Not Even Not Zen 441: Biomythography - Note 147, Competitive Writing

Competitive Writing

The class was advertised as creative writing. We auditioned with stories about ‘an egg,’ each no more than five hundred words long. Everyone got the same story prompt for the audition. It was a decent way to limit class size. A year earlier in my quantum mechanics class, the professor let everyone attend. After two weeks, he enrolled everyone who hadn't given up. But in the arts, Hampshire College classes had to proceed differently. A professor couldn’t let a hundred students carry in their manuscripts about alienation, rain, childhood trauma, and eggs and then hope only twenty would stay.

Lynne Hanley, our newest writing professor at the college, had to know writing classes were the most popular type of course on campus. Even if she had been willing to punish herself with yards of typewritten manuscripts weekly, there were factors to consider like 'how many students will fit into this room?' For a host of practical reasons, including fire codes, Lynne had to impose a limit.

Submitting audition stories struck me as better than holding a lottery. Maybe I felt that way because I had already lost a class lottery. And with the auditions, I got in.

On the first day, the professor asked me to read my audition piece aloud. This was alarming, due to my previous writing class experiences. Those were workshops wherein the operating philosophy was: no sentence should survive. Students would go through a manuscript line by line as if they were members of a special literary police unit. Sometimes it was helpful. Sometimes it was a competitive sport. Sometimes, students would find flaws in great writing not because the sentences and paragraphs weren't strong but because finding flaws was what we were supposed to do. I think it felt even-handed, to some.

But this time, people liked the story. There was even a small burst of applause, the academic equivalent of being told by surgeons that they see no immediate reason for concern. I relaxed. At the end of the class, after the readings and discussions had finished, I thanked everybody and said I would keep their comments in mind when revising.

Professor Hanley's eyes widened.

"Oh, I almost forgot," she said. "We will not be doing revisions in this class."

For a moment, I opened my mouth to object. But that was me trying to stick up for the force of my habits. Writing and endless revision went together like college and debt, to my mind. I'd been trained to believe every piece of writing must be polished until it glowed like a jewel or it caught fire from the friction and burned the author's house down.

As the next couple of weeks went by, I started to understand the system. This class emphasized first drafts and momentum. Instead of spending six geological eras polishing one paragraph, we wrote new things. It was strange, but it was good. Compared to the earlier writing classes I'd taken at a faraway university, at Hampshire, and at Amherst, Lynne Hanley's class was speedier and more productive. The Hampshire writers remained enthusiastic, too. They were willing to work, including doing the kinds of work - and the sheer amounts - it takes to improve.

In the fourth class, though, Professor Hanley said we would do something different.

"Someone in our class has been writing songs," she said. "And I think we should listen to some of his writing and give him comments in the way writers do."

Inwardly, I winced at the announcement. I had written songs for high school and college garage bands but I knew I wasn't good at the arrangements. In my head, the instrumentation and harmonies sounded wonderful. On the page, I gave up. I couldn't make enough sense out of the musical notation. Nor, for that matter, could I play five or six instruments - and certainly not at once. Songwriting, I knew, was not just poetry with a guitar leaning against it. It required additional powers. It was the difference between being able to hammer one board into another and being personally responsible for the plumbing, wiring, roofing, windows, and whatever else it takes to make sure a house doesn't fall over.

After class, a couple of students and I talked about this development.

"You know his father," one young woman said, and she named someone famous. He was a musician whose songs I hadn't heard and yet, she was right, I knew his name. He was famous.

The other student reacted as college students do when celebrity brushes the outer edge of campus life.

"That's amazing," she said.

It was, in a way, but it didn't encourage me. Maybe our song-writing student would be relatively expert. But maybe not. Also, he might be self-indulgent and overly forgiving of his own flaws. I had known a few children of successful people. Some of them seemed driven to achieve great things, which was interesting, but some seemed to assume they had already achieved them, which was not.

The next time, as I walked toward the room in Prescott where our writing class met, I remembered I was going to listen to songs. I prepared myself emotionally to hear something terrible. I assumed there would be at least one major defect: clumsy lyrics, awkward melody, embarrassing instrumentation, or the general unfinished quality common to art made by people who are, after all, still teenagers and do not yet command a full studio orchestra with backup singers working for union scale.

After we took our seats, Professor Hanley started the class normally. We reviewed a brief slate of stories. Then she nodded to a dark-haired young man. He pulled out a boombox. After some problem with the power cord, which had gotten disconnected as people shuffled around during class, the fellow pressed play.

