It's a Numbers Game--But Who's Counting?

It’s a numbers game,” my friend, Joe, explained.

Several of us were cleaning up after the art show a couple Saturdays ago and conversation turned to fitness, which is a generally touchy subject for me. I work out, I eat good food…and none of that matters since the Great Road Trip of 2007. One of the last things I did before our van headed westward was hop on the scale.  I was down 3 pounds from my already-trim size 4 weight.  Over the month-long tour, I put on about 10 pounds—a net gain of seven pounds from my norm.  No big deal, right? Trouble was, not a single pound of that vacation weight budged and, worse, it became a flabby but stubborn foundation for a trend that soared ever upward.

Nearly seven years have passed, and I have tried everything to get my body back to my ideal—the magic number that had consistently defined my size for years prior to the trip. I ran. I went to the gym. I tried, I failed, I tried harder. I made a bit of temporary progress one spring when I worked out three times a day in order to look stellar in the Bahamas. It wasn’t sustainable, and, I got tendonitis. Two falls ago, I upped the ante on time, duration, and intensity during midmorning sessions at the campus gum.  “I’m going to have a whole new body by Thanksgiving,” I told myself.  Instead, I gained a pound and lost more hope.

Since harder didn’t seem to work, I tried different Lured in by an introductory offer on Groupon, I made one of the worst financial decisions of my life and blew $1800 on laser lypo. According to the clinic, I allegedly lost something like 27 inches from my torso and thighs but not a single person noticed—no wonder, as I didn’t even go down a pants size.

The “numbers game” Joe referenced was counting calories, which, I had to admit, was probably the one thing I had never tried.  I’m adverse to numbers, and keeping up with the minutia of every morsel I put in my mouth seemed tedious, and, frankly, impossible.  Plus, I my knowledge of what a calorie really is, and how it related to my size was really rather shaky.  I knew calories were out there, vaguely, in the same sort of way I know gravity, or RAM and ROM are things, but I don’t give them much thought, you know?

Evidently, calories are kind of a big deal.  And now, thanks to technology (likely RAM and ROM are involved) there are apps that do all the work for you.  Joe showed me his favorite one, and I had to admit I was impressed. It scans barcodes on packaging, and has a database of calorie counts for, well, everything else. 

I think, like so much in life, messages resonate with us when we are truly ready and equipped to process them.  I’ve always known, of course, that eating too much makes you fat, but what’s too much?  I certainly didn’t eat too much, did I?

Joe didn’t realize it, but his word choice-- a numbers game--was what actually made things click for me.  See, a week or so before, I’d watched a TED talk by Jane McGonigal called “The Game That Can Give You 10 Extra Years of Life.”  Her story is below, and well worth the 19 and a half minutes, but let me summarize in case you're on a time budget. Jane is a gamer—games are her passion, they're what makes her tick.  And, as it happened, a game, of sorts, saved her life.  Jane became ill, and depression nearly consumed her, until she made a game of her recovery. She assembled a “team” (her husband and sister) and awarded herself “points” for small victories.  As she took control of her fate, she recovered.

Because Jane’s story was fresh in my mind, I realized that with Joe’s app, I could make a game out of getting my body back. I began to think.

Then came Fat Tuesday.  I decided to step on the scale and I saw the highest number I’d ever seen.  Encouraged by the added specter of the approaching Lenten season, I knew what I had to do.  I grabbed my phone and downloaded the app.  Game on!

Yesterday was three weeks into my game, and I’m ready to start sharing some stories from the playing field. I’m learning balance and moderation and developing a new relationship with food. But the best part? I’m winning! 

(update: more about "game play")

Now that I am confident I have turned a corner and I am on a successful path, I am ready to share some things I’ve learned.  I’ll be starting a new series of posts next Wednesday about what’s happened so far. I hope you’ll join me!

