The shorter version of a flea flicker.
It really only makes sense if you are watching football with your wife who has been sick for a full week.
It only matters if your couch can accommodate two sets of legs simultaneously.
It is only funny if the stress of children and housework and work work have already melted away a few hours earlier.
When working in a middle school that only serves 7th and 8th graders you can do something once and it is launched as a tradition. When the 7th graders become 8th graders, they will expect the major events to remain mostly unchanged and the new 7th graders will not know what to expect so they follow the lead of those 8th graders. You can hold a single pep rally and it will become an institution. You can make a single mistake and everyone will believe it to be the norm. You can reinvent traditions every year, but more likely you will just keep on building on them until an entire generation of children believe the 5k walk and run known as the Cougar Prowl has always existed.
Things do not work quite so quickly with our own children.
We have to carefully craft and cultivate the traditions every year as their memories of holidays and birthdays all blend together into one great summary of their life with us. For better or worse, traditions take a lot of work. I didn’t want anything to do with them when I was young, but I see how they are some of the best treasures and most rewarding hiding places to stow away your hopes for your family.
Upstairs, my brother and sister-in-law, my wife and two children are putting up a tree. It is a tree that was given to us by my wife’s mentor as she was starting to get sick from cancer. The lights are being carefully intertwined within its branches by my sister-in-law. The plastic ornaments are being rolled down the steps by my children. The couch is being occupied by my brother. I’m thinking about how to pump holiday music into each set of speakers in our house. And were I to project out a few years down the road, I can’t really see this scene changing all that much.
The tradition of getting all of the ornaments tangled together isn’t going away.
The tradition of watching my children dance instead of eating their dinner will never go out of style.
The tradition of vacuuming up all of the fake pine needles from the 20 year old tree with color coded branches is too perfect to forget.
It isn’t so much that I want every festive gathering to be like this one, and it isn’t so much that today is more special than other days of putting up the tree. It is that I know the memory of this moment isn’t only a memory for this year. It is one that will perpetuate and grow out of my children’s childhood and my parenthood.
Here is how I know:
I’m sitting here, typing on this computer for the 338th day in a row. I won’t remember writing this piece or having this moment in 5 years. But watching the tree as it is being built with everyone in our family looking up at what we are creating together is something that we will pursue throughout the year. It is something that isn’t specific to one night or even to the tree. We build things and watch them in awe. We do this as a family. We do it because it feels like home.
And we all want to be home, no matter how far away my children move or how distracted we get from setting up the season.
Purchase a ridiculous fake mustache and wear it as penance.
The space between the statement of the task and the completion of that task is infinite. It is the one place where all of our fear and hopelessness exists. It is where we doubt ourselves and find ourselves inadequate. It the space that spits out our evenings as the waste of fruitless tangents, leading to nothing of consequence. It is the back-breaking open ended question of how we get from point A to point B. Even if you know what you are doing, the moments in between the ask and the answer are treacherous. Each deadline is a trap, a complete time-suck that forces attention and eschews free will. We are bent toward the timeline, no matter the cost to sleep or sanity.
And that’s the good stuff.
Without such deadlines, we are nothing. We are aimless and grasping at anything to give structure to the maddening everything in front of us. Without tasks to accomplish, we are never really awake and aware of those around us. We wait and wait and wait. We hope and do not receive. The deadline is a perfect opponent to wrestle. Without it, we are just writhing on the floor with ourselves. We have nothing to reflect upon or accomplishments to be proud of.
It is the submit button that tells our story. It is what we turn in and post that defines us. It is the conduit of information from one person to another that ends up being what ties us together. It suspends us above the precipice of empty days and restless nights.
Even as I maintain my agony over each submission, I know that it is helping me. Every presentation and blog post and email is pushing me forward until I am riding on a crest of contribution and enjoying every moment. The space between action items and due dates also contains all of the people that I want to spend my life with. My children are in that space, always trying to figure out something new, always trying to push some boundary until it is time to go to school or come home or go to the bathroom. My wife is there, ready to balance our home, her studies and her passion for making everyone better than they currently are. My coworkers are there too. And our combined stress of getting things done and rubbing our braincells together is enough to light from one side of the chasm to the other.
I am thankful for my deadlines. I will gladly share them with anyone else who is interested in purpose and moving forward.
