You must be tired

Derrick is in and out of doctor’s offices, newly starting physical therapy; he endures routine injections for pain management for a condition unrelated to the initial week-long hospital stay; the extended unemployment makes him stir crazy; a ceiling fan fell from its moorings to demolish his laptop laying defenceless on a coffee table below. He tells me these things and says, “you must be tired.”

Two weeks including Canada

The summer term officially ended (for me) yesterday. Two weeks until the beginning (for me) of the Autumn term. Two weeks I should fill with productivity -- but won’t -- catch up on my reading -- but won’t -- could catch up on my travelling -- and will! Yes, when it’s leisure there’s not much cause to avoid. Derrick agreed to watch Ryu for a week whilst I head to Canada. A good ole’ fashioned American road trip, in Canada. Three days in Ottawa, three days in Toronto makes for a awfully decent potential vacation. I’ve not ever been to Ottawa. Why not see the country’s capital? I hear it’s dreadfully boring but I heard similar opinions about Canberra. Those turned out to be mostly true -- but! -- for a day, one can’t go wrong with sightseeing; plus, one shouldn’t pass any opportunity to hassle some Feds. Ottawa’s geography makes it an attractive destination, as it’s across a river from Quebec. Quebec, many may already be familiar, is France in Canada. Yes! Flannel wearing Canadians speaking French. C’est un bon monde! I’ve not practised French with any seriousness since Sophomore year in college. It’ll be a lot of fun to be, tangentially, in a French-speaking country. Maybe I’m not fair to Ottawa, singings its praises for what it cannot change: being near la Francophonie. Anyway, I’m looking forward to the very long drive to Ottawa from Detroit: 10hrs says Google Maps. Nobody break into my house!

Motherfuckers

Matt, Adam and I paid for our respective dinner at New Holland Brewery Thursday night without our respective credit cards. Debit cards, in the latter cases. She’s going to charge you for my pizza, Adam predicted. We have identical debit cards. I grimly agreed that the odds of a screw up were large, especially so considering we three invested the last 10 minutes cataloguing the waitress’ deficiencies.

(sidebar: the painfully handsome guy who comes into the cafe every day and is also a student at the seminary just made out with his waspish girlfriend. man, you can do so much better than her!)

The waitress returns to our table apologising... we knew it! Sir, do you have another form of payment. She’s looking at me. Adam and Matt look at me. I look blankly. Adam offers a story our cousin bank cards declining lately for their own reasons. I hand over my Chase card. She cheerfully takes it and wanders away into the back. Our conversation returns to the inexplicable nature of credit cards and their inexplicable habit of making people feel like deadbeats. Oh well, she’s back and it’s time to go. I’m sorry, sir. This card is expired. It expired in August. The $10 from my earlier ATM stop can’t be refused, right? What the fuck is going on?

Plans for the gym? Strike. Plans for coffee in Saugatuck? Nope. Plans for reading? Nuh-uh. Home to check credit cards? Yeeesssss.

To make a long story slightly less long, I discovered that somebody stole my checking account information. Two pending debits appear in my checking account: on for $22 from an Ihop and one for $220 from a Publix, in that order. Now, having lived in the South I happened to know that there are not any Publix on the Michigan side of Cincinnati. I also know that, having been the boyfriend of a vehement food snob, Ihop couldn’t *pay* me to eat $22 worth of their food, these two transactions are totally bogus. I called the emergency number on the back of debit card. The woman canceled the card with a formality I found odd only later. Then I called the credit union emergency number next. They advised going into the nearest branch at first open. The Holland office opens at 9a. It is currently 844a. C’mon.... C’mon!...

Having money stolen from you is pretty awful. What’s slightly less awful is that the amount isn’t very much by some standards. My colleague Ayman had thousands of dollars taken from his checking account. Some scheme operated by an organisation in England deducted pennies from his account, which he understandably didn’t notice, then removed the much larger amount days later. The salt rubbed into the wound though was that Ayman was on vacation in Lebanon when the fraud happened. His bank, as he tells it, took care of the situation by closing the account, opening a new one and returning the stolen money. Without knowing what my credit union will do in this situation, I can only hope that they behave with the due diligence as Ayman’s bank: they trace the transaction, close my account and give me back the stolen money. $240 may not be much money to some people but it’s a goddamn fortune for me. Oh! And the salt in my wounds is that the motherfuckers overdrew my checking account. Fuck you, thieves!