His song came out. And it was a finished one. Not "promising." Not "interesting." Finished. He had laid down tracks in a studio, somehow. This was not a guy strumming uncertainly to a single tape recorder in his dorm room. This was finished work. Within about a minute I realized I was not remotely qualified to critique the arrangement. I could barely scribble out partial versions of vocals and strum a few chords.

I strained to listen to the lyrics closer. Those, at least, I would be comfortable with. But it's hard to criticize words you can’t discern. And mostly, I couldn't. Lyrics on a recording do not line up neatly on a printed page. They do not give you a chance to scan ahead or return to an earlier verse to review a line again.

Abruptly, the young man pressed the stop button on the boombox. The song was over. What could I say? I didn't have even token criticism in mind. And then all the class poured in and gushed with praise.

As usual, I felt like I should pick through the words with a comb as if this had been any other piece of fiction writing from the class. But I realized, well, my response was mostly just my old habits. I was trying to do what I had usually done. With some relief, I saw everyone else was going to discuss the song. It was a good song. Maybe I could just shut up.

Sometimes when I need to be quiet or to be patient, I practice meditation. This wasn’t one of those times. I really was just trying to shut up. And maybe not be so competitive. I was growing aware I should not always try to re-write a poem or a song in my head. Mostly, for a few minutes, I practiced shutting up and trying to get with the supportive culture of Hampshire College.

Not Even Not Zen 440: Biomythography - Note 146, In Common

In Common

I stepped through the doors, first in line.

"Go on," said Roberta. The brown haired woman tilted her head to the stairs. With her not-yet-used hole punch in her left hand, she waved me through.

I was on the minimum meal plan at the Hampshire College dining commons, so I was usually hungry by dinner. Roberta knew it. She let me go through without punching my meal ticket about half the time if I was among the first to report. That way, she let me eat a few lunches during the week.

Every time she punched my ticket at lunch, it seemed to make her happy.

I put the meal pass back into my wallet and turned down the steps to the front-kitchen meal line. Unfortunately, I already knew from the eye-watering odors that I wasn't going to find anything I liked. There are only three things worse than eating a skunk, I guess, and those are: cooked squash, cooked eggplant, and cooked carrots. It's astonishing how carrots are transformed into a force for evil by the act of cooking. When they're raw, they're tasty.

Possessed by chaos spirits, the chefs had added carrots to otherwise fine spaghetti.

Tray in hand, I marched around to the back kitchen in the hope there would be something tasty and hot. The attendant waved me in. He gave me a big smile as I picked up a plate of spinach pie. (Other students called it spanikopita.) Then I smelled the pie. It reeked. I put the plate back where I'd gotten it. I crouched and squinted.

The pie was spinach and squash. Inedible.

A few minutes later, I found a place in the middle room of the dining commons. One drawback of arriving early was that I sat alone. A benefit, though, was I sat alone - sometimes with my writing pad or a paperback.

I was staring off into space, not writing, when a short, cute woman poked her head through the middle room doors. She spied me, gave an uncertain smile, and made a decision. She stepped in.

“Mind if I sit here?”

"Not at all!" 

She lived on the hall near my girlfriend. Her name was Annette. All I knew about her so far was she seemed smart, funny, and a little shy.

She started talking before she sat down. I tried to move a chair for her. She pulled up another. Her conversation seemed to come in bursts, each carefully measured, like leveled tablespoons of complete thoughts. When she gave me room to respond, she laughed at my responses. Her dark eyes seemed to sparkle.

To my dismay, Annette carried a plate of the forbidden spaghetti on her tray. She ignored it and took a sip of her drink. She eyed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"Why aren't you eating the dinner?" she asked.

I looked at the carrots in the marinara sauce. At this point in life, I sat quietly in meditation an awful lot and I didn't think I needed to use words, so I just gazed at carrots more meaningfully. You could smell them in the sour red sauce all over the dining commons.

“Well?” She indicated my sandwich with her water glass.

"Can't you tell how bad it is?" I replied after a few seconds.

She tilted her head to one side for a moment. She could smell it all right. She just hadn't thought it was as bad as I did. She chatted a while longer, hands pursed together. Her wit about her classes, professors, and life in general made me laugh. Finally, she picked up her fork.

