Category: blog

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

Today, there are four shorter prompts so I’ll see if I can be somewhat concise — not exactly my typical approach. Since there’s no real limit to the writing, though, it’s not a huge issue. The real problem is that all of my mental health difficulties are related to food and eating so tacking these things has taken a lot of effort. I know that there’s no real pressure to do this but I see it as something that is necessary, not just facing the fears, as I have to do that every day, every meal. But facing the necessity to talk about such things publicly.

Write about a lunch you loved…

First, I have to qualify this. I have never had anything that corresponds to a positive relationship with lunch. Or any meal. I eat compulsively and under incredible tension — I am both focused on food and eating every second of every day, no matter what I am doing, and terrified of having done it, having to do it and, more than anything, having to think about it at all. For most people, food is either a pleasure or a guilty pleasure. For me, there’s nothing pleasurable about it — it causes me physical pain, mental trauma and is the first and last problem that has destroyed so much of my life. That being said, there’s nothing necessary about me being the one doing the eating for it to be considered a lunch.

It’s not just food that I have had an unusual relationship with in my life. My experience of school was decidedly different — for one, I didn’t spend the usual twelve or thirteen years there, nor did I go to only one school at a time. And I was a student at the university long before I technically graduated from high school. I did, eventually, graduate from high school in the traditional sense — not so much the getting the rolled up piece of paper and walking across the stage, although I did indeed do that, quite a bit later. I went to grad (or prom, if you’re from the south). No, we didn’t have a grad lunch celebration but I’m getting to that.

I have often said that celebrations are meaningless and contribute to the artificial concept of “special” that we really need to get society away from. Recognizing a time or day as something to look forward to, spending huge amounts of money or effort on making a day unique — the amount of money spent on weddings alone could raise the slums of the world out of poverty. That being said, if the expenditure is kept to a minimum and the effort slight, there is nothing wrong with taking time to recognize accomplishment and be both proud and thankful — proud of having achieved something and thankful for the people who have helped you on the path. It’s very important to be proud of your achievements because, if you’re not, there is a hateful tendency to be proud of things you haven’t achieved — your sexuality, your race and, most destructively, your tribe/country/political affiliations. Those aren’t things to be proud of. They’re things to be aware of and recognize but there’s nothing in being straight or gay or democrat or republican or American or Canadian or Chinese or Indonesian to be proud of. It’s who we are, not what we’ve done. Being proud of someone else’s achievements isn’t just fake. It’s shameful.

So I have only two problems with high school (and other) graduation. One is that people spend a huge amount of money on it. Spending money on occasions is a huge waste and we are already such a wasteful society. If people don’t feel shameful and guilty about spending thousands on a party, they have simply missed the point of how much help those thousands could give to a child who doesn’t have enough to eat or medicine to keep it alive and healthy. How many books for a poor school even in your own city could that money spent on your graduation buy? How many shots for infants could it provide, not on the other side of the world, while that is definitely just as important, but down the street where there are mothers who aren’t able to afford a trip to the doctor so their kid doesn’t contract polio? If you think your partying is more important than the safety of other people, perhaps you need a few more years in school before you’re deemed capable of going out into the world. If you think a night of fun is more important than the lives of others and you’re already in the world, please do us all a favor and step off the planet at the earliest possible occasion.

The second problem is the booze. There is no good side to drinking alcohol. It is a hateful practice. I’m not just saying this because it is prohibited by Buddhist teachings — if anyone has told you that drinking alcohol is acceptable to Buddhists, I would refer you to the basic precepts taken even by beginners, that include a vow never to consume anything that has the potential to change perception of the world. While there are many interpretations of that line, there is no valid interpretation that would allow the consumption of alcohol, whose effect on the human body is perhaps one of the most well-documented of all medical facts. We can certainly look at something like marijuana, whose effects on mental health and pain management are still being investigated, as potentially a medication whose use is permissible in many circumstances. Alcohol has no such benefits — it is, in all ways, a poison. Both of the body and the mind. Whether legal or illegal, though alcohol is a scourge on modern society. It is a much larger problem than smoking has ever been (also outlawed by Buddhist practice, yet another prescription that has been ignored by many people who claim to be practitioners). It destroys lives and families and, in case it is not obvious, the planet. The amount of land devoted to the production of alcohol that could be better used for crops to feed people who are starving — or even for trees that were cut down to make space for those crops simply having been left there to clean the air in a passive way — is staggering. And that’s not even counting the amount of oil burned and energy wasted, pollution created and plastic and glass produced and disposed of, to get the alcoholic beverages from their place of manufacture to your loathsome lips.

High school graduation for many people may not be the first time they drink alcohol — I don’t think I knew anyone in high school that hadn’t at least had a few glasses of wine long before they reached that landmark occasion. But it’s the first time that society decided to say it’s ok. While people may turn a blind eye in silence to underage drinking, it’s usually at graduation from high school that the blind eye becomes wholehearted acceptance and, often, expectation, endorsement and encouragement. It’s not just ok to drink at grad — it’s seen as a rite of passage that is assumed to take place to the point that, while most people graduating from high school in North America are still under the age of legal drinking, there are programs (safe-grad being the most well-known but there are hundreds of others) specifically designed to keep students from drinking and driving. It’s an excuse for bad behavior and we must root those out — I would suggest, starting with this one, since it’s the gateway to societally-acceptable intoxication that should never be permitted at any stage of life. Alcohol is certainly not the root of all evils. But if tobacco had been the cause of nearly as many societal problems, it wouldn’t have taken us nearly this long to see it as something shameful and try to stamp it out (however weakly we are doing it with tobacco).

That being said, many of my friends did drink alcohol at grad parties, although very few of them would really be anything I could classify as “drunk”, thankfully. I said for a very long time that I wouldn’t go to the graduation celebration but, at the last minute — ok, one day before the actual party — I decided that I would indeed attend. It cost me nothing and I asked an equally-surprised dear friend of mine to be my date at the event. Thankfully, she had a dress that she was happy to wear and we went off to the party — both the one the school provided, complete with speeches, and several after that. It’s actually the after-effect of that a year later that the writing prompt has brought to mind, though.

The next year, true to form, that same friend invited me to come to her graduation ceremony as her date, at the same school, the same hotel and followed by rather different parties. So I did. The invitation this time was actually extended three whole days before the ceremony, I believe, so I had plenty of time to prepare. Even got my clothes dry cleaned in preparation! The speeches were interesting — my father gave one, not as my father, of course, but as a teacher retiring that year. It was very touching and I remember little other than his speech from the ballroom. I’m sure there was a meal, which I definitely didn’t touch, and dancing, which I may have participated in, although stylized western dancing is something I’ve never been particularly good at, even though I do love to try.

After, we all ended up at one of my best friends’ houses only a few minutes away from the hotel, where we continued to snack (except me) and listen to loud music and in many ways typical to teenagers party away the rest of the night. We all ended up asleep on various chairs and couches and parcels of floor (I did indeed succeed in snaring a couch to share with someone, thankfully, as the floor is always cold there, even in the late springtime, particularly at six in the morning). We were woken far too few hours later around noon by the sound of laughter and sizzling pancakes. I found myself being used as the pillow for a small dog but that was ok — it wasn’t until years later that my allergies expanded to include the canine, sadly. Stiff and exhausted but still somewhat exhilarated from the night before, I woke up, surrounded by a half dozen other recent escapees from the school system, along with my friend’s mother, who was generally laughing at us all — quite rightly so, too, as we looked like we had just been kicked out of a high-end jazz club from the thirties, except that it was the nineties and it was the living room in the middle of the day.

So there was breakfast. And that’s where this all comes full circle. My friend’s mother asked if we wanted pancakes and eggs for breakfast and my friend, obviously barely able to keep her eyes open against the bright sunlight, suddenly sat up and looked at her and said (shouted, although that wasn’t her intent, just hoarse from singing along to music most of the night) “fuck breakfast, it’s time for lunch, mom!”, after which there was a moment of silence and her mother broke out into even more riotous laughter. So we (ok, everyone except me, although I did assist in the cooking, if not the eating) skipped breakfast and had a wholeheartedly massive lunch. That, indeed, is the lunch that I loved — perhaps not the only one but definitely the one that I will always associate with positive lunchtime experiences, likely more than any other.

