Essays from the Tennant

I work as part of the carpet-cleaning crew for the Tanner Building on BYU campus. One of my many duties includes driving a machine called the Tennant, which is sort of like a mix between a vacuum that injects water into the carpet while instantaneously sucking it up, and a car. Here’s a picture!

Its speed setting dial runs along a spectrum from “turtle” to “rabbit,” and in order to get the carpet thoroughly cleaned, you have to keep it slow, the dial pointed with an angle of 25 degrees or less, favoring the turtle side. That means that at a maximum, this tealmobile cruises along at 0.09 miles an hour, and that the driver puts one foot in front of the other every four seconds or so. It’s a scream.

Needless to say, after only two minutes of driving this thing on my first day, my eyes started to roll back in my head, and my jaw groaned open, and my fingers started tapping and I started jumping up and down and I would have given anything to be doing anything else. I immediately understood the nigh-reverential pity that people had always held for whoever’s turn it was to drive the thing: “Rosie, can you help me clean the I-Capsol? I would ask Michael, but he’s going to drive the Tennant tonight.” And that was the end of that; everyone would nod sympathetically and whenever Michael would walk by, they’d give him the look that you’d give a kitten if you saw one in a jail cell.

This first day of “tennanting” for me was incidentally the day that I had grabbed Earthsea from my shelf after a season of fiction-famine; I held the machine in one hand, and read from the other, which was the only thing that kept me from not going postal behind that machine-offspring of an Apatosaurus and a snail. But Earthsea is a thin paperback, the kind whose covers will slam shut with magnetic force unless you prop the thing open with an iron clamp or if you get three sets of hands to hold it down. And driving the Tennant one-handed is like driving a motorcycle one-handed; my lines in the carpet that day must have looked like a Richter-9 seismogram.

Right in front of the Tennant’s handlebars, though, is a shelf about two feet wide—the perfect plane on which a standard hardback book can rest ajar, its own gravity keeping its pages from arrhythmic flight. After Earthsea, I spent every Tennant session in the next month reading TJ-biography The Art of Power, followed by Michael Crichton’s Sphere, the only two books I can say I have read entirely “by vacuum.”

So my number-one criteria in looking for a new book was that it to stay open at 0.09 mph, meaning that it had to be thick and it had to hardback, which I know sounds like a kindergarten method of taxonomy, and you wouldn’t believe it but library catalogs will tell you all about publication date and where the book was printed and who edited it and which edition but they don’t tell you anything about the hardbackness of the book. (When I work for a library website aka never I will start a revolution in this thing.)

I went in person to browse. The Wheel of Time? It’s been on my list, so I grabbed it, but the only copy was a 4X6 paperback, and at ~800 pages I could already hear the Tennant explosively careening into a wall or an unsuspecting office secretary or something. I moved onto nonfiction, and there was David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Tina Fey had nodded to it in Bossypants, and I had never read an essay collection all the way through before. And it was bound, hallelujah, in that cover the BYU library puts on books to keep them from getting worn, a titleless, heavy slab.

Wallace’s writing is powerfully panascopic; the topics of the collection’s seven essays are:

1. Tennis/calculus
2. The effect of television on fiction-writing
3. The Indiana State Fair
4. The poststructuralist criticism of H.L Hix
5. The making of David Lynch’s Lost Highways
6. The 79^th best tennis player in the world, Michael Joyce
7. One time he went on a cruise (the titular essay)

That diversity keeps you from ever getting tired of reading his brain, but then Wallace’s voice is so far from tiresome that he could have written seven essays about the phases of the moon and I still would have read them all. He’s funny, not with the precise craft of a Tina Fey joke, but with the underscoring electric current of a late night talk show. And he’s absurdly detailed, with a vocabulary that, for lack of a better way to say this, is huge.

When was the last time you saw anyone besides me reading an essay collection by the pool? Like the ballad, they are a now-neglected art form but still one of my favorites (obviously), because—and I’ve said this before—our generation writes them really well. Montaigne and Emerson have some cool ideas, but they lack the sense of precision, form, scope, and line that is pretty much a watermark for anything praiseworthy post-Berlin-Wall.

