one left...

I am a crier. I always have been. I've spent most of today crying on the couch. For three reasons.

First off, I'm watching Julie and Julia which is quite possibly one of the most uplifting movies about living life with dignity, poise, and purpose. If you haven't seen it, it's about a woman in crisis who saves herself from herself via an epic quest through Julia Child's recipes. I think Julia Child's life is inspirational--an overly tall, gangly, outspoken (and sonorously offputting) woman conquering the world by finding purpose. And then there's my whole "I'm always mind-numbingly, pin-prickly aware that everything comes to an end" shtick that is boiled down to its essence by movies that end in an epilogue. Sappy feelings mean that I shed a tear or two. Almost always.

But this movie is particularly prescient today because the dignified, poised, and purposeful life theme practically bangs on the strings of my current life plan--the thing that is, in my mind, supposed to make fill my life with dignity, poise, and purpose. In the past two weeks I've received four rejections to PhD programs and two rejections to full-time jobs in the area. It hurts to admit that, even in writing on a blog that I rarely write in and is rarely read by anyone. I think it hurts because there is some crazy idea that, in this country, if you can't accomplish your dreams, there is something acutely wrong with you. Right now I feel stalled, like my dreams aren't happening. And I feel empty and worthless.

The third reason is always the underlying reason behind my tears--my mother. On days like today, when the bubble of hope starts rapidly deflating leaving behind empty feelings, I want to talk to my mother. I want to know what she would say to me. The world was different when she was alive--I was younger, floating in the carefree years of youth where there are very few occasions for rejection if you work hard.

It's not like that these days. And so I'm waiting for one more decision from one more school and I'm going to be trying very, very hard to wait with something resembling dignity, poise, and purpose because I can't keep waiting around for my mother to spring back to life or for a PhD program to decide I've made the cut or for a college to decide I'd be a fantastic teacher.

Or maybe I'll just find a bottle of wine.

distance or why Thanksgiving is heartwarming

Distance is a funny thing. These days I call Woodstock, IL "home." Woodstock is precisely 263.56 miles from my childhood home. The first time I moved away from there I landed 126.1 miles away in Champaign. That venture didn't work out. ... And so I moved backwards 122.1 miles to an apartment in Jacksonville. After roughly two more years of that I moved 4347.3 miles to Paris for a study abroad program. If you are saying to yourself, Wait a minute, studying abroad isn't exactly moving, then you need to have a conversation with my sister who coordinated packing efforts to get me across the Atlantic. After a brief relocation or reluctant retreat to Jacksonville I jumped 334.89 miles to Ames, Iowa where I found a bit of myself, a masters degree, and the first place that I would make into a "home." One of the scariest moves I have made, however, is my move to Woodstock (336.04 miles, if you happened to be wondering, from Ames).

I say scariest because, despite the number of times I told myself "I am an adult" when I overloaded a UHaul truck to graduate school, I wasn't really an adult yet. I was still a kid in school. The day I got the final notice from a PhD program that my time spent on the wait list was to be, ultimately, unsuccessful, I suddenly found myself staring at a bigger and much more intimidating wall of impending adulthood. Self, I said, you've been training for 24 years. Now it's time to use that training and get a real job. And I did find a job, two to be exact, in the middle of Chicago suburbs, as many miles from where I grew up as the last place I had called "home."

And here I sit, writing out this thought that's been keeping me awake.

Tomorrow, the first full day of my Thanksgiving vacation, I will not sit. You see, somehow, no matter where I move, I seem to be near loved ones. I'm a mere 35.76 miles from my brother in Rockford which, I'll admit, was by design. The amazing thing is, though, that I landed a mere 27.85 miles away from a dear, dear friend who was just returning from a two-year pause in Japan. That wasn't by design, but I'm sure glad it worked out.

Here is where we get to the Thanksgiving part--the busiest travel days of the year. I'm not traveling this holiday but I have friends who are. Way back in Ames, I met a good friend. After he graduated he took a job in New York City but, for the holiday, he will be back in his hometown...which just happens to be 34.56 miles from my new "home."

