apple and eve

My husband was too quiet, his eyes concealed behind sunglasses he hadn't even wanted to buy, much less wear. He was thinking, it seemed to me, of how to avoid kicking something, and terribly focused on just breathing. I am always caught off-guard by the physical discomfort I experience in the rare moments when I know he is choosing his next words carefully.

I thought this punishment extreme for my "offense," and told him so. "I told you not to do it," he breathed, "and you did it anyway!" I had thought he might be a little upset. I had miscalculated. More than six months I had deliberated--and he had been privy to it--smiling while telling me firmly, "this discussion doesn't matter, because you're not going to do this."

I suppose I should have known he was serious. The smiling threw me off, because it usually accompanies all kinds of admonishments to slow down, relax, and lay my burdens down. My husband knows that I am calibrated to run circles around him most days, and that his job is to find the button, switch, or turnkey that will shut me down when I simply cannot. He smiles in such moments because he also knows that some days he might as well stop the wind from blowing or the tide from coming in.

I was serious, too. I began to entertain the idea at first because I just couldn't keep up with my own default setting. My life had begun to outstrip my stamina, between the bills, the messages, the calls, the to-dos... Then it occurred to me that it would be nice, to be able to hold and polish all that concerned me in he palm of my hand. The risks--and the price--of such convenience weighed on my mind. To hold so much information so readily would make that information not only more accessible and useful, but so precious and easily lost or misused.

It wasn't until later that what I will call the shinyness of it began to grow on me. I want to be clear about this and say that it was first convenience, and later the shinyness. It makes me feel more justified and less shallow...somehow less easily led astray. The shinyness lay in that I would be able to see and hear and do so much with the touch of a finger, that I could customize and accessorize and somehow make a statement about my life and why it mattered. Neither the convenience nor the shinyness mattered now, and neither gave me any comfort in the face of this silence and this breathing. I had shattered some idyllic dream of his, and the world would now be different.

I laid on the bed next to where he sat, the sweat of a day's work pouring off of him. I could see the accusation in his eyes now: he had been slaving away to impose order on chaos, to turn a profit while I had frivolously been throwing it away. Indignation rose into my throat, and I reminded him that I, too, toil to make our living, and that my work in part had motivated my choice. I could not even look at the thing I had brought into our home--it sat lifeless on the bed between us. My eyes were glued to his, which were staring at the wall.

He looked down at the bed, over at me, and picked up my new iPhone. I could tell that my husband, the ludite technophile, was conflicted in this moment. He had never even wanted a cell phone. When his Army instructors cajoled him into getting one when we were brand new lieutenants, he had "stuck it to the man" by buying the cheapest, most obscenely large, brick of a phone he could find. This is also the man who convinced his roommate to heft a typewriter to class in protest against the laptop girl who clicked and clacked a little too loudly in our "Milton and the 17th Century" class in college. Setting the margins as small as they would go in order to maximize the bing! that punctuated every sentence, he even duped the professor, who just laughed and baptized the obnoxious behavior as a clever ludite protest. At the same time, he is the techie who introduced me to StumbleUpon, Skype, Newsmap and Pandora. I can't even listen to Aphex Twin without the music seeming to paint images of his face in my mind, I feel so indebted to his obsession with the marriage of art and technology.

Now, he browsed the first page of apps, without looking at me once. He sighed deeply. In that sigh, I sensed some lofty, dying desire that the two of us would, on a whim, sell all our worldly possessions to go live in the mountains, or go halfway around the world. We would subsist in a desert, like monks, meditating on all the great books and wines and cigars we had ever sampled, without consuming more than the bare necessities ever again. Stripped of everything, we would feed on our rich inner lives and be able to enjoy each other's company unhindered by the world and its ploys, its crassness, its responsibilities. Perhaps in his sigh was also the knowledge that one more radiation source had just been added to our daily routine. With this, the fear of succumbing to brain cancer or distracted driving crept to the forefront of my thoughts, as I watched his fingers learn their way around YouTube and the stock quotes on the smooth touch-screen.