The manager of the local credit union branch confirmed that no less than five debits came through my account Thursday night from Palm Beach County, Florida. Each transaction required a separate printout for me to sign and date confirming their fraudulent nature. The manager then sent them via fax to what I assume is their fraud department in Grand Rapids where I further assume someone pushed buttons allowing the money be returned to my account.

On the whole this incident, while shitty, was largely painless. A new debit card is on its way and is expected next week. I cannot pay until it arrives. The book on order from Amazon rejected. What money taken was returned the same day. Props to the credit union for handling the incident with professionalism. I want to follow up with the branch manager on Monday out of curiosity as to how they’ll handle this situation. So far as they’re concerned, some people stole hundreds of dollars from them. It’s not only me saying “fuck you, thieves!” My credit union must be thinking “let’s file felony charges!”

May I pray for you?

My head was splitting. An occupational hazard of teaching is smelling fumes of dry-erase markers. The class was nearly finished anyway, so I cut my lecture short allowing them to leave. The headache heralded a migraine; difficult to look at the book, torture to think and speak. They filed out. One student stayed behind. He stood nearer the door to where I stood near the board packing things up. I hoped that whatever he needed would be simple, a ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and better yet could be answered on the way to the car park. Stuffing papers and books into my bag I noticed two things, both of which alarm me and cast overboard the hope of a simple exchange. First, this guy is young; or, at least, he looks very young. Seemingly no more than seventeen but surely at least nineteen (it is a 200-level course, after all). That thought had not fully formed when the second hit me: he’s shaking. He walked over to the table strewn with my stuff with what I describe in hindsight a hesitant swiftness: moving with a speed that could fail at any moment. He comes to a stop, a stuttered termination of motion that matches his voice. He has a question but doesn’t know how to ask it. Say it, I suggest with what I hope is an assuring smile (who can say, when one has a headache? i could also have inadvertently sneered). Spit it out, don’t worry.

He asks about my headache. I point to the markers -- occupational hazard, I explain. The chemicals are unkind. He shakes, standing to my left. I have something to ask and I hope you won’t be offended. Okay. Let’s hear it.

I heard the voice of God.

Okay.

When you said that your head felt like it was “splitting open” (in the interest of editorial disclosure, I am terribly clever with imagery) I heard God’s voice tell me to pray for you. For the pain. Some people might be offended, and I’m not trying to offend you at all but it’s something I really need to ask. If I can pray for you.

Oh. Well, okay. I shift weight from foot to foot. But you don’t need my permission to pray.

He doesn’t look at all relieved. He continues to tremble and stare at the desk. Well, he said, I need to...

His hand is over my head, just touching my hair. I look at him. His eyes are still downcast. Several moments pass like this. Triangular. Finally he speaks: Lord, I pray that you will take Professor Martin’s headache....

90 minutes later, I had eaten dinner and walked the dog. Laying down for bed, I wondered whether to report this incident to the dean. Switching off the light, the regret of not taking two ibuprofen knocked against my temples.

Sigur Rós and sensibilities

In an unscientific survey conducted by me into my own grading habits, it was revealed that students receive noticeably higher grades when I listen to Sigur Rós. The how and the why remain elusive. The wide range of emotion? The strings? the vocals? Difficult to pinpoint. Anyway, speaking of students, this semester began well. I’m a little tired though.

The semester also brought back the Hope College students. This makes me happy because the they bring back a scholarly atmosphere to my local coffee haunt. Being around people reading books, studying and writing essays helps keep me focused on my own tasks. Breathing reminders that what I’m doing matters. During the summer it’s a smattering of older local folks and hordes of high school kids. High schoolers ought to be in cages when not in class or at a minimum-wage job. Do they accomplish anything other than pissing off everybody around them?

A handful of my students complained in their journals about Blackboard; specifically, that they don’t like it, they lack consistent access to a computer, and believing that I should teach its use. That all strikes me as the mewling of kittens. The college pays for a helpdesk to support IT and software problems. Ask them. Would these same students complain that their bosses at their jobs should teach them the work? What kills me most is one who wrote that I should change teaching practices to better suit his needs. Laugh. Privileged bastard. Who thinks like this? “No officer, I did not stop at the sign because it was not convenient for me to do so.” Write that on the ticket’s backside and send it off to the courthouse. The clerks always appreciate a good laugh.