It is certainly time to contemplate the fact that I have rather overshot the target for a quarter of the prompts for today but that isn’t going to stop me from continuing the trend into the other three, although they aren’t necessarily going to be all quite so involved. Talking about alcohol and wasteful spending, though, those are matters dear to my heart — if not my liver and my purse.

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

When did everything change?

Before I get on to today’s spontaneous writing thing, I want to address something that I was reminded of today and that I get asked about at least once or twice a week. Rough drafts.

A lot of writers will tell you a strategy that works for them. For most, it’s “write everything you think, get it on the page, come back and fix it later”. That is certainly a valid strategy and one that works for a lot of people. It doesn’t work for me at all and I think we need to be very clear on the difference between what works for us and what works for everyone — there is no winning formula for writing effectively. Yes, everyone needs to edit. Perfection isn’t going to happen instantly every time. No, not everyone needs to produce a messy version and then spend time cleaning it up. If you’re the kind of person who likes to just flow with the language and you can deal with wading through it later to turn it into real, proficient wordplay, fantastic. If you’re like me, a person who thinks for awhile, writes and sentence and doesn’t move on from that sentence until you’re happy enough with it you’d send it to your agent for publication, that’s also ok. I teach both methods in classes and try to make it very clear that neither is the right way of doing things, just whatever works for you. My way is definitely more time-efficient but it doesn’t necessarily produce better work and it absolutely doesn’t work for everyone. I encourage people to try it simply because if it works for you, it will save you a huge amount of time going back over things and having to get bogged down in vast numbers of edits. If it doesn’t work for you, though, there are varying degrees to which you can write an imperfect version and fix it later — I certainly wouldn’t suggest starting from the place of accepting that it will be a complete disaster just to get it on the page. That might be where you end up and there’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s probably the slowest possible process for writing anything longer than an essay and I’d avoid it if anything else works for you, simply in the interest of using your time wisely.

That being said, let’s move on to today’s topic. When did everything change. There have been a number of sweeping changes in my life and I am pretty sure I have written extensively about having lost the person I saw as my dearest partner and greatest teacher more than a decade ago. There have been other huge changes, though. I’m going to talk about one today that very few people who haven’t known me twenty years have anything more than the slightest notion of having happened. Almost everyone who knows me knows that I’m a classical musician and that I write choral music — hell, if you browse my website, you’ll find plenty of sample recordings and sheet music to download if you happen to be a choral conductor.

When I was in school, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. I was pretty sure I wanted to teach college students but I was open to the idea of teaching at a high school if that would get me a classroom and autonomy. That wasn’t going to happen so I was set on a gradual progression toward tenure. Gradual not being my style, I pushed as hard as I could to start and finish that process as quickly as possible and met with some strikingly harsh resistance — procedure in education, as you may have discovered and as I have often bemoaned, is far more important than either intelligence or results.

But here’s the thing. Then (and now) the teaching was far more important than the subject matter. There are some people who are so passionately interested in what they are studying that they are compelled to share it with others. I have heard many people speak about this eloquently. If you haven’t encountered anyone simply overflowing with the need to teach the amazing knowledge they possess about their specialty, I would suggest you listen to some interviews or talks with/by Neil deGrasse Tyson (yes, the astrophysicist who hosted the new Cosmos series on NatGeo/Fox). I have great empathy with this position and I am also distinctly amazed by astrophysics and several other science disciplines. It’s why I feel so strongly about science communication. I never felt that about English literature or writing. To be perfectly honest, I never felt that about anything when I was in school. Some of that comes from the fact that I spent most of my educational career endlessly fighting with bureaucratic nonsense and pathetically unintelligent curriculum. But I just wanted to teach and the path to get there meant I would have to specialize in something and become an expert. So I would.

Then I found something that wasn’t so much a passionate interest as an emotional love. Music. And I don’t mean I turned on the radio one day (since we were still stuck in the radio and cassette age at the time and both are so low-quality I can’t say I had much time for listening to such things) and discovered that music existed. My parents were both musicians, along with a good portion of my extended family. And I don’t mean they sang from time to time in the shower. They were both professional musicians — my father directed a school choir, played organ and directed other groups and is an award-winning performer, in addition to being a math teacher and my mother was a performer and music teacher in schools and privately. So I grew up with music from the time that I was barely larger than a soccer ball. It was lovely.

Most of that music was classical in nature, although my dad was a fan of jazz and my mother had a fondness for Abba and the Beatles (as do I on all three counts to this day). But I love classical music. I loved it then and I always have — likely always will. I have some reservations about particular styles but that’s not the point and it’s a far larger topic for another day (why couldn’t any British composers between the end of the Baroque period and the middle of the twentieth century write anything that wasn’t both mindless and loud, for example?). But I never saw it as a career for myself until a bit later. Mostly because I wasn’t a performer. I didn’t want to be on stage. Sure, I took cello and piano lessons and became perfectly proficient and I sang in every pre-professional choral group I could get my notes on but that was something for the time outside the teaching world that I wanted to be a part of.

Then I discovered academic music. It was quite a strange development for me how it happened, actually — the irony was that my uncle is a professor of music but that was in a place so far away, his visits weren’t really about exploring my future career as much as they were about family togetherness. I don’t think we had a conversation about the nature of academic music until longer after I entered music school.

But that’s what happened. I couldn’t wait to enter university (which I did very early, another long story) but again the subject matter didn’t much do much for me. I was thinking math like my father for most of that time and I have to admit that probably would have been a wise choice in many ways. Not that music wasn’t but how music school went for me wasn’t a pleasant time.

That’s when everything changed. I had a very close friend in school whose father was a professor of music at the local university. I had known him for years but I never realized that he was a world-class musician and teacher until, well, until I started thinking about what I wanted to do to engage more with the academic community in general. So I asked him if I could join his university choir (what in some colleges would be called an undergraduate chorus). It was a huge group — eighty people, perhaps. Almost all undergraduate students, most being music undergrads looking to get ensemble credit, which they were required to have as part of their degree and choir was a pretty good way to get it. Many of them didn’t really want to be there at first but I think the vast majority began to like it after a few weeks. I was probably the youngest person in the choir but I’m not sure how obvious that was. Perhaps very. Hard to tell. But I sang there (actually, sang with that choir pretty constantly for years) and that gave me an opportunity that I hadn’t anticipated. Spending time at the university, in particular at the music school. I made friends with students and spent ages talking to them about what they were studying and such. I changed my unfortunate and misdirected notion that studying music was about relaxing and playing. I’m not sure where I got that from but it was decidedly wrong. To this day, I’m absolutely certain that going to music school is the most demanding choice an undergraduate student can make at university.

So I was hooked. I went to my friend’s father and begged him to help me prepare for my audition to become a music student and, after some serious questions about whether I understood what I was making a commitment to, he graciously agreed to coach me through the process. It took some definite hard work but I put in the time and effort and not only got in but was awarded a huge scholarship to study music there.

I went from vaguely knowing that there was nothing I wanted to be and nothing I wanted to do in my life other than teach in a higher education institution. I knew I would spend my life as an academic. To knowing without a doubt that my future lay in academic music, that someday I’d be Dr Sato, Professor of Music. Didn’t quite work out that way, as you and I both know now, as I had very little choice but to give up that pathway before doctoral qualifications came my way and switch to creative writing — a pathway that I’m more than happy with the result of, by the way. I love writing, as you can tell from the lengthy, daily posts that I have here and my list of published books in the last year alone. I am still far more passionate about teaching students how to write than I am about doing my own, though.

So in some ways, that’s when everything changed. And in other ways, it was a continuation of my life’s only real dream (which I wrote about in another post recently). Different still, it was a short detour of some years from the eventual pathway that would actually lead me to academic life in the English world. But that’s my thought for today. I’d tell you not to give up on your dreams but realistically it’s more about looking for the change that will give you not what you want but what you can’t live without. Teaching is what I can’t live without. So I grabbed at it with both hands when a chance came along to teach something I love. I did it more than once, actually. So should you. When someone tells you not to give up, try to ignore them. We often need to give up and try something else. I had to more than once. And I survived, as will you.