I was fairly certain that I had not been motivated by vanity, even as I knew that it was not modesty, contentment, or survival that had motivated me, either. I had wanted to a tool that would enable me to manage my life more calmly and happily. I wanted maps, answers, raw data, transaction and relationships at my fingertips, because life as I wanted to live it demanded this. I laughed as I watched him nibble at the idea of this new reality, hoping that with time he would only see that it was good. He threw a fiery glance my way, and I was quiet. I hoped that this was not going to get us expelled from our thus far paradaisical experience of marriage.

ticket to ride

On my kitchen table there is CD that is not just a CD. It is a ticket to ride, by train, boat, or anything else that travels along the surface of the earth. It can take you almost anywhere, as long as you are in no rush, and provided you don't have to fly. It's white and deceptively blank-looking, with ADVENTURES 2009-2010 scrawled on it. It records the trips my husband and I have taken since last fall...many of which we will remember even in our old age.This past Christmas, after hoofing it to midnight mass in Jackson Square, we took a train from New Orleans to D.C. to see my mom's side of the family.We hadn't seen them since her funeral two years ago. The romance of the rails was everything we hoped it'd be and more...but I especially appreciated the time to think, decompress, and prepare to see the people I love most. As we left the levees of Lake Ponchartrain I kept Willie Nelson's famous song, "The City of New Orleans" on my brain. As we made our way north to where the snow swished across the tracks connecting small- town America, the towns and stations we passed looked like so many ceramic collectible scenes, warm-lit, nestled in their winterscapes.

Months later, when we celebrated our anniversary in Mexico, we went by ship, and I appreciated this slower, almost premodern mode of travel for the same reason. I have a hard time leaving work at work, and being stranded on board a ship or on a train is perfect for making me leave it all behind. During that trip, I finally got to see the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, and my skin crawled with how alive the place still felt. The temple pyramid of the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl rang with echos as we stood before it and clapped--echos that sounded like the call of the Quetzal bird and the flurry of feathers. It was no longer a wistful, grainy image in a textbook, as it had been all my life. I was reminded of deferred dreams of teaching language and literature in Spanish and English, both on hold for awhile while I'm in combat boots.


In many ways traveling by these older modes of travel took me back to a time when steel and steam were at the cutting edge of progress, when everything that now seems slow and cumbersome by comparison was shiny and swift. I went back in time in other ways: back to my mom's childhood, back to the birthplace of America...

workplace angst

I ran into something today that helped me make some sense of my Army experience so far. I just completed 3 years of active service, and though I still have not deployed, I feel like I've been in a war zone in some ways. People close to me know that I've spent most of my three years in a unit with a demanding operational tempo and a less than enjoyable organizational culture. I have run into a lot of peers from ROTC, OCS, and USMA that express similar frustration from other units they've seen, although most affirm that they have seen units where life and work were far more enjoyable and meaningful.

The multiple hypotheses of this article can be summarized in the following sentence:

Subordinates with high self-esteem and an internal locus of control experience decreased motivation and increased stress when their supervisor exercises coercive, perceived, legitimate, reward, expert and referent power.

(I think this means that subordinates with high self-esteem, who like to self-determine and influence others, are often stressed and demoralized by supervisors who use coercion, rewards, status, and even professional expertise to heavily influence their subordinates.)

This made sense to me, and it happens that the kind of leadership described here as stressful and demotivating to someone like me is the very kind of leadership most often displayed and valued in my organization, and possibly in the Army (the article differentiates between high and low self esteem, and internal and external locus of control--in both cases I identify myself with the former type of subordinate). To me, it doesn't really matter that my bosses usually emerge with a high estimate of me and of my work: the angst I carry most days is not worth even the highest praise. One day, I plan to work someplace where I don't constantly have to translate myself into an adverse organizational culture. But for the meantime, I've decided to extend my active service obligation by a few years, so I need to find a way to do that with less wheel-spinning. I am trying to identify some strategies to cope successfully and not lose my mind!

I'm not sure that all workplaces are fraught with these issues, but I imagine to some extent they exist anywhere. The real meat of the article begins on p. 362, and here is an interesting clip about control in the workplace, from which I removed all the cumbersome citations for easier reading:

"People have different beliefs about the factors responsible for what happens to them. Those with an internal locus of control (internals) view what happens to them as primarily under their own control, whereas those with an external locus of control (externals) view what happens to them as determined by factors outside themselves and beyond their control. ... internals are more likely than externals to be in managerial positions and to try to influence the behavior of others. In contrast, externals are more likely to accept attempts by others to influence them, and respond more positively to directive leadership style. Further, internals are more likely to take actions to cope with stress, whereas externals are more likely to endure rather than to act. Overall, internals tend to have a higher desire than externals for personal control in the workplace.

