Borderlands: In the Far North Air

A storm's been lazily roaming the sky all evening, dropping rain any which way as it becomes too heavy. Just now, though, came a crack as loud as any I've heard in my life, the kind that sends sound rolling away a long time down the curved edges of the earth. Now rain drives up to the building to stay. Neighbors' voices click on around the courtyard.

Earlier I took my dinner at the Ethiopian coffee shop across the street, and when I came out a man was standing in the bus shelter, playing jazz trumpet out into that moment's downpour. It was a too-perfect opening credit sequence to some film noir, and the strip snapped shortly as the player began to righteously rail against some enemy, real or imagined. (There may, after all, have been some heckler out there in the shadows, obscured from me by the rain.) Still, he started up again.

In Rogers Park we often get a little music with our weather. Some confluence of factors turns these blocks into a sort of magic-realist realm—the old hippies, the new students, the park and lake. A few weeks ago Heather and the dog and I went out into the water on a still hot night. The moon was a piece of gleaming alien currency casting a pink path across the deep; I followed drifting over sandbar after sandbar as in a dream one dips between lesser and higher states of consciousness and control.

In my childhood I invented precisely one ghost story. It was simple in its outlines, was exquisitely sad, and allowed me to show off my singing voice quite well, I thought. A girl whose name I recall as Marigold lived in a house on the shore. She woke up early one morning to the sounds of beautiful singing that, had she been a real girl, she would have found annoyingly derivative of the music in The Little Mermaid. The house was large and weathered and white; the girl rose from her bed, closed the screen door softly behind her, and went across the sand seeking its source. She reached the ocean's lapping edge, but the song was still out there somewhere ahead. With eyes alert and placid brow, she began to wade in as the song kept sounding. And she followed and followed, never to be seen again.

I was not interested at the time in Marigold's salvation, but two decades later as I resurfaced as far from shore as I could walk (I don't swim well), I found that a suitable hero had appeared on the scene. He had climbed the lifeguard's white wooden watchtower and was playing a ukelele. He didn't seem to be attached to any of the few small groups on the sand; he was simply there for our safety, luring us back to the human shore with scrappy bits of song.

Another night a young man with an acoustic guitar strapped to his chest stomped and sang through the park all alone; the dog crouched and tucked her tail as if fear had jumped onto her back directly from a dark branch. And just after our move here, in daylight, a group of people in African dress sang and drummed in a wide semicircle, apparently just practicing in the bright air. More regularly, there are the Hare Krishnas, parading and chanting and shaking things; almost despite myself I like the sound, and return the smiles of the soft-eyed young women who often lead them. (They had a large festival a month or two ago and as we walked through the park an occasional emissary would come up and ask whether we'd like to join in some chanting, as if they were offering us a newspaper or a sample of a new kind of gum.) And the coffee shop on the corner holds an open mic night every week. The music is sometimes exciting, even if I suspect I'd roll my eyes at the words; I sometimes think of attending out of nostalgia, for I myself, oddly, hosted an open mic on the patio of an Ethiopian restaurant as a teenager.

If you are inclined to look on your life cinematically, this is a landscape that all but demands regular epiphanies. Yet this summer I've felt quieted and slowed, oppressed by a sort of humidity that only sometimes coincides with the weather. Largely the effect of uninteresting life complications and a heavy workload, I suppose. But maybe the vibrations of all these odd moments are finally synching up and, with the gusty early dark we're getting now, are starting to shake things loose. 

I felt that way, certainly, on Thursday night, pushing toward home from the southwest where I'd met Peter and struck up a plan to put our band back together after a dormant summer. Some minutes into my ride the clouds broke and cold rain flooded the streets, drawing astonished laughter out of me and then drowning it in the deluge. 

Eventually I turned onto Bryn Mawr and saw another cyclist ahead of me; he must, however, have actively decided to go out in the storm, because he was clad in one of those cheap, clear plastic ponchos. We were the only ones out in that quiet northwest corner of the city, and as I trailed him through the dark he was transformed every fifty feet or so by streetlights. As they caught his poncho, he he was turned briefly into a wild bag of lightning, billowing down the road. The plastic crackled in the wind as the rain began to fade. As long as our respective routes allowed I modulated my pace to follow him, a beacon of obscure but hopeful import.