He can be a bit much, Wallace, to read all at once. 5/7 of the essays are >50 pages, and I think if I had read more than one a day I would have given up being an English major. (So many artistic flairs!) But Wallace is buoyant—for all of that dense vocabulary, the content is spread thin enough that his page-turn-velocity rivals Dan Brown’s.

Last word: read the first one, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” The rest are good, but this one is dang good, testing the limits of the art form. Set in the plains of Indiana, the essay harmonizes and counterpoints principles of tennis and calculus in a story from Wallace’s high school years. This one’s got gravitas, more than all the others, and it is obvious that Wallace can keep up with Donne, Herbert, Dryden, all those metaphysical guys.

Impromptu on Luhrmann’s Gatsby

The obvious casting fumble was Tobey Macguire as Nick Carraway, but the one that disappointed me the most, surprisingly, was Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan.

Edgerton’s performance is predictably clunky; (hopefully you don’t remember his work in Warrior) his attempt at a “twenties’ accent” is frantic, and his voice sometimes sounds like a child imitating Vader’s “Luke, I am your father.” Each scene feels like he learned the lines only a few seconds before, and it comes up hollow and distracting. While Leo connects his Gatsby smoothly from scene to scene, Edgerton’s Tom seems sparse and accidental, like he wasn’t really on set with the people in the scene, but was Skyped/hologrammed in. (I’m starting to believe this may have been the case).

The rich playboy who steps down out of the clouds to have an affair with a poor woman, Tom is vile because he maintains a suave, confident front, as though nothing is going on, even when everyone knows what he’s up to. His evil comes from his conviction that everything is fine, but Edgerton plays him shifty-eyed and scared and with a weird voice.

From chapter two:

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. “How’s business?”

“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “When are you going to sell me that car?”

“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”

“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.”

“I don’t mean that,” said Wilson quickly. “I just meant—” 

Rude customers are one thing, but rude sellers—especially those who slam the door on your attempt at light humor, and also have an affair with your wife—are particularly villainous. There is a strength to Fitzgerald’s Tom that is stupefying, almost like if Norman Bates were combined with Jack Donaghy, self-aware and unaware and rich and young and smug and evil and cool and terrifying all at the same time. It was a bummer to think of how many actors could have played this better than Edgerton.

Luhrmann is a more interesting photographer than cinematographer, and Gatsby’s shots kept up with the good ones (Nicole Kidman and the lens glare as she enters the theater in Moulin Rouge, the balcony pool scene in Romeo+Juliet) My favorite was a frame of a wide room with three arched windows and billowing curtains and somebody standing in between them. (You had to be there, I guess).

Like Moulin Rouge, Gatsby romanticizes despair, and though this is permissible as endearing in Moulin Rouge, in Gatsby, it felt sort of insane. Both films are narrated by observant, passionate, socially inept men (Nick Carraway of the novel is only the first of those things, mind) pushed into high-rolling hedonism, and all they really do is flounder about, not sure how to reconcile morality with having a social life, and they escape to their typewriters to scratch out, “The world is terrible” in Courier font.

And that’s ok if you’re talking about Bohemians, but Fitzgerald’s despair is so much better than some gloomy music and faded lights. Nick writes this as the party begins to wind down:

The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices.

“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”

“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”

“We’re always the first ones to leave.”

“So are we.”

“Well we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.”

In spite of this wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night.

That seems hyperbolic, (to literally be kicking and screaming), but Nick is so suave about this that we don’t question it. (And the joke is perfect: “We’re always first to leave” and “So are we”). The novel’s power draws from Nick’s over-the-shoulder nihilism, and there is none of that in Tobey Macguire crying into the phone, “Gatsby? Gatsby? What’s happened? Where is Gatsby?” (he mysteriously knew exactly when to call) or Gatsby’s physical explosion after Tom verbally assaults him.

I gave it 51 stars out of 100. See it at the dollar theater!

