The Sun Revolves Around Us

Turn It Off - Phantogram (mp3)
Dial - School of Seven Bells (mp3)

The sky is not falling. We are not the worst people in the history of the world. Things are not always getting worse.

As an educator, a father, and a spiritual seeker, I do not look for the worst in people or in situations, nor do I try and approach things naively or with unrealistic expectations. My approach is not unlike millions of others, who feel that experience and measured optimism are invaluable companions for all encounters.

But over the course of five straight hours this week, the petty clueless self-absorption of others became fairly cumbersome.

First it was a coworker.

Another administrator and I have been methodically moving forward and honing a plan to create some energy and idea generation in our departments. Due to budget constraints, we’ve all been fairly landlocked these past four years. No conferences, no school visits, nothing. So we pushed and got approval to plan several “summer field trips” where small groups would visit a series of schools over several days, and at the end of the summer, we’d have a day-long retreat where we compiled the experiences and ideas and pushed forward on our own paths to professional and program improvement.

The director of the other department is set to retire next spring. He has served our school loyally and well, and he is a fine man.

When it was clear that one school we needed to see was located in Massachusetts, he emailed us and suggested he should take this trip, that he should go alone, and that he could report his findings back to the team. Translation: he’d love to go to Massachusetts; he’d love to take his wife; he’d love to see the scenic Northeast, and he’d even visit the school since it would help pay for his fun trip.

I can think of no better way to build camaraderie, motivate a desire to improve, and create energy for an immobilized staff than for the boss to take the travel money, spend it, and come back to tell us all about his trip. Great idea. Can't believe I didn't think of that one.

Next, it was an awards ceremony.

My daughter was one of some 400+ students in the county recognized for her creative writing. Her captivating short story, “Cant Never Could” -- and yes, the apostrophe is intentionally missing because the main character’s name is Cant -- was selected. I don’t think we’ll be making it into a bestselling children’s book anytime soon. Not until BOTG gets one, anyway.

Roughly 1,200-1,500 teachers, parents, grandparents and students packed into a downtown venue for the event, and twice in the early stages, someone at the podium kindly reminded parents to turn off their cell phones and to, ha ha, also help the kids turn off theirs as well. Yet, within 30 minutes of that polite announcement, four cell phones had announced their proud existence to the masses, thanks to their impossible-to-ignore “unique” ringtones.

We hardly heard the keynote speaker, a rich woman who had recently self-published a children’s book, because three babies spent the entire time screaming. One woman actually carried her screaming baby all the way across the bottom of the stage as her other daughter walked across to get the award. Apparently her 2nd-grade child was incapable of walking across a stage without her guiding directions. Or maybe she was modeling her screamy child’s pink dress since we were all distracted by her anyway.

At churches, in restaurants, at events like this, I’ll never really understand why screaming babies are tolerated. Never -- and please note how rarely I use absolutes in my writing; I’m one of the most relativistic wimps on the planet -- have I allowed the screaming and crying of my children to penetrate the peaceful existence of an environment for more than 10-15 seconds before removing my child from said environment, at least temporarily.

My child is not their problem. My child’s screams are permitted to interfere with or even ruin my night, because it’s my child. That’s the devil’s deal of parenting: screamy demons who frequently provide us heavenly joys.

But these screamy demons BELONG to someone specific. The rest of us didn’t ask for that child. Yet there we all are, having our dinners ruined, or unable to hear the speaker or preacher or performance, because your sweet precious snowflake in diapers is more important than the rest of us.

When I express intolerance about these issues and the levels of self-absorption and inconsiderateness required, it sends me through the roof. Not because I’m self-righteous, but rather because I know damn well just how self-absorbed I can be. I’m the Lightning McQueen of self-absorption, and if on the highway of selfishness I see other cars zooming past me at twice my speed when I’m already well past the speed limit, it’s bound to horrify me.

