My Awful Confession

So, I really like the outdoors. I like my Outward Bound trips, I like forests and rivers and mountains, I like the wide-open permeable feeling you get after being outside for seven days straight. I feel healed, I feel right. I think that's also true for all of us and the whole world.

Anytime I make these jaunts into the natural world, I come in contact with people who who have organized their life around it. I hang out with wilderness guides, mountain climbers, kayakers, wilderness rescue crews, campers, hikers, etc., etc.

But I have an awful confession to make.

Here it is:

These outdoor types are BORING.

Boring to talk to that is. I like how they can take me into the wild, which makes their actions interesting I suppose. But their minds and their words are BORING.

I don't know how to explain it exactly. You might know the type. They wear Patagonia and fleeces and have tons of camping equipment and wear sandals with wool socks. They're never, ever mean to anyone; they're laid-back and easy going and know a lot about the outdoors.

But it's like they're psychologically 10 yards away from you anytime you converse with them. They never seem to quite register the real you that is trying to talk to them. They have no edge, they have no irony. Their highs and lows are flattened into a white noise of a personality. They seem interchangeable. You can feel your own sharpness depreciate when you talk to them.

But they're not dumb. In fact, most of them were usually pretty good students. But their words never seem to cut into anything, and there's never a shortage of things that need cutting.

Of course I feel like a jerk saying it. Like comedian Patton Oswalt said, "I never realized how desperately I depend on negativity and cynicism just to communicate with the outside world."

Maybe these outdoor types lack irony because they're kind of happy and satisfied with life. And that shouldn't be a bad thing.

Maybe I was hoping to export my interest in philosophy and literature and the like INTO the natural world. To be hiking and paddling WHILE ALSO talking about Heidegger and Orwell would be some kind of heaven.

But those two interests never seem to coexist.

There are eleven other students at this wilderness first responder course. They can talk all day about the mountains they climbed . . . and yet, how much is there to say? What else besides, "yep, I climbed that mountain. All the way to the top. Then I came back down."

Not a single one of the students brought a single book with them. For an 8 day course.

My wilderness first responder teacher is a 55 year-old guy with an amazing history of outdoor experience. It seems like he's climbed every mountain, plunged through every rapid, weathered every kind of injury. He pioneered the snowboard craze in the 90's, he started his own outdoor gear company, and he's rescued hundreds of people in his 30 year career as a search and rescue expert.

And his sense of humor as he lectures in class? It's no more developed than the noises 6 year-old boys make. Fart noises ("ppppffffffttt"), falling down noises ("badoom!", "kerplunk"), or engine noises ("vvvrrrrrooooommmmm!"). He'll start to use weird voices (of various characters I suppose) that have no point, make no jokes, have no irony, and go nowhere.

I know, I'm just a pompous jerk elitist who plans to read Anna Karenina this summer. But I've heard if you climb to the top of one of the tall Tolstoy mountains, you might have an interesting thing or two to say when you get back down.

Conway, New Hampshire

New Hampshire is a pretty interesting state. In some ways, it's the forgotten child of the northeast. Massachusetts has Boston, Vermont has hippies and timeshares, Maine has Stephen King and lobster and the honor of being as far northeast as you can get. And New Hampshire? It doesn't really know what it is, which makes it kind of cool. Overlooked by tourists, it's kind of scrappy and mountainous and rustic and undefined.

But I'm getting to know only one part of it--the area around Conway. And cities where people live are always more amusing than the majesty of the landscape. Conway is a perfect example.

Let's take their newspaper, the Conway Daily Sun, which I have been reading all week. On Thursday one of the front page headlines was "Losing 'Rural' Status Could Be 'Census Consequence' for Conway." You see, if the census says that Conway now has more than 10,000 people, they would no longer be designated as "rural".

Really? Does "rural" just refer to population? Doesn't it also refer to local culture? Or maybe a state of mind?

If we look at some other headlines from the Conway Daily Sun, we'll probably want to keep calling it "rural".

Here's my favorite, from this past Wednesday:

"Bear-Crossing Signs Going Up on West Side Road".