Scope

Currently, my list of dead nemeses is as follows:

Ulysses S. Grant (I’m from Virginia, by the way)
Aaron Burr
Beowulf
St. Anthony
Lord Dunmore (I’m from Virginia, by the way)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Warren G. Harding
Ernest Hemingway

And, since my junior of high school…wait for it!…Thomas Jefferson. Call me King George III reincarnate, but I just really can’t stand the guy. I think it was because he was nemeses with Alexander Hamilton, (see above re: Aaron Burr), or possibly because I always hated memorizing the first part of the Declaration of Independence. Or that I’ve never understood what the W is meant by “The XYZ Affair.” Most likely though, my hatred has something to do with his red hair.

But my family and I went to Monticello for Christmas break, (and if you don’t know what that is, I don’t know if we can be friends) and I saw the light of day. How could someone so terrible have built such a cool house???

So I figured I’d give him a chance. With my Christmas B&N gift card, I picked up the new biography of him that just came out, Jon Meacham’s The Art of Power. It turns out he wasn’t so bad after all. At worst you could say he was overzealous and insecure; at best, he was the friendly philosopher in the background that really held everyone together.

The Art of Power was a fun read, for me, from a stylistic viewpoint. Biographers have a really unique job. They aren’t inventing a story, like a novelist or playwright, but they also can’t just give you raw data, like a scientist. They have to put enough spin and analysis in the history to make it digestible, but they can’t just add characters or fill in plot holes wherever they want. For a novel to work, the novelist has to get into the head of a character that he makes up. But a biographer has to get into the head of a real person who’s already died. They can’t just portray the person as they think he would sound—their portrayal has to harmonize with what all of the person’s family, friends, journals, colleagues, and history has said.

Jon Meacham is a fantastic biographer, in that sense. He is dexterous enough that you don’t feel like you’re reading a textbook, (the prologue’s opening line is delicious: “He woke at first light”), and he is distant enough that he shows you all of Jefferson’s sides, good and bad. He is better at writing about personal details than about government (Jefferson’s affair with Maria Cosway had me white-knuckled; the embargo of 1808 had my eyes to the ceiling, floor—anywhere else but the book), and the book ebbs and flows, as art often does.

When I first read the title of the book, The Art of Power, I imagined that the book would be talk about something very specific to Jefferson, perhaps at his methods of leadership, or a history of the writing of the Declaration of Independence. That was not Meacham’s goal; he tells you basically everything that was ever known about Jefferson ever. I respect the nobility of that objective, but the book is a pipe dream. You cannot abridge 83 years of life into 500 pages, and expect your readers to catch everything. There was like one paragraph devoted to the XYZ Affair, and I still don’t understand what that was!

Successful transmission requires a narrow scope and painstaking explication. The list of my nemeses at the beginning of this essay really only tells you something about me if you already know a lot about every single person on that list, (props if you did!), because I only gave you eight lines’ worth of time to remember and think about eight complete people. The characters in the Les Miserables movie fall flat because Hugo expected you to be with them for 1200 pages, not for 3 hours of film. Likewise, The Art of Power bites off more than it can chew. It illuminates Jefferson’s life with a flood lamp, though its readers really need the precision of a laser beam.

(And here’s my list of historical best friends, if you were wondering):

Woodrow Wilson
Alexander Hamilton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thomas Aquinas
William Wordsworth
Boethius
Luke Skywalker
Caesar Augustus
Michel de Montaigne

Content vs. Form

Lately I’ve been frequenting the non-fiction realm: Ken Jennings’ Maphead, Ken Robinson’s The Element, Jon Meacham’s biography of Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power. I like nonfiction for its weight and applicability, but I’ve turned to it mostly because I think our generation writes nonfiction very well. We have progressed a lot in the clarity department in the past century, and in memoirs and treatises, it really shows.

