Mountains Made Low

Well, here it is 10:15 or so in the evening. I had big plans. I was going to do some writing tonight—offline writing; didn’t so much happen. I’ve promised KAS a comment on her most recent blog post; hasn’t so much happened yet. I was going to write a new post for my blog; well, maybe one out of three ain’t all that bad.

But it ain’t all that good, either.

The worst of it is, for me, I can’t really account for the hours between about 5 p.m. and now. I mean I know some of the stuff I did (primarily playing silly online word games with some friends, but also a phone call with a friend), but certainly that could not account for the five—count ‘em, FIVE—hours that I had intended to spend writing, tonight.

And it’s not that the inspiration fizzled, either. I actually want to write—especially considering that I last really wrote on this project a week ago tonight (which is hard to believe, but there has been an awful lot of grading in the past week or so). And after having spent the last two major writing sessions setting up and then writing an intricate (though, I’m told, not too graphic) sex scene, I’m actually eager to move on with other parts of the story now. (Don’t get me wrong, though, the love story is actually an important thread; so along with not being too graphic it’s also not gratuitous—some may object to the idea of falling in love through becoming lovers, but it happens, and it happens in my story.)

There are still, though, other threads that I’m eager to pick up. Threads that I haven’t really more than touched in 25+ manuscript pages (I did say intricate, right?). And that I need to pick up. Because it seems to me that what I’ve got right now is about 1/3 of a manuscript (according to the nifty little word counter in Word, I’m at about 49,000 right now).

Anyway, after a brief online chat with a different friend, it’s now about 10:45, and if I’m gonna write anything at all tonight (maybe for an hour or so? maybe?), I’d best get to it.

And that’s really all I know tonight. See you in October!

This morning, I made another of the wonderful trips outside of the state of Ohio to find an ATM that will allow me to deposit my paycheck in my bank account. Yes, I’ve once again been to Michigan on a fine Sunday morning, but the intent of this post is not to gripe about leaving the state to go to the bank or even having to do so.

I noticed, when first I made this trip two weeks ago, that there is a fascinating bridge that takes I-280 across a river near Toledo. I noticed it again today—not surprising since I drove across it twice more today. The visible supports for this bridge are all in the center, between the lanes of traffic, and they consist of a number of metal cylinders running diagonally from the plane of the bridge that is the surface of the roadway to one central concrete pylon. I’m not doing it justice with my description, of course, but it’s oddly beautiful, and it’s relatively new—the steel is still bright and shiny.

It’s fascinating.

And I want to photograph it.

But that thought led to another: When I was in Newcastle, in England, three years ago (has it really been that long?), I spent a rainy Saturday doing the tourist thing. I walked all over Newcastle and Gateshead and even took the train to Jarrow and Wallsend (this latter was a waste, as the Roman fort closes a half hour before dusk, which in those northern climes in November means 3:30 in the afternoon, and I arrived at 3:45). I walked all around the first three places, though, and I took lots of pictures; I think it ended up being hundreds of pictures (ain’t the digital age wonderful?).

Today, though, I thought of the fact that I spent a lot of time, on both the Newcastle and Gateshead sides of the River Tyne, taking pictures of the three bridges spanning the river in close proximity to one another. And fascinated by the differences between the Tyne Bridge—a steel beam structure that looks very pragmatic and solid in its sturdiness, built in the early-to-mid-20th century, and very representative of its time—and the Millennium Bridge—an arched, curved, cable suspension structure built to mark the turning of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium. One is very practical and beautiful in a very industrial age way (like the Eiffel Tower—which, I must say, I have little desire to actually see, other than to say I’ve seen it; maybe I’ll talk more about Paris some other time); the other is intentionally beautiful, to the point, perhaps, of the seeming exclusion of practicality—a bridge, after all, is meant to cross a river—but having walked across it, I can tell you it does work.

I was fascinated by the dichotomy of these two bridges though, which stand on the River Tyne, a mere five or seven or ten minute walk apart.

I was more fascinated today by my fascination with bridges—something I had never consciously noted in myself before.

