A Dreadful Event

For two weeks in the summer before my first year of high school I attended the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, a camp that offers two weeks of intensive study in multiple disciplines from ballet to drama to creative writing. I had auditioned for the orchestra on my French horn and was accepted. But this story is not about my experience playing the horn, although it was memorable. My first time attending the institute (I went two other summers), however, affected my life unexpectedly.

I saw her for the first time in the cafeteria. She was a painting student. I don’t now remember what she looked like or what she was wearing at the time, but I do remember one thing—her dreadlocked hair. The bumpy, frizzy, thick locks fell down her back almost to her waist. She had a few of them tied up to keep them out of her face. What beautiful hair, I thought immediately. Soon after that came the personal resolution, I want and will have dreadlocks someday. She was the first person I had ever really seen with dreadlocks. I’d definitely never seen them on a white woman before. Unaware and probably naïve, I didn’t think of the stereotypes associated with white dreadlocked females (pot smoking, free loving hippie chicks). They were simply beautiful to me.

I got home from camp and researched like mad. I read about the history of dreadlocks and how to make them and what you should put in them and what you definitely should not put in them (Elmer’s glue) and where I should buy products. I discovered a Canadian based company called knottyboy. The website was like a dreamland. They had all the information I would ever need. Even how-to-dreadlock videos! They sold natural shampoos and beeswax and conditioning spray and all manner of decorative beads. The bright orange background of the site added extra oomph and said to me, “Get dreadlocks! They are fun!” Oh I will, I told knottyboy. I will get those dreads someday. I was scared though. Dreadlocks are permanent (unless you want to spend hours combing your hair after applying knottyboy’s dreadlock remover), and they are a statement. There is no hiding them under a piece of clothing like the tattoo on my back. If I got dreadlocks, it would say something about me. The question was what? The truth was, I didn’t really care what it would say about me. I only cared that I thought them beautiful.

And then I did a silly thing after my first year of high school. I cut all my nice, long hair off in favor of a Beatles-inspired atrocity (not for the Beatles, just for me). I had, yes, a bowl cut. I don’t remember why I did it. I went temporarily mad. My long hair would have made some meaty dreads, but my resolution to get my own set of locks must have waned with time. It was instead time for funky (and not especially flattering) short hair! I’ve always preferred having long hair, although cutting all your hair off can be liberating. Your heard feels so light and you almost believe you could float away. But beware, you might end up with a bowl cut (sorry fellow females, it’s just not a good look for us 99% of the time).

No matter, hair grows (which is what I tell people when they raise their eyebrows at the news that I’ll have to shave my head to get rid of the dreads). And fortunately, my hair grows rather fast so just a year later it was long enough. I’d spent my sophomore year missing my hair and rebuilding my resolve to get dreads. The no-turning-back-point came when I pushed submit on a knottyboy order. My starter kit would arrive in a few weeks. Can’t not get them now.

I like being dramatic occasionally, so I decided to put the dreads in the day before my junior year began. I asked my sister, Clara, and best friend, Emily, to assist me. For five hours I sat in the upstairs bathroom and endured hair-yanking pain. Getting dreads is not necessarily a fun experience. The dreader must grasp a section of hair and backcomb to form a gnarly tangle. Then the dreader massages wax into the poofy tangle, rolling the dread back and forth with the palms to create as even a strand as possible. We took breaks. I even went to IHOP with a half-dreaded head (that’s how much I don’t care what people think I look like). Finally, at the end of those five hours I had little, ugly, frizzy baby dreadlocks. They stuck out at odd angles, stiff with fresh wax.

In your first year of dreaded life, you must wake up early in the morning for hair maintenance. You must palm roll daily and backcomb at the root every other day to encourage locking and tightening. I rewaxed once a week. Sundays became hair washing day, a bigger ordeal for me than usual because I had to start drying my hair for ten minutes. If you don’t dry your dreads properly, they could eventually mildew. When people already might assume that you don’t wash your hair, you don’t want the smell of mildew rising from your head. I slept with pantyhose over my head for a year so that I didn’t rub my dreads against my pillow and loosen them. Dreadlocks are a big investment. For a while. Eventually, you feel like you have enough wax in your hair so you skip a week. You grow lazy and stop backcombing the roots. Years pass and you stop doing anything to your hair all together. You wake up and go. Sure, once a week you pull out the shampoo, wash, and carefully squeeze as much water out of your sponge-like dreads as possible, but styling gel and curling irons become obsolete objects in your dresser drawers.

(to be continued at a later date...)

Teaching to the Test: Responding to George Orwell

Out of the several trigger phrases I found, I decided to write about this one because it reminded me of my own experience: “History was a series of unrelated, unintelligible but—in some way that was never explained to us—important facts with resounding phrases tired to them.” Orwell writes this sentence in the midst of a few paragraphs critiquing the drawbacks of the English boarding school’s classical education. Facts were memorized for the sole purpose of passing exams. Wait a minute that sounds a bit like the AP system in today’s schools. AP teachers construct their classes around the AP tests, instructing their students in such a way that will enable them to pass these exams at the end of the year. 

I have mixed reactions and feelings to the AP system. It can either enrich a student’s education or severely limit it, depending largely on a teacher’s approach. For example, my AP chemistry and biology teachers taught us not only what would be on the test but what would give us the fullest possible understanding of the subject. My history classes, however, were less than delightful experiences, which explains why Orwell’s quote resonated with me. Growing up with a history professor father, I had high hopes and expectations for my history classes. But what do I remember? Not even facts or dates as perhaps Orwell remembered. I remember that I couldn’t stay awake in World History. My American History teacher talked more about South Park than about the development of our country. My U.S. Government teacher enjoyed hearing his own political views expressed. My poor performances on my AP history tests (except government, which I taught to myself) probably reflected this poor teaching. My disenchantment with the subject by that point probably didn’t help either.

