Shut Up and Work

For the last year or so, I've had my Comp I students keep a blog over the course of the semester. It requires them to write on a regular basis and hopefully introduces them to the value of writing as a tool for thought, invention, recollection, etc. They get to write it about whatever they want, so I've had cooking blogs, Jeep blogs, music, movies, your name it. One student last semester wrote about success. He said up front it was his goal in life to become really wealthy and so he was making as study of what makes people financially successful. Oddly enough, there was no post about becoming an English instructor as a way of rolling in the Benjamins. Anyway, he did introduce a new idea in one of his posts that really got me thinking. It was about goal setting, and he said something about how when we make our goals really public, it sometimes saps us of our motivation to work on the goal. He made a 30 day goal for himself on the blog but didn't say what the goal was. He wrote, "My reason for not telling you what my goal is derives from another video I watched on TED. This speaker explains how telling people our goals makes them less likely to happen. This is unlike most of the information that I have read about in the many self-help style of books that I have read but it does make sense. He says that by telling people our goals it gives us the satisfaction that we already have it, because of that we feel less motivated in obtaining them."

I found this fascinating because, like this student, I've always heard that it's important to tell people what you're shooting for because it makes you more accountable and, therefore, more likely to do it. But the more I thought about it, the more correct it seemed. In my past, any time I announced I was spending Christmas break/spring break/summer/long weekend/whatever working on a story or working on my dissertation, it almost never happened. I've spent a lot of time saying I was going to work on my dissertation only to pick at it here and there and then suddenly find a reason to shut down the computer and instead go help clean the house/break up a fight the kids are having/go to lunch with Suzy/etc.?

So I am essentially out of time with my PhD program. They like you to be done in seven years or less, and my seventh year ended this Christmas. It's embarrassing to write that. That's a really long time. Long enough that I don't want to dwell on it. Anyway, I applied for and received a one-year extension, and it swiftly became clear it was time to stop being a dilettante and get to work.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't as though I wasn't doing anything. I had my prospectus, I had rough chapter outlines, and I had about 60 pages of rough draft. But obviously, when you're on borrowed time, you need better than just that.

So, the day after Christmas, I began in earnest and, except for my wife and kids, I didn't mention it to anyone. When people asked what I was doing over break, I would say, "Just hanging out, you know? Not much." I kept my work a secret and found that I worked more and better because of it. The only pressure to work came from me and not some external, "Oh, I mentioned to so-and-so that I'm working over break so I'd better get to it" kind of thing.

So every morning except Sundays, I put on my bathrobe and padded downstairs to our cold, concrete basement. I'd turn on the brass banker's lamp that came from on top of my parents' piano, crank up the space heater near my feet, and start chipping away. The first day, I wrote a thousand words and came back upstairs at about 10:30. Suzy, to her everlasting credit, said, "A thousand words is good, but why don't you go see how much more you can get done? Write until noon." So I did that and ended up with just over three thousand words for the day.

So I started with twenty thousand words and sixty odd pages on December 26. Day before yesterday, I emailed a copy of my draft to my committee chair that over 55,000 words and 165 pages. So I nearly tripled my word count and more than doubled my page count in slightly less than two months. Some days I wrote close to 3k words, other days I barely picked out a thousand. I worked at home until school started back up and then I began working in a study carrel in the library during my office hours. I grew a beard, wore the same bathrobe every day, and didn't change my desktop background on my computer because whatever I was doing was working. (Superstitious? Maybe a little.)

Now, of course, the way I approached this was totally the wrong way to go about it. Generally, students write a chapter, send it in, get feedback, make revisions, resubmit, and then, once they get approval, move on to the next chapter. That prevents anyone from going wildly off track and writing a hundred pages of wrong-headed stuff. For me, for my life and times, this simply wasn't an option. I teach five sections of comp every semester. I have three kids. I only have a year to get this thing done. There's no time to lovingly, carefully scour each chapter hand in hand with my adviser.

Consequently, in all likelihood, there are probably some major revisions heading my way - assuming my adviser doesn't just ignore me altogether for this breach of academic etiquette. (He wouldn't do that. He may not be pleased with me, but he won't ignore me.) I know there are problems with the draft. The conclusion is weaker than Kip Dynamite. There's a fairly serious lack of theory-related sources in several of the chapters. It's personal to the point of being memoir-ish at times. It focuses a lot on Mormon doctrine at a time when Mormonism isn't super popular in the generally very liberal world of academia.

