Super Powers

Even though I think that the convenience market is way out of control, I must admit that I have a place in my heart that absolutely adores infrared sensors.

As I child, I would lay in bed and put my full concentration into turning off the lights with the power of positive thinking. Minute after minute of scrunching up my face and trying to will the lights off resulted in nothing but disappointment. How do the Jedi do it?

Now that I am an adult, I am surrounded by devices that dry the eyes of the disappointed child. I still get excited when I activate an automatic grocery store door opener. The paper towel dispensers at my school operate only after waving my hand in front of them. So, of course, I wave my hand as if I were using a Jedi mind-trick to overpower the dispenser–the force of my will demands that paper products be provided. Auto-sinks, hand-dryers, and motion sensors all give me a sense of childhood delight. I allow myself to believe that there is something about ME that makes these devices work. If you watch me closely, you will probably notice some subtle body language to support this claim. Watch my eyebrows and the pacing of my strides. Those are the biggest giveaways.

I wish I could say that it is embarrassing to admit, but it isn’t. I don’t mind being a Jedi.

Disappointment

Walking into a drafty old classroom only to realize that you have to turn on the heater or else other people will complain.

The Autobiographer

“Inspired by true events on movie screens, I am a one-man wrecking machine.”

These are lyrics from a song by one of my favorite bands: Guster. To me, the song speaks of regrets. The voice of the song wishes for another chance to do commonplace things with the hopes of having more extraordinary results. I completely relate.

God told me something interesting earlier this month. He told me to give up on the personal narrative of my life, and just start doing what is right. This is hard for me. I have spent years learning how to turn commonplace events into extraordinary moments. I think my blog is evidence.

I find myself thinking of my current experience from the future, but looking back. All the experiences about which people say, “Someday we will look back on this and laugh”, I have the ability to laugh immediately. This usually comes as a shock to others when my initial response to personal injury is giggling.

Living life from a third-person perspective is great for the writer, but lousy for the day-to-day me. I find that I am make choices based more upon what would make a better story at my eulogy instead of what would best help others—or myself. I think I have alienated plenty of my peer by trying to “spice up” the common. While some find my quirkiness to be refreshing, it seems to eventually end up ruining wonderful things that could have been.

For a while, I thought that I would show everybody. I told myself that greatness has always been misunderstood. Geniuses are often the target of ridicule. I had to be patient with “the others” until that final climax came. I waited for the high school to chant my name. They never did. I waited for a college professor to write “come to my office. We have to talk about this.” On one of my papers. It never happened. (Okay, it actually happened twice, but not for reasons of accolade.) I have waited for the one person to pull me from a jeering crowd and tell me that they are wrong and I am right. All I have heard is jeering.

In desperation, I have tried to contrive situations in which the climax would come. All of the suspense and rising action would come to a head—the audience of reality would look to me and I would provide the ultimate resolution to their conflict. Sometimes, these situations turn out—nice. Other times, abysmal failures.

“Inspired by true events of movie screens, I am a one-man wrecking machine.”

Then, on the first Sunday in October. God told me to give up. I should not try to concoct meaning in the swirling stream of events that surround me. Instead, I should simply live for the next right choice. I should be boring. I should let life happen to me, just like it does to everyone else.

This was a discouraging thought to me. Why would the God has elected me to such high tasks, ask me to live such a common life? Then I started looking around at the people who had most shaped my impulses for good. Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Arthur Reich influenced me, but only by giving me bigger words and phrases to understand the principles that I had been taught by a veterinary science undergrad, a public school teacher, and a computer programmer with tendonitis. The real meat of my life has been given to me by common people—boring people—people that will never have a book written about them. They will never be on a movie screen. Just like me.

So I made the choice to be boring. I stopped making decisions based on what would “inevitably” follow from my new perspective. I made boring choices. I blend in with the crowd. I look at my life from inside my head again. I try to make the next right choice and hope that it helps somebody.

Then my sister gave me a call. Her most recent surgery had left her very sick. She couldn’t get out of bed and she was alone. She couldn’t even feed herself. I did what I always did: I went to the grocery store and purchased what she needed, then went to a restaurant and got what she wanted. I took everything it to her place and set it on the coffee table so that she could have it when she was ready. We talked for a little while.

Then, much to my surprise, she asked me a for a priesthood blessing.

When it was all over we were both crying. We had become closer. I sat by her and held her hand while we both got control of ourselves. As I left, we followed our routine of her thanking me and me offering to help again when she needed.

It wasn’t until the next day that I realized that I had experienced my climax without even knowing it. My life, my real life, my unplanned, unscripted life had moved me to tears. Choice by unknowing choice, I had gotten myself onto a movie screen. I hadn’t gotten there by planning. I hadn’t obtained my spirituality in a contrived way, but by preparing prayer by prayer, verse by verse, choice by choice.

I’ve had my climax. I’ll be in my dressing room.

