Chrysalis City:

What makes you happy?

Has there ever been a moment when you stopped and thought, "Yes! THIS is where I am supposed to be!"
Selina | 01.04.05 - 2:16 am | #

1991 art class, painting people, knowing school would soon be over and I'd be free of bonds. Then I was a photographer who wrote on the side. I was astoundingly happy that year. I interviewed at Columbia in Chicago for art school, but let myself get talked into making more practical choices. I've been doing lots of things other people want me to do since then - so much so I've lost sight of what I wanted for me. I get a sense of it from time to time, but I have so much financial debt that its hard to see how I'll ever be free enough to get there from here.
Karl | 01.04.05 - 12:03 pm | #

I’m interested in following up on this thread because I seem to be getting somewhere. I have a flood of things that I’d like to say about this. My high school had a great art department and I was in the honors photography track. What I discovered in photography was a joy in synthesis. I would do photo shoots where I would take strange objects that I’d found at junk shops, locate an interesting location that contrasted with the objects, but somehow revealed something of the personality of my subject (I shot mostly portraits).

I also had four years of required English classes and had two mentors that shaped me there. On my free hours I would hang out with Mrs. Cantrell and Mr. Hogan and discuss all things under the sun. They taught me the classics and Mr. Tricky taught me Ginsberg and Faulkner. I learned that I could engage in the same kind of synthesis in my writing that I could in my photography.

I wrote plays for the theater department (none of them are any good) and poetry for the literary magazine; my mentor there Mr. Engelsmen recently passed away. I had a history and economics professor who processed information the way that I do, so all of his instruction was ambrosia – Larry Baker has a reputation for brilliance of which many a random reader will be aware. He taught me Rousseau and Adam Smith. He taught me China and that I knew nothing. I was also interested in the sciences – primarily biology where Mr. Lackinger had me dissecting fetal pigs and irradiating mice.

I had a fun car (convertible Volkswagen dune buggy), a restaurant job as a wine and desert waiter (and Erve Jenko began to teach me to cook - my gumbo is a modified version of his), a smart (she spoke five languages), funney, gorgeous girlfriend whose father was a philosophy professor at Washington University – he gave me my first copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and turned me on to some great jazz.

Clayton High School was my Rushmore, my happiest time in life. Before then I was a starving sponge. I’ve been mostly that since then. For the first time I’d had intellectual resources on which to draw. My former schools had all been human warehouses or at least vacuums of creativity and free thinking where the square peg is pounded into the round hole, true crushers of the human spirit.

I graduated and took a year off to really figure some things out. I lost the girl to Venezuela (which set a pattern of losing loves to their migratory impulses - Japan, China, Manhattan, etc). My California move was a disaster. I had a girlfriend at Northeast Missouri State who convinced me that that was where I should be. I got in no problem and tried to make a Clayton through the cunning use of add – drop. It was a good school, but the core classes were less advanced than the ones I’d already taken in high school. Actually no undergraduate class was as challenging as my high school, with the possible exception of Cole’s British Literature class. All of my other classes didn’t really require all that much effort, which left me time to drink too much, work various odd jobs, and meet nice girls.

[I learned that I could salve (not solve) my boredom by throwing a party. Since then I have thrown thousands of large and small parties (ten years, 365 days in a year, a minimum of 150 parties a year, that gets us into the thousands doesn’t it?).]

Adam Davis reminded me of Larry Baker in the way he thought and taught. He pulled me into the English major. David Gruber pulled me into philosophy and taught me Hume and Spinoza. I took every class Bob Graber offered in anthropology. Jim Pauls and I did not click in the photography major, he was more interested in chemicals than composition and he wanted me to take all the basic classes over again (which I soon discovered was so I could act as an unpaid T.A.). I kept up my darkroom fees for a year, but then that important part of my life just drifted away.

I learned Eastern religions from Lloyd, Continental Philosophy from Tallie, & the history of science from Philip Wilson – one of the most brilliant men I have ever met and the primary reason I became a teacher. I actually entered Northeast as a bio / photo double major, but those areas were not the institution’s strengths. Rather, the requirement of the school that I take classes that I had already gone beyond, bored and frustrated me. So rather than stick out the lower level classes I bailed on those disciplines. I eventually ran into the same problem in both English and Philosophy, only it was worse in that I was in my early twenties when I had to take the basic classes to complete my liberal arts core requirements.

Those last years of college were hard ones for me. I’d lost another serious girlfriend to early graduation. My classes were nearly devoid of content – required gym, can you name the branches of government, and that sort of nonsense. I’d lost a few friends to cancer and car wrecks. By that point I’d lost myself.

Grad school and my teaching career were attempts to make something work that wasn’t working. I think I am a good teacher and I know that there are some people who talk about me in the way that I talk about my mentors, but I still think that there is something else I am supposed to be doing. Something I missed along the way.

The best thing about those years would be Bob, a great friend and another of the most brilliant men I have ever met. There was never a moment of boredom in a Bob class, where one has free intellectual range. Bob took me to North Carolina for a summer, where I was in a multi-disciplinary intensive and did the best academic work of my life. I rode that wave through several years of teaching.

To stay in school so long I spent ten years living on loans and credit, my father never made more than twenty seven thousand dollars a year and I was the youngest of six children, so we simply didn’t have the resources to do it any other way. I had lots of scholarships along the way, but life isn’t cheap and when you’re not working it’s tough.

Now I am a ship on a reef. At the end of February I am going to have to put most of my stuff into storage. I will probably get a small apartment in south city or I will move in with my sister. I may have to declare bankruptcy. I made a serious effort to pay off my debt, clearing more than fifteen thousand of it in the past two years, but ultimately it may have proven to be too much for me. My credit history is already shot so I can’t see how a bankruptcy will matter all that much, it just conflicts with my working class ethic of paying what you owe.

Akira Kurosawa once said, “If you chase too many rabbits you won’t catch any of them.” It feels like my renasounce nature is part of my problem, I can be/do anything that’s interesting and in a certain sense everything is interesting, so what should I do? Steven Sondheim makes the point that this is idle speculation. We do what we have the opportunity to do. So rather than wasting your time looking for a calling you should answer the phone that’s ringing. My phone is not currently ringing. So what should I do?