Just goes to show that no matter how many times "home" changes, if you keep your eyes open, you find enough people to always feel at home.

From Portland to L.A to Hollywood to New York City to Ames and Des Moines to Albania to Springfield, Woodson and Geneva, happy Thanksgiving, people.

Virginia Woolf was right

I am in the middle of my sixteen hour break between two classes that I teach. I get done teaching at 8:30, am usually home by 9:00 and try to be sleeping by 11:00 so I can get up no trouble at 7:00. All this so I can feed, wash, and dress myself by 9:00. Then I spend an hour with my teaching materials before I am out the door. After an hour commute, I am at school by 11:00 with another hour before I walk into the classroom. After I am done teaching and back home (another hour commute) I have four hours before I head back into the classroom for a three hour marathon class that meets once a week. Sometimes I think the Wednesday evening to Thursday night stretch is the worst but really my whole teaching schedule isn't fun.

I'm not complaining (I love teaching and I love the challenge of my job) but I teach four courses. Monday through Thursday I am booked solid. Mondays and Wednesdays I wake up at 8:00 so I can start working at 9:00. I usually try to take a break for a run at some point but otherwise I work from 9:00 to 5:00 (grading, reading, lesson-planning) before I actually step into a classroom at 5:30 (until 8:30). Tuesdays and Thursdays start out with a long one-way commute further in to McMansiontown. It makes for an odd schedule and it is a schedule that isn't frequented with "free time." I must also admit that a big chunk of the time I do have free is spent maintaining my budget and projecting it out over the weeks to come. If you divide out the money I make across the hours I actually spend working I make far less than minimum wage. Budgets can be scary. When strapped this tight they also lead to extraneous activities like applying for extra jobs (that I never seem to get). Add to this applications to PhD programs and professional development (article submissions and conference hopefulness) and I'm out. of. time.

"Free time" means thinking time. "Free time" means time to look at the world. "Free time" means time to write. I miss recording my thoughts on my blog and in my private journal. I miss spending time making notes for a future (dreamland) book of amusing yet thought-provoking essays. Writing is a privilege. Old Ginny had it right when she said that writing is the result of a well-nourished, generally supported mind. My mind doesn't feel that way these days. Most days I feel like I am at the bottom of a giant mound. My goal is the top of the mound but the mound is steep and ever time I start to climb it grows ten feet taller (this mound is obviously fed by a subduction zone). I keep plugging away but my brain gets tired.

and that's life

When I get home, I going to swing by Barnes and Noble and buy a book for my mom. I saw several listed in the Mother's Day spread in Entertainment Weekly. They even had a section of books listed for "Mom's who like to read." That's my mom. It's been cold lately but I am sure, when I get home, it will be sunny out, and my mom's flowers will be in full bloom, and there will be just enough of a breeze to waft the pages of our books as we read together. I'm going to bring some of that Darjeeling tea I just discovered. She isn't a huge tea drinker, but this variety is just right. Not too dark with just enough of a fragrance to it. She's going to love it. Getting the tea will be my job and each time I get up to refill our cups, our dog Jules will look up inquisitively, only settling back down when I rejoin the peaceful afternoon with fresh tea and a few cookies to share. I will be in such a good mood, I might even bring him a treat or two. Maggie, our other dog, will be too busy sniffing something in the yard to notice. We will sit there, the two of us, reading our books in silence, simply enjoying each other's company as we spend that lazy, sunny afternoon together.

That's what I wish even though I know it can't happen. It's a dangerous fence to walk--maneuvering between giving agency to those wishes and, on the other side, gritting your teeth, nodding slightly, and moving on with your life. Despite the danger of walking constantly between option A and option B, balancing between the two is, by far, the happiest alternative. Either side, without the other, would diminish in importance on its own. And that's life, reduced to its essence.

creative people

So I am sitting at my table surrounded by work. The remnants of this morning's American Public Address under signs of my job topped off with Frenchies talking about expats (thesis). It's all work, and there are weeks--like the last two, and the future four--where it seems like I do nothing but work.