So the last thing I expected to pick up was this:

My friend passed this book off to me as part of a “take these to the DI” fun pack; I kept only four or five of the others (including Michael Crichton’s Sphere and Fareed Zakara’s The Future of Freedom). I put them up on my shelf, and, with the onset of “Econ 382: Price Theory” and “Eng 295: Writing Literary Criticism,” I immediately forgot about them.

But time went on, and the book above stuck out on my shelf like a giraffe sticks out between Kenyan savannah grass and acacia trees. (You know what? It’s 8:30 AM. You come up with a better simile.) Really, the book stuck out like a fantasy 80’s novel sticks out among a bunch of boring books. I thumbed through it and checked the page count: 182. This was too good to be true.

I was swiftly consumed. LeGuin’s prose does not read like an electric power plant, but more like a jungle quicksand—before you know it, she’s got you. Imagine the voice of Shere Khan reading The Great Gatsby to you, out loud, as a bedtime story, in front of a fireplace. It’s that good!

Earthsea is the first thing I’ve read in a long time without an agenda. It lives in a charmingly unique universe (look at the cover!) while its scope is so slim that you really only come to care about one of the characters, and the rest of the book is just LeGuin having fun describing her world, garnished with Ruth Robbins’ piercing illustrations. Every word matters; it pulls you in not because you want to know what happens next but because you want to know how LeGuin will say it. I was stunned at how much I didn’t care what was going on. I just wanted to listen to Shere Khan read The Great Gatsby.

There are three other books in the series, and, I am sorry to say, I honestly regret having read the last two. By then, LeGuin swaps her universe for her agenda, and her text adopts a bitter, pedantic flavor. The second one is pretty sick as far as stories go, but it lacks the resonant precision of the first book, which is finished enough to leave you satisfied, but indefinite enough to leave you thinking.

Do we always need a sequel? The author sure wants one, (I’m doing the hand gesture where you rub your thumb and your forefingers together), but, as with The Hunger Games, (srynotsry), I think it taints a good first to have a bad second. Less is more. Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Better to quit while you’re ahead. (Any other clichés you can think of, I’ll be happy to add them here).

On experience

Moses got to do a lot of things. Briefly, he grew up as Pharaoh’s son, met God in a burning bush on a mountainside, cast plagues of locusts, flies, blood, and death on ancient Egypt, and led a massive exodus from the country upon a parting of the Red Sea. He smote a rock in Horeb and it spouted forth water, he called down manna and quail from heaven, and he followed God’s shadow and pillar of fire to guide Israel through the wilderness. When he lifted up a brazen serpent on a stick, the people who looked at it were healed of the plague. When he held up his hands at the battle of Amalek, the Israelites defeated their enemies. He saw the earth swallow three men whole. And he carried the laws of God himself, as written in His own hand, down from Mt. Sinai. It was all part of a plan which would lead the children of Israel to Canaan, the Promised Land, a land “flowing with milk and honey.”

Before they got there, there was another rock that Moses smote, this time in Meribah. The Israelites were thirsty, and, to appease them, the Lord told Moses to speak to the rock at Meribah, and it would spout forth water for everyone to drink. Moses took his rod and banged it on the rock, and the water spouted forth, just as the Lord had said it would.

Except that the Lord hadn’t exactly said that the water would come out of the rock that way. He had said that Moses would need to talk to the rock, not smite it, (which he had done before, at Horeb). Either out of ignorance or unbelief, Moses disregarded the mandate and smote the rock. In response to Moses’ disobedience, the Lord said, “Ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”

And that’s where the whole of Moses’ journey comes, for a moment, to a screeching halt. He doesn’t get to enter into the Promised Land? What about all of that stuff at the burning bush, about “holy ground” and a “chosen people?” What about the manna that had fallen every day to keep them alive? What about when they walked through on dry ground where there used to be the Red Sea??? Didn’t that mean anything? Wouldn’t Moses be the first one to get to touch the rivers of milk and honey? Forty years in the wilderness, wandering in circles waiting for the Promised Land—and he never even gets to see it?