Having said all that, I have a 165 page draft with an intro, six chapters, and a conclusion on my hands, and, as I say to my students all the time, a bad draft on the page is infinitely better than a good idea in your head. A draft is something. You can revise it, alter it, expand or cut it. You have something to work with. An idea not written down is about as valuable as sculpting with air. There's nothing there to work with.  

So that's something, and I think I owe at least some of that progress to just keeping my big yap shut and going to work. Now life is just a matter of catching up on all the things I neglected while working on the dissertation (I started grading papers today. Eesh.) and waiting to hear back from my committee chair. Hopefully, he'll get back to me soon and will have at least as many good things to say as bad things to say. He will have work for me to do, that's for sure. One other thing that's for sure is that, when I start doing that work, you won't hear about it until it's done.

Small Things

I helped a family move into the ward last week. It was a familiar scene - a bunch of guys from the Elders' quorum and a few of the more robust high priests moving up and down the ramp of a moving truck, taking boxes to different corners of the house as directed by the harried, obviously tired wife. They only had one truck (not three like some other people who shall remain nameless) but it was a big one, and it was well-packed.

My cousin, Scott, was there with his son-in-law helping schlep this family's boxes of books, pans, clothes, and whatever else. One fun thing about moving to Midland is that Scott Pennock and his family live here. The Pennocks were always celebrities at my house growing up. Aunt Fay and Uncle Bob's house was a dreamland for kids - an in-ground trampoline, a giant barn, a whole closet of toys and games in the day room, and, most importantly for me, at least a couple of cardboard boxes of late 60s/early 70s comic books. Literally, some of my earliest memories are of me poring over copies of Adventures in Space and Green Lantern every time we visited the Pennocks. Of course, my cousins Karen and Kathie were the lovely older sisters I never had. They doted on  my brothers and me and put up with our endless supply of teasing and general gross boy stupidity.

Anyway, Scott is the oldest Pennock and was out of the house before I knew what was going on. I always knew of him (mission to Spain, law school, living in Florida) but never really knew him well as a person. So as luck would have it, he and his family have been in Midland (he works for Dow Chemical as a contract lawyer) for over twenty years. They are pillars of the ward here and have been a huge resource for us from the beginning.

The thing about Scott being the oldest is that he knew my Grandpa Sheffield better than we younger grandkids. For that matter, he knew my parents longer than I did. (A funny thing to say but true.) So it's been a nice thing to sit and chat with him (usually during the milling-around-BS-session that happens just prior to Priesthood opening exercises at church) about family. We trade funny stories about his siblings. (Everyone loves a funny story about Karen!) and we talk about my folks.

This is a really long way of getting around to something pretty small and insignificant. Last week when we were both helping this family move in, I had grabbed the bottom half of a rocker-recliner and was carrying it into the house when Scott passed me and said, "You know, I just got a flash of Dennis there just now. The way you bear-hugged that thing and just started hauling it into the house - that's exactly something your dad would have done." I laughed and told him that Dennis wouldn't have asked for help whereas there wasn't any way I could actually get it through the door and could he help me out? He helped me manage it through the door and we moved on to the next set of boxes.

It was such a small thing, but I keep thinking about it. Growing up, I always felt like I was the son who was least like Dad. Physically, personality-wise, all of it. I took painting lessons and acted in plays while actively hating being taught how to fix an engine or install drywall. I was emotional and talkative whereas ol' Dennis was...shall we say, not?

I really came to appreciate Dad and his ridiculous arsenal of skills and abilities when I got older. I wish now I had retained a lot more of the practical things he tried to teach me how to do. As I've written here before, he and I became friends in that last fifteen years years of his life and I'm so glad that we did.

But I still don't think of myself as particularly Dennis-y and a lot of the time I wish I was more so. His problem-solving skills, his wisdom and facility with finances, his laconic "let's just get it fixed" attitude, his titanic work ethic. There was so much in him that I see lacking in myself.  Having Scott see some insignificant flash of Dad in me makes me both happy and sad. I'm glad there are bits of him in me (even if it is only the way I manhandle furniture), but as always, I'm just sad that he's not around to be the real deal.   