Transformative Junk

Mediocre things can change our lives.  When I think about the cultural products that have shaped me I can pick out a handful of The Great Works that have been truly formative, but a lot of what impressed itself upon my impressionable youth is stuff that I now find a little embarrassing, or ought to if I've got as much good taste as I tend to assume.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I remember being 16 and sitting at the coffee shop with a friend of mine who always seemed to have some terrible older boyfriend and the newest of her terrible older boyfriends. The conversation turned to books. The terrible boyfriend must have read a few, I suppose, but apparently not as many as he'd absolved himself from reading by declaring their very existence pretentious. In the latter category was Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

"I dunno, I see what you mean," I said. I knew already that I didn't like or respect this guy, but I found it almost physiologically necessary to defend every nicety of my vision of the world in those days. (Today I'd more likely roll my eyes and find a way to leave the table, tired coward.) "But on the other hand, I have to admit that there's a sense in which it changed my life."

I started to go on, but then something shifted in me or in the air or just in the snake-faced dude's expression, and made it clear that no further unpacking of this statement would be possible. One could nearly see the shiver of superiority traveling from over-gelled hair to belted jeans. He may still be drawing energy from it today.

So here is what I meant by that. I was not making a claim of value; I was simply stating a fact about the course of my existence.

I don't really know how I began to find adult literature to read. When I was probably 11 or 12 I began sidling from the YA section of the library over to the tall, dense adult stacks, not without a guilty glance to see whether my mom was following. (I was always scared to betray any change in myself as a child, perhaps supposing that my family had only just learned to love me and would have to start the whole process over again if they knew who I'd become. My heart raced when I had to tell my mom I wanted to start shaving my legs, or had gotten my period, or had decided to stop eating animal products; I never confessed to dating anyone until I was well into college. Even now when I am out in the world I feel compelled to retain my state of motion as long as anyone can see me, will keep running until my thighs burn rather than draw attention to myself by stopping.) So I know roughly when this happened, but I don't know on what principle I began making my selections and started building the chain of references and associations that would propel me through my phantom syllabus. My family mostly did not read books, and my friends who read were in thrall to fantasy and sci-fi, so however I chose, I did it on my own. And somehow, the year I was 14, I got to On the Road.

Before that, reading for me was mainly—to borrow a phrase from Michael Chabon, an author from whom I can remember no other sentences—"a kind of pyromania." I made my library selections in bulk. Words were a commodity I took entirely for granted, to be consumed as thoughtlessly as water from a drinking fountain in the hallway at school. You pass by and you partake; you are always at least a little bit thirsty, after all. Reading was the default state, and still is, as I cannot sit down to eat alone, relax on a park bench, or ride a bus without my nicotine-strong craving for something to read beginning to twitch. Or to use another metaphor it was a sort of steady job, one I loved but without the ambition and intentionality to make it a career.

I read On the Road and the idea that there were such things as literary style and literary culture began to take shape. In place of lucid and reasonable prose there was this torrent of impassioned chatter among people for whom writing and the living that fed it were holy duties. The rush of it all pulled me under within pages. When I had to return it to the library I put it on my Christmas list—which must have been on the assumption that my dad and stepmother would never bother cracking open a book that wasn't, say, obviously obscene, because just flipping through it again now I recall that there are whores and sex parties and drugs on every other page.

I think I had not yet found many models for interesting adult lives. I was reminiscing yesterday to Heather about the time when, at age five, I dismayed my mother by musing that the job I'd most like to have when I grew up was rounding up the shopping carts from the enormous parking lot at Meijer. My ideas about my future had all been in areas where you could essentially keep being a lone child hobbyist—Olympic figure skating, or painting, maybe. This book made me yearn for a sense of community, of collaboration, to become one of "the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing" and recruit others to my cause. (This made me even more obnoxious, definitely, obviously, but it also made me renounce the habit of boredom, which I've kept off my trail for the most part ever since.) It was my first brush with any kind of counterculture, and I wanted some.

It turned out that no one wanted to start the next Beat Generation with me (and I think that this is, pathetically, how I actually formulated the problem to myself), but I did other things. I began to see value in the very act of taking intense interest, in cultivating the power of enchanted attention to the world. So I took up languages and banged my head against complex physics and mathematics. I burned my way through Beat lit and let it lead me to other poems, other novels, bodies of cultural criticism, philosophers. Eventually I found other flesh-and-blood writers, in the poetry slam scene and in an arts-center writers' group that turned out to be one of the most important institutions of my teenage years. Possible paths through the adult world began to light up.

