Tuesday, March 31, 2009

No. I will not get a neckchain.

I hate glasses.

To be fair to the whole concept of optical devices, I really do appreciate them in theory. But it was easier to be impressed with the instantaneous improvement afforded by a pair of mild nearsightedness correctors, which had the magical property of instantly dispensing with the nuisance of myopia at the slight trade-off of a frame on your nose.

This was all that I needed, and only in certain situations at that, until a couple or so years ago. But now I believe that I’m in need of some sort of specs-on-a-hinge device, where two pairs of glasses, joined at the earpieces, would flip to the top of my head, or down to eye-level, depending on whether I intended to see the wipe-off board in Japanese class (that’s where they used to have chalk boards--up front,) attempt to differentiate “hi” from “pi” in hiragana in my textbook, or read the impossibly, ridiculously miniature lettering on the back of a shampoo bottle at the grocery store. There would be three options: distance glasses, no glasses, and 1.50+ magnifying.

I understand that it is the purpose of “progressive” lenses to address all of these conditions in the convenient package of a single (or rather 2 single) lenses the size of dried prunes.

I got a pair maybe 1.5 years ago? But see...I can’t read out of the bottom part like I’m supposed to. If I hold the book at a distance of about arm length, then yes...I can read with the glasses. But I’m better off without them entirely. And when it comes to that tiny tiny tiny stuff, it’s magnifiers or forget it. So I don’t know (and please help me if you know the answer to this question) whether the problem might be that my prescription of 1.5 years ago, which apparently wasn’t exactly up to date as of January this year, is maybe just not strong enough.

The question is whether it’s worth sinking a few more hundred dollars into an updated prescription, or whether I should just learn to love pushing glasses up and down my face in class, and fishing out the magnifiers in the grocery store.

Because the real nasty thing about presbyopia is it just doesn’t correct with the delightful alacrity of myopia. It’s kind of picky.

Anyway, I think that if I had any gift for synthetic parts manufacturing, then Lifetime Guarantee Flexilenses® which you get implanted could be a really big seller. In the meantime...(crap)...I will be that dork handing objects to my children and saying “what does this say please?” And they will tell me. But Gabe will pronounce it weird.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Maybe you clap the hand against your foot.

I would say our road trip to Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey was good. Good in the somewhat interesting, we found food, and Janet the GPS did yeoman duty sense of good. The college visit itself has derailed me into all sorts of side ruminations about Gabe, college fit, and what the heck we should do with the kid.

(As an aside, I will say that I’m never so happy to see my bed as when I’ve just spent the last night in a hotel. Not that the Holiday Inn Express was bad. It was fine. Good even. But the disorientation experienced by Jeff, who gets up at night, can’t find the bathroom, turns lights on, then can’t figure out how to get back in bed always means my sleep is pretty patchy. Threw into focus for me exactly why I don’t go out of my way to plan trips anymore. And the coffee was weak. But you’d expect that.)

But, back to Gabe. Answering the question What should Gabe do after high school? feels like a restatement of What is the sound of one hand clapping? Like trying to answer the koan, you must--in trying to answer the Gabe question--actually think of an answer where it appears none exists. Maybe you can throw away the koan as stupid, but you can’t throw away the kid. And here’s where the usual objections or words of counsel, from the well-meaning, hit the bricks and go splat.

Doesn’t the kid need to figure this out for himself? Well, yes, ideally. But this kid isn’t even motivated to do the usual things, like drive a car or, um, move, sometimes. As far as I can tell, he would, if left unattended, default to eating Honey Nut Joe’s O’s and finding intriguing new animes online. All day. All night. It might not ever occur to him that he was now out of high school and in need of a plan.

Maybe you’re just a control freak. Let’s get this straight, right now. I don’t want to control anyone. It is my greatest wish that each person control him/herself. But, like a medium-ranked canine which will assume alpha rank if there’s a vacuum, I am keenly aware that there are things in need of controlling and absolutely no one stepping up to the plate.

So maybe if he didn’t assume you’d take care of it, he’d step up himself. Voila. Exactly. It’s my only hope. Which is why the default thought that you can send an undermotivated kid to the community college for a couple years falls flat. Gabe must go somewhere else. Somewhere where it’s good and clear that I’m not there to back him up.

But I doubt if that place will be Fairleigh Dickinson. Of my many impressions, the one that has filtered out most strongly is that it is not a school of non-conforming odd-ducks. Gabe would be the marginalized figure he more or less was at Summit. Baltimore Lab, where almost everyone is uniquely weird, has been a refreshingly better fit. Hence, it is my latest line of thought that, like the ugly duckling and the swans, Gabe must be dropped amongst a freaky dorky weird collection of creative types in order to have a hope of finding the inspiration to be who he is.