So I finished grading seventeen speeches and was contemplating tomorrow's reality of twenty more and the unreality of a thesis that might write itself when I decided I needed a break. Not just a paltry need, like really, really needed a break.

So I pulled up facebook and, through a series of clicks, ended up on The Study Band. Now, The Study Band is special because my friend Jack is the pianist. I met Jack in Paris and I still remember the day I fell in love with him (no, not that kind of love, sicko) and an idea in one instant. Paris was difficult the first few weeks. It is far from home, and it is different. My head hurt with all of the change and, like everything, it all circulated around memories of my mom.

So I was trudging through the courtyard one day, fumbling with my lighter, headed for the lounge. It was a cold day in January and the cigarette smoke did that awkward thing where it hangs around your head. I was in the process of blowing it away from my eyes when I heard someone on the piano. It was Jack, and he was playing but not just playing, he was meditating, performing some act of self-therapy. By the time he had finished his song, his little bit of self-therapy had worked on me too.

So that's when Paris became about a lifestyle--the artist's lifestyle. Jack would play, I would write, we would spend long hours drinking with purpose and then wander the streets and, for me, it was all about experience. Like most artists, we weren't too terribly productive during our time in Paris (uhm, it takes time, duh) but it was worth it.

So when I am stuck at my table in Ames, Iowa surrounded by endless work that is so structured, so rigid, and, in some way, so painful, I listen to my friend Jack's band and I get this serene feeling in my shoulders and in the back of my neck. I am comforted because I know people who are out there giving the world the middle finger, writing music, living the lives of artists. Someone has to. So if it can't be me, I am glad it is Jack.

will you get in the car now, ma?

"Goodnight, Christy."
"Goodnight, Ma. [Long pause as Bridget Brown turns and walks toward the car. She turns back to look at her son.] Go on, I'm all right. Will you get in the car now Ma, I'm fine." [Bridget gazes at her son, unsure of her place with him, unsure of his place with the world. She turns, and enters the car.]

And so ends, or nearly ends, My Left Foot--the movie starring Daniel Day Lewis as a man with cerebral palsy. It is a movie I must watch alone. I spend the majority of it crying. Crying not for Christy or his tortured body, not quite crying for his mother, but, instead, crying for my mother and what could have been or would have been between us had she not been the one to go first.

For me, the movie is about two things. First, it is about a tortured soul. Christy grew up misdiagnosed as mentally disabled, fought until he could communicate first with his left foot, then through garbled speech, then through painting, then through better speech, then, finally, through words on a page. While I am not crippled, I am tortured. When I watch the movie, I think of growing up gay and not knowing it, knowing only that I was different. That I am "different." But, truth be told, even my head can't fully justify placing myself on the same level as Christy Brown. I am only able to manage the parallel when my mind slips gracefully into the movie's second subject--the love of a mother for her child. The movie's portrayal of this subject really gets under my skin.

This woman, played by Brenda Fricker (the homeless woman in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York), is astounding. There is not a second when she is not fretting over her son, shielding him from his alcoholic father, pushing him little by little into the world, saving money for a wheelchair, trying to find him help, and worrying about his mental well being. She is the spitting image of my mother in some physical characteristics, but mostly in her personality.

My sister told me the story once about my bike accident. I don't remember it--I was unconscious for a while. The last thing I remember was closing my eyes for a second too long. I woke up in a hospital room with imprints a bridge on my face. But my sister remembers sitting at the table with my mom and my dad while I was out on my bike. Somebody told someone where I lived and sent someone else running to tell my parents that I had been hurt. As my sister remembers it, my mom was up, keys in hand, and out the door before my sister or my dad could even process what was going on. My mom's baby was hurt. That's all she had to know.

That's sort of who she was. You didn't notice her much (odd because her physical stature was quite imposing) until you either made her mad or hurt her children. Then she was scary. Nobody messed with her babies. Sometimes I think that protecting her children, offering them the best she could, was what she lived for. She certainly didn't get the chance to live much for herself.