Probably all of my cultural pursuits have had similarly inauspicious beginnings. The first time I really noticed the electric guitar was some session player's corny solo on a Natalie Merchant tape; though I've just completed a country guitar class in which we made our way through Buck and Hank and Merle and Johnny, my first country music loves were Garth and Shania. The first mosh pits I dove into were at terrible third-wave ska concerts. All junk of various grades, created and loved in absolute earnest.

I think some people have been better at rolling along with the popular culture of their times, so that they're pushed out of the music and books and movies they enjoyed very naturally as the culture moves on. Then, when they're a little older it is easy to laugh affectionately at those vintage selves. It's okay to keep them around, framed in warm irony and nostalgia, and compare them without much embarrassment to the collections of other people of your generation (though a little embarrassment usually must be feigned for decorum's sake).

There was something more deliberate and therefore more culpable about the way I hacked my path through culture. I really chose these things. Which is maybe why I felt compelled, at even a couple of years' distance from her, to put up a bit of a defense of the absurd kid dreaming of roaring across the country taking Benzedrine and shouting about angels. She is to me as an eccentric and overbearing aunt from whom I have received a vast inheritance. She is no longer with us, but I must not be an ingrate even so, nor despise the lowbrow means by which she made her fortune.

The Embarrassment of Being Earnest

I.

Over a few days this past week -- mostly while packed into a car also containing my mother, my sister, her friend, Heather, and the dog, en route to and from the Red River Gorge where we were doing some small-scale backpacking -- I read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, just something I'd pulled off Heather's bookshelf for the journey. Everybody knows the story, I suppose: young man enthralled by Tolstoy, Thoreau, and his own depth of spirit sets out to make it entirely on his own, living off the land and then dying on the land after a mercilessly swift series of miscalculations. Krakauer attacks the situation with sympathy, especially in a middle chapter dissecting the chorus of sneering voices who chastised Chris McCandless for his foolish death.

        

From the available evidence, McCandless doesn't seem to have been an especially likeable person. I would, I think, have clashed with him across the seminar table in college, constantly prickled by the suspicion that beneath the discord our deepest convictions sang in unison. His notes are full of ardent underlining and rampant self-glorification. He seems to have treated other people highhandedly and with insufficient respect for their reality. But I don't think that fully explains why lives and deaths like his are held in such contempt, because there's also something defensive, reactionary, in the tone of the castigators.

There are certain lives that are popularly read as an act of judgment against mainstream existence, whether those living them would ever formulate such a judgment or not. The smoldering annoyance provoked by this continual imaginary judgment comes out against the less dramatically ascetic as well: there is for instance the scorn tossed at vegans, straight-edge kids, non-drivers (to name only categories of which I am or have been a member). And I've just as often fallen on the other side: how often have I rolled my eyes at the fasters, the neatniks, the taut creatures who organize their days around workouts?

All these people have given their lives a certain tentative form, and the more committed, like McCandless, a much stronger one. Such forms omit deliberately things widely considered worth pursuing; they refuse to frame their neglect to obtain these things as a failure. And, often accidentally, they function as statements, as argumentative positions that would be very uncomfortable to engage seriously in debate. So their deliberate omissions must be reframed as failures. They must be drawn into comparison and competition with the critic's normal life, which is shaped without much conscious intention by the essentially economic imperative of continual growth, acquisition. Any answer to the critic's challenge will typically serve only to make the defendant appear as fanatical, judgmental, and foolish as everyone has suspected all along.

Therefore it's better to be silent, assuming one doesn't in fact possess the strain of messianic zeal that made McCandless apparently insufferable. I yearn to go unnoticed when I turn down the cheesecake, just as in high school I gave only a cheery "no thanks" to whatever bottom-shelf bottle was being passed around, just as I demur on any number of more sensitive and deeper-seated subjects. I keep the scope of my convictions very small. They do not trespass on anybody else's life.

II.

"Would you believe -- could you hear without laughing  . . . that for years my secret ambition . . . was to stand up fearless and honest like Joan of Arc or Galileo --

         "And suffer for the truth?"

