I wrote a poem for you. I don't consider it nearly sufficient for all that's been floating around in my head lately, but there it is. It's all I can manage to squeeze out at one in the morning. I have been trying to write it for a while. Everything, lately, is for you or about you, but that was the first time it came out in one piece.
--
Today, predictably, there was a lot of talking done on the
election. In "Writing America," particularly. Mr. Beitelman has been challenging
us a lot more lately than usual. He is a mouth of philosophy and language
and he shows us what it means to question the mainstream and the anti-mainstream
simultaneously. We learn to be neither conformists nor nonconformists --
we learn to think and breathe and create and exist. In history last year,
Ms. Hubbard had something written on the board that I find
myself
coming
back to -- this awful William Golding thing about first, second, and third-rate
thinkers. It was on this small board behind her desk that she never used
for anything else, so every day I'd sit staring at the green ink. It grows
on you. And I can't believe I can't remember it now, after a whole school
year of staring at it, but it says something to the effect of thinking like
everyone else, vs. thinking the opposite of what everyone else thinks, vs.
just thinking for yourself.
And I think that's true of what we're learning from Mr. Beitelman.
He is a teacher
in
the true
sense
of the word.
I feel like I'm finally beginning to belong to some sort of big picture.
We're reading Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot and there's
this part where she quotes a messageboard post on Rushmore:
"Geeks tend to be focused on very narrow fields of endeavor. The modern geek has been generally dismissed by society because their passions are viewed as trvial by those people who 'see the big picture.' Geeks understand that the big picture is pixelated and their high level of contribution in small areas grows the picture. They don't need to see what everyone else is doing to make their part better."
--
We have a reading tomorrow in creative writing, one that has
been freakishly advertised with beauties like these.
There are many more that have been plastered around the school, each with
different times listed (3:06, 3:13, 3:16, 3:09), and cleverly calculated
jokes. I'll have to post some of the better ones here tomorrow, when I get
a chance to get them off my school hard drive.
I'm reading 'plates" and an excerpt
from "creating your own work."
I'm bombarding you with links and self-promotion, and I'm aware of this.
--
It feels a little more comfortable here, lately. I know I'm
always making some sort of comment about "here," about this web world of
2000, where writing sometimes exists and sometimes doesn't. I know you probably
don't care, but I can't always pretend that it isn't some sort of bizarre
communication. Let me struggle, and maybe I'll get past it.
It feels better when I write this as a letter to you. It aims my words in
one direction. It is less like tossing a penny off the Hoover Dam and more
like tossing one into the bottom of a river bed. I hope you don't mind.