But the movie also portrays a son's love for his mother. There is a scene in the movie, early on, when young Bridget Brown is pregnant, near her due date, carrying young Christy Brown up the stairs to his bed. She is sweating, breathing heavily, her eyes betraying doubts about her physical ability. She gets Christy in bed and again, it's her eyes--they tell us there is a problem. "Christy, I have to go and make a phone. Stay there. We hear her stumble out the door, down the hallway, and fall down the stairs. Her cry as she falls is absolutely sickening. The look in Christy's eyes is panicked and charged with adrenaline. Using his one good foot, he drags himself off the bed, out the door, down the hall, and to the top of the stairs. Seeing his mother collapsed, he half falls, half crawls to the bottom of the stairs where he pounds on the front door until help arrives. Christy, poor, crippled Christy, saved his mother's life.

That scream Bridget Brown makes as she falls down the stairs--I have heard that cry before. When my mother was caught in public with the evidence of a failed surgery, she made that cry--a cry of defeat and worry, a cry of concern not for herself but for others. She was defeated, and she couldn't fight much longer. She couldn't fight much longer for herself but what I think really got her was that she couldn't fight any more for others. Standing with her in that store when she made that sickening, end of the rope cry, I was alarmed and charged with adrenaline. I couldn't do much, but I would like to think that, in some way, I saved her that day. I put her in the car, and drove her home. It seems presumptuous of me to assume that my very presence gave her comfort, but watching this movie helps me remember the things my mom did for me when she was strong. Helps me remember the relationship we had. Helps me think that she needed her children just as much as we needed her.


And then we are back to the end, or the near end, of the movie--the point when Christy tells his mother to get back into the car. The last conversation I remember with my mother was at least a week or two before she died. We were cleaning out boxes of her things from her sewing room. I uncovered my pillow and pillowcase from daycare--items she made for me with her own two hands. I was devastated. I had forgotten about those things and I was suddenly afraid that there would be no one to make me things when she was gone. "I really would like to stay, Marc. But I can't." It was said in a caring voice, and her eyes showed caring and strength. But looking back, I think I also remember something else behind the front. A look of uncertainty. She was unsure of my place in the world, unsure of her place with me, unsure of what was to come, and most jarringly, aware that she wouldn't be here to find out firsthand.

And so she's still around. Not in any definite presence but she haunts my days, my nights, my weeks, my months. I have good days and bad days and they fluctuate based on how much of your memory I am able to process. Well, mom, I am not fine but I am okay. So will you get in the car now, Ma? I'm fine. Or I will be someday.

i sleep with my baby blanket

I am twenty-three years old and I sleep with my baby blanket. It's an odd admission when I am not curled up in my bed with the blanket itself nearby. It's not something I would admit to when I am teaching or when I am out with friends pounding shots at a bar. It isn't an admission that fits into the adult world. Adults don't sleep with their baby blankets. Baby blankets are things we leave behind when we hit puberty and the attractions of the same (or opposite, if you must) sex lure us out of our heads and into the "real" world. It's not normal. It might not be sane. But I sleep, unabashedly, with my baby blanket.

My baby blanket is worn and tattered. It has holes in it and the silk edges are frayed and, in some places, falling off. My baby blanket didn't always look like this. When I was home for semester break I did some cleaning and I discovered a picture of me on the family vacation to Disney World--I was somewhere around five years old. In the picture I am sleeping on the bed, half the blanket spread out under me while the other half wrapped around me like the bun of a hot dog. I was shorter then; the blanket was longer than I was and its pale yellow color, much purer then than it is now, is offset by my hard-won Florida tan. That picture gave me pause. It isn't that I have always slept with my baby blanket so peacefully and tranquilly as I did then. My recent baby blanket dreams are a product of my recent past.