So says one of Joanna Russ's characters in The Female Man, and my laughter is only the laughter of sympathy. After I considered that martyrdom and ensuing sainthood might not be as accessible a career path as I'd hoped at age five, I still retained St. Joan as a role model and thought perhaps I'd enter a convent. At fifteen I'd abandoned religion or the other way around, but I still tried my hardest to find a way to accept the Christianity a friend of mine was trying to lead me back into by way of Chesterton and Anselm. I walked around under low, oppressive clouds for two weeks after smacking into what seemed the inarguable blank wall of Spinoza's Ethics, which casually and coldly did away with any meaningful conception of free will given its premise of an omniscient god. (It's not really much better if you omit the deity and start from a scientific, mechanistic standpoint, but the whole thing seems less invasive, somehow.) The knowledge nauseated me. Color was drained from every interaction until it crept slowly back of its own accord, as sleep must come after a long string of insomniac nights.

I mean to say that truth was of direst importance. I tucked a letter into the library volume of Spinoza beseeching anyone who'd gotten around the problem to assist me; I passed notes on the question to a bemused, unhelpful friend in class; I wrote a term paper for my community-college philosophy class that was little more than a wail in the general direction of the heavens and my professor. I got an A, but no answer. 

I thought I'd be a philosopher, probably (and just the mention of the word brings on a phantom chorus of cackling about useless degrees). When I finally decided not to swear off college, I went to the mountains and talked and talked about truth for four years. To get in, I wrote entrance essays on riding my bike (which my high school English teacher all but called boring) and on Robert M. Pirsig's work of pop philosophy Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I took very seriously, not knowing how little respect it was accorded. My youth is a chain of embarrassments, and not in the regular way of awkward and troublemaking teenagers everywhere.

But I also got a little more urbane at college, aided by friends who knew how to deeply enjoy ephemeral things and make cutting remarks in amusing ways. I'd never been a pure crusader for truth, anyway -- too lazy, too easily distracted. Imperfectly, I became civilized.

So I'm arch, I'm diffident, by nature and cultivation both, but push most any button and watch buckets of earnestness come pouring out. Just get me on a long car ride alone or a walk in the woods or at the edge of the shore at night and you'll easily harvest enough material to embarrass me further for years to come. For instance, I'm readily seduced by thoughts of wandering away into wilderness ready to prove my self-sufficiency. I loved many of the fellow creatures who accompanied me up and down sandstone slabs and switchbacks in Kentucky, but I also ached to travel those same paths in solitude and silence.

(Part of the appeal of being alone in the wild is, I think, the near-impossibility of really doing wrong. Most of my crimes against what I feel to be my better nature pertain to other people, or to making poor use of my time. There are no other people out there, and only a limited number of ways to spend one's time, all of which seem intrinsically worthwhile, if not virtuous. A very bright and morally simple reality presses in from all sides, leaving little room for error.)

A wary thrill rises in my chest when I meet a fellow natural pilgrim. My friend Kari once noted that she tended to date "Levins" -- after the Tolstoy stand-in in Anna Karenina, the spiritual seeker, agriculturalist, and railer against falseness. I seek them out too, on the page and as acquaintances; I wrote my senior thesis on Dostoevsky's Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Myshkin, two exemplars of tormented earnestness. But I also keep my distance from them a little, aware of how easy it is to be written off as a kook, to make oneself completely unlikeable in the rigidity of one's chosen path.

It's an odd mix: in many ways my character is built for strong belief. There just isn't much content with which I can, in good faith, fill those channels; it's a dry, impoverished truth I've ended up with after a youth spent trying and failing to make various doctrines add up. But my thirst for those big nouns -- the good, the true -- remains, ready to embarrass me and annoy any of the more sensible souls who come into contact with it.

You Guys Must Be Rich

“Occupy [Your City Here]” keeps going on, somewhat miraculously; I haven't been involved, have only been involved in activism by any stretch of the term tangentially and sporadically since I was in high school, really, and I wonder how I would have felt about it then, when it still seemed to me that my life would be spent in passionate protest. I am a little excited about it now, from a distance, feel that it is good that it is happening; generally I am pleased to see extensive and spontaneous use being made of our public spaces and freedoms, testing them to make sure they still work.