Given these differences between internals and externals, it is hypothesized that internals are generally less receptive to supervisor power than externals, especially to supervisor reward, coercive, legitimate, and referent power. Not only do internals have a tendency to obtain and exert personal control, but they also tend to resist attempts by others to influence them. Therefore, internals might need less supervision from their supervisors than externals and may even perceive the exercising of supervisory power as unnecessary and unwanted, which could lower their motivation and increase stress levels. It can be argued, however, that internals would be more receptive to the supervisor's expert power than externals. Given internals' tendency to perceive situations as controllable and their preference for taking constructive actions to resolve problems in the workplace, they are more likely to appreciate and make use of their supervisors' professional knowledge and expertise to solve problems and improve performance. As a result, internals are likely to react positively to high expert power of the supervisor, especially given their relatively stronger belief that good performance will lead to rewards."

A very interesting dichotomy, to say the least.

References

A. R. Elangovan, Jia Lin Xie. Effects of Perceived Power of Supervisor on Subordinate Stress and Motivation: The Moderating Role of Subordinate Characteristics. Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 20, No. 3 (May, 1999), pp. 359-373

pitter patter

I had the immense privilege today of accompanying a friend and coworker to her ultrasound. That we had to drive 2 hours to get to this appointment should tell you something about just how rural Louisiana can get--how long has ultrasound technology been around? Going in place of her husband, who was very disappointed that he could not get off work to accompany her, I was poised to get the video footage that would make him feel like he hadn't missed this irreplaceable event. (This is especially poignant for this couple, because this pregnancy is the first to successfully pass the first trimester, so this is a story of overcoming odds.)

From the first, tentative images of the baby wiggling around inside of my friend, I found myself referring oddly to this child as "it." Was "it" an alien, or an animal, that this pronoun was appropriate? Of course not, but I didn't know how else to relate. Still, I was captivated as we traced from one human feature to another. Spinal column, upturned nose, flexing ankles and fists... I was one creature beholding another, a new and still-forming life. And then, without warning, we moved to the baby's lower regions, where, prominently displayed, spread-eagle, between (already!) muscular legs was the mark of future manhood. From then on, it was not so hard to talk about hands and diaphragms--they were all his, and he was breathing, moving, living as we watched and held our breaths with anticipation.

Later that evening, with our small group bible study, we talked about how he will reorient the lives of his parents. In a sort of alien invasion, he will reprioritize and reorder the world as they know it, abolishing all notions of "his" and "hers" and "yours" and "mine," becoming the first thing that is totally "ours" for both mom and dad. We laughed about the ways he is already beginning that shift, making way for his arrival. Watch out world! We prayed the following portion of Psalm 139 as an appropriate prayer of thanks for the health and safety of this baby, and for the life given to each of us:

¹³For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother's womb.
¹⁴I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
¹⁶Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.

(from the New American Standard Bible)

becoming "normal"

I have been reading for my Masters in Education program, otherwise known as the MAT@USC. We talk about being sociotechnically literate, and the program is a good example of that, with all its multi-print/media sources and modes of conducting class online. An article by I would like to focus on by Miraca U. M. Gross introduces the central dialectic of identity construction for gifted students. She posits that there are two extremes for identity diffusion that many gifted students tend toward, but advocates a more integrated, socialized, and balanced view of gifted student identity (Gross, 1998). Gross contrasts George Bernard Shaw, who created a "dazzling array of masks" behind which to hide his giftedness, with Einstein and Cyril Joad, who seemed to remove themselves "gently but firmly from the obligations of social intimacy," believing that the "differences between [themselves] and the people with whom [they have] to associate are so much greater than the differences among them, that there is little hope of finding someone with similar values, or beliefs, or interests" (Gross, 1998, p. 8). I have often found myself straddling this line, and have been jealous of others who were better at role experimentation and creating glamorous masks for themselves, or who could get away with being reclusive and people were in awe of them for it. I always had a sense that there was something unhealthy in it, but I envied them because I wasn't any good at role playing or forswearing the company of people altogether. I envied them, but I didn't see a future for myself in their shoes, so I was stuck working out my identity in the context of the people left and right of me.