I used to write research papers in a single evening. I would slog on through 20 pages, even if it meant pulling an all-nighter. To me, it wasn’t a question of sleep or of planning, it was a matter of continuity. I wanted the first draft of anything that I was doing to be done in a single mindset. Surely, it would get better over time, but plowing through a set of research and having a single thesis could only be done in one night. I would write out starts of sentences, I would rewrite the first paragraph 20 times. I would brainstorm behind my cursor for hours. And then I would write. I would write so much and so fast that it seemed there was nothing more important than the next words coming across the screen. All of my fast typing skills from instant messaging my friends on IRC in middle school payed off in these long sessions. When I had a thought, it would almost create itself, coming shooting out of my fingertips across those keys. It was all I could do to keep the momentum and the pressure of my mind on the topic at hand. It was all about the rest of the clean white page. I had to fill it, at all costs.
The one thing I never did, though, was fill it with extra space. I would never double space my work until I was finished. I knew that writing two pages with narrow margins and double spaced paragraphs was cheating. It was letting the length limit dictate my writing. It was letting the confines of the platform tell me when to stop. And stopping wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to write until the ideas would no longer come. Until I proved my point, I couldn’t be done. That moment, though, of selecting all of the text I had just crafted and pushing the lines away from one another was sweet satisfaction. It was made everything right, even if I knew there were still grammatical and logical errors in my work. That decision set more than the type. It made it so that everyone could see just how expansive my arguments were and just how much work I had done in my overnight experience.
And I would print out my essays and reports and short stories so that they could be read and commented on by my capable professors. They required this convention so that each one of them could add their critique within the letters I had cobbled together. They literally wanted to read and write in between my lines.
I wonder if this experience is a lost contentment. Will those in the future of digital submissions and blog post reflections ever know what it is to be done, to double space and set things right with the world? Will they ever be able to write on their own without the distractions of Facebook messages or texts? Will there be a moment in the early hours of the morning where the triumph over a single topic is so absolute that you can grab each line and stretch it out into two?
Probably not.
Probably the future of text is in the hyperlink and not in the format. Double spacing probably won’t mean anything to my children. Hand written comments will give way to metadata. It will be tagged and annotated, not red penned. I think this is overall a wonderful advance into a brave new tomorrow where there is no such thing as losing a story due to hard drive failure or losing a notebook. The blog, though, is no substitute for the quiet victory of typesetting a momentary masterpiece. The moment where content gives way to margin play is one I will miss. It is a subtle loss, but a loss just the same.
We currently own the most comfortable couch that I can ever hope to have. While not immediately plush and inviting, it is the kind of couch that deceptively lulls you to sleep with its firm support and ability to fully stretch out in a number of different directions. And then there is the corner. Where this traditional l-shaped wonder is most magnificent is in the corner that leaves no shoulders stressed or mind worried. This corner has basically been claimed by my wife ever since we got it 4 months ago. Having just paid off the bill, it is almost completely hers. We are not productive on this couch. We are watchers of entire TV seasons in one sitting. On this couch, we know nothing but the casual glance up at the clock and the inevitable shock of just how late it has gotten.
I wonder at our purchase, now. I wonder at just how many meals are going to be consumed on the couch because of how easy it is to make picnics within the L. I think about all of the forts that have already been constructed for my children with no regard for the utility of this piece of furniture. The naps that will be had are too many to count.
Should we have gotten two couches like we had before so that no two people could accidentally sleep end to end until 4 am when we decide it is time to crawl up to your bedroom? Should we have gotten an intentionally uncomfortable couch so that we don’t sit for long periods of time chipping away at the world’s store of great acting?
I submit that a comfortable couch is essential. I believe that whatever life we are giving up by daily relaxing and sinking into that deep mocha fabric is not worth living. The world that exists outside of comfortable couches is nothing to be concerned with. It is for those who write thank you cards after coming home from a party. It is for those who converse about lawn maintenance for over an hour if given the chance.
Comfortable couches are for those of us who believe in pressure and release. They are for those of us who root for one another to be always be better, while knowing all the while that we can crash if we need to. They are for those of us who don’t want to ever be accused of not knowing what we have until its gone.
We know what it means to be still. We know what it means to enjoy each others company. And we do it. Every day.