[estimated reading time 11 minutes]

What was the one thing you always wanted?

I must admit that this is probably the most difficult question for me to answer, not because I don’t know the answer — it’s obvious and anyone who’s known me for more than a few minutes will know the answer, too. It’s that it sounds so artificial and performed. I’ve never had the kind of desire that other people say is normal and human. I don’t want people or sex or pleasure or even companionship. I will accept people on occasion and companionship when I feel up to it, which is rarely. But the one thing that I’ve always wanted was a classroom. I don’t just mean to become a teacher but to have a classroom of my own in which I could create the environment, make the decisions on how to teach, what to teach, the way classes would be structured and how evaluation would take place.

In an age where this is not at all what teaching is, I feel more and more that my one dream is staggeringly out of reach most of the time. There was a time when education was about taking a series of things that was important for students to know and understand, giving that list to a teacher and, sometimes with some general guidance, telling the teacher to use their expertise to make sure that the students in the class possessed that information. Those days are now long gone.

With the advent of required hard-copy lesson planning, segment-by-segment guidelines for how to teach individual topics, classroom materials prepared by government departments or by the school’s topic-specific specialists (from worksheets to sample instructional tools to powerpoint slides, as if teaching from a powerpoint was ever going to be a sensible approach in a classroom unless you are both incompetent and visually obsessive), the days of teacher autonomy have completely come to an end.

What is the result of all of this? Simply put, we have made education teacher-proof. It’s not necessary for the teacher to know anything about the subject, know anything about teaching or, in general, know anything. It’s no longer even necessary for the teacher to speak the language or do anything other than provide behavioral management in the room. The class can simply get on with the lesson while the teacher sits at their desk and quietly meditates on the meaning of life — or paychecks.

People say to me that it’s a good thing that students are getting a standardized education and that we can now expect that all students have never been left out because of having a bad teacher or that everyone has achieved a particular level and that is wonderful. And in some ways, I can see how that might be the case. But the level that we are now allowing students to consider “achievement” in a course is so incredibly low that by the time they finish high school, it is highly unlikely that students will be capable of much beyond the level of tying their own shoes and knowing which direction is up.

Making sure that every student is capable of a particular level of expertise in all subjects is incredibly important. Eliminating the role of the individual teacher is certainly not going to solve the problem, though. But there’s a far larger problem than that. Students will, generally speaking, live up to expectations. If we have intensely low expectations, students will absolutely live up to them. Why is western education without exception abysmal? With every passing decade — and every passing year in many cases — we lower the achievement standard in schools. Students giving the same answers on the SATs, once seen as the real benchmark for academic excellence before entering post-secondary, are now given higher scores than their parents and grandparents received. We are told a story about the rise of the knowledge economy but it appears we are selling knowledge all too cheaply.

Why has the world not completely collapsed if we are training generations of uninformed and disinterested graduates? Two reasons. One is that the people who are out there expecting others to have a certain level of knowledge are well aware of the level that they might possess and are unlikely to ask them to perform better than that. How has that happened out there in the wild where teachers aren’t the majority and people aren’t really told any of this? The process has been gradual and the reduction of standards in the classroom has meant that as new students graduate, the people who have graduated in the years previously are similarly uninformed and, as they are older and more experienced in the world, they don’t expect the new graduates to have the same level of knowledge that they possess — it’s a downward spiral where expectation follows experience and experience begets expectations for the future. If you ask a group of people for an answer and get nothing but intellectual excrement in return, you’re unlike to ask the same question again without expecting the same answer and that is, indeed, exactly what you will receive.

The second reason is that, while this is a world nearly completely lacking in knowledge within the heads of the general public, specialist knowledge is at an all time high in a very small minority of the population. While the educated elite has always been a minority, there has never been such a gulf between those who have received a high school or undergraduate education and those who actually possess some real learning about a topic. Why does that matter? In a word, Wikipedia.

You know and I know that if there is something that we don’t know anything about, ten minutes and a few taps on our phones and we will be able to sound like an expert to anyone other than an actual expert in the field. Don’t know anything about Etruscan pottery? Ask the internet. Need to have a conversation about American immigration policy? Ask the internet. While there is an intensely overwhelming quantity of fake news out there, there are some places that are surprisingly good at moderating the quality of their articles and Wikipedia is a deity in the world of online fiction. While there are many articles that are subpar, the overall understanding possible from reading a few pages of an article on almost any topic is so much higher than a typical student would possess after an hour or two of class time on that subject, it is staggering to comprehend that this shift has come about completely during my lifetime — in fact, during the second half of my lifetime, to be more accurate. During the time that I have been an adult, the shift has occurred where reference books and trips to the library to investigate basic questions has been replaced with keyword searches on devices that were science fiction when I was a teenager. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not really all that old.

So we have a knowledge economy, they tell me. Actually, we have an absence-of-knowledge economy. Most jobs require you not just not to have any particular knowledge about anything — you can do them far better if you have no knowledge about anything in general and the topic of the job in particular. The more you know, the more they want you to unlearn and teach you in a different way. Knowledge isn’t the price of admission anymore. You used to get a job based on what you knew. The price of admission now is train-ability. How quickly and thoroughly you can become indoctrinated.

That’s not a surprising result, of course. The school system has moved from teaching knowledge to teaching understanding. And that’s exactly what it should have done — in a world where knowledge is free and freely available in an instant, the only thing that needs to be there for knowledge is an awareness of how and where to look for it. Need to know the names of all the member states of the UN? Look it up. Need to know the constituent chemicals of petroleum distillates? Look it up. You’ll know in less time than it would take an expert to list them off and that is plenty fast enough for any use. Not to mention, the internet doesn’t have a bad day or make mistakes because it had trouble sleeping the night before. So we don’t need memorized knowledge, as the entire wealth of human discovery is there for the accessing twenty-four hours a day to everyone.

This sounds like praise for the shift. And it would be, if there had been a shift. We have moved from teaching knowledge to not teaching anything. The theory is that we would be able to access that information in realtime, as we do in the real world, in class. But we don’t actually let students do that. We still test them on knowledge that they can acquire without any effort — and then wonder why they no longer have it memorized. Not only is there no benefit to it, there’s no practical side effect of having to repeat it endlessly in a search to see it that would automatically translate into at least partial memorization. If you have to keep working at seeing something, you will gradually learn it by rote. If you can get it any time you want, seeing it a thousand times is unlikely to imprint it into your memory.

We should be teaching students how to understand the information but we don’t do it. Teachers aren’t particularly to blame for this, I must add. Teachers must indeed shoulder the blame for certain problems in our modern education system but I would suggest that this isn’t one of those things. I know many teachers who would love to open up class to students using all the real-world aids they can have — using a phone or tablet in class, for example, shouldn’t be something that we try to stop but something that we encourage. We should be teaching students how to function in a world where electronic communication is not just the norm but realistically the only form of communication that exists in much of life. We should be teaching how to merge the life of in-person, vocal communication with using technology to acquire knowledge and then to apply that knowledge to the situation at hand. Is it any wonder that students go home and spend their lives holding their phones and have no idea that it’s rude not to actually speak to the person next to them? Where would they learn this if not in school? We’re no longer training students for the world around them. We’re training students for the world of the nineteen-eighties. And as much as I miss my childhood in that decade, that’s not where we are today and the world doesn’t work either at that speed or in that analog reality anymore.

Who’s to blame for that? New curriculum has become an exercise in pandering to special interests, trying to be sensitive to differences (which of course we should be) but instead of doing it well, it’s meant minimizing information and knowledge to such an extent that you can graduate from high school or finish an undergraduate degree with so little actual knowledge or understanding — realistically, if you can’t pass any test or examination with the information that you can find in ten minutes on the internet, I would be amazed. I have yet to see any course that wouldn’t be easily completed by someone with access to the internet and a vague notion of how to keep that information in their mind for a day or two. We have raised standardization to an obsession and lowered the bar to the point that everyone can step over it without even having to try.

