Leann Fischel

The scent of a Hallmark store gives me the same feeling as when I inadvertently remember how my kindergarten teacher smelled.  It was a heartwarming scent, though an odd memory, but more than recognizable for reasons understood only in my brain.  The ladies at the front greeted me as I entered an almost empty store.  They asked if I needed help.  I should have said, “Yes.”  The maze of greeting cards tested my will.  In all the stores I have been to for Hallmark, I’ve never had such difficulty finding what I wanted; after all, she will be 81 years young August 31^st and I have to find the perfect card.  I found rows of “sympathy” and “thank you” cards, of “get well soon” and “congratulations cards”, and the all-too-exciting milestone cards.  Round and round I went through the aisles till I found “her birthday.”

I’m one of those people who is less than satisfied with looking at only five or six cards and picking one.  Oh no.  I must have opened thirty cards, and the second one I read, that’s the one I chose.  I have to make sure I’ve picked the very best I can.  I have to make sure it says everything I want it to say without being more than eight lines; I don’t give books inside cards.  As I wandered through these cards, I considered that this may be the last one I give her; this may be the last August that she sees.  But I quickly push that thought away.  She has been a devoutly religious woman since as long as I can remember.  God has been good to her, she would say.  God has blessed her with long life and the chance to see her grand babies.

Many of my friends have never met their grandparents, or were not old enough to remember them.  The lady at the register told me how lucky I was that I had the chance to spend time with my grandmother, that most people never get that chance.  I considered the concept, the idea of not having that chance, but had no way to fathom  it.  All four of my grandparents are still alive.  All of them are almost eighty, if not already.  My grandparents would all tell you it is God who has gifted them with long life and a chance to see their grandbabies.  What about chance?  The chance that they still live to this day, that they have been alive through more than fifteen presidents, through the Depression, World and Gulf Wars, through the times of housewives and flappers, less than a decade after women gained the right to vote, through a time when inequality of races and sex was a perfectly accepted concept?  But leave long life to chance?  Never.

Michael Dean Clark

(The second in a series on my attempt to hike to the top of the tallest peak in the continental United States. You can find the first here.)

“Everything I have I count as loss/Everything I have is stripped away/Before It started building I counted up these costs/Ain’t nothing left for you to take away.” Hello Hurricane – Switchfoot

At present, I find myself deeply influenced by pretty much all of the music of Jon Foreman. Most know him from his group Switchfoot, some from his side project Fiction Family with Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins, still others from his solo seasons EPs.

In my case, I listen to pretty much anything he chooses to put to record, including Switchfoot’s vastly underrated cover of Beyonce Knowles’ “Crazy in Love.” If I had to rank current song writers, Foreman’s in the top three.

So, given my musical and lyrical man crush on his work, it’s really no surprise “Hello Hurricane” came to mind as I trudged down Mount Whitney without finishing what I came to do. But it was an odd convergence.

I think at first I wanted to hear these lyrics as encouragement. You know, I may have failed, but really in the big picture I’m way more blessed than cursed or something like that. And, at another moment, that would have been a valid, potentially comforting interpretation. But with a little distance, I think it was something else.

A short digression to get to where we’re going. Consider it a switchback in the trail of this piece. One of the guys in my hiking party, Dave, is the originator of a process called the 100 Things Challenge. If you want specifics on this process, see here and then buy Dave’s forthcoming book. Generally, it’s about looking at the clutter of things you have and how they’re standing in your way of living simply content.

This concept is never more apparent than when one is backpacking. You carry only what you need, plan very specifically so you’re prepared for contingencies, and truly enjoy all you have (dehydrated sweet and sour pork from a plastic pouch is only truly edible at the end of a long hike).

So here’s the intersection. You’re never as aware of what you need as when you put a limitation on what you can have (as in the case of carrying what you will need to survive a mountain or trying to maintain only 100 personal possessions). What you have, then, is at once much more critical, and, strangely, much more easily defined as temporal.

In our acquisitive culture (that culture being more generally human than merely Western and capitalistic), we expect the inverse of this relationship, only to find that the more we get, the more we have to have to convince ourselves we are secure. Our possessions fail to bring joy or peace. Instead, they breed a fear of going without so strong we fail to see how rich we are.

I can hear your thoughts at this point. “But, did I really read this whole blog for a shopworn message on the evils of consumerism?”

Ha. To quote Lane Hall, you’ve been “Trojan-horsed.”

Where Jon Foreman and Mt. Whitney merge for me is in the way we treat successes like possessions, desperately piling up easy wins to ward off the sensation that we are all failures. However, the more cheap “triumphs” we collect, the more we suspect our lack.

Only the reality of an earned failure can shift our view and move us embrace the message of Foreman’s chorus.

“Hello hurricane, you’re not enough/Hello hurricane, you can’t silence my love/I’ve got doors and windows boarded up/All your dead-end fury is not enough/You can silence my love.”

Michael Dean Clark holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is an assistant professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. Currently, he is somewhere between Milwaukee and San Diego.