When I was ten, I played through Pokémon: Blue Version, for hours on hand, catching and training dozens of endearing creatures. One day, as I approached the battles of the Final Four, I came home from school to find that one of my sisters had picked up my Gameboy, started her own game, and saved over my file. I was devastated! My work and glory were lost; I was kept from the Pokémon promised land.

We flinch when we hear about Moses not being able to enter Canaan, just as we do when we lose elections, when we are forbidden college admission, or when we fail to achieve status of Pokémon Master. Something within us does not want to be shut behind closing gates. We want to make it to our final objective.

What would Moses have thought of Canaan? It definitely would have been pretty cool in those first few days, when the Israelites are all brimming with excitement, and you get to stick your hands in the honey river and swim in all the milk. Everyone is at ease because they don’t have to go to war anymore. And then after a few weeks, the milk and honey gets commonplace, and you sit around wondering what to do in your spare time, and you reminisce about what it was like to watch the shade and flame of God lead you, day and night. The Promised Land, in glory, is not the burning bush. Canaan is not the parting of the Red Sea.

Beyond Canaan lies a different goal. The goal is what Moses felt when he first saw the bush that burned without being consumed. The goal is watching the Egyptian army advance further and further, and commanding the Red Sea to splice. The goal is going to bed every night with the hope that there will be food on the ground the next day, and then in the morning finding fallen manna. The goal is getting water to come out of a rock. The goal is receiving laws from God himself. The goal is not Canaan. The goal is something else.

And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.

Doctrine and Covenants 122:7

Every time you delete an unnecessary Facebook friend, an angel gets his wings

If you look at a person’s profile pictures, and more than 3/4 of them are pictures of just them, alone…watch out! That is a litmus test that has saved me from many a star-crossed relationship, thank you very much. And beware of the ones whose pictures are of anything but themselves–the ones with profile pictures of movie posters or political cartoons or sunsets. These are the kind of people who sit in the front row of movie theaters, and the ones who order pizza with white sauce instead of red. Best to just keep your distance.

Central American Facebook, if you haven’t yet come in contact with it, is a brand new, fiestastic explosion every day. Statuses are typically religious in nature, WITH ALL OF DA WERDS IN CAPPITTALS AND MISPELD “~*TE ZIGO 100PRE MI DIOSITO LINDO*~”. They love to tag you in pictures you are not in, and they comment on your old photos, “Que onda vos???” if they want to have a conversation. Latin facebook, and I am absolutely serious about this, is one of my favorite parts of our world culture. They ignore all of that stuffy American internet etiquette that makes people say stuff like “He did what?” and “Ahhhg that was so awkward!” Instead, pictures of puppies and shooting stars and everything is just so much love.

What if social media had existed since the beginning?
—Hannibal would have been a fun one to follow on Twitter, live-tweeting the entire Battle of Zama, with some fun facts about elephants as well.
—Most viral you-tube video: Building the Great Wall of China! Ok, you’re right, I’m the only one who would watch that.
—I guess the cavemen would have played Draw Something instead of making all of those paintings.
—The award for most photo-mirror profile pictures goes to Cleopatra.
—I’m not sure who the most annoying Instagrammer would have been, but I would assume Nero, #violinpractice
—Alexander Pope would have been the one always sharing links to something from The New Yorker.
—Best blog? I have to go with Boss Tweed, closely followed by Woodrow Wilson or Queen Victoria.

Regarding the title of this post, Facebook doesn’t really have a good “mass-delete” option available–you have to delete people individually, and it can take some time if you’re looking for a deep clean. My preferred method of friend-purge, for all of those “We were both at Warped Tour in 2004″s or “Our siblings are best friends”s, is to remove them on the one day per year that they will show up on my wall without fail: their birthday. It’s the best present I could ever give them!

Transmission

In the late 1300’s, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about thirty fictional men and women who travel to Canterbury to see the remains of Saint Thomas. On the way, their Host offers a challenge: they will get the chance to tell the group four stories during their trip, two on the way there, and two on the way back. Whoever tells the best story, as judged by the group, wins dinner. As Chaucer composed it, each character first gives an introduction about themselves, followed by their tales.