There’s No Home-like Place

A few months ago, I found myself in a very strange place emotionally. I felt like a foreigner no matter where I went. In the tumult of my pilgrimage, I sought to find home. It was a new dimension of homeless. I wanted to find that feeling of being home.

They say you can’t go home again. I was determined to show that I could. For the summer months, I left the fair town of Logan to attend school at Salt Lake Community College. I moved in with my parents. They didn’t have a room for me—nor did I want them to. I specifically asked that they not. While living there, I juggled the dynamic of being both adult and dependant. Not fun. During those months, I realized that my parent’s house was not home. Home was somewhere in Logan, and I had to find out where.

I went back to Logan as soon as I could. I packed my bags, put them in the car, went to my last class, and immediately made the trip to the great cold North. I didn’t have any place to live, but just to be back was a shot in the arm.

Since I drive a convertible now, I have to be a bit more judicious about my living quarters. Logan gets pretty snowy, so I decided that I should park in a garage—or at least a car port. I found a place right away that was a dream home. Unfortunately, they I couldn’t move in for two weeks. I would have to find accommodations.

Accustomed to being an urban camper, my first impulse was to sleep in the canyon. On the way up the canyon, I friend of my mind pulled up behind me on his new hog. He didn’t recognize me because of the new car, but I got him to pull over. He invited me to his place, and I spent a couple of nights at his place. It was a home in which I had lived for years, but it was his place now. It wasn’t my home, it was his. We talked about the old days and he admitted that the neighborhood had changed. Most of the people that knew me were gone. Careers, spouses, and opportunities had called them away. Not even the neighborhood was home.

In the meantime, I went to a three-day training conference for teachers. It was different than last year, because this year, I was experienced. I could weight the content against what I knew, not just what I anticipated. Regardless, the significant part of the conference was when I was giving a presentation and looked out into the hallway.

Watching me like a proud mother was Ann. Ann had been my mentor teacher that I had hand picked to be my mentor. She is a fantastic teacher. For the first time, I realized that she wasn’t going to be my mentor anymore. I was no longer in her nest. She was no longer my home.

After two weeks and one day, I called on the bedroom that I was anticipating. “Sorry. That room was filled.” Jerks. I went looking for a new, new place. I considered moving in with the gentlemen that I had lived with last year. Turns out all three of them were either engaged or married. Even my most recent home had dematerialized.

By this time, I starting to wonder if I would ever have a home again. The new school year was quickly approaching, and “my” class would be in third grade. I don’t know if every teacher goes through this, but I felt like getting a new class would somehow be cheating on the other. These little eight-year-olds were like my own children, and I wasn’t allowed to keep in touch with them. Third grade is like a bitter ex-wife that says that I was a lousy father and that I shouldn’t see the kids ever again. I could start again, but “my” kids would never see me again.

In this time of existential crisis, I turn to old reliable: Chinese food. It isn’t a very solvent coping strategy, but it is…well…reliable. Or so I thought. Even the China King Buffet, the mother of all Chinese Food, was gone. I guess their last Department of Health closure was their last. It is now “The House of Chen” and serves a different menu. No more General Tso Chicken, and their Sweet and Sour Sauce tastes like every one else’s.

The feeling of being foreign was back, but this time, it was accompanied by a new feeling of despair. I didn’t have any place to go. I had no refuge to which to return. I had no safe place where I could lick my wounds before returning to battle.

So I threw myself into my work. I went to my classroom and made preparations for the coming year. Even when the essentials were covered, I continued working with foresight (a commodity that I didn’t have last year). I copied reams and reams of paper. I measured and re-measured lines on posters. Having something to distract myself from my sadness was valuable. Before I knew it, the new class came and Grant was Mr. Bushman again.

I got home—which, for tonight was my sister’s home. Took off my shirt and stood in front of a fan. I was hot and tired. I started preparing for sleep. I emptied my pockets. Handkerchief, wallet, keys, and phone. And marbles. Marbles are points. Group leaders get points at the beginning of the day, and I take them away when group members require correction. The group leader gives them to me, and I put them in my pocket since I don’t have time to walk across the room and put them in the green coil pot.

I don’t have a church, a neighborhood, a place to live, a mentor, children, a favorite restaurant, or anyone with whom to discuss it. I am homeless. But somehow, seeing three oblong marbles on a make-shift bookcase made it okay. Home isn’t a place or a person. Home is a feeling. I don’t know how to produce that feeling, but I was encouraged that three little pieces of glass could. These days, home is having a pile of green Bushman Bucks poking out of my pocket. Home is having little voices yell whatever crazy statement I coached them to yell. Home is getting more French Fries than any of the other teachers. Home is helping baby boomers not be scared web-based applications. Home is work. Work is home.