Deanna Hershiser

This year began for me with a fresh Moleskine and gel pen. I’m halfway through the little notebook now, jotting random ideas when they surge onto my brain’s shore. I did this when my kids were little, capturing gems that I can always find preserved in my file drawer when I want them. Things like my daughter, at four, telling me we should really say “last day” and “last night,” or else go with “yesterday” and “yesternight.” Shakespeare would have been proud, I thought.

I’m sure the savvy Pierce would point out we now have mommy blogs for that. You can record your child’s wisdom plus pictures and music — all kinds of media, in fact, to make the best memories of moments.

This is true. I follow several amazing blogs by creative young women, most with kids. But the one or two or three I like best contain an interesting element that goes against the exhortation to leave old ways behind. They’re by women who make use of technology while learning to sprout quinoa and ferment kombucha and cook and preserve and create and savor life by methods older school than I had imagined.

Then there’s my son and survival info. He has found some good sites, like Survival Blog. Great for if you ever want to live off the grid. Or if we someday have to.

This is what gets me: middle of the night, waking to those lurking what-ifs, I drift into wondering. We never know where the country and economy are heading. We live on a planet brightening its orbit with electricity, but after a hundred years plus, we’re tethered to that power source, albeit wirelessly. In the blink of a sunspot, everything could switch off, and we would really have to learn a few 19th-century survival methods. (Which reminds me, I need to jot down addresses of my blogging-mama friends whose homes are closest to mine. I’m glad they’re learning what my grandma knew.)

Never happen, you say. And on spring afternoons, sunshiny with exercise after I get myself off the computer, I’m with you. I haven’t sprouted any quinoa yet. But I’m still writing in spare moments on paper with pen and resting easier about retaining my little words and insights.

Deanna Hershiser enjoys tweaking technology and pondering theology at her blog. Her latest memory-musing about simpler stuff is forthcoming at The Shine Journal.

Stephen Swanson grows tired of the continual questioning of the power of communication, especially from students.  “Why would I need to write essays,” has become a standard of expressing frustration, and even veteran writers feel that way sometimes.  So, he offers this micro-blog…

Why Writing Matters (Vol. 1):

It Pushes Me to Care

(“Vol. 1″ in no way implies that additional volumes will certainly come in the future, although they might.)

This week, I read this (http://blog.sojo.net/2010/04/21/arizonas-immigration-bill-is-a-social-and-racial-sin/), and it renewed my faith that writing can accomplish the task of informing and motivating in ways that stem from fundamental desires to congregate rather than divide.

Stephen Swanson looks to reality TV to establish his new philosophies and contents of education.  He is very glad that Lent is over, as snark abounds in this column.

Recently, as I tried to convince the IT department why I needed “Hulu” and a couple other television-streaming websites unblocked, I was surprised to learn that not everyone innately sees the educational importance of contemporary reality television.

Who has not learned something from reality television?  I could found a whole school curriculum drawing from reality TV.

A Catalog- a brief selection

Survival 101: encourages students to challenge themselves through personal and physical challenges of deprivation and competition, while including discussions of ethics.  Section topics will also include Biting Fauna, Things You Might Be Surprised You’ll Eat For Money, Things You’d Be Surprised That You’d Do For Something to Eat, and a brief discussion of history/anthropology.

Fitness and Weight Loss 220: strives to show students ways to adapt cultural standards of health and beauty on individual levels, rather than addressing the deeper, institutional, economic and cultural aspects of society that result in the definitions or extent of the problems. Methods will include strict dieting, large quantities of exercise and shame, as well as peer pressure.  Plastic surgery might be covered, time and need permitting, especially for female students.  The course will not emphasize long-term health or effects that are not visible or measurable, preferably on big screens and numbers in front of others.

New for Fall: ALL students must have liability waivers signed and notarized before any activities or surgeries begin.

Apprenticing in Business, Finance, and Other Competitive Industries 480: Students will examine ways to work as groups as part of a corporate environment, including introductions to basic business, marketing, and publicity concepts and exercises.  Additionally, students will be expected to become versed in the privileges and ethical laxity that their desired career owe them as a mark of their success.  A short thematic unit will cover staging “performances” that display corporate goodwill through a short period of working in a lower class job or the destruction and rebuilding of a needy person’s house, regardless of the effects on their costs and abilities to retain the house in the future.

*Note: The quality of this class depends highly on the quality of participants.  So, come ready to learn.

Spring & Summer Interims in New Jersey, New York, Miami, Chicago, Cancun, as well as many road trips and tours will be offered to all students.  These courses emphasize interdisciplinary learning that test and encourage the development of problem solving, setting and keeping goals, travel planning, time management, and relational communication.

*Note: Additional, specialized interims will be offered on specific subjects as follows: “The Effects of Steroids”, “Alcohol & Other Mood Altering Substances”,  and “Inter-gender Non-verbal Communication” (Same-Gender N-V Comm. is offered when interest dictates).

*Additional Note: “Sitting in Cafes/Clubs, Awkward Silences, Staring, & Flesh-colored Beards”  will not be offered after this year, and all students must attend the “Social Diseases” workshops before and after their trips.

***

Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain  aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications (Calvin College), Film Studies (Central Michigan University), and Media and American Culture Studies (Bowling Green State University. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in detective narratives.