In many ways, I envy those fictional pilgrims, listening to each other’s stories as they travelled along to Canterbury. Chaucer’s work is unfinished, but I marvel at the collective knowledge that those pilgrims would have reaped from those 120 stories. Each pilgrim told their prologue and their story, and in so doing, they created an intellectual feast. I don’t know how any of them slept! I would have been so excited to hear the stories from the next day. They must have learned so much about each other. Even just hearing others’ past experiences would have been a powerful experience in itself.

Encouraging communication between people can be like trying to push an elephant, but I have become a large fan of communication in the past two years, (something alluded to in “Xenoaerophobia”), and I don’t mean that as an outlash against the “isolationism brought about by technology” or whatever. I don’t know if talking is really a problem in our society, but we can definitely improve our listening, and, especially, increase our asking of questions. Hearing people’s stories leads to greater public empathy. We connect better, and can understand our similarities as people, once we hear what is actually going on.

COROLLARY

There are (among one or two others) three books on the shelf above my desk that are worth their weight in plutonium, if you ask me: The Western Canon, Bossypants, and Finishing the Hat. I owe a lot to these books, but even more to their respective mouths: Harold Bloom, who taught me how to read, Tina Fey, who taught me how to write, and Stephen Sondheim, who taught me how to listen. They are demigods, and in each of their books, you see them explain who they are, and what they do, and why they do what they do, and how they do it. Their books are their souls. I can hardly fathom the fact that I can actually hold those books in my hands, and I can flip through the pages, and I can learn what they’ve learned, and I can know what they know.

And there are plenty of great people out there who haven’t unleashed themselves into script. Quentin Tarantino, who taught me how to watch, has still not released any sort of memoir, (but you can bet I check Amazon every day!). Neither has Rosalind Hall, the director of the BYU Men’s Chorus, or Dane Spencer, professor of Victorian literature, or Richard Baldwin, a close friend of mine. I am fortunate enough to know those last three, but there are billions of people who, unfortunately, will not get that chance for a while.

Stories, and memoirs, can speed up that process. They help us develop literary friends who, plausibly, we would never meet otherwise. I often wish everyone in the world would write their own book, and then that everyone else would read it. The knowledge and character that would be preserved, were that the case, is bone-chilling.

Spikenard, and a book about India

Spikenard was once anointed on the head of Jesus Christ by Mary, who had been a disciple of his for a while. She had purchased the spikenard, which was very expensive, so that she could give it to Christ for a gift. He allowed her to anoint the substance, and on doing so, he was chastised by Judas, who said, in effect, “Why are you letting her do that? Spikenard is expensive. It would be better to sell it, and give the money to the poor.”

I’d imagine that Mary was probably very hurt by Judas’ comment. The spikenard had cost a lot of money, and she knew that she also could have helped a lot of poor people with that money. She also knew how much Jesus meant to her, and she wanted to show it. “Gift giving,” says Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock, “is the purest expression of friendship.”

Maybe it is better for us to give up everything we have to the poor, but Jesus stood up for Mary. “Let her alone,” he said. “Against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you, but me ye have not always.” Mary had come to Jesus with “the purest expression of friendship;” how would she have felt if Jesus had told her to donate the spikenard to someone else?

It is important to show love, and it is also important to accept it with appreciation. It is not ok to give gifts to everyone around us if, when they give a gift back, we set it aside apathetically. Likewise, as much as we ourselves may give complements, we should be able to respond to compliments of others, not with, “Oh please, you’re kidding yourself, I’m really not as great at windsurfing as it looks,” but something more appreciative and modest. Accepting gifts requires humility, as contrary as that may seem.

COROLLARY

Last December, a friend told me about a birthday gift she had received from her parents. She had asked for some specifics for her birthday, certain clothes and movies, which she received, but the last present she opened was something she hadn’t expected. She handed it to me from her night stand.

It was a book called India. One of those grand, coffee table books, the kind that pulls everything in the room in towards itself. Large and stately, with a bright yellow jacket, its title letters were embossed like silver. I glossed through it. There were many colorful photos, rich in detail, accompanied with chapters explaining the history of India, politically, economically, and culturally.

