Bipolar Work Disorder

Bring Down - Midlake (mp3)
Suppose - Buffalo Tom (mp3)

May is the cruelest month.

The long year of routines, assignments, obligations, ideals, hopes, goals and opportunities is pulling into the garage. The joys of new and successful experiments have begun to fade. Attempts at getting others excited about new ideas run into deaf ears and tired eyes. Some things didn’t get done. Some things didn’t get done well. Friends are retiring or leaving for other schools or different locations.

Everyone is desperate for an ending, even as many of us will continue to return to our school every day over the summer, even as the work of preparing for another school year must go on.

At the beginning of the school year, I find myself reeling in a panicky sense of vertigo. Work feels like one of those games where someone stands in a glass-walled booth while money flies all around them, and the stress and excitement comes from just trying to snag and grab onto as many of the possibilities and ideas as you can. In the fall, the dollar bills are flying all over the place, but by May, it seems like there’s just a few bills in the air, and you just can’t seem to get your hands on any of them.

In the fall, amidst trying new things and breaking new ground, all the standard parts of previous years come and go, and dozens of unexpected fires and challenges emerge. Fall becomes about time management, about prioritizing, about keeping your head in the chaos.

May, for me, is about next year. What can I do to improve? What changes can I make in our routines to increase efficiency? What new concepts or angles must I pursue, and what can I afford to let go of?

The problem is, getting momentum on this kind of thinking, for me, requires cooperation, conversation, discussion. I’m in a position that relies largely on the buy-in of other people. And, in May, few people give a shit about next year. They care about four beautiful letters -- J-U-N-E -- and call out to her like they were in a Calgon commercial. "June, take me away!"

Mostly I’m very zen about these things. I sympathize with the frustrated voices, the tired eyes, the listless posture and slumped shoulders, the comments about how ready everyone is to get the frick outta Dodge and enjoy a nice summer break. I get it, and I understand it. And not all of it is negative and tired. Some of the looking forward to summer is positive and eager and excited, and even though my job remains basically the same all summer, to be utterly spent in May just happens in this biz.

Yet in a flash, my peace and calm can turn to anger, or deep sadness. I get angry that better-compensated coworkers are checked out. Or sad that other schools are busy making big ambitious announcements while we’re just staring at those big letters: J-U-N-E.

Then I get happy again, because a coworker is retiring, and all these people stand up and say great things about him, and his life is such a testament to what we’re trying to do here, and his words bring tears to my eyes, and I’m so very proud of what I do for a living and where I do it, because we are a legitimately impressive community.

Then I get angry again, because the goober five chairs away from me doesn’t know how to silence his phone in a faculty meeting, and it erupts twice during the retiree’s emotional speech. And his techno-ineptitude serves as a reminder of just how many people around me have no friggin’ clue about technology, nor do they seem to feel the slightest bit of discomfort about their ignorance.

In fact, they sometimes act angry that the world refused to freeze in place and instead expects them to keep learning shit. Just because your passion is history or physics and a student’s is Call of Duty or YouTube doesn’t make you any different than they are if you can’t open up and learn stuff you find boring. Some teachers are to technology what dumb jocks are to chemistry: This is stupid. This has nothing to do with me. This is for nerds.

Educators, of all people, should enter their workplace every day expecting that they’re gonna have to keep learning shit. You know, “lifelong learners” and all that? It ain't just a tag-line. It's fer real, yo.

Frustration becomes sadness because we’re losing some amazing veteran teachers to retirement. And, even if they were a little too embittered at times, they were still dazzling and amazing teachers, and their gifts in the classroom will not be easily replaced.

And then I get tired, because switching from one emotion to another so quickly and unexpectedly and constantly is exhausting. Not to mention it’s friggin’ hot outside, and I hate the heat.

It’s a cruel month. So then I, too, think it: J-U-N-E...

My Musical Malaise

Birth School Work Death - The Godfathers (mp3)
I'm Not Okay (I Promise) - My Chemical Romance (mp3)

Friday, March 4

Dear Diary,

When it comes to music, the last few weeks can be summed up by a single word: MEH.

Musically, I’m somewhat bipolar. In my manic times, I’ll download 40-50 songs submitted to our BOTG mailbox, listen to them and my many other new purchases voraciously, and then post a “Music Bonanza” of my favorites. I’ll make mixes for people. I’ll be sitting in my office or a meeting, and a song will pop into my head because of some random comment or dialogue. When I’m musically manic, the 9,000+ songs on my iPod are like non-corporeal entities swimming around me at all times.

The downside comes in the depressive phases like the one I’m in now. For the last week, I’ve barely listened to my iPod. I’ve acquired half a dozen new albums over the past month, but none of them are getting spins. One might be inclined to think this is due to the lack of quality of said purchases, but in times like these, who’s to say?

Saturday, March 5

Dear Diary,

As a test, on my way home yesterday evening, I turned off NPR and put on my “Five Star Playlist,” the list of some 300 songs that should never, under normal circumstances, stop playing once they’ve begun. The most important 3% of my collection. And what did I do? I skipped past the first five. I skipped through half a dozen more in the 23 minutes it took me to make it home.

This, people, is dire. It is musical malaise.

Sunday, March 6

Dear Diary,

Things are so bad that tonight I actually sat next to my wife on our couch and disintigrated almost two whole freakin’ hours of my life watching the 25th Anniversary concert of Les Miserables.

I realize that thousands of music-loving souls think Les Miz is just about the greatest piece of artwork since the Sistene Chapel, but I ain’t one of ‘em. What’s more, it wasn't the entire musical. It was just the actors half-acting, but without any of the stage movement. Just standing in front of mikes singing the songs.