And that was FRONT page news. And many more to choose from. These headlines are from the past 3 days ALONE:

"Library Book Sale in Full Swing"
(It's such a bummer when it's only in partial swing.)

"Race Fans Rejoice: More Bathrooms at N.H. Track"
(Rejoice. That's right, the fans are rejoicing.)

"Bartlett/Jackson Food Pantry Now Open on Saturdays"
(It's such a bitch when you can only go Mon-Fri.)

"In Golf, As in Life, Timing is Everything"
(An editorial, of course. Too boring to read.)

"Police Cite Wrong Record for Suspect in Pepper-Spray Assault". (Didn't 40 people die in Chicago in one weekend recently? And all the while, the Conway Police were dealing with the ominous pepper-spray assailant.)

"Soup's On in Conway Village: Annual Conway Village Festival and Soup-a-thon is Saturday."
(I talked to some of my other Wilderness First Responder classmates about this. I could sit at home and just eat my own can of soup, but it wouldn't be a soup-a-thon. So the question is, what is the minimal number of cans you would need for it to be classified as a soup-a-thon? We decided it would be twelve. Twelve.)

Ah yes, the rural life can be funny. It can make you feel pretty superior about yourself.

Then again, the other day, I was the one digging through a stack of recycled newspapers, looking for headlines I could make fun of for this blog. Which means I'm an asshole. New Hampshire may be rural and rustic, but I'm an asshole with a blog.

Maybe I should try rural and rustic some day.

Wilderness First Responder

So I’m on the outskirts of Conway, New Hampshire, for about 8 days. I’m getting my Wilderness First Responder certification at a wilderness medicine school. That means I’m learning how to stabilize fractures, treat hypothermia, dress lacerations, etc., all improvised with what you can find in the wilderness or in a camper’s pack.

Yep, that’s me, a tough outdoorsman. The kind of manly roughneck that can survive on twigs and morning dew for a month if he needs to. The kind of guy who can wrestle a bear and catch salmon in his teeth.

Or at least that’s the plan.

Because I seem to have a ways to go. I’m not in the wilderness per se . . . if I was I wouldn’t be posting this blog. I’m moving between rustic three buildings: a classroom, a dining hall/administration office, and a dorm, all a few yards from each other in the New Hampshire woods.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I’ve been battling a face rash all year. It comes and goes, and when it comes, it’s a real drag: itchy, painful, inflamed, red, rough skin. All over my face. The only thing that helps a very powerful steroid cream. Which I didn’t bring with me.

Two days into the wilderness course it started to flare up in a serious way, so I had my roommate find the cream and overnight it to the camp. Yep, I was being trained to survive in the wilderness, and I needed a face cream mailed to me. What a mountain man.

Superman’s downfall was kryptonite. Mine is ketoconazole cream. For dermatologic use only.

The Real Housewives of New York City

For some reason, I watched clips of The Real Housewives of New York City today. For those of you who don't know (and I hope that's many of you), it's a reality show about the richest wives/gold diggers of New York City. I think I was checking out the Huffington Post, and there was a link to some of these wives' shenanigans, and I watched it.

I saw about 5 minutes of clips, but I think that's enough to understand the scope of the show. (Kelly really is crazy! That Bethany is such a bitch!)

These women are the most embarrassing, reprehensible, unabashedly shallow, useless, self-involved people on the planet. Which must the the function of the show. Maybe we needed to get to the rock bottom of the human species, to take all the horrors of consumerism and wealth and media whoring and superciliousness and selfishness and push them to their logical ends. And when we do, we get these housewives, the most shameful, vile versions of any human beings ever. And then we can look at it and say "there, that's it. That's as low as we can go. It can get no worse than this. We can start here, and any move we make will be an improvement. And least we know which way is up."

And yet, I may just need to watch a few more of these clips before I go to sleep tonight.

