Calling Things By Their Names

1: On Having No Talent

For several months about fifteen years ago, I used to sing in public regularly. A bar not far from my apartment in Indianapolis had ``open stage'' nights four times a week, and I performed in most of them. My act was me and my guitar; about half a dozen songs by me, plus covers. Folk rock novelty stuff, I suppose you could say . . . I've never been real good at identifying musical genres.

One comment I got pretty often was ``it's different'' -- which, of course, generally means ``it's terrible, but I don't want to hurt your feelings''. Fair enough, too; my flaws as a performer were (and still are) glaring. The worst two, unfortunately, are my singing and my guitar playing. My stage presence leaves something to be desired, too.

For all that, I'd have good nights sometimes. The crowd would pay attention and show signs of liking what they heard, whereupon I'd start feeling great -- this was what I lived for -- and it set up some sort of feedback; the crowd would have more fun because I was so obviously enjoying myself, and so on. Anyway, I came to believe I had it in me to be a pretty good entertainer, even though I certainly wasn't much of a musician.

I played a few auditions for actual paying gigs but didn't land the jobs. Two went particularly well. For the first one, there was just a committee of about four or five people. They seemed to get a kick out of my stuff and I thought I had a pretty good shot. Nope. At the second one, I had one of the best nights in my life. There was a good crowd and I made a big hit. I vaguely knew somebody from one of the other acts and she was openly envious and sure I'd be invited to come back. But no.

I talked to the guy who booked the shows several weeks later and he told me why he hadn't hired me: bad musicianship. He offered to play me the tape. Well, no thanks . . . I already know what a bad singer and guitarist I am . . . but doggone it, the crowd was for me, and that seemed like it should have been the point.

Well, OK. I had moved back to Bloomington and started school again in the meantime and gotten a girlfriend besides. So I had a lot less spare time and anyway, there were no regular open mike nights around here. I started playing a lot less and quit writing new songs. Most of whatever skill I had faded very quickly. It was to be eight more years before I hit another peak as a singer.

I've always felt sort of guilty for not sticking with it. Most of the time, I'm able to live up to the motto: ``If at first you don't succeed, try again, then quit; there's no use being a damn fool about it.'' But in this particular instance, again and again, I find myself feeling envious of singers and songwriters whose work I admire and have this feeling that I should be doing something like that and that I quit much too soon.

The nearest I ever got to a paying gig was playing for beers in the bar car on a cross-country train trip. I got plenty drunk for nothing over the course of several hours and everybody seemed to be having a good time. I'm also proud to be able to say that there was a time when I could stand in a park in the middle of the night singing and people would stop to listen; I consider this one of my greatest accomplishments in life. There's nothing like it and I miss it a lot.

I try not to blame the people who didn't hire me on those auditions. They were probably even right and I wasn't ready for the pros. You need a heck of a lot of persistence in show business and a cast-iron ego that laughs at rejection. I have to admit that I never developed these for the same reason I've never kept up a habit of practicing several hours a day except for a few periods of a few months: it just wasn't that important to me.

2: On Having No Class

For a just over a year, I recently had no class quite literally: I spent a summer, fall semester, spring semester, and summer with no teaching duties. It took some getting used to, since I'd been teaching more or less nonstop for eleven years -- seven years in graduate school and four as an assistant professor.

The story of how I came to be unemployed hinges at least partly on having ``had no class'' in the more figurative sense. My immediate superior, and presumably the entire administration up to the president of the college, perceived me as unprofessional. And they had reasons.

First of all, my appearance. Somewhere along the line, I'd stopped wearing the business casual campus uniform and returned to jeans and tees. I just couldn't bring myself to continue spending a lot of time and money on making myself uncomfortable. There was one other full-time faculty member who dressed like a normal person but she had tenure and could get away with it. I'm pleased to report that during my four years at the college, ties became somewhat less common; I think I had something to do with that.

I even let my hair grow. I've always hated having to go to a barber; just like wearing expensive clothes, it seems like throwing away time and money. Since it only needs to be done once in a while, it's much easier to put up with. But on the other hand, when my hair's grown out, I always know how it's going to look and it doesn't stick out anywhere and make me feel silly.

Now, I know very well that it's possible to succeed in academics with hair: look at John Gardner, Raymond Smullyan, Stephen Pinker, or David Chalmers, for example. But it's certainly true that my chair mentioned it to me disapprovingly. Obviously it made her uncomfortable.

Beyond my violation of the unwritten dress code, though, and presumably much more serious, were my violations of the unwritten code of professional conduct: for example, my call-me-Owen laid-backedness with students or my willingness to question some of the straight-from-the-Dilbert-Zone stupid management tricks indulged in by our administrators (in the most respectful possible way, of course).

For the first year or so, I tried to pass. I really did. I guess I made it, too: I got a better merit raise that year (as a percent of my tiny-for-the-profession salary) than most of the rest of the faculty. The irony of this is that my classes went fairly badly that year since I was just figuring out what was what, and that right around the time I hit my stride and really started doing a good job, I was fired.

