Diving In

Perhaps what keeps folks from starting a blog is a lack of having anything to talk about. I contemplated starting one a few months ago when I moved from the largest city in New England (Boston is, isn't it?) to the burbs, but what could I say about killing the soul of my 20 year old self that hasn't been repeated ad infinitum all over the internet? Then, two things happened.

1) I got over myself. (Who's really going to read my blog out of millions anyway, right?) and
2) I got shamed.....

Let's explain that second part and then we can get to my newly decided mission. (Did I mention I have a mission?)

See, about two weeks ago, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century by opening a facebook account. I've been computer literate since learning Logo on a Commodore 64 in the fifth grade, but for the past decade or so, computer literacy has meant a mean way with the Microsoft Word and a more than stumbling ability to navigate various virtual classrooms adopted by the universities I work for. My friends laughed, and I hid behind a veneer of academic/ literary superiority which is often code for "I fear the future."

But I did it. I dove into facebook. I even put up a picture and made comments about what I was doing.

And, as is often the case, my past jumped up and bit me..... hard..... right in the backside. Friends from elementary school, high shool, college, graduate school all came out to say hello. Some thought I had fallen into a big hole 20 years ago, and some knew better. I even had to come to grips with the fact that some of my earliest 17 year old students were know staring down the business end of 30. Ouch.

While I don't allow current students to be my "friend" on facebook, I was happy to see many of my old charges from my days down south at Clemson, until each and every one of them started asking me where they could find my writing. See, they knew me in grad school when I had secondary office hours in Nick's and could usually be found in the back booth, hidden behind a book, recognizable only by the cloud of smoke drifting upwards from behind the book and the non-Budweiser, non-Coors, non-Miller beer propped alongside. There was invariably a yellow legal pad filled with incomprehensible scrawling only tangentially related to any course I was teaching.

We had conversations that had nothing to do with our classes. I was researching dating, marriage, and sexual rituals of the middle ages at the time and trying to point out how things haven't changed all that much. Come to think of it, an offhand comment from one of them led me down that dirty little road to my research in the first place. Imagine my surprise when more than a few of them met up with me more than a decade later in the vast morass that is facebook and said they missed me.

This shamed me in more than one way. First, I have no writing to direct them to. As will happen, "life" seems to have taken over my life, and writing has been one of the casualties. I have decided that that has to change. I have often looked at friends and relatives with a certain disdain for their dismissal of what was once so important to them. How many times have I seen people giving up their careers for a multitude of reasons and felt silently superior. I must admit, with a more than slightly red face, that I have done the opposite -- I've given up what once mattered more than anything for a job.

See, I'm a teacher. An adjunct professor, but that's just a fancy term for a teacher who doesn't have to turn in her attendance book and lesson plans these days. Like many teachers in the trenches, I've hung onto the Academy I attended and looked with chagrin on what it has become -- a career factory. Maybe, though, it isn't the Academy that's changed. Perhaps somewhere along the way, I am the one who stopped being a part of the Academy and become instead what I never wanted to be -- a grader. Perhaps the fact that my students don't seem to seek out the fantastical and the mundane in creative ways isn't because the system has failed them or because they are different. Perhaps, just perhaps, it's me. Perhaps when I gave up what I once loved above all else, I shut their gate to those realms where the unbelievable is realized and the unachievable is mastered.

Oh, my mission. I'm going back to the basics. I found my brain in reading the classics and in writing about them. More importantly, I found my fight and my drive in discussing them with those around me. So that's where I'll begin. I think I owe my current students that much -- to give them the chance to see the me that helped create some of the coolest people ever to graduate from Clemson -- students who still think and still read and got big enough in their britches to shame their old professor who should have been smart enough to know better than to get old -- because in books, we don't have to.

I'm luckier than most bloggers -- there are a few people who want to read what I have to say. Not many (perhaps fewer after a post or two) but some. For now, that will be enough.

So, in the spirit of a dark rainy night at Nick's, here I go -- like Ferlinghetti's poet, climbing on a highwire of my own making and balancing on eyebeams, diving in. There might be beer; there will almost certainly be a haze of smoke, and there will be writing. At last.