Work on the house continues if the pace is jerk-and-stop. The passthrough between the living room and kitchen is cut. Hanging the drywall on the kitchen side hasn’t yet happened. No paint yet, either. Right now my kitchen is barely functional. I tore out the cabinets on the east side two months back and tore out the other side yesterday. I’m hoping that Adam will have time soon to help with the drywall and cut out the cabinets on the sink’s right side. I’m dying to get the kitchen into something functional... and ready for a bit of goddamn personality. At times I want to call a professional re-modelling organisation and throw a couple thousand dollars at them. I don’t have a couple thousand dollars to throw. People warned me about the perverse combination of glacial pace and piecemeal finances involved with owning a house. I wanted so much to disbelieve. The living room is a headache located in a far off future realm of terror that maybe will come ashore this winter. A big problem is that I lack a sense of style. A friend in Ann Arbor, who also recently bought a house, mentioned in conversation that some piece of furniture ‘didn’t match the house.’ He used it as a throw away comment but it panicked me. I thought the piece in question was lovely and would kill to have it. Did this mean I like the wrong things or that I have no sense of what works and does not?

A short stack of things are graded. A larger stack remains. Back into the beautiful sun, on the bike, to home. Ryu will want a walk and a short stack of chores need done.

Todaybour Day is a Labour Day

The hospital released Derrick this afternoon, sooner than either of us expected. Hospitals do that. They tamp down expectations so low that when exceeding them produces an asymmetrical happiness. They look like saints, take the gratitude with a stoicism I can’t begin to describe but dislike anyway, and off one goes to the parking garage. I don’t like hospitals. “To this end, we all must come,” I can’t help think. The old, infirm; the lame. This afternoon I saw a woman in her twenties weeping in the hallway. She perched in a vestibule that had more business as a bookshelf then a place of grief. Her hand over her mouth, was it there to muffle the sob or some more basic, instinctual gesture? I felt terrible for her. I looked at her as I passed. I owed it to her. To acknowledge her grief. I hear you and see you and I am so, so sorry for whatever has happened. A story I read (or heard on NPR?) years back taught me a lesson: that homeless people are, in fact, people that deserve recognition. “The worst thing a person could do,” a former homeless person said, “is to ignore me.” We are still people, he went on, and deserve the simplest gesture of recognising our existence. Being ignored was worse than being told “no” to a request for change or told to “get a job” or “get the fuck out of my way.” Those are words directed at a person and confirmed that person’s existence. I heard the woman maybe twenty seconds before I saw her. My back stiffened and I threw out my chest, the way I do if wanting to impress an attractive man walking the opposite way. I can do this. Do not look down. Don’t. She’s right there. Her eyes cast downward, her hand over her mouth, she sobbed. Seated upon the ridge, her feet dangled a good foot from the hospital corridor floor. She’s a child, I think to myself. I looked her full in the face in the moment allowed by my velocity and her immobility. Her eyes cast downward, hand over her mouth, she sobbed, and then I reached the door to the stairs. I did the right thing, regardless of her knowing or acknowledging. She and I were the youngest people in 3rd floor, north wing, at 115p on a Sunday holiday weekend mid-60s after a heavy fog and promising winds. What was I thinking about before I heard her aching?

Seeing South Africa

Tonight I saw the film ‘District 9’. It’s a “sci-fi thriller” that takes place in a contemporary Johannesburg hosting a refugee of aliens. Actual extraterrestrials, not the legal sort -- though the distinction is largely blurred as the film progresses. Anyway, I loved this film. It made me angry, embarrassed, regretful and lonely depending on the scene. Mostly, the film provoked an (I swear, this pun isn’t intentional) alienation: I miss South Africa despite never setting foot upon its soil or the soil of its mother continent. The characters’ strong English South African dialect, the Afrikaans names and phrases peppered into the dialogue (“tot siens, tot siens!”), the clicking of the Xhosa and Zulu speakers mixed with the clicking of the aliens. Where is Nico DeVilliers, I wondered? Where in Europe is the tall Afrikaner musician? Alles van die beste, my vriend.