"Wow." She chewed for a moment and, as if determined to prove me wrong, she swallowed. She looked me in the eye the whole time. I gagged a little as I imagined the taste. "Yeah, that's bad."

"The salad bar is the best thing in the dining hall." Today I felt particularly strongly about it.

She waved her arm and continued her thoughts on politics. I liked her gestures, graceful and quick. But her sarcastic opinions and general smart-assedness were even better. She paused at the finish of a complete thought and gazed down at her plate.

"I've never tasted spaghetti this bad," she observed. She gave her food a sort of disappointed smile and she was off again, conversationally, this time back to life in the dorms. As she described hanging out with her friends, I started to hope, just maybe, that I would fit in with them. They sounded great.

To my surprise, Annette stirred up another forkful of spaghetti, complete with a carrot. While checking me out to see if I was staring in horror, as I was, she popped it into her mouth. Again, she chewed - this time, slower.

"It really is awful." She frowned.

I stared in astonishment. She had eaten the cooked carrot.

"If you don't mind my asking." I put down my sandwich. "After you said it was bad the first time, why did you take a second bite?"

She barked out a laugh.

"To make sure I was right?" Her eyes sparkled. She got me laughing about this, too. "I couldn't quite believe it."

She stirred the spaghetti a third time.

"Fuck this," she said. She put down her fork. "I'm going to go make a peanut butter and jelly or something. Save my place?"

For the cutest smile and sharpest wit around? I would have been happy to wait as long as I could sit still. Longer, really, since that usually wasn’t long enough. 

"Sure!"

And when she walked away, I felt instantly bereft. Sometimes I felt lonely in the dining hall. This was a little like that but this time accompanied by a feeling of warmth, as if I could feel the layer of affection that underlies the world.

 

Not Even Not Zen 439: Poem - A Line of Children

A Line of Children 

Gently, I eased my car past a line of children
on a wide, white sidewalk in the city.
Each of them held to a colored rope as they walked.
A woman at each end of the line, front and back, 
hovered near, mother hens watching over 
their row of baby chicks.

And suddenly I was in a different age.

I was standing on a wide concrete deck,
like the wide sidewalk but at the edge of a pool.
Shielding my eyes from the harsh sun,
breathing in the chlorinated fumes.
I was wondering where my nephew Julian was.
The women watching him in the pool, 
how did they lose track of him? 

He was four years old. Four.

He was an articulate boy, a little shy, 
a gentle soul. He was kind to other children,
willing to share but happy to play alone,
a quiet touch with adults, and a great admirer 
of his cousin, my oldest son.

I remember the looks he gave my son.
his short, nimble fingers, his gestures,
his deep eyes, his walk, his smile.
Julian was going to be a great person.

This year, he would have been twenty-eight.




 - Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 438: Biomythography - Note 145, Getting the Job, Pt. 2

Getting the Job, Pt. II

My wife had needed a lot of support from me as she started her career. It took me four years of paying for her school, our house, and her hiring process for her to qualify for a full time gig. But after the big push, she had returned a lot of support for my job progress, too. It was how we lived - it's how a lot of families live. 

As soon as I started at the NIH, I was forced to accept a long commute. Ninety minutes, less or more depending on the weather, sitting in traffic developing middle-aged back pain. We got no paid lunch, so I spent twelve hours away each day including the car trips. Sometimes I spent more time from home when I stopped by the gym on my return. My wife supported my exercise - within the limits imposed on us by being two adults who needed to drive their children to events in the evenings.

Diane even encouraged me to try mock interviews as I applied for the new CIO job. She accompanied me when I made my appointments in the Hood College Career Center.

I'd worked at Hood College for six years. I had started, in fact, as the only computer programmer in the Career Center, one of four programmers on campus. It had been more than a decade since Hood but there was no doubt about the strength of the relationship. Even though most of my old friends there had moved on, the staff understood me as a former employee. They had heard about me working with their office to create their first two Internet sites. Now they were happy to help.

"How old are you?" said my mock interviewer, a woman who seemed unreasonably young. She dressed smartly in a gold-and-silver pantsuit. But when I was a graduate student, the staff had been older than me.

"Forty-five," I said.

"Perfect." She rapped her note cards against the table top. The cards were how she had been reminding herself of the interview questions. "That's the perfect age to move into leadership."

The concept escaped me but, when I met with Diane after the mock interviews, my wife heard the same statement. She turned to me and said, "Of course."