As I sat in my grandmother’s dining room table, I knew that there was something very different about the evening’s events. There wasn’t going to be a rousing game of cards or a big football game to watch. There was something much more subdued going on that was difficult for my 6 year old brain to put together. At one point, my aunt came out with these buttons that had a big red circle with a line going through it. The drawing of what they were against was ominous but entirely unfamiliar, though, so I asked what was happening.
My mother told me that some people wanted to put in a trash incinerator near my grandmother’s house and that a few people were going to get together and talk about how they could make them stop. She said that they were wearing those pins to show that they didn’t want the incinerator. Immediately, I wanted to wear a button too. In my head, I imagined the trash burner being right next to the bedroom I slept in while I stayed ay my grandmother’s house every December. I did not want to smell burning trash as I was going to sleep.
I wanted to start my own 6 year old’s crusade throughout Chillicothe, Ohio. I knew nothing about the political, economic, or social underpinnings of either side of the argument, but because my family was against it, so was I. And we would have buttons to prove it.
That was the first time I saw how a single idea could be so universally understood as to have everyone immediately on board. The framing of the problem was simple. The answer to the question of “Do you want burning trash next to your house” is always going to be no. The other side doesn’t have buttons. Their case can only be made with cash in hand. The only way incinerators are built near housing is by way of compensation to the local government and the residents. It is a harder case to make, even so. There is no community that is going to stand up and fight for their right to burn trash. There are no after dinner meetings with concerned citizens who discuss ways to get more incinerators to be built in their community.
And yet, none of the things I believe in are causing people to get together in living rooms and make buttons. There is no big, anti-busywork campaign that has children and adults alike in an uproar. There is no one beating the collaboration drum from dawn until night so that we make sure that tomorrow is filled with more ways of connecting with one another instead of less. There is nothing so concrete as an incinerator to rally against, no symbol of everything we do not want. There is no image of a child sitting in his bedroom playing with his toys and being overrun with the smell of burning trash and the possibility of being consumed by the fire itself.
But, perhaps there should be.
All we would need would be a few people to frame our debate so that arguing against it would inherently be corrupt. We would need to break down our arguments for authentic learning and networked spaces into something that a 6 year old could understand and promote to all of her 6 year old friends. Most of all, we need a story that can be told on a button, not by simplifying it beyond all recognition but rather projecting a haunting image.
If I were starting a homegrown organization to sit around dinner tables and talk it would be called something like, Inquiring Minds for Learning Reform
If I were making buttons for that organization, here is what they would say:
“What do you want to know?” – An image of an inquiring mind would be opening up to a world of possibilities.
“Did learning happen TO you today?” – An image of an inquiring mind would be forced to sit in a seat.
“Tell me a story.” – An image of an Inquiring mind would be listening to people all around it.
“Let me Google that for you.” – An image of an inquiring mind with a smart phone, googling a current event
“Who is in your learning network?” – An image of an inquiring mind being networked to other inquiring minds that have different hats on representing all of the things that can be known through networked learning.
“Did you stop learning after Graduation?” – An image of an inquiring mind pushing away a laptop with Wikipedia up.
“Inquiring minds unite!”- An image of a locked inquiring mind with a big red circle with a line through it.
Everything changes and it isn’t a hyperbole to say so. My experience of the mall in the days up to Christmas has been roughly similar, but the people I am with and the things that I am interested in are in stark contrast. Never before have I felt the need to rent a two-seater car to push around in the mall so that my children are entertained as my wife looks for purses and I search out coupons on my phone. The stores are mostly the same, but I don’t feel the need to go into Brookstone and see the “coolest toy” setup. I want to go to the bookstore and find gift sets of Harry Potter so that my children will know them in a way I never could (having grown up before most of them had been written).
I can’t compare my experiences apples to apples. The family of four has no equivalent in my days before marriage and children. I can’t compare working from home with teaching directly. They are completely different disciplines. Furthermore, I have no way to compare my value to those around me at this point to my value in the past. It is my conclusion that comparing apples is impossible because the moment you have picked one off of a tree, the tree ceases to exist.
Metaphors are the only solace we have for these inadequate comparisons.
The moon is a folded napkin, waiting for me to wipe my mouth after the most satisfying day.
My family is a never-ending piggy back ride where no one is sure who is carrying whom at any given time.
