea. Lighthearted in tone but not exactly brief. I was a little intimidated, as well as annoyed at myself for not having done some mental prep before now.

Even though I am an acknowledged introvert, I've done some public speaking, and have even occasionally gone out of my way to do so. The trouble is, when I go out of my way to talk to an audience, it's typically because I want to tell them a story, a story I've thought long and hard about, and they're usually there to listen to me. Being the emcee at a wedding is pretty much the opposite: it's not a story—it's who's going to the buffet line next and announcing that the cake is getting cut—and you need to make up what you're going to say on the spot, and no one really wants to listen to you all that much. You need to speak slowly and clearly, or people won't know what's going on and they will be annoyed. But you can’t take too long about it, or people will stop paying attention, and then they won't know what's going and they will be annoyed. It's a tough gig. "Good luck making it funny or entertaining on top of it all," I thought.

Dude will probably be more prepared than I was for the reception. He might be taking it a bit far.

Fortunately, things turned out to be much easier than my worries allowed for. When I got to the wedding, I was handed a piece of paper with a list of things I needed to announce, and told who to talk to if I wasn't sure what to do next. This eased my burden from "MAKE IT ALL UP ON THE SPOT" to "make up what you're going to say about these thing in this order," which was a considerable relief. Then the wedding happened, it was lovely, and we moved into the reception hall, which was a huge gymnasium full of tables and food and party favors and activities, with hundreds of people to corral.


I got on the mic and told people what they needed to do to get started. And then they did those things. I started to feel less nervous as I realized folks were actually going to listen to me. Maybe it was just because I was loud (super good sound system in that gym), but it took surprisingly little effort to get people to pay attention.

 At all events, when the wedding party arrived, I announced them in my biggest most sports stadium announcer-like voice and got the crowd to give the bride and groom a standing ovation. I started feeling comfortable with my role; I dismissed tables, announced found cell phones, and introduced toasts, all with greater ease and enjoyment than I'd expected. I even got in a few jokes, like this one:

"And now it's time for the couple's first dance! Folks, this is, in fact, the first time these two have ever danced with each other."
[look of panic from the couple]
"No, not really, I just made that up."
[look of relief from the couple and laughter from the guests]  

At the end of the wedding, my newlywed friends came and thanked me. "You were definitely the right man for the job," I was told, which made my heart glow. I think I'm ready to try it again sometime.
 

---

* I mentioned to a friend that I'd been at this wedding and he remarked that hadn't made it, but that he'd heard it was super traditional. "There were ... traditions," I replied, unable to articulate in any way how unusual the thoroughly bilingual experience had seemed at the time.
** These were from the bride’s family farm in Guatemala. They just might be my favorite party favor ever—in concept if not in reality, as I don’t drink coffee for similar but not exactly the same reasons as Hank Venture (i.e., it will make me jittery and unable to sleep but it won't make me stay up all night building Murphy beds, nor, alas, will it turn me into Jungle Batman).
† I don't think we need to go into detail about my internal debate over whether to spell this word "MC" or "emcee." Suffice it to say my choice was made based on how easy it would be to make the spelling fit into a pun for the title of this post, which is both a reference to a The Dark Knight and a tribute to the emcee in question, who I remember being obsessed with the movie before it came out.


Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/4464019859/
Photo 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnhopephotography/6684080461/
Photo 4: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alejandroerickson/7377866212/

Story Lab Recording II

Part of a series of Live Story Recordings.

Art by my friend Alex

This week, I'm posting a story I told on stage at Story Lab Chicago in June of this year. I had a lot of fun telling it! If you're interested in reading instead of listening, I've told it in slightly altered form here. (The art above, which is from a collection of stories I made into an album, was made by my friend Alex; you can find more from her here.)

On Going to Weddings & Judging People

Children, wake up,
hold your mistake up,
before they turn the summer into dust.
—"Wake Up," Arcade Fire

I went to a wedding this weekend, and it was rad. As weddings should be.

As a guy, I am not culturally obliged to think this about weddings, for which I am thankful. I know lots of young women who are all about talking about weddings and their accoutrements. But I also know a fair number who have no interest in the subject, or who actively avoid it because it makes them uncomfortable or annoys them. Heck, I even know one who has never been to a wedding. And for some of the gals in these latter categories, the assumption that you will, just by default as a female, want to gush about dresses and centerpieces and colors and catering must be pretty doggone frustrating.

The main thing that grabs my attention at weddings is music. I love how wedding music heightens and highlights the already heady emotions on display. And I like getting an insight into the character of the wedding couple by observing their music choices. How one communicates, say, the drama of the bridal processional, says a lot about what sort of people are getting married that day: you can go hyper-traditional with the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, stick with a classic (or cliche, depending on your view) with something like Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, or find something totally original, like, say Bjork (note: I have seen this--it was sweet). Me, I always wanted the last movement from the Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky, a favorite from childhood, though it's probably a bit over the top for any wedding that's not super formal and intense.

Given this predilection, I was pumped to see a selection of non-traditional musical elements on the program at this wedding, as it would be (1) fun and (2) a chance to see what kind of folks these were--they were known to me, but by no means did I know everything about them.

There are a number of key feelings that wedding music can seek to highlight. You can work the solemnity angle: this is a ritual, after all, with a long history and a profound, life-changing significance; for this, people tend to choose lovely, clear, stately classical music, often easily recognizable by most attendees. There are also the bittersweet emotions on display: the parents lose their children to adulthood, the couple cease being individuals and become part of something bigger, and so forth; for this, pop ballads are best. But at this wedding, the primary emotion in the music was joy at the beauty and excellence of the occasion; in particular, I was pleased and surprised by this spirited Celtic tune for the entrance of the bridal party, and by the use of this Jack Johnson song for the recessional. I didn't agree with every music choice, but overall, they were great.

That last sentiment, "I didn't agree with everything, but..." is the big trouble with weddings for me. In addition to everything else they are (a celebration of two people's union, a chance to meet new people and see old friends, an opportunity to enjoy free food and dancing) weddings are definitely a time when I have to try to keep myself from judging people's taste. I get really riled, for some reason, if I hear a scripture read at a wedding that seems to always get read at weddings (I'm looking at you, the Love Chapter); similarly, a piece of music that appears constantly at weddings, or anything else that I've seen too many times. "Don't these people know this is a cliche? Have they not themselves seen this at a dozen weddings in their lives, some enshrined forever in cinema? This is boring and foolish." These and similar thoughts cross my mind at most weddings at least once, and I know they shouldn't—but they do. (I also, of course, have trouble with sappy pop, or anything I see as cheap or low-brow.) I think this attitude is primarily about my deep-seated need to feel superior to other people, which is something I am fairly certain I've always had, but only recently really started to recognize and deal with.

But such thoughts are self-centered and unkind, and so I denounce them. Weddings are awesome no matter how you set them up, and so I say, go for it: play the greatest hits if that's your style, and don't let anyone tell you different! Whatever you play, I'll see you on the dance floor afterwards.