And that’s when the mental postcard from my childhood arrived. I’m not saying, though, that this flash of memory from when I was 9 or 10 indicates the source of my apparent bridge fetish. No, I don’t think it’s necessarily that at all. But when I was a kid, I remember building a small wooden footbridge with my dad.

Actually, I remember trying, first, to build the bridge by myself. And failing miserably. I was thinking it was a project I could handle, and that it was very important to me that there should be a footbridge across the gully that ran through the 3+ acre hay field that went with the old farmhouse we lived in at the time, though I don’t remember why it should have been so important.

But it was important, and seeing the spectacular lack of success I was having with my efforts, my dad decided that he and I could undertake this project together. So we did. We built a stout bridge, based on landscape timbers and deck boards with railings on both sides (a feature I hadn’t considered). Then we moved it into place, and dug away at both ends so that the bridge would sit solid and level on the ground.

Though not from precisely the happiest time of my childhood, this was a happy memory, and I smiled at the thought of it as I drove across the bridge that occasioned this little picture postcard from the past.

Continuing my drive, though, I realized that I’d gotten this particular postcard before. Not in the same way, though, not as the memory of building and placing the bridge, the memory itself. Instead, I’ve remembered that little wooden footbridge in my imagination. In this case it was four or five years later when I was reading a book (Faerie Tale by Raymond Feist, if you want to know, and now I want to read it again—almost 20 years later). You see, in this book, the primary setting was described as rural, as an old farmhouse, but there was not really enough description of its interior or surroundings to form a good imaginative picture of them (and I don’t mean this as a flaw, because it wasn’t really necessary that there should be such a level of description). Today, I realized that, while reading as a teenager, I supplied a mind’s-eye picture of that place, with that same snapshot from my childhood: the old farmhouse where I had lived for two years.

Of course, I made some changes. The part of the hayfield on the far side of the gully was filled in with trees, as the story described, and a post and rail fence ran along the bottom of the hill on the near side of the gully, where Dad’s (always) oversized garden had been in reality. There was a gate set in this fence, and there, though the story didn’t demand it, on the far side of the gate stood my little footbridge, now leading to the path that disappeared up the hill on the other side leading into the woods that was never there, in reality. This was how I saw the story, where I saw its strange and supernatural events unfolding.

Reflecting on this, on both sides of my conversation this morning with that ATM in Michigan (still a surreal, if utterly mundane, feature of my real, current life), I got to wondering how much of how we see the world and our life is shaped by these snippets, these snapshots, these picture postcards from our childhood. How much of what I see around me, that is, of how I live and behave in the world, of what I expect out of life is based on what I experienced before the age of 5, of 10, of 15?

These may be questions worth further exploration in the future, but for today, and the memories of teenage reading aside, I’m grateful for my trip through Toledo, and the chain of memory that crossing an interesting bridge on the Interstate brought up in my mind. That little postcard from the past, from the summer or early fall of 1984 or the spring of 1985, did make me smile.

Amazing how that happens sometimes.

Two weeks ago when the #5 Ohio State Buckeyes traveled to Los Angeles to play the #1 USC Trojans, the team that the rankings—if not the hearts of Buckeye fans across the nation—said should have won did, indeed, win. It was ugly. It was a drubbing. And it was ugly some more.

But where it got ugliest was in the press, where the lack of respect afforded to the Ohio State football program specifically and Big Ten football in general turned it from a hideous loss in to an “unmasking” of the Buckeyes that revealed them for the pretenders to a top-5 ranking that they are in the eyes of the national media establishment, two consecutive trips to the BCS national title game (and three trips in the Tressel era) notwithstanding.

Now here we sit, two weeks later, and those same Trojans, who survived their bye week with their #1 ranking intact (no mean feat when those same Buckeyes have fallen in the standings the past three weeks, two of those downward moves following wins!), have been handed an embarrassing defeat by the unranked Beavers of Oregon State in their PAC-10 opener.

Let me say that again, so we’re clear: Unranked. Oregon State. Beavers.