Response to E.B. White's "The Ring of Time"

The ring of time—those moments when time acts differently than time as we understand it, linear and irreversible. Time seems to stand still because it “[begins] running in circles, and so the beginning [is] where the end was, and the two [are] the same, and one thing [runs] into the next and time [goes] round and around and [gets] nowhere” (540). E.B. White makes such observations while watching a circus performer practice, attempting to describe something we all somehow intuitively understand but can hardly explain with words, the behaviors and effects of time. He admits failure in the essay but says that as “a writer, like an acrobat, [he] must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him” (541). I like this image. Writing is thus naturally humbling, an opportunity to practice this difficult fruit of the spirit.

But White tries again to explain this ring of time in the next section. He compares the South, stuck in cycles of racism, to those moments when time seems to stop. But instead of admitting failure at the end of this section, he confronts the true nature of time—that “the only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change” (544), which comes with the inevitable passing of time. The ring is an oxymoronic impossibility but still exists as a “worldly or unworldly enchantment” (539). The ring’s magic is like the circus’s magic, “universal and complex” (539).

I think the P.S. rearticulates the sobering conclusion that “time has not stood still for anybody but the dead, and even the dead must be able to hear the acceleration of little sports cars and know that things have changed.” Although sobering, this claim cannot withstand those unusual moments of time transcendence.

Response to E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake"

We’ve all been there before—the flexible realm of being where past and present fuse. This warping of time occurs significantly when revisiting places of memory as E.B. White does in “Once More to the Lake.” He vacillates between being himself (the present adult, father self), being his father, and being his son (or himself as a boy, reliving memories). He experiences the emotions of all three simultaneously. He feels as if nothing has changed since his childhood. The lake is “fade-proof” and the woods “unshatterable” (535). He fishes like he used to, eats where he used to, and notices the seemingly identical dragonflies. But of course things have changed. Forty years has brought him gray hair (perhaps), a son, paved roads, and loud motors. His lake memories become his daily rhythm once again.

As I read, I was reminded of an article I read last semester about pastoral literature and its tendency towards extreme nostalgia. While White avoids extreme nostalgia (partly by claiming that nothing has changed), his essay does hint at what the article essentially claimed—that every generation looks backwards, believing that earlier times, such as during childhood, were simpler, better, etc. Isn’t that why the phrase “the good ol’ days” is so widely used? White bemoans the loud motors he now hears vrooming around the lake, yet he admits that his “boy loved our rented outboard, and his great desire was to achieve single-handed mastery over it” (536). His son doesn’t seem to have a problem with the motors. Perhaps in forty years he will, acting just like his father, looking back with fondness on those perfect summer days spent at the lake.

One Morning in a Fifth Grade Classroom

The morning was off to a normal start. I mean in fifth grade, how strange can things get? Oh dear, Suzy said something a little nasty. Oh dear, now we have to create models of American Indian villages. Oh dear, there I go being a teacher's pet again. When Mrs. Scott turned on the television so we could all watch the breaking news that two planes had flown into the World Trade Center towers all I thought initially was, "Wait, what towers?" Having not been to New York City and having lived most of my life in a comfortable hole filled with young adult novels and school projects about wolves and who even knows what else, I suppose my ignorance was understandable. I was not an idiot of a fifth grader, however. I knew something bad was happening, something awful. I got an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, as if I'd swallowed a rock. I think I started crying. The day gets a little hazy. We were all a lot quieter. 

My fifth grade classmates and I would get to know hardship a little better as the year progressed. That year was the first time I'd ever known someone who died of sickness. My class, dubbed the gifted and talented group, had been together since third grade. Sure, some had left and some had come, but we pretty much were with the same classmates for three years. So when Chris got cancer, it wasn't like, "Chris who?" We all thought it incredibly unfair for a person as young as Chris to die. And we were scared, too. We weren't any older.

In some ways, I feel like I'm not any older than I was eleven years ago when planes struck and towers fell. I guess I know a little bit more-- my school projects have gotten a little longer, I spend more time doing homework. But I still get that same confused, rock-in-my-gut feeling when something bad happens. I look at the death of another friend with the same reaction: how unfair for Logan to die at only 18. I still look at international crises and say, "Wait, what ____?" You fill in the blank. What terrorist group? What country? What rebellion? I'm still ignorant. I'm still a teacher's pet (I've just stopped handing out Snickers bars). I'm still wondering why people would willingly drive planes into skyscrapers. I'm still learning about what happened. And I'm still praying for peace.

Response to "Glory Days"

I can’t quite figure out Menand’s tone but see it most noticeably surfacing at the beginning and end. The way he opens, with the comic depiction of his family, prepares the reader for a sarcastic piece about the silliness or ridiculousness of the Olympics. But he confuses us by writing, “In this flock, I was the unlikely black sheep.” So he, unlike his family, seems to appreciate sports. But he reminisces that as “a shrimp” in his “prepubescent days,” the actualizing of his basketball dreams were always impossible. After spending most of the article seemingly reporting facts about the development of the Olympics or about different books written about the Olympics or even about how the Olympics are really just an extension of imperialistic Britain, Menand slowly winds his way to the claim that “winning really is what the spectacle is all about.” Menand argues that all “the virtuous talk about the honor or competing and the comity of sport” simply clouds the facts that sport is merely a spectacle about winning. This claim seems a bitter truth.

So does Menand like the Olympics? Perhaps he is a reluctant sports fan, one who embraces sports despite objections to cost, etc. Perhaps he just likes sports for what they are—a spectacle, nothing more, nothing less. Even in the article he can’t decide how he feels, ending with a long string of questions and the so-be-it statement: “We have the Games, however we got them, whatever they mean. Let them begin!”