I was fortunate enough to have several schools and teachers who knew what to do with me, and I made friends with others who learned and developed much like I did in Honors, AP, and special elective classes. But there was always the reality in the hallways, at sports practice after school, even in orchestra or the school play, that not everyone was on the same page. In college it still surprised me to find that my genuine love of learning (I think we talked about the accompanying physiological arousal in the 518 class) was not shared by many of my classmates. I assumed that the love of learning was why you went to college, and yet they were surprised by my caffeinated persona following a good read or an essay test. Gross outlines this difference by saying that "one of the basic characteristics of the gifted is their intensity and an expanded field of their subjective experience" (Piechowski, 1991, p. 181 as quoted in Gross, 1998, p. 5).

Here is where the rubber continues to meet the road for me. In college, I became close friends with my roommate who by her own admission was not academically inclined whatsoever. We became close primarily because she was patient with me while I continued to be myself. I wove into our daily conversations about typical college girl things my reflections on what I was reading, listening to, experiencing in my classes and hobbies. I persevered when I noticed that she was losing interest, either by linking it to something I knew she was genuinely interested in or by giving myself permission to lose her interest--without taking it as a negative assessment of who I was. (I still employ this technique today with friends, bosses and coworkers in the Army, when our interests don't align.) To me, it was a better use of my "giftedness" than to cloister myself away from the women on my hall or prefer only fractured, pedantic relationships with other bookworms like myself. I had sought her out as a socially stabilizing force because I perceived, perhaps selfishly, that she could bring me into a world of relationships that I would otherwise struggle to cultivate on my own. In a sense, I sought her out because she was "normal."

As much as I loved learning, I wanted it to be relevant to the people I was meeting, and I did not want to be consumed by the isolation of my own academic ego and miss out on the pure, wreckless joy and adventure that college friendships could bring. My roommate did just that, introducing me to people I would have barely sought out or talked to otherwise. If I felt they were boring or shallow, it became my challenge to invite them into a deeper dialogue, which I instinctively knew they must have something to contribute to. That was when I stopped envying my more gifted friends and acquaintances who put on masks or withdrew from community. I was watching them become fit only for academia or niche interests, and I couldn't follow them there. I wanted my life to be lived in the arena, inviting others to realize their potential instead of entrenching or flaunting mine. I would like to say that at this point I was unequivocal about my self-acceptance and the social integration of my gifts; however, I recall on several occasions attributing my enjoyment of less intellectual company to the fact that I just wanted as intelligent as my more reclusive or flamboyant friends.

It is only for God (and my employers, perhaps) to know where I fall on the spectrum of giftedness: others are more gifted than I, certainly. The essential thing is that I have known for a long time that I am different than many of the people I run into in life. My moral sense was perhaps the first thing I noticed was heightened compared to many of my grade-school peers, then other acuities followed. This is a classic nature vs. nurture debate as well, which I do not want to explore at the moment--I only know that who/whatever is responsible for my giftedness, I am responsible for revealing the greatest good out of what I was given, for myself and for others. That my roommate could begin to sense this impulse in me--where others wrote me off as nerdy, ostentatious, or even insecure--is half of the miracle of relationship for someone like me. (That said, it still wasn't much fun when, using my normal vocabulary in daily conversation, people often gave me a hard time about using "big words" or being "too excited" about how my theology class related to my Emily Dickenson reading that week.)

Eventually, my roommate began to realize her own unexplored passion for learning, and as her awareness of herself increased, we continued to enjoy the great potential of friendship. I watched her go through a stage of isolation and loneliness as she began to differ from established norms she had taken for granted, and then to flourish as she painfully began to reintegrate herself into our social context as an emerging thinker. She always had an acute moral empathy for others, and she had an exceptional drawing and painting ability, but she had not necessarily been characterized as academically gifted. School continued to be a struggle for her, but she was now aware that substantive learning could occur in many other modes, and that this was attractive and important to her. I think this demonstrates why it would be a mistake to assume that all gifted kids should be kept from interaction with their "normal" peers. Given the right impetus and encouragement, gifted kids can help their peers unlock their own potential, and also benefit from the social interaction that implies.