While my dear wife drifted off on a heavenly cloud of “One More Day” and “On My Own,” my daughters asked dozens and dozens of machine-gun annoying questions, all justified, because being young girls, they desperately wanted to know WTF was going on so that they could like and understand WTF they were hearing and WTF was making their mother so orgasmically joyous.

The only explanation for me enduring this estrogen-stirring spectacle with my female family was that I’m in a deep, deep musical depression.

Monday, March 7

Dear Diary,

I think I’ve figured it out.

The National, The Civil Wars, Lori McKenna, Justin Townes Earle. These are the highlights of my recent acquisitions. It’s all great music, but it can be a little somnambulant at times. The albums I bought attempting to perk me up failed. "Perky" isn't really what these bands are shootin' for.

Once in a while, the gravitas of my preferred musical leanings wear me down. It’s like the hangover our society felt after the grunge overload of the early 1990s. And at times like these, I need Eric Stoltz to raise up that adrenalin needle and slam it right down into my heart. A few years back, it was The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance.

I know most True Music Fans detest MCR, and I ain't about to go trying to convince anyone of their musical genius. But when you’re drowning in the quicksand of folk acoustic singer-songwriters, nothing pulls you out quite like the seething screamy electric war. MCR were my Dread Pirate Roberts diving in after me and pulling me out of my quagmire of musical malaise.

So last night, in a desperate attempt to wash the taste of Les Miz from my ears, I bought the latest Dropkick Murphys album Going Out In Style for $5 at Amazon.com. (If you must know, The Boss makes a guest appearance on "Peg 'O My Heart"; that fact, plus the discounted price, plus the awesomeness of their song in The Departed all combined to make this a no-brainer purchase.)

I still love my pop music, but increasingly an acoustic guitar, a little harmonization, and some straightforward production quality sends an arrow through my heart more effectively than bombast. But like any drug, too much of a good thing leads to serious consequences, and I was drowning in the wonder of too much heavy dirge and too little superficial lightness of being.

In come a bunch of punky Irish laddies from Boston, driving their Irish car bomb 120mph into my droopy ears, jolting me back into reality faster than talk of tiger blood and rock stars from Mars.

Thank you Dropkick Murphys. You can't sing well, and your songs kinda all blend together in my head, but you rescued me, and you have therefore entered a small but select group of bands capable of curing my musical malaise.

Just in time for St. Patty's Day.

Uh-Oh, I Might Be A Woman (Or Maybe I Just Love One)

Sound On Film--"Julia Was A Lady" (mp3)
Never Been Julia--"Love Will Come" (mp3)

I'm not going to admit to openly weeping during Julie and Julia, but I will say that I spent most of the movie with misty eyes. That's a tough confession to make, but it is true. That's the beauty of a movie theater; if your fingers don't go to your eyes too often, no one can tell that you've been getting veklempt.

For me, Julie and Julia created that perfect storm for my male emotions--food, writing, and blogging and the triumph of all three! While I'm not inclined to say that I thought it was a great movie, I will say that I enjoyed every second of it.

And why shouldn't I tear up? The journey of Julia Child from O.S.S. clerk to Queen of sophisticated American cooking represents one of the pinnacles of our democracy!

Much as I like Amy Adams, I didn't care much for her character, Julie Powell, though I was willing to get caught up in the various crises that arose from her somewhat random decision to cook all of Julia Child's first cookbook in a year and to blog about it. Frankly, she isn't much of a blogger (see her blog); her posts seem brief and trite and superficial compared to what you read on the best of these pages. But, I was perfectly willing to cheer internally for the growth of her readership, the opportunity to turn the blog entries into a book, etc. And I was willing to put up with her story, knowing that eventually we would get back to the good stuff.

Everyone seems to have recognized by now that the real gift of the movie is seeing Julia and Paul Child's marriage and experiences come to life. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci offer excellent portrayals, and the story itself is a compelling one, set as it is against the backdrop of McCarthyism.

Oddly, for me, the triumphant moment, the moment when I almost started to cry, involved no major characters. It happened when Julia Child's future editor went home and made Julia's Boeuf Bourginonne on her home stove, using the pages from the cookbook that had been submitted to Alfred Knopf Publishing, and when she put the first bite in her mouth, it was clearly a transcendent moment for her and you knew that the publishing house would accept the cookbook and our country would (eventually) be saved from the stale cooking of the early 1960's.

It is no stretch to say that most of the food that we enjoy today is the result of the success of that one cookbook, Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, which took us as a country beyond our casseroles and canned goods and limited grocery store offerings and showed us that there was so much out there beyond us. I ate in America in the 1960's. Most of you didn't. It was atrocious.

Julia Child showed us that supposedly difficult cooking was simply (ok, not entirely) a matter of breaking down a complicated dish into manageable steps. She showed us how much precision matters. She "mastered" the willingness to try anything and embodied a joie de vivre that remains enviable today and that Streep captures perfectly.

And when the movie doesn't quite reach the conclusion you expect at the end because Julia Child was not impressed by Julie Powell's project of cooking all of Child's book in a year and blogging about it, that outcome, when you research Child's reaction, is not a matter of generational differences, as some would like to suggest. No, it's deeper than that. Julia Child lived and taught a paradox: treat French cooking with an absolute seriousness of purpose, but have fun with it. The mastery brings the joy, but so does the attempt to master. If things don't quite work out, you don't have a meltdown, you fix them the best you can or start over.

It doesn't seem that Julie Powell got that message. She followed the recipes, but not the ethos behind them, at least in the film version. I couldn't finish the book.