USC was not beaten by Arizona, Oregon, or Cal—all teams who might have had a legitimate claim to the ability to defeat the Trojans on any given Saturday this fall, and all teams who now, along with Southern Cal, have a legitimate shot at the PAC-10 title.

When the new poll comes out, USC will clearly no longer be #1, though the invective surrounding their loss has not been as strident as the anti-Buckeye sentiment we saw two weeks ago. It’s clear, though, in the eyes of the voters that the Big Ten and the PAC-10 are “old school” and need to be cleared away. There is no respect for the history of the decades in which these two conferences defined NCAA football. Where the Rose Bowl was the national title game.

And maybe it has to do with the fact that these two conferences respected their tradition and told the BCS and their national title game to stick it for a number of years at the end of the last century. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that these two conferences have been so solid from top to almost bottom for so long that they’re taken for granted.

Mostly, I think it’s just about hating on programs that are always at least solid (Ohio State, Michigan, Wisconsin, Penn State, USC, Oregon, Arizona) when the teams you like, the teams in your conference can’t claim that. Call it jealousy. Call it sour grapes. Call it childish. Call it all those things—’cause that’s what it is.

So Southern Cal will not be #1 come Sunday night. And they shouldn’t be. But, and I’ll say this right now: One loss shouldn’t drop a team this good (and, damn, the Trojans are good this year) and farther in the polls than #5. Period. But I’m gonna predict a #7 ranking for the Trojans.

Beyond that, though, here’s the other thing to watch for. While the Big Ten gets no respect in the polling, and the PAC-10 doesn’t fare much better, I’ve been watching with interest as the golden child among collegiate football conferences of the late 1990s falls into a similar state of disregard in recent years. Yes, I’m talking about the Big 12. You watch, this week: With Southern Cal’s loss, even assuming an Oklahoma win, a winning Georgia team vaults over the Sooners in to first place. Moreover, don’t be surprised if both a winning Georgia team and a Florida team that lays a smack down on Ole Miss today perform those rankings gymnastics, landing #1 and #2.

Assuming wins (and real spanking of Ole Miss by the Gators) from the rest of the AP’s top 7 from last week, here’s what I expect to see tomorrow night: #1 Georgia, #2 Florida, #3 Oklahoma, #4 LSU, #5 Missouri, #6 Texas, and #7 USC. And I only expect Oklahoma to stay as high as three because launching three SEC teams over a winning Sooners club and to the top of the poll would be entirely too transparent. Even for these wackos.

Maybe.

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, and/or watching my status updates on Facebook, you’ll know I’ve been writing recently, outside of the blog, and outside of the “normal” academic world that I’ve tried to write for, with mixed success, in recent years. I’m working on a work of fiction, and I’ve statused on Facebook about progress—and lack thereof—for the past several weeks, and I’ve mentioned, here in the blog, some of the frustrations I’ve felt in terms of doing the writing (posts like the one about modeling writing for my students and the one about fictional characters come readily to mind).

Just an update, today. I wrote an even longer while back about the creative process, both in the arts in general and for me, and my writing, specifically. I raised some questions about inspiration, and how life circumstances impact the ideas of inspiration and creativity in general.

And if you’ve been keeping up, you probably know that I’ve been feeling a bit put off by the writing task I’ve set myself because of a specific place I had come to in the story, a—ahem!—particular scene that needed to be written in the story that I was not feeling in a particularly good place, in my own emotional life, for writing. I wasn’t sure, that is, if I was, myself, prepared to feel what I needed to feel to write the scene.

Yesterday, though, after a day in the office—teaching and grading (and writing a fair to middling blog post)—I came home, ate some supper, took a power nap, and powered through. I reread the last few pages I had written, to refresh the scene in my mind (I wrote them more than a week ago), and wrote about ten new pages last night. And they didn’t come out half bad (though until I did some rough editing this morning, the typos and things like subject-verb agreement in spots were way out of control!).

So I don’t think that what I wrote was half bad, and feeling what I needed to feel to write it, to put myself in the place to capture the emotions and sensations in words, wasn’t half bad either. In fact, I sort of enjoyed feeling those emotions, even if only to pour them into words on the page.