And it is interesting that class is starting to become a part of the public conversation that's harder and harder to ignore, if only in a simplified way. I thought about class as an anarchist youth, certainly, listened to proudly working-class hardcore bands and made conflicted steps towards claiming that identity for myself (all the while cringing against the philistinism of my surroundings and hungering desperately for a sense of security they couldn't provide). Still, the extent of what it meant to be working-class didn't fully develop for me until I went away to college and lived among honest-to-goodness rich kids for the first time and began taking the kind of jobs my family had had all their lives to support me in my leap away from my native culture. Until that point the “upper class” was a political concept that showed up mainly in newspapers and statistics. We stayed out of each other's way.

Sady Doyle has a wonderful essay on Tiger Beatdown that's been making the internet rounds, about her conflicted feelings toward OWS and the understanding of class that lumps an entire 99% together. I recognize intimately the milieu of the childhood she writes about, especially this:

“My first stepfather worked the night shift at a grocery store; it wasn’t understood that we were doing poorly. My best friend’s mother worked the deli counter at a different grocery store. You could live on that money . . . So, not all of us had office jobs, or the education or background required to get them. But we had our own houses, we were suburban, the idea that we weren’t firmly middle-class would have been an insult to us. Of course we were. Everyone was.”

Growing up, we lived roughly at the middle of a fairly smooth gradation along the river from the older, shabby blocks of wooden houses toward downtown (and south of those, the only housing project I knew about in my city) all the way to curving streets of well-kept two-story brick homes whose backyards sprouted play structures that looked more solid than our entire aluminum-sided ranch house. My first elementary school there was in the direction of the nicer neighborhood, from which most of my friends were drawn, but differences between us still seemed easily hopscotched over. They'd have the name-brand backpacks and fancier lunches, maybe, but we still played in the same parks. I think we all figured that aside, perhaps, from a handful of celebrities or people living in mythical ghettos or rural shacks, everyone was basically like us.

In fifth grade I transferred to a performing arts school in the inner city. Here I noticed for the first time a few kids who were clearly poorer than me. The trick at this school was somehow to remain authentic, of the street-savvy neighborhood, while still having Starter jackets and nice sneakers; those who couldn't manage both of these things were mercilessly teased. One of the few friends I managed to find was Breanne, a scrawny, clingy, loudmouthed blond kid who lived on the hill up close to the housing project. I went to her house maybe only once; I remember it being dark and cluttered inside, disorienting, and the outside covered in the kind of stick-on siding that resembles roof shingles. We were there just to pick up her homework or something; she never wanted to invite me over.

And in fact, I may have had her over only once as well. During that visit she let slip to my mom that I had a crush on Jake Bullock (10-year-old guitar prodigy, dreamy eyes beneath floppy brown hair) and I wanted to wring her neck for it I was so embarrassed. My mom had recently cleaned house, I think, when she came over; we looked good. Nonetheless I was unnerved the next day at school when Breanne said to me, “You guys must be rich, huh?”

No one has ever said that about my family before or since. In college the common, polite, getting-to-know-you question “What do your parents do?” was a nonstarter for me. “My mom's a receptionist, and my dad drives a truck” was, at an expensive liberal arts college, far distant from the sort of teacher/architect or lawyer/lawyer parings that had brought forth many of my classmates. In my year alone were at least two rumored heirs to big-name business fortunes. My family's history was a thick, blank wall for these interlocutors. What more is there to talk about, in a line of waitresses, cashiers, factory workers? What link can be drawn from those people to the girl waist-deep in Aeschylus and Plato? What is she doing here?

Unless you'd caught me in some chance shibboleth (my freshman-year surprise and envy that a friend had a house with fireplaces in it, for instance, or contemplating out loud pawning some of my stuff for enough money to join the Search and Rescue team), you would not have guessed my origins. More than once I've gotten some variant of “Oh, I thought your parents were professors or something!” In my last job, a woman I was training at one point said, when things had irreversibly deteriorated between us due to her near-pathological incompetence, “You must not have had to work through college.”

“I've always worked,” I barked back.