If that last paragraph was touching to you, then you were probably under the same delusion I live in. Work is home? That isn’t touching, it is a sickness. The bell rings at 3:10, then home starts to fade away. Like a dream from which I am forced to awaken, home gets softer and softer, replaced by the tumultuous silence of homelessness. I go back to the place I live. I eat food. I watch youtube. I go to church. I go to parties. I flirt with girls. I get high fives. I drive my cool car. I call my family. I pray. I read. But, these places, these people, these things, they aren’t home. Most people can’t look forward to their weekends. I hate weekends. I count down the minutes until Monday Morning. I’ve got a five day weekend coming up, and I can barely breathe when I think about it. To enjoy one’s work is good. To enjoy nothing but work is dysfunctional.

Why am I writing this? Why am I publishing these thoughts on the internet? Why am I shouting into the vacuum? I guess I’m just waiting for an echo. When I hear it, I will walk toward it. Right now, the only thing that echoes is an Elementary School.

Personal Update…Barely

Hello Faithful Readers,

I have enjoyed writing for both of you, and I’m sure that my long absence has thrown you into an existential wreck.  Whoops.

I have had a number of adventures in the past few weeks, but I haven’t had the emotional energy necessary to do any writing.  Right now, I am just collecting words.  Later, I will organize them and throw them your way.

I’m not dead–I’m just behaving that way.

Maternal Instinct

I witnessed something extraordinary–and yet not.  It was something that I attribute to maternal instinct in its truest sense.  It was an instinctual behavior produced by a material organism.

I was driving on a dirt road, away from one of my favorite places to park my “home”, when I saw a mother bird and what I assume were her three little birds in the road.  They were running away from me in the same direction as I was approaching them.  My four wheels were much faster than their eight legs, so I was gaining ground.  Mother bird then took and abrupt right turn, removing herself from danger.  But the three little birds did not follow.  They were chirping and running, running and chirping, but they didn’t change their course.  I thought to myself, if I were a predator I could eat these little birds easily.  That’s when mother bird returned, barking as she ran toward me.  Then she stopped.  The little birds kept running, but the mother bird just stared me down.  “It ends here,” she seemed to say.  “Whatever is going to happen, is going to happen now, and it’s going to happen to me.”

Luckily for mother bird, I was not a predator.  I had no interest in eating, killing, or ever toying with her progeny.  I was just a homeless guy that was headed off to take a morning shower.  After I stopped the blazer, mother bird flew away, caught up with her little ones, and they all walked off of the road together.  This was not a noble choice made by a discerning matriarch; it was the natural consequence of genetic prescription.  Nevertheless, I was changed.  I thought of my own mother.

Once upon a time, there was an abusive lawyer and his abused son.  When the son spent the night at my house, the lawyer came early in the morning to get him back.  In one corner of the porch stood a three-piece suit, in the other corner, curlers and a nightgown.  Mother bird–although only mother by proxy–looked up into the face of a predator, and stared him.  “It ends here,” she seemed to say.  “Whatever is going to happen, is going to happen now, and it’s going to happen to me.”  The lawyer yielded.  The boy was safe.

At another time, I was in the hospital and I was in extreme amounts of pain because of nerve damage sustained from a major back surgery.  I could hardly talk.  I could actually feel people walking outside of my hospital room, and it hurt.  There was one doctor with particularly poor bedside manor.  He would kick my bed and I would wince in pain.  The first time, mother explained.  The second time, mother reminded.  The third time mother stared him down.  “It ends here,” she seemed to say.  “Whatever is going to happen, is going to happen now, and it’s going to happen to me.”

My inner scientist says that this behavior is strictly instinctual.  Mothers whose genes have constructed this fix action pattern as a response to predatory stimuli produce like-phenotypical offspring that survive and later reproduce.  It’s just textbook natural selection.  At first, my inner theologian resents this idea.  It seems to cheapen the sacrifices made by my mother.  To attribute her heroics to mere animalistic drives seems reprehensible.  But then my inner theologian asks me to compare my animalistic drives to those of my mother.  Left to my instincts, I would be addicted to chemicals and behaviors that would have killed me years ago, and there would dozens of people around to spit on my shallow grave every chance they got.  If Mother’s most base and primal urges are to lay down her life for me, I can only imagine the pinnacle of virtue she is, and has yet to become.  I am sobered to think that I am the beneficiary of natural benevolence.

At the end of the day, I don’t actually believe that humankind was the product of evolutionary development.  I know that my mother was prepared to be a mother long before she was born.  She was trained by scores of capable tutor in this an other vales.  She has overcome some of her own natural tendencies toward selfishness.  The whole me cannot attribute Mother’s virtue to circumstance alone.  She has trained herself into a new instinct.  She reacts maternally even at times when her genetics might prescribe preservation.  This too is sobering.

Call it nature, call it nurture.  I just call it home.

Hubris

Thinking it’s cool that a group of first grade girls falls silent as you walk out of your classroom, their only words, “It’s Mr. Bushman.”

Gaffe

Deciding that paging yourself over the intercom is funny—only to discover that next year’s PTA board just got their first impression next door.

iContact

Two people communicating via web cam, so that neither is actually looking “at” the other person, but down slightly.

Teenager

Someone who is trying to figure out how much of what adults say is total crap.