Live (and write!) and learn, I suppose.

Now, on to the rest of the story….

I have one bad habit—okay, addiction—that I’ll openly admit to, by which I mean that everyone who knows me, even a little bit, knows about it. And I have another bad habit that I’m a little more selective about who gets to know about it. But not much, really; it’s what you might call an “open secret.” There are those among my friends who would tell you have I have other unhealthy (bad!) habits (addictions!); but I’ll mostly deny that those things are addictions or even all that bad in the broader scheme.

I’ll also readily admit, though, that the “bad habits” I’ll confess to are, by and large, unhealthy. And that one should probably be given up entirely and the other at least cut back on. But as I’ve thought about that, I’ve also thought that I used to have many more bad/unhealthy habits than I do now. And I have changed those bad habits, given them up, and replaced them with “good” habits, or where the replacements aren’t quite habitual yet, at the very least healthier practices most of the time and good intentions.

I thought about this today as I was talking with a colleague (albeit while indulging one of those bad habits—I’ll leave it up to you to guess which, as either is as likely as the other just prior to a 9:30am class, really). And I thought about it because my new pants have become something of a running joke among my co-workers and colleagues here. So, of course, this colleague made a comment.

At this point, I’ll interject with my disappointment that after the second new pants post, no one asked the question that the post begged—and that I pretty much begged you to ask. About the size of the new pants. But that’s what it comes back to today, for me.

Most of my changed habits over the past several years involve diet and exercise, and I have much healthier habits now than I did 3½ years ago, or even 2 years ago. I’ve worked over those years to slowly and incrementally change those habits. And it’s paid off.

And here’s what I mean. Studies have shown that for men having a 40-inch (or larger) waist is a good predictor of all kinds of cardiovascular, pulmonary, and other (like diabetes) health problems. 40 is that magic number. Under it, and you’re at lower risk, over it and you’re at higher risk, among men with other similar risk factors.

Which is where the new pants come in. I’ve known for a long time that you can’t trust your jeans to tell you your waist measurement—the waist “measurement” on most jeans is much more a size than a true measurement, at this point. For me, there has always been a size differential between my jeans size and my size in “grown-up pants.” Not a huge differential, but a small one, nonetheless. And I’ve always assumed that the size in non-jeans pants is close to (if not always exactly) the actual waist measurement.

And this is what ties my healthier habits and my new pants all together. For the first time I can remember, the waist measurement in my non-jeans pants is under 40 inches—38 to be precise, and they fit(!!) and look good (or so I’m told as part of the running joke at work).

So even if I have some bad habits left—the kind and exact number remaining open to debate—I’ll dwell, instead, on the things I’m doing well and right, the healthy habits I’ve developed over the past 3+ years.

(And I’ll say that my short-term goal in terms good habits and their results from last spring has been met—actually was met a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m left only with my long term goal, the place where I’d like to land and stick. Something tells me that this goal, even though it’s not that far away, may be the hardest one to reach. I’m convinced, though, that my healthy habits, particularly as I work at making the exercise habit more habitual and less sporadic again, will get me there. When? Who knows. But sometime.)

I was getting some things done around the house today, and as I was doing that my mind started to wander…. Probably not surprising, really, because whenever I’m working with my muscles, my hands and my body, my brain tends to shift into a whole different gear. And my mind tends to wander, ranging to and fro, finding any number of things to kick around, but not really dwelling over much on any one thing.

Today, though, I found my mind focusing on things I need, jumping from one to the next. Some of these are material needs, some are emotional needs, and some are things I need to do. Regardless, here’s a list of ten things I need, in no particular order as to rank and with little or no commentary on them—most of them are pretty self-explanatory, anyway.

• A waterer for Tigger that circulates the water.
• To pick my bike up from the bike shop before the weather turns for good.
• More hours in the day, every day.
• To mow the grass.
• Everything in my house sorted, organized, and put away.
• To go to the gym regularly, as opposed to sporadically.
• Patience.
• More than one night’s good sleep in a row.
• The love of a good woman.
• To get my grill set up, again before the weather turns for good.