Which leads me to Columbia College. The son of Gabe’s carpool driver/teacher, a Lab 12th grader, has discovered a most appealing atmosphere at this school of arts and media in...Chicago. Chicago? I said. That’s so far away! Indeed, it made no sense to me at all until I checked their web site, watched a couple of their videos, and was quickly awash in the remarkable realization that here was a school full of students who are--each in his/her way--as weird as Gabe. It was a crazy wake up call, which highlighted what a wrong environment FDU--with its girls in Ugg boots and baseball team boys--was for Gabe.

FDU has a great LD program. But here is, perhaps, the second most important take home point I took home from our FDU visit, and it was made by the counselor presenting the program to us. That is: Do not pick a school with the LD program--no matter how fine--as the primary focus. Pick the school first for whether it fits the kid. The program is icing. Nice icing, but icing.

Still--don’t worry mom--it is not my plan to send the kid to Chicago. (I may show him the video...but, seriously. Don’t worry.)
It is my plan though, to look for something that looks like that. Because, here’s the thing:
What do we know about Gabe? What has he put any effort into and what makes him proud? Here are a few things that come to mind: He likes...hypnotism, sleight of hand, moonwalking, weird right-brain cartooning, unicycling, the rare work of fiction or poetry he actually sits himself down to do, ideas and notions that drift in from somewhere left of left field. He needs focus, motivation, and inspiration. But he’s not going to get it by being the weird kid among preppies. But maybe, in a place where the arts of all sorts--drama, writing, game creation, storyboarding--are being performed by better-focused kids all around him...maybe in such an environment he will catch a glimpse of what he wants to be. And maybe I’m stupid. But maybe one hand can clap, I don’t know.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Telephone Company Flunk-out.

When I was 21, I flunked out of the telephone company.

That was quite a long time ago. I’ve never completely addressed the subject, because I didn’t then--and possibly still don’t--know exactly what to make of the experience, but at the moment I feel like trying, so here goes:

I was a recent college grad, with a motley B.S. in Animal Science (by way of anthropology, art, and French, + 3 undergrad colleges.) So I was certainly not facing any obvious career path, and this explains why my father--a loyal executive (retired) of C & P Telephone--felt that pursuing an inroad into telephone company management might be a thought. So he put me in touch with a former colleague who suggested--strongly--that I NOT enter from the ground up--that is, by means of an entry level operator-type job--but rather wait until an entry into the management track opened up. My dad, meanwhile, ever mindful of honest work, suggested the opposite. Why not do the phone rep training track while I was waiting? As it turns out, I think the first guy was on to something. But I listened to dad. Here’s what happened:

At this point I can’t even remember what the job title of the position I began training for was. Some kind of service rep thing. A phone answerer/do you want fries with that type of person. I commuted daily, with a red-haired guy whose name I’ve forgotten (but who drove a VW Bug he retrofitted himself,) 1 hour each way, to the training facility in Hunt Valley.

For what ultimately would have amounted to maybe 8 weeks, I (and my fellow job-seekers) engaged in a step-wise, semi-self-paced program in which we simulated the behavior of real service reps by taking phone calls from remote training personnel (playing the role of “customers.”) Gradually, we’d add a new trick to the list of topics to cover, or sales hints to plant in every telephone encounter with the other side. And at certain pre-determined junctures, they tested us by means of a similar simulation.

Said hello the right way. Check. Inquired as to whether customer’s equipment was working satisfactorily. Check. Proposed an upgrade to more expensive equipment, without being obvious that the equipment was more expensive. Check. (This was the old days...when phones were owned by the phone company. Within a matter of a year, equipment privatization happened, and people bought their own crappy phones.) But, see...this was where things started to get weird. Because the check-off list of things we were required to cover, in any and all customer encounter, became so specific and picky that I believe, essentially, my brain rebelled. Do you have kids? Do they play in the basement? Could you use a phone in the basement? How about in the doghouse? Does your baby need a phone? Do you have a baby? Are you planning to have one? It was actually kind of sick and pathetic.

You were not allowed to miss a trick on these test calls. I do not know, to this day, whether I was capable of passing. All I know is, I could not say all that crappy stuff. Whether I actually forgot parts, or whether it was simply so contrary to my nature to fit into somebody else’s box, I cannot say. But what the manager lady told me--and I remember this distinctly--is that I did not “meet the objective.”

I did not know how to respond then, and I still barely know. The objective? What was going on there? Clearly, there was no leeway for personality or even a glimmer of independent thought in that gig. Was I too dumb? Surely I was not less intelligent than all telephone service reps of the 80’s. Too stubborn maybe. Too ornery, also maybe.