Finally, most of us will have to work with some "normal" people in the course of our adult lives. My life in the Army has given me painful examples of this, where my analytical, compassionate, and creative impulses have earned me negative social ramifications more than once. Yet I am consistently given more challenging jobs and encouraged to pursue a military career. Someone gifted in the arts and humanities might miss the value in military culture and leadership styles. This can be counteracted to a point through self-reflection, reading the literary works of military thinkers to develop a warrior-scholar paradigm, and appreciating the art-and-science aspects of martial skills. Soldiers will surprise you with their ingenuity, their sometimes beautiful lightning reflexes, their intimate knowledge of equipment, and their logistical sense of the material world by which they live or die. Even the conformist camaraderie of military culture takes on its own life and artfulness from unit to unit, until it can be rightfully called in some cases esprit de corps. (I was so nerdy as to quote the British Romantics to myself while navigating my way through night forests with only my compass and map, to keep from panicking. Similarly, as a cadet, I couldn't march well until I conceptualized the movement as a dance, for which I had prior experience.) If it were not for these kinds of investigations, it would be easy for me to conclude that the people around me were stupid, unimaginative, or base, autocratic literalists. What I have had to perceive over time is that there are many forms of being gifted, and out of sheer necessity some are more valuable in my job than others.

In sum, our definitions of "gifted" and "normal" begin to warp as we place them in close proximity to one another. One realizes that the aim of every human being ought to be social and personal integration, rather than isolation or conformity in either extreme. That each person learns at any age to appreciate solitude and individual pursuits as valuable in and of themselves is vital to identity construction for anyone. In compliment to this, each must learn to appreciate the value of human community as inherently worth the cost, recognizing of course that some communities will always suit her interests and personal growth better than others.

References

Gross, M. (1998). The “me” behind the mask: Intellectually gifted students and the search for Identity. Roeper Review Feb 20 (3).

(-) invective

tell me
without tremors
your sine qua non sobbing--
don't offer
with clenched fists
a cold blanket to wrap up in
against the hurricane
unfurling inside
to wreck all arguments
and make flotsam
out of buoyancy.
spare me
the harsh sand settling--
burying our so-called waterloo
with
finality.

(Written as a perspective meditation from my husband's point of view. He has to put up with too many of my tirades about the Army lately. I think I saw this poem in his eyes this week, bent over the spaghetti he was making, as he asked if I could render the account of my horrible week "without invective.")

past tense: conjugating absence

Today I was talking to my masseuse, oddly enough, about some unpolished silver I have in a drawer, passed from my great grandmother through my mother, to me. We were talking about how tarnished silver has so many fascinating colors, it makes you not want to polish it. I think I feel some kind of compulsion to talk about meaningful, deep things with her because she represents a union of physical and spiritual well-being that can only be described as intentional and, of course, full of meaning. As a result I may force conversation sometimes, trying to appear integrated and whole, when I really come fractured, in knots, and adrift in the world. After all, what you pay a masseuse to do is clearly something you are at least partly missing in your normal daily routine. In my case, it is not a deprivation of human touch or visually appealing environment: I inhabit my office space like a home, changing the lighting and decor to suit, and at home my husband is a constant physical presence that comforts and calms. I come for relaxation, which is too easily left by the wayside even at home, where I can find things to work on and improve when I should be resting, meditating, praying, or otherwise integrating the spiritual and the physical. Talking about the unpolished silver, I started to say that "my mom always says" I should polish it before using it (she never did, because she rarely used it, of course). I caught myself, but didn't know how to conjugate the verb "to say." Clearly, she said it once, or maybe more. She does not say it any longer. Or does she? Every time I replay a memory of her speaking to me, does she "say on"? Does she have speech in my thoughts that continues beyond her lack of vocal chords? Certainly she lives in other capacities, too--in the thoughts of every one who ever knew her and calls her to mind from time to time. Can I say that she says anything--or is all her voice in the past tense, for me? Whatever life she now has is paradoxical: she lives and she does not live, speaks and speaks no more. Am I allowed to say that she still speaks to me, or is that admission insane? There are a handful of songs that reduce me to weeping on my knees in church, because I cannot hear them without her voice leading the singers. I hear it like an echo: faint, but undeniably present. I admit that I am still not very well acquainted with the grammar of loss.