The Beats; or, Finding Our Own Rhythm

"Think of it like literary jazz," I offered, by way of explanation. Having turned in their Travels trip journals last week, our classroom discussions shifted from adrenaline junkies and ethnocentrism to the beat generation as we collectively cracked the cover of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

To say Kerouac's style is different from Steinbeck and Crichton is like saying the soundtrack for Frozen (Did you catch this tribal cover of Let it Go?) is a little different than the soundtrack for last year's controversial The Great Gatsby.  One has tight structure and a discernible melody...the other is something you can't quite pigeonhole but could, loosely, be called jazz.

"Does it have a plot?" was an early question.

"There's an awful lot of characters" was another concern.

"ish" and "yeah," was about the best I could do, because, honestly, if I showed up at my MFA workshop with this stuff I'd be crucified.  "Where's the structure?" B would say, and, "Flesh out those characters!"  It just simply wouldn't fly.

Kerouac got away with his free-form, willy-nilly account of life as a young vagrant partly because of of a set of ideas influenced the collective art of the period-- what we now call the beat movement.  The beats rejected the status quo and embraced experimentation.  Jazz thrived within the context and, a jazz-like syncopation seeped into works like On the Road.

Many students view the protagonist, Sal, a wannabe writer and Kerouac's alter-ego as a maleable hobo with no real ambition.

"He just runs with the wind," N said.  "What are his goals?"

Other students were concerned with the economics of the whole plan of traveling around the country meeting up with friends in various cities. I reminded them of an article I gave them around spring break, from National Geographic Traveler, forwarding the notion that being young and broke is the perfect time to travel.  Discussion then turned to couch surfing and Craigslist Joe.

But when conversation circled back to goals and aspirations, they still viewed the adventures as irresponsible and Sal a failure.

Then M pipes up.  "This guy is a writer, right? Well, writers need stuff to right about and it looks to me like he wrote about all these adventures and well, we're reading about them.  Fifty years later."

A thoughtful silence filled the room.  Yes, yes, success,  everyone seemed to realize, in unison.  There is value in the recorded experience.

And then I thought about my two semesters of MFA workshop, and of the conflicting advice:
"Don't begin with dialogue!" we heard in the fall.

Now it's spring, with a new leader at the helm and dialogue is fine.

""Don't tag dialogue with anything more descriptive than "he/she said"( ie: no one should "gush" or "explain."), a student parroted from a seminar.

"What? No!"  gushing and explaining is fine, according to B.

And you know what?  On some level, it's all nonsense.  If those things ever were rules, I shamelessly broke both in the opening line of this post. And Kerouac?  He doesn't have a discernible plot, structure, or fleshed out characters.  And it just doesn't matter. My students are forgiving of theses gaffes.  They are now just interested delving into the experiences of the beat generation.

As for me, I will continue, worship or not, to record my experiences in my way, too.  And perhaps, just perhaps, I'll encounter forgiving readers as well.

Crushed, this time in print

Last night I went to my MFA workshop after three weeks, due to a spring break/professor was on a book tour hiatus. It’s only beginning to dawn on me how terribly things went.

I was in the bubble this week, except for in this class the prof (B) calls it “the cone of silence.”  I prefer the bubble, so I am sticking with that.

I was uncomfortable with the piece I submitted from the start.  I just had a vague bad feeling about it—partially because I used up all of my more polished material in the fall workshop, and also because I just instinctively knew B wouldn’t like it.

Last night, I was a little heady because on the positive side he spoke highly of my "carefully modulated rhinous" which I thought sounded impressive, even if I had no idea what it meant. Today, I looked at his printed evaluation and discovered that, of course, he was impressed  by my wryness which made a lot more sense, but seeing the rest of his critique in print made things look much more grave than they did during the banter of workshop.

The piece in question was a more polished version of the gallery incident I wrote about in this forum while it was happening.  I fleshed out the characters a bit, particularly Lisa and The Curator.  But I should probably stop writing at this point and check my notes, as I have already committed a faux pas.  My signature Capitalization of Important Ideas has been a festering issue ever since I started going to workshop.  Last night, it was called “kittenish” and I was advised that caps “are not inherently funny” and that Salinger was the only one who could get away with it, and even then in just small doses. It’s been such an issue I am probably just going to abandon the practice. According to my feedback, I have much bigger worries.