I asked myself afterward: Could I have passed? Was it possible for me to have done so? And I still don’t know. I failed. I don’t know what it was a failure of, but I don’t think it was a failure of intelligence.

I suppose, what I honestly believe is that the program was, essentially, a screening process for automatons. You would be filtered out for a faulty memory, no doubt, but you would also be filtered out--of this I am certain--for free thought. The process was meant to squeeze out any who could not, amoeba-like, conform themselves to a service-rep sized box.

You know what? That’s not right. My sister (smarter than I by most measures) would not have flunked out. Maybe I was just dumb. Or maybe I was just exceptionally stubborn in the face of rigid expectations. I don’t know. I still don’t.

But I do know I would have stunk at the telephone company. Even as a manager.

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Clarence meows like Bob Newhart.

Clarence the cross-eyed muse likes to thwap his tail at me. If he were more of a humanoid muse he might tap his foot impatiently, or drum his fingertips on the kitchen counter, but as it is--in his vague felinity--the message conveyed by the tail comes across unmistakably.

It’s time to edit, prods Clarence...and I do. Bit by tiny bit.

In the AARP Bulletin, an article profiles several folks who returned to the work force in their 50’s and up, finding jobs--in every case--in retail. I could do that. I could do the Barnes & Noble bookselling thing, if not the Trader Joe’s food-peddling thing. Sometimes I think I should do it now. Not spending current income flow could possibly do more to reduce potential impingement upon future security than tacking on supplemental income later.

But it’s not a serious option, and Clarence knows that perfectly well, even if my hesitancy to wrestle with creativity goads me into supposing that not-working is the irresponsible move. Ha. Like leaving Jeff home by himself while I hang out in the stacks at B&N would be responsible? Not. Not that I don’t need to pull myself back into the land of the living at least a little farther...I think I do...but I cannot abandon my charge to do so. Hence, I am home, lots...and also hence, Clarence is right. I have no good excuse not to scrape what creative energy I can muster into helping him keep his job. And earn Muse Stamps. Which he can spend at the Muse Stamp Redemption Center on a big refrigerator-sized scratching post to leave his claw sheddings in.

So, here we are, Clarence and I, trying to get this crazy kite of a story aloft, whether or not the wind is blowing.

This does not mean that I will never be semi-gainfully employed, but conditions for now leave me with absolutely no excuse to not keep at the fear-inspiring dream. I should probably befriend failure...same as I’ve befriended anxiety...then we just won’t have to worry about that anymore, and Clarence and I can get down to work.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

snow comin'?

Is an overnight with the sibs a good thing, or a bad thing? Regardless of the fallout, I’m inclined to consider any event that gets Jeff interacting with humans other than me and Gabe to be a plus, but tiredness takes a notable toll.

It’s a little weird, when he walks in the door. How was Rehoboth? I ask. Good, he says. Where did you stay? His face goes blank. Did you guys go out for dinner last night? More blank.

Later he is able to tell me that they stayed in the home of a friend of Cousin Robin’s, but no information about dinner is within reach. He remembers that he stayed on a bed that was not so comfortable, and that he was cold. And he thinks he was in Cape May. Rehoboth, I remind him. Pointlessly, actually. A quick forensic examination of the duffel bag reveals that the clean t-shirt and briefs I sent went unused, but a hand-towel from the host house came home with him. Bedtime, I think, will be early tonight.

Will be for me too, if I finish this Pinot.

Clarence the cross-eyed muse, on the other hand, seems to be right on the ball today as I edit Weird Tale #4, or what exists of it, so far. Well, Clarence is a help. But there’s also Friday’s acupuncture, which seemed--at least for the first 48 hours--to cause all my inward negativity to blurble up in great glarbs and splots until, well--for today at least--I’m left with a little inner tranquility and a bit of creative energy.

I do not understand the latest Giant Food retrofit. I went there today. Not something I do often, but we needed o.j. and mango chutney (yes, we needed that,) and even though the same cute Asian produce man asked me if I needed help finding something 3 times, I still could not help but feel that Giant, in its newest incarnation, is designed to drive humans crazy, much in the way of a Walmart.

And yet, not everyone detests Walmart, nor was Giant--on the eve of what they say will be 5-8 inches of snow--suffering for want of customers. No. In spite of the fact that the aisle shelving now towers ominously over you like trash compactor walls in a nightmare sequence, Giant has customers. It is clear that my brain, like my foot, was not the model upon which the marketing wonks based their mainstream prototype. Which is fine, as long as there’s Trader Joe’s. And teriyaki tofu at good Japanese restaurants. With chopsticks.