This is not a mistake that has been made universally. Chinese, Japanese and South-Korean education systems, while certainly not perfect, have raised their standards while those in the west have dramatically lowered theirs. Those same countries have made their education systems more generalization-friendly at the high school level, making students understand a larger range of things, now that specific knowledge is no longer necessary to be memorized, allowing people to, in general, have a higher level of applied intelligence in the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, the education system in the United Kingdom, for example, is still stuck not in the twentieth century but the nineteenth, where rote learning is king, technology is banned from the classroom except for teaching tools (what exactly is the point of a smart board unless you are beyond incompetent and need dancing pictures to get students to understand fractions and the placement of lines on a map?). Specialization at a young age has made students in the UK some of the least educated in the world and the university system following from that useless high school graduation is just as ridiculous — for a system intended to create universal knowledge, a general education for all, given its name “university”, high degrees of specialization mean that those who do go on to finish an undergraduate degree in that country have highly specialized knowledge in a very tiny area and possess no ability to even have a conversation about anything else. Not that the level of knowledge in the specialized area is particularly high but even looking at a country with a deplorable secondary education system like the United States or Canada, which has fully embraced the teacher-redundant prescriptive curriculum model, at least university education includes enough general education that graduates of undergraduate programs are well-rounded and capable of intelligent conversation in a variety of areas of life.

That may sound rather curious as a problem and being able to speak intelligently about things may not appear to be a hugely desirable trait to you but it is making itself felt in western Europe in particular of late. People can’t communicate with each other. Someone who acquired a math degree can’t have a conversation about anything beyond the weather with someone who got an English degree. Not because these two people are stupid but because they simply have no overlap in their knowledge. Students love specialization because it means they don’t have to take anything they’re not interested in. It’s not until long after that they realize they simply lack any understanding of the world around them except in a very small, concentrated direction. People no longer feel a connection to each other — violence is on the rise, hatred abounds, nationalism, tribalism and segregation are rearing their ugly heads in a way that would make Hitler and Mussolini sit up and clap (or salute, perhaps) for the first time since the forties. If you don’t share any understanding with the people around you, they’re “other” and that’s to be feared, to be hated and to be fought against. If you can’t think of an example of this, take a look at the election of Trump in the United States or multiple right-wing elections across Europe (or the Brexit phenomenon in the UK, to be more specific in a European context). People don’t share anything with people of another political bent and that means they can’t come together — not for anything.

Teacher autonomy breeds a variety of approaches to learning, student-driven teaching and mutual understanding. If every teacher you encounter in your life has a different style, a different approach, not every one of them will be the optimal for you but some of them will reach you where you are and, for the others, you will strive to get there to meet them where they are. Not every teacher will be excellent but to solve that problem is to improve teacher training, teacher evaluation, increase teacher pay to attract the most intelligent people into academic roles (teachers are paid less now in terms of actual buying power than they have ever been paid in the history of record keeping for standard salaries in all western countries — even compared to salaries in the Great Depression or during the World Wars!). We do need a higher standard of education and to get that, we can either rely on technology or rely on having better teachers. It is obvious which direction the western world is heading on that but I would suggest that this is a horrendous mistake and will come back to bite this society in the ass — and it won’t take generations to do so. Education in China, Japan, India and various other countries in what is often grouped as “the east” is becoming more demanding and more rewarding. These are the countries that are beginning to dominate production and economic power in the first half of the twenty-first century and that is a trend that is going to continue unless education in the west catches up. I’m certainly not suggesting that western nations deserve to be dominant in these areas but, at this rate, Europe and North America are going to see their economies crushed in short order by Chinese and Indian market domination and it is no more correct for the power to lie only in that area, either.

So I dream of a classroom of my own. Relatively complete autonomy to achieve prescribed minimum goals and to extend those goals as far as my students are capable of progressing. To create and teach, to mold new minds to be as intelligent and capable and creative as they have the potential to be. It’s a beautiful dream and I hope someday I will feel like it has the possibility of coming true. For now, all I can do is hope that I will be able to escape a system of public education that no longer values education and whose society is hell-bent on eliminating understanding, knowledge and intelligence as virtues, relegating them to the status of disgust (listen to one of Trump’s speeches in which he references “averageness” as opposed to “intelligence” and you’ll know what I mean). Perhaps wishes someday do come true. I’ll stick to university education for the moment, where I can at least have an impact on student learning and really teach people some things. My father was a high school teacher before making the leap after retirement into post-secondary education and I can only imagine what dreams he had for a classroom when he was little, still thinking of becoming a teacher. At his feet, I learned the importance of education, of working hard to be an intelligent person and be able not simply to have knowledge and understanding but to see it as your duty to share and inspire those things in others. In the age of the automaton-teacher, there’s no longer a place for real teachers life my father in the school system and it is, without doubt, a far sadder place and a far more lacking world for its loss.

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

Write about a time you itched, physically or mentally.

Indeed, this has to be one of the most curious writing prompts that I’ve ever encountered — mine are often just as weird and probably more so but this one, I have to admit, intrigues me. We all know what physically itching means, of course, but mental itching? Speaking as someone who suffers from very severe pure OCD (not a desire for order, how popular culture often sees the disorder, but a need for a sense of having done something in the correct way, which is neither defined nor describable, combined with compulsive thoughts that are intensely troubling, in my case, disgusting — for some other pOCD sufferers, these can be sexual or violent but in my case, they’re all related to eating), mental itchiness is all too common.

I guess the point was to write about one of those but I think I will take this opportunity to tell two stories — one about the physical and the other the mental. The physical is probably the more entertaining for those who don’t live inside my mind so I will begin with that one.

When I was in my twenties, I lived alone for awhile in a suburb of St John’s. I had (only one of the many I would inhabit) a one-bedroom apartment which was fairly nice but being underground is never a pleasant situation to be in, really. What was nice, though, was that I had a few very close friends who never forced me to talk about the past or engage in debate or even deal with discussion of daily life. I was incredibly thankful for that. I have no interest in anyone’s daily life so if I don’t ask about what you did today or show interest in what you are doing, it’s not a reflection of you. I don’t have any interest in my own daily life so there’s no way I’m ever going to care what you had for breakfast or where you’re going shopping or if you have a date tonight. Anyway, I have some fairly serious medical problems (lupus, high-functioning autism, severe neurological damage, etc) that were certainly present at the time and I had given two of my closest friends keys to my apartment.

It is, of course, fairly typical to give keys to your family members but there was no family nearby that could have helped me in such a situation and I thought that this would be a more sensible approach. Anyway, I came home one day after a long day at the university (I’d describe what was so interesting but I honestly have no clue and it was likely just a set of meetings at the education faculty and were uninteresting in the extreme) to my usual routine — put a pot of vegetables and lentils on the stove to cook, get in the shower, get out and eat dinner, etc. Nothing particularly exciting. What was, however, was that by the time I got to the end of my dinner, I felt like my body was on fire. I went and turned down the heat (eastern Canada is not a place where heating is optional for about ten months of the year and the two for which it’s not tend not to be those in which school is a large portion of life, either for student or an instructor) but that didn’t do much. I was chatting online with one of my friends and mentioned in passing that I was curiously hot, maybe having eaten hot soup too quickly, perhaps? Getting a fever, terrifyingly enough?

She asked if I had had a hot shower, which, of course, I had, and began to laugh uncontrollably. During my absence, my kind friend had visited my apartment and emptied several packages of itching powder onto my bath towel. Suffice it to say, I was less laughter-inclined and went to take another shower, after which the itching and burning was dramatically reduced. Of course, I can look back at this now and it is entertaining and I certainly don’t hold any negative feelings about it. I haven’t thought about it in ages, in fact, until this prompt occurred today. I must say, I miss my old life sometimes. Always, really. Except for the cold, which I still experience on a constant basis and which I need to desperately escape.

