LXXIX.

Yesterday morning, I woke up too early, feeling tired and a little directionless, a little uncertain of my commitment to the things that had made me so happy for two weekends straight, a little lonely, a little of that old winter-is-coming-and-I’m-not-ready. And I had nothing in the refrigerator but eggs, and couldn’t eat eggs so early, so I put on formal shoes with my sweatpants and ran down the street, around the corner, down another block to the deli. When I walked back home with cream and yoghurt in a black plastic bag, I suddenly saw that the morning was brilliantly sunny. But it wasn’t just the sunshine: it felt, for a few minutes, like everything was going to be okay. And then it was.

I think I am just getting the creative part of my head back from where it’s been for two months, on the good side, poured into pushing my teaching to somewhere it hasn’t gone yet, on the bad side, reluctantly given over to trying to be the person someone else wanted me to be.

LXXVIII.

Designer Philippe Starck on human possibility & responsibility:

The bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today. And today, we have no idea of what we shall be in four billion years. And this territory is fantastic.

That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. It is our romanticism. Mutation. We are mutants. And if we don’t deeply understand, if we don’t integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story. Because every generation thinks we are the final one….

And here is something: nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate.

LXXVII.

The number of people present on the court to make a match between two players possible at the US Open is astonishing. I counted more than twenty. That doesn’t include most security or any of the people who make the whole event happen.

LXXVI.

Here’s Dan Pink talking at TED about studies of reward and motivation, which show that rewards can be very motivating for simple, rote tasks, but can actually work against motivation for complex, creative tasks. He argues that what motivates people for “21st century” work environments are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. One company gives its engineers a full day, every so often, to work on anything they want, but they all share at the end. And a huge number of their innovations and solutions come from those days. Google employees famously get “twenty percent time” to do whatever they want – with whomever they want, using whatever techniques they want. And again, a huge number of their innovations come out of the projects that begin in twenty percent time.

What would autonomy, mastery, and purpose look like in a middle school environment? Could we give kids 1 school day, say, once per semester, and allow them to work alone or in groups of their choice, with as much or as little help as desired, to do whatever interests them most? What about a whole school week, twice a year, or the afternoons of a whole school week, or the mornings, or one day every week, or one afternoon every week? With the only real requirements related to supervision and safety, and sharing what you produce at a specified time? Even if we embraced this idea, would we truly be comfortable with what this might look like for some kids? Would be comfortable with unfinished projects? With abandoned ideas? With projects that looked like play? With the inevitable, occasional slacking? With truly interdisciplinary projects? With not knowing at the start of the day or the hour what our job, as teachers, was going to involve?

LXXV.

This is what bone-tired means: enough energy to eat, or cook, but not both. When you put your feet up, your calves knot and jump your legs off the tabletop. And so you are drawn downwards, to the couch, to your back, to your back on the floorboards. Tired in the arches and calves, in the thousand angles that make up the musculature of the shoulders, in the sides of the fingers, tired even in the web of flesh between pinkie and ring, tired in the smooth soft dime behind the ears.

LXXIV.

Effortless. Beautiful. Interesting. Approaching what I want (in my head it’s more like walking through a room filled with shifting filaments that slide around you as you explore). Moment after fascinating moment.

LXXIII.

Here’s to the bums with their backs against the windowless brick wall of the ConEd plant, who asked for a quarter and assured me that it wouldn’t rain tonight. You don’t need your umbrella.

Here’s to the hunched old man who took the socially inappropriate seat on the bench next to me when other benches were empty, and waited five minutes before he asked what I thought the outdoor air temperature was right then. Were you sitting in the park in the heat of the day?

Here’s to the drummer I never saw, to the saxophonist playing to empty benches, to the families who brought their children outside in the thick summer air to picnic on a blanket on the paving stones in the dark. And here’s to the runaways asleep on the grass, soft-bodied in the grass, soft in their grubby asexual black jean cut-offs. To the blond dewy girls leaning arched against the metal bars of sidewalk scaffolds, saying beep-beep from the sidewalk as men passed. Beep-beep.

LXXII.

More and more, the famous people who are dying are people I’ve heard of, or whose contributions mean something to me even if their names don’t. And not just the obvious ones, the sort-of famous, too, which is what makes it noticeable.

LXXI.

For months there were no words, just getting through the day, and days and days of crying and hating myself for crying. But there was also a sharpening, a fierce flaking away of what was not necessary. A sense that whatever time was still mine should be spent, lavishly, on what mattered most, walks and conversations and meals shared. There didn’t seem to be much need to see anyone who wasn’t an old friend or a good one, or to be seen anyplace or to be able to say I did this or did that or was there.

LXX.

The first lines of Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

And later:

Out in the open world, out in the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid throated young fellows, free to do as they liked, and above all, to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

…

But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man, without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power.