February

Time to check in again. I don't mean for these to be monthly posts. I really would like them to be more frequent, but for now, this is as good as it gets. I'm on the verge of finishing a big project, and once that's done, I'll have more discretionary time to do things like review movies and complain about the weather.

It's Friday afternoon, and Avery is at home today. She's been complaining all week about not feeling well. She didn't have a fever, cough, diarrhea, or any other sign of sickness so off to school she went. Last night, she was up every hour on the hour coughing and hacking, so she's home today and has an appointment with the doctor later on.

It's another blisteringly cold day here in downtown Freezerville. Maryn was supposed to participate in an all-day snow sculpting competition down by the Tridge today, but they canceled it due to cold. I'm glad they did. The two minutes it took us to get from the van into the community center for Avery's basketball game last night made my hands feel as though they were going to break off at the wrist.

Despite the cold, Suzy is out and about. She is meeting with Erin the Great, Linda the Powerful, and Addie the Slobbery at Zehnder's in Frankenmuth this afternoon. One of the things we kept saying over and over when we were in process of making the move to Midland was that it's only an hour and a half from the Detroit suburbs. That means a meeting somewhere in the middle is less than an hour away. I love this aspect of living here. Rather than being a soul-killing six hour drive through Chicago and Crudtown (that's what I like to call Indiana), it's a pleasant hour and a half straight shot to family and friends. That's pretty great.

One nice highlight to my day so far was receiving a Facebook message from my old pal, Jeremy. I've written about Jeremy here before, years ago. He and I were buddies at Idaho State and were both English majors and poetry dorks. Eventually, he went into broadcasting, starting a local show on KISU called InHouse that specialized in playing music by independent and local bands. After graduating, he parlayed that into a show on Oregon Public Radio in Portland. He's been there, promoting bands and playing music, for over seven years. Earlier this week, he posted on FB that he had just been unceremoniously laid off. I dropped him a line to say how much I think that sucks and how much I've admired what he's done over the years. He wrote back today to say thanks and to affirm that, despite the time and distance between us, that we are still pals. That's nice, you know? To know that even after years without much real contact, your friends are still your friends. I love that. It makes cold, snowy days filled with child sickness and doctor appointments much better.

Well, child #1 isn't going to drive herself home from school (though I'm sure some part of her wishes she could), so I'm off to pick her up. Avery and Park Fu will stay here, equally mesmerized by the power of unlimited cartoons on Netflix. They won't even know I'm gone. 

In The Wampa Cave and Other Thoughts

It's three in the afternoon on the last Sunday of winter break, and the snow continues to rush to the ground like it's late for a bus. I shoveled the walk this morning before we left for church, clearing the two or three inches that fell last night, and then had to do it again when we got back from church three hours later. Now, three hours later still, there's another inch or two back on the sidewalk. I'll probably get out the snow blower this evening sometime so the driveway isn't utterly impassable by morning. Maryn and Avery are hoping for a snow day tomorrow. We are hoping they get the freak out of the house and go to school. We'll see who gets what they want.

It's been a pretty quiet break - or at least as quiet as any winter break is for the Brown family. Maryn's birthday on December 14th, our wedding anniversary on the 19th, Christmas, New Year's, and then back to school. Like I imagine most people's holidays are, it's been a combination of frenetic activity and utter stasis. We've shopped, visited family in the Detroit area, gone to movies, gone to parties, and been busy while simultaneously having days where we just sat around and did so little, outside observers may not have been able to tell if we were actually alive.

The weather has surprised us. I'm from Idaho, Suzy's from Michigan, we lived on the open plains of Illinois for five years -- you would think we'd be totally jaded about winter weather. We should be strolling out into five foot snowbanks in Hawaiian-print Bermuda shorts and flip flops with a virgin mojito in hand saying, "Huh, we could still golf in this."

But no.