As for the other kind of itching, mental itchiness is a relatively constant thing for me. I suspect that this is mostly an issue of context interacting with memory. When one thing goes wrong, that is the end of potential positive experience in a day. This is a real problem in more than the obvious way. My best days tend to be those in which the largest problems occur. When I feel even slightly better, I have to take advantage of that to do the things that I cannot do in other circumstances — going to the grocery store, going outside for a walk, being around people to do something. The problem with that is that that increases the likelihood dramatically of a triggering experience and, without exception, this happens. As a result, I have learned to be extremely afraid of feeling better. When I feel better, I have to do these things because I have to do them at some point and I can’t often do them. If I don’t buy food, I can’t eat and while dying of starvation would be an ideal experience for me, I cannot allow that to happen for the sake of not dying before those who have sacrificed everything to keep me alive. So I have to go to grocery stores, one of my three hells on earth (grocery stores, children’s gatherings, hospitals). When something goes wrong during food preparation (timing being changed, being interrupted while cooking and losing track of the preparation or not performing a necessary step in the preparation to duplicate the previous times, burning the food, having it stick on, setting the timer wrong, etc), that is an impact that reverberates for weeks and that is flashed back on endlessly, in addition to the fact that having to shift a meal an hour or two later as a result means that the next meal and the next and the next must also then be later to avoid eating too soon afterward.

Specifics, though? It’s about special events — other people want excitement in their lives, for today not to be a repetition of yesterday, to have something to look forward to. I need things to look forward to, as well, but what I look forward to is a long-term thing, not a specific event. I don’t want to experience the world or think “in ten days I’m going to a great show!”. I am terrified that when those experiences come, I will ruin them. I will be sick or unable to go. I will be too afraid. Special is a terrifying word for me. It is a source of tension and potential trauma. It is a thing to be obsessed over. This may come as a surprise to those who have experienced my tendency to plan special events. I have a lot of experience working on the professional side of the photography world. I don’t particularly like doing the photography itself but I love teaching it. And to teach something, you had better be an expert in it or that defeats the point. So I learned a lot of photography by research, trial and error, etc. I’m quite proud of my ability but it’s never been something I particularly liked doing — it is, however, something that is incredibly rewarding to teach to those who do enjoy it.

While living in Canada, I organized quite a lot of photography events and was a participant on the organizing groups for many others. The first of those events on the east coast, after having moved there from Vancouver on rather short notice, was a photography scavenger hunt in the city center. I had some help from a few friends organizing it but it was me who was responsible. I had prepared the clues, the rules, the information, advertised it thoroughly. Local social media was buzzing with it and I even got to talk on two local radio stations promoting it. There was an online signup and, while that wasn’t strictly necessary before the day of the event, there were nearly three hundred people having registered (I’m not sure how many people actually participated in the end, off the top of my head, but it was definitely more than that). Looking back on it, it was an extremely successful thing and I had nothing but positive feedback. Some people didn’t like the clues and such but in terms of the event itself, the people who participated thought it was good and the businesses involved in the clues were all positive about the fact that it brought them interest from the people who were looking to come and take pictures, which was free advertising for them when the pictures were posted online, eventually.

That’s generally how my photography events have always gone. But the day before, I sat at home on the couch and shivered with anxiety for hours. Actually, that didn’t really end until the time I had to leave the next day to start the event itself. I didn’t share that fact with even my closest friends at the time. I was terrified something would go wrong. I had encouraged people to do this and that meant that in some ways I would be responsible if a child ran into the street while participating and got run over. I would be responsible if someone walked around the city and got sunstroke from being out in the sun too long trying to get pictures. I would be visible there and people who hated me (of which there were and are far too many, being a rather visible non-gender-rights activist in a very populist and conservative and tribal society) would know where I would be and could make a very public display of causing me pain. None of that happened but I spent the previous day and a good portion of the event itself terrified that it would.

Anyway, it went off without a hitch and I spent the day answering questions about photography, promoting free photography classes — even talking about the writing classes that I was teaching at the time to some prospective students, which was an unexpected plus. The next event was somewhat less itch-inspiring but I certainly didn’t get to it without the fear of disaster.

The moral? There isn’t really one. Except perhaps that we all feel itchy sometimes. Until tomorrow…

[estimated reading time 8 minutes]

What do you do well?

In a culture where self-promotion has become an obsession and competition is talked about like a birthright, talking about what you do well may seem like an indulgence. For someone like me, whose cultural background is quite the opposite and fitting in, being silent, disappearing is not just the norm but my most fundamental desire, it feels awkward in the extreme. But it does give me an opportunity to talk about something that I find curious and have for as long as I can remember.

First, though, I should answer the question. There is a short list of things that I do well. By well, I don’t mean I do them better than an uneducated infant. I mean, I do them at a world-class level. And that’s important to me because, while I have no desire to compete with others, if I did things poorly, I would either need to significantly improve my abilities in them or stop doing them. It confuses me how people do things badly and then continue to do them — without trying to get better at them but without stopping them altogether. It’s the community choir syndrome. People are perfectly fine with sounding awful and expect others to come and watch and listen while they sound awful. If this was a choir of four year olds, this would be understandable. They haven’t learned how to sing well yet. The conductor is doing all they can just to get some notes out of them. And with each passing week of rehearsal, they gradually improve. But community choirs are different — people expect them to be bad and justify it because these people don’t care about being good at it. How anyone can care about not being good at something confuses me in the extreme. If you can sing well, sing. If you can’t, either learn how to do it well or don’t do it. This isn’t specifically about music but it’s a handy example and my ears remind me of it on a rather continuous basis, especially in this country where the aim isn’t perfection but tradition, and that includes rhythmic inaccuracy, wild dynamic variation and a conducting style that puts the beat pattern everywhere imaginable but where it’s supposed to be and that I find is slightly more difficult to follow than would be an orangutan with a baton.

What do I do well? I write (how many books of poetry published this year was it again?), I sing (although far less of late, sadly), I write choral music and I teach (if wishing made it so, a return to North America and a happy life at a nice creative writing faculty…). Of course, there are other things that I do “well”, as the question asks, as there are for so many people. But these are things that I do well enough to be held against any competitor. And that gives me a sense of pride. That’s what I want to think about today, though.

Pride. When you hear the word, you probably conjure up one of two images — the military or stupidly flamboyant parades. Both of these have serious issues for me, far more the second, honestly, but I’ll talk about the military first.

I could say it’s because of my Buddhist heritage — Buddhism prohibits conflict, physical or otherwise, and is inherently pacifist without exception — even fighting for the lives of your children is strictly outlawed and accepting brutal punishment is a basic tenet of much of the Buddha’s teachings. I could say it’s because Judaism is anti-war. I could say it’s because Jesus taught a strictly egalitarian system of peace and love. Or, probably more relevant, I could say that State Shinto destroyed an entire generation of Japan and that the corruption of that millennias-old faith system that was in every possible way committed to peace to turn it into a mobilization motivator for a country that had every chance to seek peace was a disaster of unimaginable proportions. But none of that is it.

Fighting is simply wrong. It’s not that it’s religiously outlawed or against ethical guidelines prescribed centuries ago. It’s that it’s just wrong. There are moral absolutes and fighting (no, I didn’t say killing, but that’s wrong too) is wrong. Conflict goes against everything human progress is meant to cherish — knowledge, understanding, compassion, love, caring, service. If we fight, even if we only do it with raised voices and harsh words, even if it is just allowing ourselves to express speech motivated by a bad mood or exhaustion or having had a painful day, we are wrong, we are guilty and we should be ashamed of ourselves. That unto itself is unhelpful, of course. We must be those things and use them as a motivation for change. And that is what is wrong with being proud of the military — especially if we are in it, which I am not, nor have I ever been. If you are fighting, you are wrong. It doesn’t matter why you’re doing it. It’s always wrong to fight. Self-defense is wrong. Aggression is wrong. And having a group of people dedicated to fighting, regardless of tradition or culture or anything else that we can talk about, it is, simply, wrong and must be ended. I would use the same argument against the availability of weapons but I have already spoken far too long about this today, since this is not even the topic I intended to discuss.

Pride is a far larger problem. I don’t mean specifically gay pride, although that is a symptom and a brutally obvious one of a disease that has infected the entire western world (and much of the eastern world, too, though far less so, for unusually painful reasons — how much sexuality-derived solidarity can there really be in a place where sodomy is a crime punishable by torture and death by stoning and how likely are people to worry about having a celebratory parade when the entire neighborhood is fighting for its very existence against opposing armies or tyrannical leaders? I should begin this by saying that I am by no means prejudiced against anyone for their sexual orientation, their gender, their race, their background, anything. I’m not. If you think I am, you may perhaps want to ask me about mine, which I’m not going to go into here and may in a later article. But let it suffice to say that I have every reason to be accepting — although, that being said, we all have every reason to be accepting, when we really understand that humanity itself is at stake.