Tonight I brought the most recent edition of Harpers to read. Ah, South Africa you’re there as well! A new short story by J.M. Coetzee; another essay from Breyten Breytenbach. Coetzee’s story makes me laugh -- the old, crazy man. When is your next novel? Will it be set in South Africa? I never finished reading ‘Slow Man,’ because it bored me to death. Can you maybe write -- for me -- another Elizabeth Costello? Breyten, I liked your March 2009 essay “Obamandela” so much that I felt a double thrill when the Very Old Man’s foundation nearly accused you of slander. You won’t mind, you terrifyingly smart ex-convict, that I use your ‘seven months pregnant’ joke. Ek kan, ja?. Mooi bly.

I miss South Africa, terribly. Ek nie kom van Suid-Afrika af. Ek leer die literatuur Suid-Afrikaanse in Amerika. Mooi bly.

Tot siens, tot siens!

Addicted to nuts

I cannot stop eating. I cannot stop eating the almond/pecan concoction made by the True North snack company. This is not a shill. These nutty snacks come in adorable squares. Five of the squares is a single serving. Each day at the office I eat at least two servings. I lock the drawer in which they reside to prevent over-eating. They’re fucking addictive. Healthy and delicious? Hell, yes! Overdoing it? Shit, please no. I’ve never smoked or freebased heroin but I am reasonably sure that these nutty squares compete with those things in terms of a person absolutely needing to have it in their bodies.

A colleague had a bag of these in a box during a recent office move. I saw them, was very hungry, and sneaked out a few cubes. Immediately hooked, I snagged a handful, leaving behind an apologetic note and a request for purchasing information. Sorry for taking your snacks and where can I buy my own? She noticed a week later, agreeing to pick up two bags for me when she next went to Sam’s Club. A beautiful arrangement. I get delicious snacks while avoiding the horrible breathing Hell mouth of Sam’s Club. Everybody wins! I’m reminded that I’ve yet to reimburse her for the bags. I win!

Comparisons

I performed some perfunctory, grossly unscientific research into which foods are ‘fat burners.’ Supposedly, some foods are the metabolic versions of Devastator: individually they do exceedingly little but together they form a piss-your-pants terrifying juggernaut of fat annihilation. I plopped the words “foods that burn fat” into Google, which kicked back some depressing results: lots of generic, bland websites with loudly obvious URLS: www.burn-fat-now.com, www.e-diets.com and others. These domain names are designed not to promote education amongst the web-browsing public but, rather, to generate revenue for the site owners and their greasy-slick revenue-mongering advertisers. Some “scientifically proven” weight loss pill that the Norwegian population uses since 1930 to be beautiful; a vaguely Latin or Chinese berry mixture that “melts” one’s stubborn belly fat. Anyway, the sites did contain lists of food somewhere amongst the spam (no pun intended). The lists were not terribly surprising in their content. What surprised me was the scant overlap amongst them. It seems odd that sites culled together by Google’s search algorithm for this admittedly un-precise criteria had so little in common. Here’s a list of the foods the sites suggested burn away body fat, presented in no particular order: beets, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cherries, orange-flesh melons, whole grains including oats, berries, asparagus, soybeans, apples, eggs, low-fat milk and cheese, beans, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, ginger, citrus, bananas, and garlic. The three items that made the list which surprised are the spices. Cayenne pepper? Look. I know that correlation is not causation but nowhere in my humbly huge breadth of experience is there a link to svelte bodies and Cajun cooking. Ditto for cinnamon (Cinnabon, anyone?). Ginger seems fine (in the interest of disclosure, I ate ginger stir-fry vegetables for lunch today. Please support Spice of Thai restaurant by purchasing their delicious foodstuffs. Tell Sue that Don sent you. She will not give a discount for any reason, so do not try). Anyway, the list is obvious. Eat fruit and vegetables, say school lunch posters and middle-upper class moms everywhere. Adhering to eating only the foods on this list requires one to be vegetarian, so, ahem, shouldn’t I be as thick as a toothpick? (now, in the interest of fairness, one site did mention lean meat but with the caveat that lean meat is expensive and likely outside the budgets of most people.) What interests me is the few items which overlapped from site to site: whole grains / oatmeal, 1% milk, apples, berries and soybeans.

I eat these by quantity of buckets. Good for me!