Instead, we cower before the subzero temperatures and gawk at the seemingly endless supply of snow dumping on us. We wrap up in fleece pajamas, fleece bathrobes, and fleece blankets and sit in front of the tv like it's a fireplace, pining for summer. My brother Dave has already started giving me crap about it. (We're brothers - it is in our nature to give each other crap. It's how we roll.) Today when I told him about how people were posting Facebook photos of empty shelves at grocery stores ahead of the imminent storm, he laconically texted back, "I have found that all you easterners typically freak out over nothing." (Dave's an educated guy. He knows so much about bankruptcy law that he probably didn't have room to retain small things like the difference between the Midwest and the east. Alas.) Anyway, I know I should be tougher than this, but there really is a difference in the weather between here and anywhere else I've been. It's colder here. Snowier here. It's like this is Winter's gym. It's where he comes to work out and get stronger. It's where he stares at his icy white biceps in the mirror and says, "Oh yeah, baby. Look at those guns!" And then he punches Midland County in the face. It sucks.

Anyway.

We've watched three or four movies over the break. Let me give you some brief reviews:

Frozen: Great music and voice work. Slightly generic story and underdeveloped side characters. I like that the central relationship and the act of love that saves the day in the end are not romantic. It's about sisterhood, and, as a dad of daughters, I appreciate that.

Robot and Frank: Set just barely into the future, it's about a former thief who is suffering from the beginnings of Alzheimer's. His kid gets him a robot companion/assistant and the old guy teaches it to be his partner in crime. Saw it on Netflix. Suzy and I have determined that most everything available on Netflix streaming is kind of lame and sad. It's slow and not terribly entertaining. It's like a joke that doesn't make you laugh but instead you just smirk and say, "That's funny."

The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug: More of the same. I fear Peter Jackson lost his soul somewhere between Return of the King and King Kong and hasn't been able to get it back since. It has energetic action set pieces and giant CGI spiders so real, you can practically smell them, but who cares? Bilbo is played as an burgeoning heroin addict, and none of the other characters are emotionally engaging at all. The only blip of interest other than the best onscreen dragon I've ever seen is the weird, inexplicable cross-species romance between Turiel, the elf, and Kili the dwarf. And that wasn't even close to actually being in the book.

Sleepwalk With Me: Comedian Mike Birbiglia's barely veiled autobiography film about his beginnings as a comic and the ultimate demise of his long term relationship. It's also about how he suffers from a sleep disorder that makes him act out his nightmares. At one point, he dives out a hotel window because he's dreaming that he is running away from missiles pointed right at him. As far as this film goes, remember this: comedians are funny, movies about them usually are really not. It's surprisingly dark and flat for a movie about a guy learning to be funny. 

Thankfully, now that winter break is over, our tv shows are coming back on and I'll have a reason to live again. (Sad that making fun of Revolution is a reason to live - but there it is.)

One thing I didn't make mention of here or on Facebook was our anniversary. This was #15 which is kind of big. We kept our celebrations pretty low key because funds were low in the days leading up to Christmas and because we are locked here on the ice planet of Hoth. So we'll probably go out of town for a couple of days over spring break once we make our way out of the wampa cave. (Try that obscure reference on for size.)

Anyway, even though the actual day was a couple of weeks ago, I feel like I still need to say a couple of things to/about Suzy on the occasion of us being married for 15 years.

Marriage is a really complicated undertaking. Maybe it's a blissful skip through the daisies for some people (though I doubt it), but for most people, it's largely made up of a lot of hard work. I was raised in a home of all boys by parents who were pretty relaxed when it came to things like cleanliness or organization. (This is an understatement.) I grew up to be something of a know-it-all who remembers a lot of useless trivia but sometimes forgets what time his kids are supposed to be at school in the mornings. I have an almost maddening sense of "Oh, it will probably work out"-itis that sometimes verges over from a healthy sense of optimism to a lazy sense of "I'm too tired to think to hard about it so I'm just going to hope for the best." I have problems is what I'm saying.

So, despite the fact that, in my mind, I'm quite a catch, the reality of it is that I can be really hard to be married to. Despite this fact, Suzy has been married to me for fifteen years. I'm not being glib when I say I really admire and appreciate her patience and diligence. I appreciate her sticking with me for all this time.