My problem is twofold — pride in something we have not accomplished and group association in lieu of individual responsibility.

We are, in the contemporary world, encouraged to take pride in the wrong thing. If you are gay, that is not a problem. If you are straight, that is not a problem. If you are, like me, an abject and committed ace/aro, also not a problem. What’s the problem? Being proud of it. You like girls. Or guys. Or simply don’t want to let anyone stick anything inside parts of your body. Totally cool however that goes for you and it’s your own personal decision to live that life. It’s your life and your sexuality is your business, not mine, as long as you don’t use it to hurt anyone else or try to impose your sexuality on me. I’m for all the freedom we can have without compromising someone else’s freedom and safety. Which is, after all, the only kind of sustainable freedom a society could ever hope to have. When you start being proud of who you are rather than what you do, though, it does two things. First, it stops you from wanting to be a better person. You’re not perfect, nor am I. You may be closer than me but I doubt it. we are likely all the same degree of broken inside and need to spend our entire lives improving. That’s what life is for — to learn, to become a better person. That’s why we respect the elderly so much, in almost every culture, as a general rule. Seventy or eighty years of learning what’s important and what’s trivial might not produce a perfect human but it will usually produce someone who has a pretty good understanding that can be passed on if you ask. My grandparents (I really only knew three out of the four but that’s pretty good compared to many of my friends who didn’t even meet one of theirs) were amazing people, all having lived through at least one intense global war and had learned vastly important lessons that they were overjoyed to pass along to me and anyone else who asked. Yours likely are, too. You should ask. This isn’t an argument in favor of spending your entire life feeling guilty and ashamed of who you are. It’s just a plea not to be too happy with yourself or see yourself as a fixed entity that neither can nor should change over time. Life is about seeking to be a better person — if you give up, please, do us all a favor and leave the planet. We don’t have time or space for people who are self-satisfied.

Secondly, there is a group dynamic problem. Groups lead to mob mentalities, which are decision making situations that always produce the wrong outcome. Most people would never go out onto the street and break windows, set fire to cars, beat defenseless others. But in large groups, these things happen every day, all over the world. Groups don’t make good decisions unless they are completely calm and in a quiet, rule-centered environment. And even then they rarely do — just look at the decisions of the UN General Assembly or any representative governing body — lately, if you pay attention to the House of Representatives in the United States or the entire British government, though, you won’t have to spend more than ten minutes before you find a really obvious example of mob mentality taking over from good judgment.

The problem is that groups tend toward extremes. Being gay isn’t a problem. Being open about being gay isn’t a problem. Getting together with a thousand of your closest gay friends and producing a movement, making yourselves intentionally different — not because you’re gay, since that’s a perfectly reasonable motivation for feeling different, but because you want to be separate from society. That’s a problem. Why? You think you have a right to be different and you most certainly do — as an individual. Group differentiation, though, that simply causes difficulties for everyone, including those of us who don’t want to stand out. Standing out because you are different (for example, because you are Latinx, because you speak with a Chinese accent, because you have red hair — or blue hair, for that matter), that’s perfectly fine. Creating a movement where you have made an artificial rift in society, encouraging people to fight with each other, that is not ok.

Being proud of yourself is a good thing. But it has its limits. If you are proud of what you have done today or what you have accomplished in your life, that is wonderful. It’s right up there with being thankful that you have had the opportunity to live another day. It’s a great motivator. If you are proud because of what you are, you’re just looking for a reason to establish difference between you and others. You are a human. We are all humans. We are all different from each other. We don’t need groups to tell us that and those groups will only divide us. You’re not separate from me because you’re different. You’re separate from me and from others because you’ve drawn dividing lines and we must erase them if we are to come together in peace.

We don’t need a parade but if we’re going to have one, let’s use it to celebrate our interconnectedness, not to show off our difference and encourage conflict. We don’t need groups but if we’re going to have them, let’s have groups that serve others, not that serve themselves. As Thich Nhat Hanh popularized in the west, we “inter-are”. Let’s not forget, not pretend that we’re members of different groups. Let’s stop building walls when we could just look down and realize there’s no boundary there to even have to build a bridge over. Let’s stop calling ourselves names of division. It’s fine to classify yourself for descriptive purposes but group membership is nothing other than creating a fictitious reason to fight. Stop fighting. If you can’t be at peace, at least be silent, sit down or, if that’s too much for you, go away. Now.

[estimated reading time < 1 minute]

I tend to avoid promotion here but one of my oldest friends is celebrating an unusual birthday — the birthday of her blog. For a year, she’s been exploring where cerebral palsy and society intersect and I believe that’s a truly vital thing in an age of self-interest when empathy is dying and acceptance is a dirty word.

So I’d highly recommend all of you go and take a look. And while you’re at it, wish her a happy birthday.

[estimated reading time 3 minutes]

I mentioned spending time homeless in my latest post and didn’t expand on it so I figure I probably should. I have had several periods in my life where I was without a home — not that I forgot where I came from, just that I wasn’t able to have a roof under which to sleep.

For me, that was a bit of an odd situation because, while it did mean a few times that I had to sleep in the open air, which was unbelievably painful, I must admit, it usually meant sleeping in my car. Whether that qualifies as your definition of homeless, that’s a whole different discussion and, as usual, unless you’re a close friend, I don’t care what you think, anyway. And if you are a close friend, I won’t ask you what you think about this because it’s not really relevant. I don’t think of myself as being in the same boat as those who spend their lives sleeping on the side of the road in a sleeping bag and I’m not asking for your sympathy. I’m writing about this for a completely different purpose.

For about a year and a half of my life, I was completely unable to afford a place to live. I was teaching but, as many of you are likely aware, the amount that a junior college instructor makes is generally nowhere near the potential of paying rent in a studio or (dare one dream?) a one-bedroom apartment. I know what most people would think at this point — if you can’t afford to live alone, you have to share. And that’s what most instructors do. But, of course, I am terrified of people. Being alone is my deepest desire and I need isolation. Autism is part of the reason, phobia is another, the fact that I am an insular and quiet person who absolutely requires silence, separation and time of peace without fear is probably a greater part than the other two.

So I made a choice that, if I couldn’t live alone and be free, I would pack up my things, put everything I didn’t need immediately into a cheap storage locker or sell it (which is what happened to any furniture I had acquired by that point, leaving only a few boxes of treasured things I had been given over the years), put some suitcases, a pillow and a sleeping bag in my car and crash for the nights. I lived on nuts and dried fruit and rice cakes, slept outside the city under trees or parked on side-streets thanks to the magic of darkly tinted back windows. I forgot what it was like to sleep stretched out (cars aren’t really that wide) and discovered that it got unbelievably cold despite the insulation in a car once the heating was turned off and learned to sleep in sweaters in a winter sleeping bag zipped up over my head.

It wasn’t a terrible experience, honestly. Because it had two things going for it. One, my daily commute was pretty short because I didn’t have to go far away to find a place to sleep. Two, far more importantly, I could escape. The only thing I couldn’t escape was myself, which is unfortunate, as that’s what I most wanted to get away from, but I could get away from people. I couldn’t be found by anyone who wanted to hurt me — that may sound paranoid but, having been brutally attacked more times than I’d like to remember in my life by total strangers, simply based on who I am or how I present myself, it’s not paranoia, I assure you and I have the scars and physical damage to my body to prove it. I was anonymous and I had disappeared from a society that didn’t approve of me and that I hated with a passion that has never been matched with anything — oh for fluent spoken Japanese so I could immigrate! Eating was difficult — that’s really the only thing that was terrible about living in the car. But I survived.

Anyway, I know it was a curiosity for some who didn’t know me through that period of time when I mentioned it in the previous post. There’s the answer. A surprisingly up-beat post about not having a home, right? Even more surprising, given that for me to write positive things — or for any poet to write about something that’s not dark and sad, for that matter — is a bit of a shock, I know.

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

When did you sleep outdoors?