Beyond that, it was a day for the body to work and the mind to rest, which is not a bad deal on occasion.

I’m sort of amazed by the fact that my post earlier in the week about my recurring dream has generated as much chatter as it has—almost none of it on the blog itself. (KAS did post a very sweet comment, of course, and I’m happy to know that she thinks that highly of me, though I don’t necessarily 100% agree with her assessment of the situation.) I’ve gotten a lot of “back channel” commentary on the post though: email, IMs, and other ways of commenting that aren’t quite as public as the blog—at least more such chatter than my posts generally engender. Usually, after all, when people have something to say about a blog post, they comment on the blog post.

And the people who have commented seem to be taking the dream, particularly given its continuing recurrence over the span of years, quite seriously. Of course, I found it important—at least intriguing—enough to post (after having written the post early Sunday, thought it over for 24 hours, and sought pre-posting feedback from two friends).

So I thought I’d clarify. There are two elements of the dream that are at least somewhat shocking to me in my waking life. One is probably quite obvious to anyone who’s read here for a while. That is, quite simply put, in the span of time I’ve been having this dream, kids have not been in my plan; not that the prospects for such things have been limited in that span (though they have), but that I’ve really thought that having and raising kids was not in my plan, even if the prospects were there. I’m quite happy being an uncle to my sister’s two amazing kids, thank you very much. That, I had thought, and still think, is quite enough for me.

The second thing is, of course, that the little girl in the dream has “my eyes.” There was a time in my life when kids were in the plan. And while the discussion on this topic was on-going at that time, I always had sort of assumed that any kids in my future would be adopted.

I say this because I’m adopted, and for all the challenges that you hear about (mostly overblown, to my way of thinking) in raising adopted kids, my parents did a wonderful job raising me. I have always thought that, if I were to take on this child-raising thing, I’d want to do what my parents did: take in a child who needs a loving home, and provide that home.

But, like I’ve said, there was an on-going discussion. And I was open to that discussion. In part, this has to do with the fact (as crass as it sounds—but remember: I’m adopted) that I’ve always thought that homemade gifts are better than store-bought ones. And what is a child, really, but a gift of love that two people give each other?

Please remember that, as I write this, I’m speaking as a “store-bought” kid. It doesn’t mean that I think my parents thought of me any differently than my sister (who’s “homemade”), that I thought they loved me less, or treated her better. Quite the opposite, in fact; which is my point in bringing it up.

People believe that there’s something special about the bond between parents and “homemade” kids. That there’s something important in that bond. I can’t say aye, no, or maybe to that, since I’ve never experienced it from either angle. But I have experienced being adopted from the child’s side, and I can say that I don’t feel any the poorer for having been raised by people who chose to open their home, their lives, and their hearts to me; people who welcomed me and became my parents. People who never treated me any different from my sister, who came along a couple of years later and was “their own.”

I never saw any difference from my end, so I always believed that—if there are kids in my future—I (well, I am always part of a we in this line of thinking) would adopt them. Lots of kids in this world who need homes, who need parents, who need families, who need love, after all.

So I’m shocked by the dream image of a child looking back at me with my eyes. That possibility, in the past, always remained under discussion, but it was never really real to me. I’ve looked at dream dictionaries, which seem to say that dreaming about a child you don’t have is about you, and had insights offered (like KAS’s idea of the dream being my subconscious way of telling myself something about me). And I just don’t know. That, though, is why I blogged about it…. To try to figure it out, sure, but also just because it has been so shocking to me over the past couple of years. I have no idea what to do with the images.

So, of course, I put it out there. And writing about it, now twice, hasn’t really garnered me any insights. It has, however, netted a couple of good conversations. At it’s root, I’ve put it out there primarily because it’s caused me to question more than one thing (the two surprising points) that I thought I pretty clearly knew about myself. Hasn’t changed my thinking yet, but it’s got me thinking about a matter I was pretty sure (okay, damn sure—100% sure) was closed in my mind.

And you know me: always thinking out loud—or at least on the blog.