Progress of Some Sort

Now that I'm done with this whole Harvard gig, I ought to reflect a bit. I remember writing my first sentence for my first essay for my first class . . . a rather anxious undertaking. I'd write a sentence and then panic: is that sentence smart enough? It has to be a Harvard sentence. It's for a Harvard assignment, and it will be read by a Harvard professor. Is that how they write their sentences here? Is that how Harvard scholars string their words together? Is my vocabulary embarrassingly shallow? I'll write it again. O.K., how about THAT sentence. Uh oh, am I trying too hard? Is that a vacuous thought that amounts to no more than a thinly-veiled attempt at sounding intelligent? Will I be exposed for the sham that I am?

It went on and on like that.

And then, by the end of the year, I was turning in a 34 page paper that largely disagreed with the professor's position, the very same professor that would be reading and grading the paper. (What can I say? He was wrong, really wrong.)

None of this means I think I'm smarter than Harvard academics. Far from it. If I was honest with myself (and because the ed school is an entirely different animal than the other schools), I'm in the bottom 1% of the university. I'm not bummed out about it or anything, I've just seen the intellectual acumen of folks around here, so I know my place.

But now, at the end of the year, I find I'm not really intimidated by all this brilliance. I'm not brilliant myself, but I'm also not that insecure when I'm amongst the geniuses. They're smart, but they're mortal.

I'll consider that my Harvard education.

(And I like cooler bands than they do anyway).

Graduation - Part 1

Yep, graduation at Harvard University. I think it's supposed to be a big deal. At least it's a spectacle.

Every school has their own graduation in the afternoon, but on graduation morn they actually get everyone together for an all school event. That's when the president speaks, that's when they give honorary degrees (Meryl Streep got one this year), that's where it's nearly impossible to get tickets as a spectator. So after a previous night of drinking and celebrating, you wake up very early the next morning, squint through the pain in your don't-really-feel-Ivy-League-at-all aching head, and you head out to the yard.

And it's packed. It takes about two hours just to file in, and then you're stuck in a teeming prison of brainy graduates for the entire ceremony. I spent most of my time worrying about my bladder and the impossibility of finding a toilet if needed.

Some of the ceremony feels like you've snuck into an old cultish ritual. It all starts off with an announcement from the Sheriff of MIddlesex County. (Nearly impossible to say that title without affecting an east coast snobby lilt in your voice). I guess he's the ACTUAL sheriff of Middlesex County; he rides in on a horse, wears a top hat, and walks (stomps) around the stage with a huge scepter in his hand. He marches up to the microphone and bellows (like the word "bellows" was invented just for him): "AS THE SHERIFF OF MIDDLESEX COUNTY I DEEM THIS ESTEEMED GRADUATION CEREMONY IS NOW UNDERWAY!"

It's pretty obvious what's happening here. Harvard is the oldest university in the country, so they have some antiquated rituals that have never gone away. Apparently in the days of horses and buggies (and a university that would only admit white males), the Sheriff of Middlesex County would officially start and end the graduation. And he still does.

Which had me wondering. When the Sheriff first did this long ago, and for for the first 10 or 20 graduations, it fit the times. It was the protocol, it was completely normal. When he does it now, it's mere theater, a throwback scene which provides some charm and some history. The ridiculousness of his outfit and his scepter and his histrionics are completely anomalous to modern times, and are enjoyed for exactly that reason. But what about those years between these two extremes? What about those awkward years when the whole Sheriff ritual seemed ridiculously out of date, but it was still too soon for it to be a gesture to antiquity? Those must of been some tough years. The Sheriff must have felt like a complete tool, especially considering the getup he'd be wearing. Wearing no costume is fine, wearing a costume that everyone knows is a costume is fine, but wearing an outfit in which it's unclear if it's ironic or just a poor clothing choice, is the worst.

Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, the ceremony. Next came the undergraduate speech. Every year they pick some over-overachiever over all other overachievers to give the student speech. Can you even imagine such a person? Think of how type-A you have to be to even get into Harvard. And think of what a go-getter you must be in the top 10% of your class at Harvard. Now fathom the unfathomable person that can actually surpass ALL of this. I guarantee you they are no fun at parties (and are cold and inert in the bedroom).