Despite my misgivings, I submitted the piece anyway because it is/was meant to be the title piece for the manuscript I am/was working on called Not Gallery Quality: An Exhibit of Sketchy Composure. Which, is a reference to my unorthodox and unpolished lifestyle and my resulting madcap adventures. I wanted honest feedback and I did/do want to improve it. To B’s eyes, the piece came off as “pretentious” and he said that if I wanted to be funny I had to work on self depreciating humor.  The trouble is, anyone who has read this blog for any length of time, know that that is virtually all I do.  As I mentioned prior, I wanted constructive feedback, but right now I’m feeling like all I happened was I got served notice that capital letters aren't funny and a lecture on having a bad attitude.  He even alluded to me not being a good role model to my daughter by defending myself to The Curator, I mean the curator.

I have no cohesive ending for this post.  Nothing witty or wise, no silver lining.  I guess the takeaway here is that art of all kinds has a dark, subjective side and also that we all have bad days and today is one of mine.

Road Tripping on Tuesday

“I kind of feel sorry for him,” K said.

The remark took me by surprise.  Our Great American Road Trip course has been following the real life adventures of literary icon Michael Crichton as it unfolds in his autobiographical page-turner, Travels.  We’ve followed Crichton into the depths of the sea, to the top of Kilimanjaro, and across a Pakistani landslide.  We trekked along side him into the Rwandan jungle and the Mayan pyramids. And I’m not even sure I’ve adequately covered the highlights.  In short, this guy was a living, breathing issue of National Geographic. Personally, I have vacillated among a range of responses: envy, most certainly, disbelief, a desire to retrace his itinerary….but pity? No, that never occurred to me.

K—and as it happened, several of his cohorts, were of the opinion that Crichton’s high-octane adventures were a sign of discontent, of not being comfortable with himself or his life.  They saw him as a thrill-seeking high chaser.  Others, such as the writer below, were just incredulous:

For the most part, though, the students were more excited b Crichton than Steinbeck.  They found him "more modern," and many were really interested in the opening segment, Medical Days, where Crichton recounts his experiences studying at, and ultimately quitting Harvard Medical School: 

When I was developing the course, I was really excited by the idea of the students creating “trip journals” as a response to each book, but I wasn’t sure how they would respond.  Each trip journal is to contain:

·       Questions for each reading (they have to come each day with 3 discussion topics)
·       3 personal reflections
·       1 formal essay (based on one of your reflection pieces)

Two of the following:

·       artistic response (such as themed journal cover, sketch, or other artistic element)
·       souvenirs (“photos” from the internet, maps, brochures, etc.)
·       video or multimedia response
·       Three scholarly articles with one page summary
·       Two scholarly articles and two draft pages (for their final 12 page paper)


I think literature is most valuable when it is personal; when it's an interaction between a per on and pages.   It is the job of a student to make meaning--in all disciplines, really, but especially in literature.  That meaning might come from connections to personal events, links to interesting concepts from other disciplines or literature, or trough a keen imagination.  I wanted the trip journals to allow room for students to make meaning on their own terms, in their own way.  I couldn’t be any more pleased with the journals thus far.

This student mapped and scrapbooked key events

This guy made travel brochures from some of Crichton's destinations

This person drew flags from everywhere Crichton went.

But the experience goes beyond just making meaning for the sake of enjoying a good read.  I see my students internalizing ideas, concepts and lessons that they, themselves forwarded in class discussions.  For instance, M drew a connection from an observation Steinbeck made about how people tend to think their own lives, homes, ideas, etc. are superior to everyone else's to the concept of ethnocentrism, which he had just learned about in his Communications course.  He shared the idea in class an then another student picked up on it as part of a personal reflection:

How do you "make meaning" when you read?  What options would you choose for your trip journal if you were in our class? Do you think Crichton was foolhardy or adventurous?  I know I've been gone awhile, but talk back to me...I've missed our online class!

(note: The Great American Road Trip literature series is typically a Friday Feature this semester.  However, spring break and life events derailed my entire blogging schedule. This Tuesday post is meant as a show of good faith that I am still here!)