I suspect that most people have fond memories of sleeping under the stars or camping vacations with their family and friends. For me, sleeping outdoors brings back two memories — one highly traumatic, the other being homeless, which was oddly far less traumatic but just as sad in other ways.

For some people, childhood was a time of happiness, laughter and freedom — if not freedom from bedtimes and curfews, at least freedom from employment and misery. For most, though, childhood is the source of traumatic memories that will plague their lives and destroy their mental stability, even if they don’t realize it. It’s that time of life when some develop “mommy issues” or become “anal-retentive”, as much as Freud may have been a sex-crazed maniac with a misogyny complex that should have earned him many slaps across the face (and likely did), his understanding of childhood as the source of limitless potential disorders of the mind was groundbreaking and wholly correct. The specifics he mostly screwed up more royally than those with crowns and scepters but it was a first step on a long road — and most professionals now do an even worse job and pretend the whole thing is about self-acceptance and letting yourself be lazy, which is so far from the answer it’s already had more of a destructive effect on human society than any number of climate crises and that, indeed, is saying something.

For me, childhood was a mixed bag of experiences. My home life was generally a beautiful thing. I had loving parents who valued learning and knowledge, shared their love of music and literature and art and writing with me at every junction and made me understand that the world could be a beautiful place if only I was prepared to create that beauty and revel in art and science. For someone who didn’t understand society, interaction, human thought, mixed feeling and who was hyperempathic to the point that someone mentioning that they didn’t feel well would cause me to be in so much pain I could often not even move, this was a very important lesson. School was completely the other thing. Sartre taught us that hell is other people. It is. But it’s a bit more specific than that. Hell is being forced to spend huge amounts of time with other people who are, to put it very gently, too stupid to live. And I don’t mean the other students. I mean the vast majority of the people who were teaching the classes. I don’t say this because they didn’t know anything about the material they were supposed to be teaching. They didn’t but that’s not the biggest problem. The issue was that they were completely unprepared to accept that a student might actually possess either knowledge or intelligence. They had expectations of young stupidity and if you didn’t fit that pattern, you were a problem to be solved rather than a person to be cherished. I hated every single moment of school — until I was in high school, which was a very different and highly-customized environment for me — and dreaded it.

So time away from school was usually an eagerly-awaited period. Especially since it was mostly around the holidays in December, a time when my family would stay at home, not have to encounter the outside world for long periods of time, and I could actually spend time playing board games with my parents, doing puzzles, reading books, writing programs on the computer and anything else that came up — those were generally how days were spent, though, I must admit. That and lego. But, as with most block-related things, not the subject at hand. Or it was in the summertime, a time when I could finally escape the hateful climate in Canada for its brief periods of warmth, read under the trees and walk in the forests and sit on beaches. I could finally be alone and that was vastly important.

There was one time that this didn’t quite work out, though — and that’s when the target was to sleep outdoors. My parents decided that to have a childhood experience, my sister and I required camping. I had so little interest in it that it could have been measured in negative numbers but my sister was a far more typical young person and wanted “experiences”. She wasn’t bored because she had nothing to do. She was bored because she wanted to do different things. I just wanted days to be the same. The life of an undiagnosed autistic child is one that most parents struggle with and only truly see the damage from later. My parents did what they did out of love, not knowing what it would cause — and the ripple effects of that shortened week have lasted to today and likely will beyond that.

We are talking about a climate in which tents were a disaster waiting to happen — high winds and sporadic rain were more the norm than sunshine, especially at night. You could certainly have a wonderful experience in a tent in Canada but you had to be prepared to do it at a moment’s notice and disappear in the middle of the night if things shifted from a climate perspective. So my parents did what most parents did at the time — they thought about getting a camper. That was, of course, a ridiculous expense and a luxury most couldn’t afford so they did the next best thing — they went out looking for an old used camping trailer and found one that was being sold off by someone who had discovered just how much of a nightmare not being in your own bed was and wanted out. Or maybe they were just upgrading to a new thing. I have no idea, really, but they were selling this on the cheap and it was about the size of a changing room with a two-ring gas stove. In theory, four people could sleep on its folding bunks and it was small enough to be towed by a car. My dad’s little South Korean hatchback didn’t have the required power to tow a blade of grass so my uncle came along with a classic Chevy that could have dragged out entire house (lawn included) the length of the province.

From the moment I got in the car, I felt overwhelmed. I don’t know if it was the atmosphere, the fear, the excitement that I didn’t feel but that my sister couldn’t shut up about, the idea of being disconnected from clean and tested water, having to go to outdoor bathrooms or simply the smell of the food that was being consumed in the back of the car by my sister while I sat wedged between my father and his brother in the front seat in a car whose suspension felt very much like taking a trip across choppy water in an inflatable raft. I have absolutely no memory of the rest of the journey and only remember that when we got there, I had a high fever, spent the night in agony of the emetic variety and we returned, not a week later as we had planned, but the next afternoon. I think I may have been taken directly to a doctor who lived in our neighborhood and given medication but the whole thing is an incident that has taught me to be terrified of change, disgusting sensations and time spent in enclosed spaces with groups of people.

For most, the experience of a camping trip with their families may be a good or bad time to remember but it likely is nothing more than a distant and passive dream. For me, that day was one, a highly significant one, in a series of childhood traumas related to fear and sickness that would transform my adult life. That, indeed, is sleeping under the stars for me. Hell isn’t just other people. It’s not being able to escape yourself.

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

Tell me about a missed opportunity…

I’m not sure how long it will actually take me to post this online — in practice, day four might end up living in the land of the missing for awhile. But I will eventually share it. I believe that honesty is important. Not just that telling the truth is inherently necessary for society to stop being so angry and divided and tribal but that sharing what is inside our minds is fundamental to our duty as social beings. So while this is a particularly difficult and traumatic topic for me, I feel it is necessary to share it. If I don’t, how can I ever expect my students to share what they think and feel? How can their writing ever achieve the high points that it otherwise could if they can honestly look back and say Sato-sensei only wrote about things that don’t matter…

So much of my life is simply a collection of missed opportunities and wrong decisions that felt right at the time. Years of chemical dependence on medication that I kept getting prescribed because it was taking away the surface symptoms but was causing untold disasters underneath. Entering into a long-term relationship in which I was continually attacked, tortured and forced into things that I can’t possibly imagine how I didn’t run away. Among other things. All the while being a respected instructor to people who had no idea things weren’t going well underneath. But that’s what being a teacher is all about. It’s about making life better for your students, even when life is a disaster for you. I saw my father fight through the darkness he encountered while inspiring whole generations of students who remember his happiness and encouragement forty years later. I saw my mother, complete with a broken back and unrecoverable spinal damage, wake up every morning and live as an example to everyone who learned from her — and there were so many who did.

My example to follow was to live a life of service to young people. To instill in them a love of language and reading and writing. I think I accomplished it at least sometimes and I am so proud of what they have accomplished. I talk to people now who were once my students and they tell me how much better their writing is. And that’s wonderful and I’m glad I could help them but it’s their hard work that makes it possible. I can’t make someone a better writer if they don’t put in the effort and concentration. All of them did. At least the ones who thank me did. Those who weren’t prepared to put in the work, they did something else with their lives.

But that’s just the background. What opportunity did I miss? The one that comes to mind was more than ten years ago, when I was living back home in Canada. I would say I found someone that I loved deeply but that’s not really what happened. I was found by someone who loved me and taught me that love doesn’t have to be according to society’s sexually-obsessive norms, that it is about depth and connection and the beauty of silence and gentle contact and never being left alone. I have cared deeply for people in my life, both before and after, yet never have I felt at home in the arms of another since she disappeared. She was my dearest friend, my partner, my reason for living. And she is gone. Now she lives only in our minds and dreams. We met because of a pair of mutual friends who no longer speak to me. But I will always be thankful for them, no matter how long I live, because of, if nothing else, that one moment they gave me.

I’ve written before — many times, in fact — about learning to find happiness through the eyes of another when happiness was something I truly believed was only for other people, for neurotypicals. I forgot how to find that happiness when she died. I don’t think I can learn how to live it again and I have more than a decade of trying since then to figure it out. I’ve failed.