Throughout college I always had a pleasant on-campus job and frequently another less-sheltered service job. The first of these was in a movie theater where I sold tickets and concessions and cleaned. The selling was nominally my job but the cleaning composed the bulk of my time – clearing rafts of popcorn, food, and trash from the theaters after the lights went up, polishing lobby fixtures, wiping down bathrooms, which sometimes included soaking up vomit with a special powder that turned it into a solid substance that could be maneuvered into a dustpan. Even when we were behind the counter and no customers were around, we were not allowed to lean against the cabinets or sit on the one battered stool in the staff area. This connoted laziness. Instead we were to always be cleaning – scouring away grease and syrup from every crevice of every machine and counter. Nearly everyone was younger than me and passed the time saying terrible things about each other.

A boy in my circle of college friends asked, apparently in all innocence, “Why did you start working there? Do you just really like movies?”

And so that was a kind of class realization, there.

When I graduated and moved to Chicago I did so knowing that I'd fit well enough into whatever service job I could find. I could handle the shooting foot and ankle pains induced by long hours of standing, the forthright disrespect from customers and managers, and the fierce, bizarre rivalries that sprout up when people are forced to compete for the only things – the big tips, the days off – that make their jobs bearable. I stayed in my last bad office job for three years largely because I felt that the service industry was the only obvious alternative.

For me, being working-class has meant a certain instability at the foundation of my life. Will I be able to go to summer camp? Will we lose our house? Will I be able to afford to go to college even if I get in? Will I be able to afford my second year of college if I make it through the first one? My student loans? What if my parents are laid off? It has meant that I do not ever fully trust that things will be okay or that I will not suddenly be jettisoned from the ranks of the well-off and the cultured. And it has meant that a slender serpent of resentment slithers quickly through my ribcage when I sense the presence of those who have not been kept continually off-balance by these questions.

Just briefly. In a way I am frequently at home among these people, after all – they are so well-bred, congenial, have had the time to read books and think of art and never felt they were stealing anything from their families by doing so. But there is a little venom in me still, and all the foreign privilege I have lucked into may never be sufficient antidote.

Curriculum Vitae Somnium

We deal with children in such bad faith. Even when we are kind to them, we tend to treat them more or less as pets who can be expected to bask in our mere attention and the solicitousness overenunciated in our tone, without any requirement that they understand us. We are constantly using children for our own amusement, asking them questions to entertain ourselves rather than for any actual intention of conversation.

Daily, kids in the building come into our office to drink water from the magically cold cooler with the wax-paper cones, or just to explore, slipping out of the grip of their parents or older siblings on the way from the front door to the elevators. I like kids, they tend to like me, and I try to return the favor by speaking to them as persons, though I don't always succeed.

My coworker would also say that she likes children if asked, but when faced with them she is every overbearing distant aunt a child has ever had, speaking too loud, underestimating their age and level of comprehension. And she asks the questions children are doomed to answer over and over until adulthood with polite boredom, like celebs on a fifteen-year-long interview circuit. What's your favorite color? What's your favorite class in school? Do you get good grades? What's your teacher's name? What do you want to be when you grow up?

This last one is interesting, I think: from the time they can speak, we begin demanding that children justify their childhood by envisioning their place in the adult world. This isn't unnatural, of course -- adulthood is a favorite game for any child.  Overhearing such exchanges got me thinking about the shadow career that has preceded and run parallel to my actual work life, the trajectory of my responses to the question, posed or tacit, of what I would like to be.

Olympic Figure Skater, ages 5 to 11
The only athletic pursuit at which I ever truly excelled was figure skating. It relies on lower body strength and a good sense of balance, which are about the only physical powers I possess in more than trace amounts. I took group lessons at the local city rink and moved through the levels. There were skill sets you had to learn to pass each level. Much like Girl Scouts and Awana, which I also adored at the time, progress was measured and rewarded through workbooks, stickers and badges. I loved my teachers and, as I got older, wondered how they had come to be skating here at a little arena in Grand Rapids rather than on my television screen. (I liked Surya Bonaly, who never placed in the Olympics, best -- the huge strength that overpowered her grace, her smile that was fierce rather than ingratiating, her pride and temper. By contrast, Nancy Kerrigan couldn't really hold my attention, but I still wrote her a fan letter when I was about eight; they printed an address for her somewhere.) I wondered how they felt about that.

As I got older I stopped getting better as quickly; it was around the time I was working on my single axle, the hardest of the single jumps. I never quite got there. I had reached the highest level the Park District offered, and my family didn't have the money to pay for private lessons. I'd also sprained my ankle badly in the spring of fifth grade, keeping me off the ice for almost a quarter of a crucial year. So it all stopped -- the crispness of the early Saturday mornings at the rink followed by cheeseburgers at the diner on the way home, impressing friends at school skating parties, performing in the ice shows (think dance recitals on ice).