Lo más triste

In March, I met an old acquaintance for breakfast in Saugatuck, as is our custom when I am single and our gets-together raise no (unnecessary) suspicions. He’s a writer but trained as an engineer and travels the country often for both career needs. He’s an amiable guy, makes for good company. With whom else can I talk about writing and learn about publishing? That’s the format for breakfast: catch up on events either one cares to share, followed by what books we read since and what news of his developing manuscript. This March morning, he surprised me by picked up a conversation from the year prior. We discussed one of his characters -- which is to say that I interrogated him about the character -- while strolling along the Singapore Yacht wharf. The day shone brightly. The sun’s light poured from the sky; it bounced from the water and boat hulls. My acquaintance justified his character’s behaviour, as my mind wandered. Half-listening to an imaginary biography, half-staring across the Kalamazoo River he caught me out: what are you thinking about? Your character is going to kill himself, I said, not directly at him but at a vague point on the opposite shore. What?! No he isn’t.. wait, why do you think that? The tone of his voice, an uncommon mix of scandal and pleasant surprise, should have woken me fully to my surroundings; rather, it made me more introspective, curious of the forming thought I shared prematurely. He persisted through my silence. Do you know Virginia Woolf? No, he says, should I? Yes. Your character reminds me of Woolf’s character Mrs Dalloway. A perfectly normal, good and reasonable person living her good life and doing good things. She’s so normal that when one wonders -- 50 pages in -- why Woolf dedicates a novel to the maudlin personality, *bang* Dalloway says that she’ll kill herself. It’s something nobody in her world will expect. So more shocking for the lack of intended explanation. It simply takes place. No rhyme, reason. Your character reminds me of her. A normal life, no tangible sources of discontent and certainly no suffering; the bills are paid, the lovely accoutrements bought and shown, acquaintances maintained but undeveloped: somebody so suffocatingly good and normal, it cannot survive. Whatever else I said to the poor writer is lost from memory. In all fairness, the reaction came out of Mrs Dalloway than my companion’s character description. I was being unfair again. My character won’t kill himself. I don’t want to kill him, he said. Than give the poor bastard a reason to live. Let him access to something -- anything -- to which he can anchor his life, even if that anchor is a goddamn lie. Shit, give him religion, I said -- again, unfairly.

Return to this March. Return to the mediocre Saugatuck restaurant. Do you still struggle with those feelings, he asks. Not since I read “The Bell Jar.” Do you know it? He shakes his head. It kills me that this writer is unfamiliar with the classics. No judgement implied or intended, simple wonder. He gets a brief review of Sylvia Plath’s novel about a charming, sophisticated young college woman working up the social and economic ladder. Then, her life falls apart. It swings in vicious circles. Her centre cannot hold. The artifices of her identity snap at the joints. She repeatedly fails to kill herself and repeatedly fails to offer an explanation to the one question asked of her: why? Why do you want to kill yourself? Why do you feel like this? Why do you make your mother suffer worrying about you? I read this novel early summer of 2008 and almost entirely on the patio of Lemonjello’s in Holland. At times, the book drove me out of my seat to pace the small concrete space (Paul Mason’s stories collected in Head Cases also had this effect on me). Plath’s book felt from then on like a bulwark to the creeping voice urging terrible action. The protagonist... I read so damned much of myself in her: the tedium of living irrationally in a rational environment. Being a successful person by nearly all objective standards yet actively jettisoning those standards as suffocating traps. The poor, barely white-trash child makes good in the competitive , socially divisive world. No, I tell the writer with confidence. I don’t have those feelings any more. “The Bell Jar” accomplished what the therapy and medication did not. Having said that, this salad is so shitty it makes me suicidal to have to pay for it. We laugh. It looks like a shitty salad, he agrees.

I spoke too soon.

It’s happening again. That clarion voice speaking. You are going to kill yourself. Thursday at Meijer, while looking at peanut butter. It began a month ago, just before I signed the mortgage. Easily dismissed. If I die, who will pay the mortgage? The credit union would be furious. Chuckle, ha ha. Its intensity builds, as each time previous to this. Comparing peanut butter prices, the voice WHY NOT KILL YOURSELF was so loud that my head jerked sideways, the way it does when a fly comes near the ear, and then pinched the bridge of my nose as if to stifle a sneeze. These two movements, in rapid succession, disturbed me far more than the provoking thought. A perverse, psycho-somatic reaction. It keeps happening. The college administration would be furious if forced to find a replacement for my two already in progress summer courses.

I hope that the writer doesn’t ask me about this next time we have breakfast.