We are still married and still enjoy spending time together. The intense romance of the early years changes and evolves into something steadier and more durable. Life becomes less about dates and more about getting homework finished and new shoes for basketball season. But amid all that dailiness, all that quotidian stuff that has to get done, there is this partnership that is constantly being forged and shaped. I am still in the process of learning how to be the husband Suzy needs me to be. I am still learning things about what makes her happy and what does not. I am still hearing stories (perhaps less often than before) that I've never heard from her.

Suzy has a lot of gifts, a combination of abilities and insights that I've never seen in any one other person. She has this way of seeing through to who a person is. She just manages to see past the smoke screens and bs people put out into the world and usually manages to see the heart of who a person really is. Often when she makes an observation about a person (or me), it has the effect of a really good metaphor in a poem. I think to myself, "I have never thought of it like that, but that is exactly right."

I really admire Suzy's work ethic. When she takes on a task, she really, really does it. She has this tenacity that I have had to learn to keep up with. As I mentioned earlier, I'm more of a "Isn't it time for second-breakfast" kind of guy and I am always happy to take a break. Suzy gets. it. done. Whether it is co-oping at Parker's preschool, overhauling our entire storage system in the basement, or just decorating our house for the change of the seasons, she starts a job and stays on it until the corners are swept and the windows are clean.

Suzy's aesthetic sense and her organizational skills somehow dovetail together. Whatever center of the brain it is that coincides order and beauty, Suzy got a double helping there. Some people have the ability to put things away, to file and label, to organize and straighten. Some people have natural skill at beautifying and making whatever thing they have influence over more lovely, more pleasing. Suzy somehow fuses these two things. If you think it's easy, try organizing 15 years of storage or even handing pictures in the bathroom all on your own and see how you do. Then invite Suzy over for some insight and watch how it changes. I honestly don't know what the secret is. I just know that when Suzy touches things (books on a shelf, the file cabinet, drawers in the kitchen, pictures in my office) they are more organized and more lovely than they were before. I think that's a Godly trait, frankly. God is an artist who works with grace and order. I think a person who is able to evoke those same characteristics is like Him.

One other thing I admire about Suzy is her devotion to us having an eternal family. She has been committed to that ideal since before we got married and has stayed committed to it through times when it was easy and times when it was excruciating and seemingly impossible. She likes me, she loves me, and there are times when she might think I'm pretty good looking. But she is married to me still for reasons that go beyond those things. She keeps her covenants. She has this steely place within her that is locked on to what is right and it has kept her (and us) anchored through many a stormy sea. I appreciate that about her - that steadiness and firmness that exists within her in the midst of all the small, daily annoyances and distractions. She's a good woman, and I love her. I am glad I married someone with so many gifts and with such strong character. She is a good example to me in so many ways.

So assuming I don't die an early death by freezing solid here in Meatlockerville, USA and assuming she doesn't kill me for again drying a shirt that she has distinctly told me four hundred times does. not. go. in. the. dryer, here's to the next fifteen years, and the next fifteen after that, and (depending on my heart health) another ten after that. I love you, Suze. Thanks for being my wife.

FLW

It's been over a month. I know. Sorry.

I've been reading a lot about Frank Lloyd Wright lately. As everybody knows, Wright was kind of the atom bomb of architecture in the 20th century. He's been dead for over fifty years, but his designs are still ubiquitous in books, documentaries, calendars, films, etc. His influence was so powerful and so wide-reaching that even after all this time, he's probably one of the only architects anywhere that your average joe can name. He was a big deal and continues to be.

What not many people know is that when I was growing up, before I wanted to draw comics or write poetry or do anything else, I wanted to be an architect. I don't know where the idea came from -- my mom probably -- but some of my earliest memories are of me drawing plans for ridiculously fanciful houses. (One, as I recall, used a rainbow as an entry sidewalk. That should tell you how young I was when I was making these drawings.) Anyway, when I was twelve, my dad arranged for me to visit an actual architect's office and hang out for a while. John Watson was a family friend and he had a small firm that at the time had its offices on the second floor of a beautiful old building just across from the river in Idaho Falls. I sat at giant drafting table and had my run of all the tools and materials I wanted. I talked with Mr. Watson and he answered all my questions. At the end of that visit, I was more of less resigned to not being an architect. Too much math, too much management and seemingly not enough creativity. I left with the impression that it was an architect's job to just sort of manage everyone else, and that idea didn't appeal to me in the slightest. So I left that idea behind and went on to study portrait painting, landscape painting, literature, and poetry. (Jeeze, is it any wonder I am poor? Look at that list. I might as well have taken classes in "Would you like fries with that?")