I don't skate much these days; it depresses me to feel all the skill I've lost and won't ever get back. Realistically, I know I could not have come within shouting distance of the Olympics anyway: professional figure skaters tend to come from rich families or to be so prodigiously talented that it doesn't much matter. But the ability to sail along the ice and alight into the air is a freedom I have lost and still miss dearly.

Police Officer, ages 9 to 10
Given my subsequent adolescent rebellion and general anti-authoritarian outlook, this one's funny. But at the time, the idea of being a cop played into two of my most deeply held values: being good and being tough. I liked stories about tough women. I had an inflated sense of my own moral superiority. And I thought it would be neat to carry a gun. All of these things are still true to some extent. (Please don't worry: I doubt I will ever actually own a gun.)

Stage Actor, ages 10 to 16
In fourth grade I wrote, directed and cast myself in a class play about a yellow submarine full of schoolchildren that ventured under the ocean to learn things about marine life. It was a blatant (if unconscious) ripoff of The Magic Schoolbus, and I'm not sure why my teacher let me take charge of the whole project in this way; my casting decisions and audition process especially caused some dissension among my classmates. It's a natural slide from games of pretend to the theater. My two best friends and I thought we were so good at pretending that, taking advantage of our costumes on Halloween, we advertised and staged during recess poorly-attended productions whose concepts were dictated by the need to incorporate such casts of characters as, for instance, a ninja, a vampire and a robot.

When I was ten I transferred to a performing-arts magnet school. It was in the inner city where kids knew more about being cool; I'd been on the low end of the coolness curve even in the neighborhood where I lived. I was teased more that year than in the rest of my childhood combined, but I loved going to theater class twice a week. I tried to take charge of my group's skits, but sometimes I was stuck with boys who just wanted to shoot at each other. Too scared of being called a snitch and a goody-goody, I didn't stand up for my own vision, and sat there with tears welling up behind my glasses when, inevitably, the teacher chastised us for the formless violence I'd been roped into acting out.

I didn't win a major role in the school play that year because I looked too young. This was a problem throughout my first two years of high school theater, too: still asked regularly if I would like a kiddie menu at restaurants, I couldn't even convincingly play a teenager. I kept at it, though, competing and often placing in statewide competitions.

Theater was a big part of my life in high school. I met one of my best friends -- the first kid I knew who was as queer and as radical as me -- at a competition, though socially I didn't totally fit in with most of the theater kids. I was too quiet, too internal, not positive enough, and I think that's why eventually I turned out to be not completely cut out for the stage.

I'm good at pretending to feel things, at imagining myself into other situations. I can Method it up any day of the week. But I have always been accused of emotional illegibility; ultimately I couldn't project myself far enough for an audience to see clearly. For a while I had thought I'd try to go to college and major in theater, but I'd decided against it by my senior year. I think I was a pretty good actor. I wouldn't have been great, though. It wasn't worth pursuing. There are plenty of other ways to play pretend.

Eco-Terrorist, ages 15-17
I've never been more idealistic and more disenchanted than I was then. I didn't think I was going to go to college at all. I thought I was going to go live in the Pacific Northwest and spike trees and live from dumpsters. I was reading a lot of CrimethInc lit and Edward Abbey.

Astronaut, age 17
In my senior year, my teacher for statistics and homeroom decided for his own obscure reasons that I ought to become an astronaut. I was pretty good at statistics, despite my previously lackluster career in mathematics, and I think I had really liked a Nova documentary that we had watched in class. His advocacy of this path for me was confusing, flattering and deeply weird.

Librarian, age 18 to the present (intermittently)
I first thought I might go to library school when I began working at the college library my freshman year. My friend Kevin laughed at me when I mentioned it -- he said it sounded like the most boring, uninspiring civil service job he could think of. And it didn't hit me as a divine calling, true. Between then and now I variously considered publishing, linguistics and typeface design. But librarianship seemed, and seems again now, like work for which I am very well suited. My vocation always be art-stuff. But this feels like less of a compromise than any other avenue I could pursue.

(I've left out lots of things, of course. And if anyone will please correct my Latin in the above, I would be delighted.)