My friend really loves India. Not that she goes around talking about it all the time, but her family and close friends (and I mean really close) would be able to pick up on it. 1) Bombay House is her favorite restaurant, 2) her favorite writer is Salman Rushdie, and 3) she went to prom with a guy named Anant. It’s one of those things that you don’t notice until it hits you; when I saw that book about India, the light bulb clicked—this really was the perfect gift for my friend.

And she hadn’t asked for it; really she didn’t even know the book existed. I pictured her parents perusing the shelves of Barnes and Noble to find something perfect for her, and then finding it. It was the type of gift that Jack Donaghy admired in episode 4.8 of 30 Rock, when Liz asks Jack want he wants for Christmas, and he reproves her for assuming that gift-giving could be so statically mindless. “Gift giving is the purest expression of friendship,” he says.  “I’m going to think about what I know and like about you, and find the perfect gift, and then you do the same.”

I think those are the best kind of gifts. We don’t ask for them, but they are perfect for us. Finding them takes time and genuine cognition. They are not gift cards. Only the people that are closest to us could ever be able to pick them out.

Xenoaerophobia

I once flew from Richmond to Detroit after visiting home for the holidays. Flying, a rare and mysterious privilege once treasured by my childhood, has gradually become an anxiety-ridden, uncharming chore of my early adulthood, as I fly more and more often for school. It is not my favorite thing to do.

There is always a moment of truth when you move down the aisle, duffel bag in front, and you reach the aisle 5 rows ahead of where you will be sitting. From there you can see, poised between the hustling, bustling passengers, an empty spot, that, judged on the distance, must assuredly be yours. Likewise, you get a glimpse of the people that will be your neighbors for the next few hours. These people get physically closer to you than most other people will ever get in your whole life, excluding only your girlfriend, your masseuse, your wife. Unless you are a xenocontactophile, (a word I just made up that sounds absolutely terrifying if you think about it), this can be pretty scary.

I got to 14C, (a window seat! Ka-ching! $$$), and noticed that I would be sitting next to a middle-aged woman I had seen earlier in the airport, who had been wheeled around in a wheelchair until she got to the gate, when she walked out of her chair and onto the airplane, apparently un-handicapped. Weird, I thought, but harmless. This lady was not a 250-pound man with biceps the size of my head and a scowl like a pirate king. She did not have dreadlocks and was not wearing harem pants. She was not dressed in a track suit or leopard print boots; cougar-alert in the clear. She was not a group of high-school students headed to Washington D.C for band retreat, and she was not carrying any babies, as far as I could tell! I would probably be fine.*

* Conversely, my favorite people to travel next to are newlywed couples, (they keep to themselves), laptop-consumed interns, people who sleep, service animals, elderly Chinese women that don’t speak English, and nobody.

She looked up at me from her seat and I broke out my most cordial smile. “14C?” I offered. Obviously I knew what my ticket said on it, and wasn’t really asking a question, but this is a tactic I keep in my arsenal of travel. An initial moment of brisk chatter can relieve tension, and, if played correctly, can be the only amount of courteous conversation you ever feel obligated to engage in for the whole trip. If all went well, I would sit in my window seat for two hours in complete silence.

To my surprise, she responded with a grumbling mumble. “Rrrfgmsirrizzglllmsprntz,” she said under her breath. Occupying my seat was a large purse, which she swiftly seized. She mumbled something else, and as she rose from her chair to let me squeeze by, I heard her say, “This is absolutely ridiculous.”

Is it ridiculous? I thought, That a person will be sitting next to you? On an airplane? In coach? This is my knee-jerk when I hear irrational declarations; I tend to sardonically question people’s English. I really do doubt that today is the worst day of your life, or that that is the best piece of chocolate cake you have ever eaten. I don’t think that if you see that person on campus it will be “awkward,” nor do I agree with your assessment of Taken 2 as “frikkin’ amazing.”