Anyway, even though I left it behind as a professional pursuit, I have always been interested in and moved by architectural design. A well-planned, beautifully designed building can be as exciting to me as a good poem, song, story, or movie. I just dig it. Working in downtown Detroit from 2006 to 2009 was kind of a thrill for me because, for all the homeless guys and decay, there were all the gorgeous buildings everywhere I looked. Narrow row houses and Victorian mansions in Corktown, art deco sky scrapers downtown, crazy Modernist and Brutalist campus buildings at Wayne State - it was an architectural bonanza.

So, like a lot of buffs, I'm fascinated by FLW's designs - his big, famous ones like Fallingwater and the Guggenheim but also his small, obscure ones like Teater's Knoll, a tiny artist studio perched on an outcropping of basalt above the Snake River, the only FLW design in the entire state of Idaho. Every aspect of his buildings is fascinating - exterior, interior, landscaping, lighting, all of it. His designs always catch my eye, are always distinct and, I think, really lovely.

So, out of curiosity, I've been reading about him lately. First I finished a small, narrowly focused non-fiction book called Death in a Prairie House by William R. Drennan. It focuses on a story I'd heard about but never really understood. In 1914, seven people were killed and a fire was set at Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin. Written by an academic but with a nice literary flourish, the book carefully explains and contextualizes what Wright was doing in rural Wisconsin, who was in the house, who committed the murders, and a lot of other information about Wright's career and life at the time.

Once I finished that, I checked out The Women by T.C. Boyle. The book fictionalizes Wright's relationships with his first wife, Kitty; the mistress he builds Taliesin for, Mamah Borthwick; his crazy, heroin-addicted second wife, Miriam Noel; and his mistress-then-third-wife Olgivanna Lazovich. As that list might indicate, FLW had his issues with women.

While I've been reading these two books, I've been checking out big coffee table books filled with pictures of FLW's drawings, houses, office buildings, textile designs, etc. So I've been going back and forth between full-color evidence of the guy's obvious inspired brilliance and tales of his dishonesty, unfaithfulness, impatience, and just sort of ridiculous hypocrisy. It just combines into a really weird picture in my head.

The guy straight up abandoned his wife and six kids. Left them in the dust and took off with the wife of one of his clients. He was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, borrowing here, taking out loans there, hawking prints and drawings, taking advances against projects he knew he'd never complete, the whole deal. He was a control freak who would manipulate his apprentices' personal lives, use their property as his own (if they brought a car to Taliesin, they had to repaint it to Cherokee red at their own expense to match everything else on site), and generally use them as slave labor on his property. While his creative work continues to influence the world even now, as a person he wasn't very admirable at all. In general, he comes across as deeply flawed and slightly ridiculous as a human being. It seems like he was almost a savant -- super brilliant in one area and almost completely helpless in every other way.

The more I read and watch about people who are the absolute best at what they do (pick anything - sports, arts, politics, etc.), the more it seems they all share a kind of extremity of personality. They're all focused on their pursuit in an intense way that excludes almost everything and everyone else around them. They shut out their families and children because they need to design, write, practice, whatever. Their focus allows them to excel in their field but it also almost always seems to encourage a really messy kind of selfishness in their personal dealings. It almost makes me wonder if someone can be the very best at what they do and still be a balanced, kind, faithful human being or if excellence automatically equates egomania. Or, more realistically, is it simply that they are people like everyone else but none of the rest of us have biographies or feature articles written about us? If anyone researched and wrote about your life, how good would you look? For myself, I imagine I'd come out looking a lot like FLW - deeply flawed and slightly ridiculous, but minus the famous, world-changing influence or lasting works of beauty.

These driven genius types are just regular human beings with hang ups and obsessions and mistakes, but amid all that, they manage to create stuff that lasts, that moves people, that changes the world. I guess I can admire their accomplishments and have compassion for the rest.