It was all part of her teamwork. On the way home, we talked about the concept of a promotion 'for the family.' We discussed it with the kids over dinner, even though they had no idea what was going on. We wanted them to understand the expensive suits. And the stakes. I practiced my interviewing in front of the kids in the hope they would learn something about the process.

Finally, the second interview rolled around. I drove down to the main NIH campus in Bethesda. On a large campus, it's easy to underestimate the time spent in marching from place to place. It's easy to get hot when hiking in a suit, too. After a mile or so, I wandered the halls of Building 31, lost, but cooling down, physically and mentally. I had plenty of time. When I arrived at the NCCAM offices, glass-walled and beautiful for a federal administrative space, the suite reminded me of the glass-walled meeting room where I'd had my first interview for this job

For half a minute, I talked with the receptionist. She directed me to the meeting room, where a woman in a suit stood facing the glass walls, studying the table. Even from behind her, I recognized she was my prospective boss. I had finally figured out which one she was. As I approached, she turned toward me. She did a double-take when she recognized me. She paused for a moment, stunned, and then beamed.

"You cleaned up well!" she exclaimed.

"Thanks." I put out a hand to meet hers as she reached to shake. "Sorry I was so tired last time. I had just finished a three day sprint of fixing a firewall. And I had to come right to the interview."

"Tell me about that." She glanced me up and down as if to make sure I'd dressed as well as it first appeared. "You were the Acting Deputy CIO?"

"Oh, yeah." I nodded. That had been an unofficial title but the work had been very real. I had done the job. there was no point in being modest about it now. I had accomplished projects at the NIH leadership level. In fact, I was known for it among the IT staff. My boss was not really in the computer business, though, so I needed to impress her with what I’d done.

We spoke for a few minutes. Then her deputy came to meet us. To both of them, but especially to my new boss, I tried to point out my advantages. In my roles at other institutes, I had learned how to do the CIO job in all respects except budget. I could launch into my work and produce visible progress from the first day. 

“What experience do you have with data calls?”

“Lots.” That was an easy question. Federal data calls got passed down to me a half-dozen times a year. 

Such higher-level requests hadn't existed when I started at the NIH - or at least they hadn't made it to the labs. One year, the HHS asked for a few spreadsheets. Next, the NIH got the idea to ask. Now everyone in IT around the clinic and labs spent a lot of time reporting upstream. 

I automated my reports when I could. Mostly, federal data calls involved spending, just stacks of columns without context, basically unusable for making decisions. However, lately you had to know the reasons for the spending, too, and write about them. Even some computer technicians didn't understand the difference between a 4-port firewall meant to protect a medical instrument and a 256-port firewall-switch meant to protect a block of labs. So the number of people who could report competently on everything was small. 

"The data calls have been taking up almost two full time people from my staff each year," she said. "I mean, it's a team of five, really, but it takes a lot of their time and they sure are complaining."

"That could be ..." I hesitated as I thought and as I wondered how my idea would be received, "because they don't have the right background."

"Yes!" Her voice rose with emphasis. "Exactly."

The discussion proceeded naturally (and energetically) from there. In my last few positions, I had been a member of IT teams with enough staff to share the workload of the data calls. Here, that wouldn't be the case. I was sure I could handle them on my own, though. My main worry was going up against the Deputy CIO (not an Acting title, I noticed) of Fannie Mae. Maybe that person didn't have any NIH experience and couldn't leap into action but I had no control over their prestige or the strengths they might bring to the job. All I knew, in the end, was I'd done well. 

Finally, a week later, I got called in for a follow-up. I wore the second suit. (It was being useful already!) This time, the Executive Officer introduced me to the Director of the Center. The Director had a fair bit to say. She and the EO interviewed me a little more but mostly the Director told me about the direction she was taking and how IT needed to fit into her plans. 

Afterwards, my boss took me outside to tell me that, as I suspected, I'd gotten the job. 

On my drive out of the NIH campus, I stopped at a light and thought about how this had become a family victory. I fumbled with my Blackberry. Diane deserved to know. She would want to hear right away. As I sat at the light, I dialed. My wife picked up after one ring.

"We made it," I said. "I got the job."

"Go team!" Diane shouted.

"Yeah!" Go team, I told myself. Well done, team. I took a deep breath and felt myself relax. Somehow this confirmed not being so taken for granted. I felt more supported as part of our team than ever before.