But here's the catch: who ever is selected to give the speech, they have to write it in Latin, and then MEMORIZE it in Latin. It's not a student who is majoring in Latin mind you, it's just someone who has to put the WHOLE thing in Latin. And it must be memorized. That's right, you're 22 years old, you've memorized a 15 minute speech in a language you don't speak, you're at the most esteemed university on the planet, the Harvard president is sitting behind you, and Meryl Streep is looking on. So you better have that shit memorized. And to think I can't go to the grocery story without a list written down.

Why give the speech in Latin? I suppose it's another antiquated ritual a la the Sheriff. But more likely it's just Harvard pompousness. YES Harvard, we know you're smart . . . YES Harvard, smart people speak and read Latin . . . YES Harvard, most of us don't understand a word of this speech, and we feel a little dumb for it, and that's what you wanted. So here was this young woman, rambling on in Latin about pursuing your dreams or some such nonsense, and I don't get a single word. But then she said something and some people start chuckling. What? You're laughing? At what? You were tracking that whole speech IN LATIN? For real? Is that even possible? Can you be funny in Latin? How would you say "take my wife, please"?

Graduation - Part 2

Here's a cool part of graduation. Every school carries a different representative object to wave. The law school had gavels, the divinity school had a halos over their heads, public policy had inflatable globes, the ed school had books, and the design school built structures out of legos and taped it to their hats. I saw one person with a gavel AND a halo . . . must've been a double major. Or maybe he was representing the justice meted out by angels. The business school waved American flags, though I think dollar bills would have been better. (Or can you somehow wave the oppression of 3rd world peoples? Isn't that what they've been learning?)

Then came the honorary degrees. A was a pretty impressive bunch: a philosopher of justice, an experimental sculptor, a bioethicist, a researcher in blood-based disorders, a molecular biologist, etc. People who probably never get stoned. Or couldn't name a single NFL player. And yes, Meryl Streep also got one. It's a little disheartening to see how everyone craned their neck when her turn was up, after dozing through everyone else. Sure breaking the boundaries of science or revolutionizing philosophy are both impressive, but if you give us a movie actress, we are INTERESTED. Sure your research may solve a fatal illness, but did you star in "Mama Mia"? Because Meryl did.

My favorite recipient of an honorary degree was Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of a U of Maryland university and a founder of multiple programs that serve underprivileged african-american youth. Why did I like him so much? Because he has two degrees from the University of Illinois. My school.

So I have three schools under my belt now: U of I, Northwestern, and Harvard. If you've gone to multiple colleges, sometimes you wonder where your loyalties lie. If the schools played each other in football, who would you root for? For me it's easy: University of Illinois first and foremost, and always. No contest. Your undergraduate years are somehow housed in your DNA--that formative time is inextricable from who you are. For me, the other schools are nice add-ons, but they'll never touch U of I in loyalty.

So there I was sitting in the hot sun in Harvard yard, half paying attention, when I hear "Mr. Hrabowski completed is graduate degrees in mathematics and education at the University of Illinois." And do you know what I did? I whooped. Loudly. Really loudly. I didn't plan it--it wasn't one of those times when you think "well, I know what I could yell . . . should I do it?" It was an involuntary whoop that I couldn't have retained if I wanted to. But people had to know I was there to REPRESENT.

Of course graduation is a big day for the Harvard University president. Right now that's Drew Faust, and she made her presence known in a strange way. Before one of the honorary degrees was given out to a person, someone would stand up and read their straightforward bio. And then Drew Faust would stand up and add HER two sentences. And what a two sentences they always were. You could tell she had working for the past 6 months on making her lines JUST SO. Once she spoke you could hear the (deliberate) elevation in eloquence and vocabulary. She'd say things like "his perspicacious insight has us soaring to new scientific heights" or "his vertiginous climb to the top of his field is only matched by his galvanisation of the movement." At one point my friend April took out her iPhone, got online, brought up dictionary.com, and started to type in every unknown word that would come out of Drew's mouth.

In the afternoon, things got down to business. All the schools broke into their own ceremonies, and soon enough I was walking across the stage and shaking hands, and I was graduated.