But, I conceded, maybe she was referring to something else. I still hadn’t figured this woman out yet, and my arrival to the seat could have been totally incidental. Maybe she was a great philanthropist, and she was just musing over the widening poor-rich gap as “ridiculous.” Maybe she was an acclaimed singer-songwriter, and the charity concert she was planning for next July just wasn’t getting the celebrity traction she was hoping for.

It clicked. Middle-aged woman? Mumbling under her breath? A wheelchair she didn’t need? A little too much to eat over the years? (I forgot to tell you about that part). This woman wasn’t the hitman, the cougar, the band geek, or the screaming baby, and she unfortunately was not the Socrates or Sheryl Crow I had in mind. She was the whiner, the one who needs the cabin to be kept at exactly 71 degrees Fahrenheit, and who wants an extra seat for her purse. I could see it in my head now, asking for two extra blankets, telling me to close the window before takeoff, requesting drinks even when they don’t have the drink cart out. This was going to be no sky-picnic.

I jumped into my seat, eager to avoid any eye-contact. I sat down and pulled out my book as fast as I could. “It is sweltering in here!” she droned. “I am absolutely going to die.” Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!

She went on. “I’ve already talked to the worker lady about it. She said she’s done all she can.” She spoke with a quick, metropolitan mumble, swallowing most of what she said into the next word of each phrase. “And she said that they’ve got the air on full blast. Full blast! Why would ANYONE run ANYTHING on full blast???” (I’m not paraphrasing. This was exactly what she said.)

I neglected to say anything, and just kept reading my book. The “worker lady” walked down the aisle and my new seatmate complained to her again about the heat. I pretended to read my book while cynically contemplating the materiality of people, which is what I usually end up doing on plane rides anyways.

An hour later, we were in the air, and it was time for the complementary beverage and snack. The lady asked for a Coke with no ice, along with a glass of water, one thing of pretzels and two things of cookies. I asked for basically the same thing. (Hey, I never said I hated everything about her.) We sat there enjoying our snacks, and she turned to me and said softly, “So, are you from Detroit?”

Uummff, I groaned within. I did not want to be having this conversation right now, especially not with this lady. I powerfully articulated, “No,” hoping she would notice the difference between my cool accent and her ridiculous one. “Oh,” she said quietly, retreating back into her shell.

“Are you from Detroit?” I said.

“Oh!” she said, somewhat startled. “Yes I am; I’m flying home for work on Monday.”

“What were you doing in Richmond?”

“My parents live there, I was visiting them for Christmas.”

“Cool. I’m from Richmond.” I explained that I was going to school in Utah and that I had a connecting flight from Detroit to Salt Lake. Then she told me she was going to school too:

“I went to school after high school but I got married and dropped out. But then, you know, my husband died, and the house burned down, and I lost my job, so now I’m back at it, trying to finish up my degree.” (Again, I’m not paraphrasing.)

She was quick, and nonchalant. “Wow,” I said, not really sure how to respond. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok,” she said. “I have a job now, and an apartment of my own. It’s only one-bedroom, so I never like guests staying very long. It gets crowded.”

All of the jagged edges that had bothered me about this lady seemed hazier now. She had told me her life story in roughly two dozen words, and, had I not been paying attention, I might have missed it. A one-bedroom apartment? She must not have had home insurance, and, from the sound of it, she probably hadn’t had a life insurance policy for her husband either.

We talked for a little while longer and she told me about her job and what she was studying in her classes. She said that computers were her least favorite subject at first, but that now she actually found them very likeable. After a while, I went back to my book, and the plane landed. When the gate was prepared, she hurried off the plane without saying goodbye, pushing past people in her rush to leave.

Everyone’s story is different, and there is an unfortunate disconnect to our existence so that we don’t usually get to hear each other’s stories, at least not in the way that we know them ourselves. That may be for whatever reason; we might not have time, we might not listen well, or, as in my case with this lady, we might judge people too soon. I don’t know if there are actually any inherently nasty people out there; they may just be people that are getting misunderstood.