The regret, though, is that I failed her. The last time I spoke to her was the day she died but we had spoken every day before that, too. She’d gone to visit her family. It wasn’t a long trip but she’d been gone for a few weeks and was planning to spend quite a bit longer there. And she asked me to come. Told me to come, in fact. There was an insistence there that I don’t think I fully comprehended at the time. Either that or I was intentionally ignoring it. I was working — at a job that I hated — and I was fighting against using this as an excuse to leave and take time away from it. I could have gone. I could have been there. It was obvious that I should have and I knew I was making a mistake at the time. I could have grabbed the opportunity to leave the work that I didn’t want to be doing (working in tech between teaching semesters is unwise even if you need the money rather desperately). But I didn’t. I said I’d come soon. And I did.

If I’d gone, I’d have been there that night. I’d have been next to her. I’d have heard what had happened, who had said something, who had done something to trigger the extreme feelings she had. I’d have been awake and right there to hold her until she was safe and saw the sun come up once more. Of course, I know you can’t be responsible for someone else’s safety forever. But perhaps it would only have taken one more time. One more morning of surviving. One more day of hope. I don’t think I could have stopped her from dying forever. But I do think that I could have stopped it that night and perhaps that would have been enough for her to feel life was worth continuing for awhile. I owed it to her. She taught me that I had a reason to stay alive. I wasn’t there when she needed me to teach her the same lesson.

I cry every day. I teach, I work, I read, I write but she is the inspiration for much of that work and writing and her devotion to young people has given me an extra drive to teach — as if I didn’t have it before, of course, but every little bit helps you get up in the mornings. I remember the day of her funeral. Her parents were far more calm than I have ever been since. They accepted it. They cried and they were paralyzed with grief but they weren’t hysterical or panicked (I certainly was). Their loss was profound and they faced it with composure that it would take me years to learn. Their regrets were my regrets. Their failure was my failure. They have survived and I have nothing but respect and love for them.

I have learned throughout life that regret is a daily experience for me and profound, heartbreaking regret, shame and guilt are the foundation for my entire life. But there is nothing that I look back on with so much guilt, so much shame, such a degree of regret as not being there when I had been asked and told to step in and save the one person who had saved me. I let her down. I let myself down. I forgive myself some days for my failures and my stupidity and my inaction and my weakness.

I will never forgive myself for this.

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

Where did you come from? How did you escape?

Everyone comes from somewhere. The problem is, some people come from so many places it becomes cumbersome to list them. So I generally gloss over the details. Am I Canadian? Japanese? British? American? Buddhist or Christian or Jewish? I try to identify with things that matter rather than things that are just descriptors of my ancestry and genetic makeup but sometimes that just doesn’t get the job done.

I grew up in a city on the east coast of Canada called St John’s. Actually, we lived in a city that was truly oddly named, especially for a predominantly-Christian suburb — they called it Paradise. No, that’s not a joke. Just look up Paradise, Canada and you’ll find it. It’s not all that large but it has some beautiful sections, a variety of ponds and walking trails, many homes and absolutely nothing of note beyond that. Much of it was, when I was little, housing for people who couldn’t figure out how to build a house, much less afford to own one, and who had them anyway. But the part I lived in was a bedroom community for commuters. It was home. Of course, that’s a very simplified version of my backstory. There are other places involved, too. There’s the fact that I wasn’t actually born there in the slightest. There’s the fact that I moved around to various places and probably felt far more at home in Vancouver than I did in the home of my early childhood — except for the actual house itself, where I probably felt more comfortable than anywhere I’ve ever found myself since.

But that’s not where I come from. That’s just where I lived. Where I come from is more a question of culture. Being adopted, there are all sorts of confusions about cultural identity that other people don’t have to deal with but in my mind and in my choices and in my actions, none of those make any difference. Adoption is just a historical truth for me and not part of who I am — just part of what happened to me. My parents aren’t my “adopted parents”. There aren’t any more “real parents” than the ones who raised me and I find it nothing short of viciously disrespectful when people use such words to describe them. Or not to describe them, as the case sometimes is. My parents are my parents and they have helped and supported me more than any expectation could ever have imagined possible. Blood isn’t thicker than water. Commitment is. Blood is just something we talk about when we have to pretend to like our families but don’t. I love mine. And I like mine, too. I suspect few of you can say that honestly about yours. If I had adult consciousness at two months’ when I was being adopted and I could see the future and know my parents, I’d have chosen them and I keep choosing them every day. Any adult (and many children) could walk away from their parents and never look back if they wanted to. I don’t. And I never will.

Enough about adoption, though. It’s a beautiful concept but it’s not all that relevant to the issue. Where I come from is a merger of two cultures. Canada isn’t so much a melting pot as a crossroads. That’s both a disaster and an education. Speaking French and English as a child, I found myself conflicted about identity. Add to that the Asian questions — what does it mean to be part of Japanese culture, what about secular Judaism, can you respect Jesus but hate the church that stole his name — and life became rather quickly something not just to write home about but to wonder about leaving home to escape. But home was great. It was the rest of the world that was the problem.

I was raised on literature and mathematics and music and art. My parents are both academics and both musicians. There was singing and playing every moment of every day of my early life and I grew up pressing keys and blowing through things and pounding on pots and pans and singing my heart out at every opportunity. My mother is a beautiful writer, both prose and verse, and my father is a brilliant educator. I learned more in the few years between birth and school starting than I think I ever did after. School was nothing more than a tedious and often traumatic waste of time. At home, I got an appreciation for literature, both western (which I generally abhor, especially anything that can be termed classic) and eastern (which has more than just a special place in my heart — it is pretty much my entire bookshelf from Genji to Keiko and beyond). I learned to add, subtract, factor, derive, integrate and plot. I learned to write stories and tickle ivories. And I learned to ask questions, answer them and walk away from a fight. At school, I learned to be judged, to be bored, to be isolated and to be held back because young people aren’t supposed to be smart — it wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized that, especially in this populist, tribalist society, adults aren’t supposed to either be smart or want to be, either.

So where do I come from? I feel at home in so many cultures. I can sit in the temple and meditate and chant (you can choose, Pali, Sanskrit or Japanese, I’m good with any of them but the first is my preference when I’m alone). I can sing in a church as long as you don’t expect me to buy into the contemporary notion of supernatural divinity. I feel particularly comfortable in shul but I’m happy to clap my hands to summon the kami and close my eyes to honor my ancestors and yours. Where don’t I feel comfortable? Well, that’s where the escape part comes in.

I don’t feel at home in the slightest in western culture. I don’t drink and I don’t believe in democracy. I have no interest in representation or self-government and I have absolutely no time for pandering to the lowest-common-denominator in society. Japanese culture is all about fitting in but respecting excellence, education and knowledge. Western culture is all about being average and seeking pleasure. It’s beyond disgusting. It’s self-destructive. It’s also highly gendered.

Gender is a concept that was created to enslave people for personal pleasure. There’s no physical reality to it at all. There’s nothing inherently different about “man” and “woman” any more than there’s a difference between “blonde” and “brunette” — just because something is a physically-divergent descriptive idea doesn’t make it relevant. What genitals I have doesn’t make me who I am, nor does it make anyone who they are. If you are identifying yourself by what’s in your pants, perhaps you are paying far too much attention to what’s in your pants — or to what you want to put in someone else’s, for that matter.

So it’s not a place I was trying to escape so much as a culture. Western culture in Canada is oppressive. I didn’t discover until I ended up in the UK later just how much more oppressive and painful it could become, though. Here’s the problem. I don’t have an answer, really.

I read eastern literature and practice my Japanese pronunciation, although I must admit it’s pretty shit. I binge on jpop and kpop when I’m trying to exercise (rarer than I’d like to admit) and fall asleep to the sound of kotos and their musical partners most nights (or the rain but that’s rather non-culturally-specific). I translate ancient scriptures into contemporary English and poems from more languages than I’d like to admit. And I long for a teaching job at a university back home in North America teaching creative writing — not because N/A is where I particularly desire to be but because there ain’t nobody going to get me to teach it in Japan given that it is, after all, English and that’s not so much a thing there. So how do you escape the culture that penetrates your every waking moment with its aggressive presence? Good question. I’ll let you know when I succeed.

For now, I do my best with headphones and a heavy dose of literature.