Well, almost.

It's entirely likely that a Harvard graduate is an insufferable person. They think they went to the best school, so they likewise think they're amongst the best people in the world, and what they say is some of the best things humans have ever said. As my brother told me a few months ago, "you're now going to be really insufferable, aren't you?"

I don't think so. As I sat back in my chair with all of the other graduates, I looked down the aisle and saw everyone opening up their large, sealed envelopes to pull out their diplomas and have a look. To sit back and admire it. I started to do the same: pop the golden seal, lift up the red flap, and look inside for that piece of parchment paper with the calligraphic script you've been working so hard for.

But mine didn't have a diploma. It only had a single sheet of paper.

Apparently you have to complete some financial aid payback forms before you can graduate. Supposedly everyone knew this. Supposedly there was email after email, and reminder after reminder. And I missed it all. Maybe it was my laziness, maybe it was my flakiness, maybe it was my disorganization. All I knew was I didn't have a diploma--instead I had a little piece of paper that was gently scolding my neglect.

I looked down the rows and saw all the diplomas in the proud hands of the graduates. And then I looked down at my sheet, which might as well have been a note to the principal's office.

If I ever seem to have a bit of that Harvard arrogance, I assure you, it's only an act.

It Changes Everything

Do you want to know what changes everything? What can change your day, your week, your whole year? Something that, if you started with it, just about everything else falls into place?

Naps.

That's right, taking a nap.

I had the good fortune to be able to take naps this year. Because I had the varied schedule of a student, I could nap an hour in the afternoon here and there, or sometimes in the late morning, or right after dinner (since I was going to go to bed at 2 am anyway). I would take a nap at the library, take a nap in my own bed, take a on the couch downstairs . . . I napped with the best of them.

I cannot tell you how great it is. When you nap your mood improves, your health improves, your cognition improves. You have more energy and you're more alert and you're more present and you're more alive. I'm sure it adds years to your life.

But this shouldn't surprise us: if your body says it's tired, it knows what it needs, so you should go to sleep. Pretty simple.

If you start with naps, everything else can fall into place. True for an individual, true for a society.

Napping is so great and so essential, that I think it's a crime if you can't do it. If your culture has constructed itself so that it's impossible to take naps whenever you want, it's a culture that's gone badly off the rails.

So here is my new gauge of the worthiness of a society: how much napping can you do?

And I'm not really joking. If your culture has ample napping time, it's a culture that honors biorhythms, honors health, and honors individuality. Do you know who does all the napping they ever need? Hunter-gatherers . . . both stone age hunter-gatherers and modern hunter-gatherers. Consider this passage about an aboriginal group in Australia:

"Apart from the time spent in general social intercourse, chatting, gossiping, and so on, some hours of the daylight were also spent resting and sleeping. If the men were in camp, they usually slept after lunch from an hour to an hour and a half, sometimes even more. After returning from fishing or hunting they usually had a sleep . . . . The women, when out collecting in the forest, appeared to rest more frequently than the men. If in camp all day, they also slept at odd times, sometimes for long periods."

That's right, by my formula, the aborigines are more advanced than we are. They have lots of napping opportunities. We have almost none. And we think that's progress.

Bumming Myself Out

I think the oil spill in the gulf is too much. It's too depressing, too demoralizing, too apocalyptic. Our final stab into the heart of mother earth. Or something.

This is one of the first times I am deliberately ignoring an important story, a weak defense mechanism against a crushing reality.

How can we keep ignoring the natural world? Is it that we're lazy? Selfish? Reluctant to give up our comfortable modern lives? Is the truth of it all too depressing?

Credible scientists say that in the future people will be amazed that we spent so much time and money on the Iraq war, when global warming was so much more important. IT'S NON-NEGOTIABLE. Nothing happens if you don't have a landbase. Countless lives are at stake. Countless ecosystems are at stake. Other credible scientists say it may be too late. And still we ignore it.

I'll try to write a more upbeat, casual blog next. Something about graduation. If the oil spill hasn't reached the Massachusetts shore yet.