It’s worth noting that in all these examples -- the trip planning, the cell phones, the screaming demons -- for every self-absorbed poop face at the center of my focus, there were any number of people who weren’t in it merely for themselves, people capable of sympathizing with and caring about how the shoe might feel on the other foot.

And to those people, I salute you. The ability to share looks of indignation and impatience and mockery with you when we are pulled into these aggravating moments of someone else’s self-absorption is often the only thing that keeps me from going postal.

We Become Our Parents

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti--"Can't Hear My Eyes" (mp3)
Donnie Iris--"I Can't Hear You" (mp3)

My wife and I left a "concert" event at intermission on Saturday night. It's a student-performance show that we have enjoyed for the past three years, but this year, we just weren't feeling it. Why? Because we couldn't quite hear it.

No, it wasn't because our joint hearing is shot, though it is headed in that direction. Instead, the kids behind us just would not shut up. We got there about 15 minutes before the show started, and that left us with a choice of seats in the upper third of the auditorium. Little did I know that that is where all of the middle school children sit.

And that's when we became our parents. It's not a role that I enjoy playing. But play it I did.

Ears did have something to do with it. When you get older, your ears, even if they haven't been abused at rock concerts like mine, are not as good at distinguishing between noises coming from different sources. When you can't hear something that you think you should be able to hear, it makes you feel anxious and isolated.

So we became our parents in two ways: 1) we turned around and asked the children to be quiet and 2) previous to that occurrence, the wife looked repeatedly at her husband with the expectation that he would be the one to take care of it. Nevermind that the wife in question is a litigator who spends her days (and nights, debriefing) in confrontation and conflict, while said husband has established himself in his school in a very comfortable "good cop" role.

The husband-wife interplay built until after the second performance. The wife kept looking at the husband--when was he finally going to do something about the incessant talking going on behind them? And so, yet another example of the greatest motivator of man since time began kicked in--the gaze of wife drove husband to act. So the husband turned around, tapped the knee of a boy from his school in lieu of the many chattering girls surrounding (thus keeping this as a social agreement among men) and said, "You're not going to talk non-stop the whole time, are you?"

You'd have thought I reached above his head and pulled the string attached to the lightbulb above it, so shocked was he to have to embrace the idea that he was making too much noise. And he did stop talking. Sort of. For awhile. And not nearly as much.

Me, sensitive to children's issues as part of my life for the past 27 years, immediately flashing back to a moment in my own middle school when our French teacher had the very bad idea of taking all of us to an evening performance of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, a well-known Moliere play that not only had we not read in English but that, as middle schoolers, did not even begin to be able to comprehend in French. So we were antsy and crammed into tight seats and chatty and fidgety and when my friend Mark, sitting next to me, decided to put his right foot up on his left knee for a change of position, I was having none of any invasion into my space, and so I shoved his foot, causing it to kick the woman in front of him in the head. That she only turned around and let us have it but didn't go get the manager and never told our French teacher is one of the great miracles of my life.

And I also glanced over at my daughter and her friends, several seats and a couple of rows below us, and noticed that every time I checked, they also were talking pretty much non-stop.

My male friend behind me wasn't having much luck either. Chastened by me, he had really toned down his talking, but that had had no affect on all of the girls surrounding him that he was trying to navigate, and so perhaps he sat there, mostly miserably or using sign language, while they continued with the multitude of things that needed to be said while one performer after another took the stage. I didn't have any intention of telling him that it was not going to get any easier, that navigation.

Until intermission.

One of the beauties of marriage, cultivated over years together, is that without having said a word, without have expressed a discontent or sulked silently, both of you stand up at intermission and know that you have had enough and that you are leaving. So it was with us. We were not angry or upset; we had just had enough.

We drifted slowly, without apparent sense of purpose, toward the door. And, I suppose, that is a bit of our parents, too, that realization that no social outing is all that important, that it's just as comforting and satisfying to smile your goodbyes and walk out the door towards something else. Whatever happened that we had missed, we would hear about it. That would be enough.