During the summer between my sixth and seventh years in school, I had a biking accident. It was stupid. The neighborhood kids and I used to dare each other to ride down a hill with our eyes closed. At the bottom of the hill is a bridge of sorts--the road crosses a viaduct and is hemmed in with rough-hewn two by sixes that once were emblazoned with reflecting plastic but now show their age with the rusted-out brackets for these mythical, long-gone notifiers of traffic. The dare was to not open your eyes until you sensed that you were on the bridge--the high, wooden walls of the bridge changed the sounds that bounced back to your ears. I was never brave enough to do it in front of my friends, so one day, while biking alone, I decided to prove to myself once and for all that I could do it.

I wrecked.

Crashed head on into the side of the bridge leaving imprints and scars of the two by sixes and the vacant reflector brackets. I was unconscious for a while, woke up in the emergency room for a minute, and then went back under until I had been moved into a room in the pediatric wing of the hospital. I recovered quickly, as children tend to do (what with the cells replicating so fast and all) and was back on my feet in no time. Until the first day of the seventh grade when my balls hurt so badly that I had to go to the office during first hour orchestra practice.

At the doctor I was told I had a potential hernia--likely the result of my biking accident--and that I would need surgery. Subsequent visits to specialists confirmed that I would, indeed, need to go under the knife. At the last check-in before surgery the doctor told me I could bring a stuffed animal with me into surgery to comfort me as I went under the anesthetic. I felt a bit foolish being offered such a surgery companion. After all, I was becoming a man. I was rapidly growing upwards and outwards. I had at least three combined hairs underneath my two arms. You don't offer "men" with at least three combined hairs underneath their two arms the chance to take a stuffed animal into surgery. Secretly, though, I was grateful. I was petrified at the thought of going in there alone. I didn't have a favorite stuffed animal, but, as I recalled, I did have a baby blanket stuffed away somewhere.

Somewhere along the line my parents realized that the heavy blankets and pillows that helped to lull me into sleep before surgery would be stripped off--along with my baby blanket--during the operation. Sending a baby blanket in could be risky. It might not come back to me. And so my mom went down into her sewing room and embroidered my name--Marc Malone--into the silk hem in a light, mint green. After surgery, the blanket came back to me safe and sound.

That is the story of how my baby blanket became emblazoned with my sure-to-be-famous-one-day name. It is not, however, the story of how my blanket came to rest in the bed of its now twenty-three owner. That came much later, after my mom had died of cancer. Her death came at a rather unfortunate time. I had long undertaken the balancing act of leading a double life. In public, I was straight. In private, on the internet, in chat rooms, I was gay. I was okay with that balancing act until she died. Something about her passing toppled the framework of my delicate lie. I wasn't comfortable in my skin. I hated me. I didn't know how to be both things--straight and gay--at once. Something needed to go.

That process was long and difficult. Probably because my mom's death was its impetus, I tried too hard to hold on to my past and fight off the future. I became depressed and friends talked me away from window ledges and laid down underneath my car so I couldn't escape with an armful of pills and a bottle of water. It was rough, but on the other side of it all I found a different way of being--a way of being strong and confident. While this stage of my life seems to (in terms of my body) weigh a bit more than the double-life-living me, I am better off here.

Somewhere along the line, however, in between therapy sessions and finding myself in literature, I recovered my baby blanket. Perhaps it was the first night I cried myself to sleep after I was ousted from my double-life. Or maybe it was just the first night I drank too much alcohol and needed something comforting to put me to sleep in a spinning bed. Regardless, I found what I needed. I found the appropriate amount of comfort in the past while staying firmly grounded in the present. My baby blanket is more than just a threadbare, shredded piece of fabric. It is, rather, the collection of all my life experiences. It is my trip to Florida as a five year old. It is my double-life. It is my mother's embroidery. It is my mother's death. It is my nearly-experienced trip off the seventeenth floor. It is my trip to Paris. It is coming out of the closet. It is moving to Iowa. It is pursuing a dream. My baby blanket is everything I was from birth to a second ago and it is what propels me towards the life that I want to lead, whatever that is.