My world is a sandbox and in it I play in it. Always.
My wife just got rid of her Facebook account. She had been threatening to do it for the last year or so. She claims that she was not using it for the right reasons. Sure, she wanted to keep up with what was going on with her close circle of friends, but she does that on the phone and through text messages on a daily basis. She also wanted to continue keep up her non-profit’s presence, but now that she no longer works there, it hardly seems like much a draw to go and lurk. In fact, she considered most of what she was doing to be lurking. She would look at photographs of old friends or see status updates from people she only “befriended” out of obligation. In essence, there was no good reason to keep using facebook for her. And other than trying to tell her that she will need an account one day to sign up for other services because Facebook connect may be the defacto login of the future, I wasn’t able to come up with anything compelling to persuade her otherwise.
Social networking is not a requirement, yet.
For those of us that work in social networks and our livelihoods depend upon making connections and cultivating communities, Facebook and Twitter are essential. For those that cannot (or will not) keep up with their friends through more conventional means, social networks are the bedrock of our contact with the outside world. For everyone else, they are a luxury. They are the thing that we do to pass the time. They are entertainment. They are a slightly more active version of television. Status updates and infinite pictures and movies are the things that we do while we are waiting in line, for something else better to happen in “real life.”
And I like that my wife still has a choice. I like that she can go in and delete her account (even if her profile picture and “likes” will probably never fully be deleted from the memory of the internet. I like that she can quit Facebook and feel no lingering effects of disconnect because she has all that she needs outside of those “friends.”
She is more open to what is in front of her than I am right now. She can dial someone on the phone and feel as though she has someone on the other end that really wants to hear from her rather than someone that is just eavesdropping on a wall posting that doesn’t seem to have a beginning or end. No one is going to “poke” her or tag her into a list of nonsense. No one is going to look her up after 15 years of non-connection and rekindle a small friendship that was doomed once she left Kansas City.
I am proud of her for quitting Facebook. It is much more than I could ever do. The connections I have on that social network are split into Former Students, High School Acquaintances, Internet Colleagues that I already connect with through Twitter, email or Skype, and my family. While I like seeing how my former students have turned out, most of the time I end up checking in just to tell one of them to take down a picture of them drinking (so they can get a job in the future). The three people I still talk to from high school I call on the phone and send emails to regularly. The internet colleagues I have collected over the years have more ways to contact me than I care to list. There is nothing that Facebook presents other than a way for my family to post pictures of our gatherings in one place. And I don’t post anything other than notes of Facebook because I don’t own anything that I put up there.
Of what value is this silo of connections?
The only thing that I can think to answer is that I don’t YET know. I am so intrigued by the singularity of Facebook. It is the only service that consumes over 500 million active users. Its potential is so amazing that I want to stick it out until I find it useful. I want to be there when they come up with the thing that connects us all together in a more meaningful way than what we like or where we went to college. But, they better do it soon. Otherwise, I might have to join my wife in the land of the Facebookless.
I love when other people parent my children well. I’m glad when my brother feels empowered enough to put my son in timeout. I’m glad when family friends get my children milk. I don’t think twice about letting other people we have chosen to share our house with take a central role in talking with my children and listening, and giving them attention.
I am not afraid of passing off my parenting duties for a few minutes when others are so willing. It is not an abdication. It is a righteous choice. I am supposed to let the village around me take part in bringing up my kids. Not because I need a break or can’t handle my own children, but because my children need to see that their are other responsible adults that care deeply for them. They need to see love from everyone and not just an insular view of it from me. They need to see the diverse ways that people can live and experience the world. And they need to see it work in their favor.
It is the same with anyone seeing things for the first time. The newbies in any community need to see that the community cares for them even if their primary mentors are unavailable. They need to know they are taken care of and will be ushered through their rites of passage.
And events that measure time, like birthdays, holidays and anniversaries must be observed. The years of use and the number of connections within a community matter. They should not be take lightly. We should know how much you have grown since the last time we saw you. We should mark when the newbie is no longer new. We should move them from the kids table. They should be able to speak intelligently about the things that were formerly out of reach.
That will allow our communities to progress, to change over time and adapt to the needs of its members. My children will one day host Thanksgiving, and I hope that by letting them know their community they will never forget just how important it is.