Dear Angela,
I want you to succeed. I want you to do well in all your classes so you can continue to slack off with minimal guilt. Were you to start doing badly, you might start feeling bad and actually develop a work ethic and everyone knows that that’s no fun. So you see, it’s in your own best interests to do well so you can become lazy, even though the two seem paradoxical.
I digress.
I want you to succeed and you’ve been doing a decent job of it thus far. Sure, you felt your toe spontaneously split while walking to your history midterm and sure, it bled all over the flip-flop you borrowed from your suitemate, but you owned that history midterm, so I’ll forgive your ailing feet. And yes, it’s true that while practicing ballroom you crashed into your partner, stepped on his foot and then literally richocheted off him, but since you’ve improved so much since then we can pretend it never happened.
But today. Today.
Angela, here’s the thing. When you’re taking an ASL video midterm, the type where the topics are covered extremely quickly and the signs shown only once, it’s understandable to have questions in your mind. However, the questions in your mind should be questions like: what sign did she just do? Do I know that sign? What shape is the fingerspelling?
The questions should not (and I repeat, NOT) be questions like: so, if she’s facing me and she points left, is that my left or her left? Or is my right? Left, right, which way is left? Am I supposed to flip her around? Wait, is she even facing me? Should I turn around to mirror her? What about the map? Which way is she facing on the map? Oh..oh God…how can I supposed to know which building she’s indicati–nooooooo.
If you do badly on your ASL midterm because you didn’t know how to mentally flip a person around in your head to align with a map (despite taking five extra minutes to ponder this and even turning your body in your chair), you are a failure at life.
Please, for the good of all of us, practice your spatial awareness. Trust me.
Sincerely,
Those Who Want You To Succeed
they make someone hide in a tiny armoire for over ten minutes just for the joy of seeing your face when you open your closet to take out a garment of clothing and see their purposely disturbing face staring at you.
My suitemates keep listening to the song “Back at One” by Brian McKnight. It’s a sweet, simple, easy-listening, predictable love song that’s not quite up my alley and normally I would have no objections. This time though, the chorus bothers me:
one, you're like a dream come true
two, just wanna be with you
three, girl it's plian to see that you're the only for me
and
four, repeat one through three
five, make you fall in love
Normally I would rail against the cliché nature of these songs, but this time the irritation is different. The list format and specifically the lyric “four, repeat steps one through three” distinctly reminds me of the lyrics from a completely unrelated song: “Dick in a Box”.
one, cut a hole in the box
two, put your dick in the box
three, make her open the box
So while everyone else has their eyes closed and is swaying to this oh-so-romantic song, I’m pursuing my lips in disgust. Thus is my life.
lovesack Chinese school blanket alter ego I put the fork in the garbage disposal dingdingdingdingding! quote of the day Goody’s three times a week spending all day with Aleks Simone de Beauvoir teaching Mandarin ‘will you marry me’ never miss a beat do you like him Schopenhaur Nietzsche Foucault semiuke broadening my mind save the mural we have the best soda soulmates let’s carve pumpkins edit my essay avocado Mafia salt and pepper show me your ____ Taco the dinosaur a defense mechanism panopticism Dr. Caroline Volcanic Victor American Sign Language multi-lingual yellow blue bus ¿casarias conmigo? you two are exactly the same saltwater room skeptic stripper yes I realize that the interesting narrative you guys (‘girls!’) evacuate the dancefloor ghost team enemies midterms on Monday we are so lucky I love you
type of place
Anne McCarroll was a middle school teacher but she sold writing and journalism to me better than anyone I have ever known.
Today I received an email from her daughter updating me on the fact that she had died over two months ago, on August 5. She was 73, but it was still a sudden and unexpected death and somehow the fact that she has been gone for so long is the most surreal aspect of this ordeal. While I was still in Sunnyvale, while I was packing for San Diego, while I was envisioning the life before my eyes, this teacher who had such a profound influence on me and where I am today was already gone and I was never the wiser. Everything seems poisonous now, tainted. While I was driving to San Diego, she was gone. While I was having my first day of political science, a major I chose partly because of its use in journalism, she was gone.
I feel strange. I feel sad because she was the teacher that had the biggest influence on my life, because she empowered me and made me believe in my abilities to a level that stays with me today. She influenced me on a level that changed me forever — she pushed me to try journalism, which was the defining event of my high school years, or my college years and is my current career plan. She made me believe in my writing, elevating my confidence from the level of complacency to true conviction in my abilities. She made me into a self-fulfilling prophecy: from being a good writer, she made me believe that I was phenomenal, thus imbibing me with the drive to improve until I truly was great.
I remember small things, like the way she stood outside the door on the first day of eighth grade and shook my hand, or how she accosted me to tell me how much she loved my essay about 10 things I did. How she routinely read my essays aloud and posted them to the wall, things that embarrassed me then but please me now. How she let me choose the quotes of the day, and how she offered books to me and offered to take me out to lunch and meet her daughter and her family. How much support she offered me and how much she believed in me. How she told me that I was the most talented student she had ever had. How in the course of one year she changed the course of my entire life. How she read her own work and told us about her three children who all attended Stanford. She is the woman that made me believe in the power of one teacher to change a child’s life — I could never be a teacher, but since her I have never denied their power and influence.
I remember the bad things too: how much she played favourites, a tendency I disliked even as I was the one favoured. How she sent Joey outside simply for blowing his nose, how she could be overbearing and uptight. I remember feeling guilty because even as I acknowledged the positive effect of her tutelage, I often disliked the way she treated others.
Mostly I remember the good. I remember how much she truly loved and appreciated good prose, no matter who wrote it — I remember her joy at Lisa’s question about Aleve and Sabrina’s essay that highlighted all the phrases she told us never to use. I remember her encouraging me to apply to Stanford (“you could easily do it!”). She was, quite simply, a woman who loved and appreciated writing and was discriminating about it: a trait that made her a mediocre teacher for most, but the most wonderful one for me.
The impact of her death is like losing a lifeline. On an altruistic level one person that was wonderful is gone from the world, but on a personal, selfish level, there is one less person who believes in me. One less person that fiercely knew that I was capable of great things — and I doubt not for a minute the strength of her convictions in me. One less person that I can share my success with. One less person I have rooting for me to succeed. The world has become just a little less personal, a little less on my side.
I feel old and tired. What does Michael Jackson mean to me compared to these people who seemed ageless when I was 13 but are now ashes to ashes and dust to dust? What does it mean when I am old enough to have people close to me, people who once seemed immortal, start drifting away?
In the months before her death we corresponded briefly and always planned to go to lunch but never did. This is the queerest feeling of all, that I had the opportunity and was unable to and realizing that it is truly too late. What if we had had lunch together? What would that have meant to her, to me? Her daughter thanked me for the difference I made in her life, but that phrase sounds incompetent compared to the difference she made in mine. Years before this moment I had long ago decided that she was one of the five people who changed me the most, the five people I would meet in Heaven. Years ago I had decided to thank her in the dedication to my first book and today it hits me that she will not be alive to read it, that she will not care.
One of my goals coming into UC San Diego was to find a mentor but it took me to lose one to realize what I had. Thank you, Mrs. McCarroll. Thank you for shaping me and helping me find the path I knew was right for me all along. Thank you for showing consistent support, more than my parents, more than any other person I knew and I hope I always made it clear to you how much you meant. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but I would rather be ashes than dust! I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time. You showed me how.