So here again, I found myself being prevented from doing something I wanted to do, and did fairly well, for reasons that I considered to be beside the point at best. For rekindling the lost curiosity of long-term math phobes where a lifetime of I'm-the-teacher-so-do-it-my-way authority figures had conspicuously failed -- no matter how well dressed -- I got essentially no credit; in fact, rather less than that. By the same token, my wide learning (to say I was among the best-read faculty members may be boasting; it isn't empty boasting) and my (more-or-less universally acknowledged) talent in writing seem to have counted for very little if they counted in my favor at all. According to my own standards, I had become a good math-and-humanities professor and was becoming a better one, but since I insisted on carrying myself like a prole, I was ejected from the profession like some foreign substance.

In a word, my version of my brief career at my ex-college is something like this: they wanted a salesman and hired a teacher by mistake.

Well, who am I to tell anybody else how to run their college? They clearly know what they want; I'm clearly not it; what's the problem? Why should I blame the world? The world isn't going to change on that account.

Ah, but the question for me is: to what extent is it the world's fault? I mean, OK, I'm willing to take my share of the blame: I'm stubborn and opinionated and lacking in tact and so forth and so on. For me to go on resenting the evil little no-talent bureaucrats that wrecked my life for no very good reason may be mere self-indulgence. I guess I'm somewhat inclined to self-pity, but I do realize that it's a vice. I don't want you to feel sorry for me just because I got shafted.

What I do want is for you to be ticked off because a whole lot of other people got shafted right along with me. I'll end up having hundreds, maybe thousands, fewer students over the course of my lifetime than I planned. A sizable number of students I didn't have will go on to become teachers; I could have helped them be better ones; their students will suffer in their turn. I'd like to be able to convince you to be angry on their account. But angry at who (or at ``whom'', for those who believe there is such a word) or what?

Is it really entirely because I wouldn't take the world as it is? And not at all because the world wouldn't take me as I am? What a responsibility! The things I have to do to keep my soul intact. Geez.

3: On Having No Life

I've got three different jobs. It works out to about two and a third times full-time or so. I've had to cut back on . . . well . . . pretty much everything else. The weird thing is, I don't seem to mind. In fact, I find to my surprise that I'm even fairly happy and, if not actually content, certainly at least well-adjusted. More so than at any other point in my adult life, maybe.

Sure, it'll be a relief when the semester ends next week and I only have to worry about my overnight job and teaching the algebra class at the community college (they're on quarters). There'll be time to get caught up on sleeping and reading and stuff. And the zines, of course.

Ah yes, the zines. I really love doing 'em. It's probably fair to say that making zines is one of the main reasons I find myself so pleased with my day-to-day life -- always after the time spent with my beloved wife and cats, obviously, but right up there with (the fun parts of) being a math teacher.

But it has to be said: The Ten Page News is most of my social life (and e-mail is much of the rest). I have two main categories of friends: (1) old pals I hardly ever see any more if at all (most of the ones I'm at all in touch with get the zine); and (2) friends I've never actually met---fellow publishers that I know only by correspondence and zine trades. It just seems like there must be something pathological about this: most of my socializing is conducted sitting silently in a room by myself.

I miss hanging out. Probably nearly everybody finds that they're doing quite a bit less of it as they get older. Schedules start filling up and you end up having to go to fairly elaborate lengths just to set up times and places to get together and catch up on each other's lives. Most of us also seem to do a hell of a lot of moving around from city to city, which certainly doesn't help. Add to that in my case that after spending most of my life in Bloomington, a real walking-around-running-into-all-kinds-of-people kind of place if there ever was one, life in just about any other city will feel more isolated.

Mostly, though, it appears to me that other people in more or less similar circumstances generally seem to overcome these obstacles and have regular face-to-face interactions with their friends. Probably I'm doing something wrong: in fact, it seems fairly safe to say that I'm lacking in some pretty basic social skills. But that's another story.

4: On Having No Clue

A lot of things that other people apparently take for granted elude me entirely.

In at least some cases, it's because of my own willfullness: for example, as I mentioned in On Having No Class, I can't stand wearing much of anything but jeans and tee shirts. I suppose if I worked at it for long enough, I'd find a way.

But I also seem to have acquired a pretty good knack over the years for making strangers uncomforable -- even when I'm trying to be friendly. I think one reason is that I communicate my own discomfort in my body language, tone of voice, and so on. Certainly it's true that I am usually uncomfortable meeting new people. But then, so too must a lot of other people be who hide it better or something.

There are tricks one can learn, of course. No doubt I've learned quite a few of them myself . . . I'm not a complete pariah, after all. But the tricks I've heard about -- use the other person's name a lot, touch them, ask a lot of questions -- are cheap salesman's gimmicks that annoy the living bejeezus out of me when they're used on me. So I can't use them myself in good faith.

I don't want to have to put on an act. A lot of pretty ordinary social behaviors feel to me when I do them like pretending. I hate that. Obviously, we can't go around acting with perfect sincerity at all times. It seems as if I've sort of decided to deal with this by adopting a relatively flat affect, and this sometimes puts people off.

A related failing, one which has given me a lot of trouble, is my tendency to emotional outbursts. I'll go on hiding my feelings for as long as I can stand it, then let go with everything I've got. No middle ground.

More generally, I don't seem to do well at any type of negotiation or confrontation. I'd rather pay full price than haggle; rather endure bad service than ask for better.

I see I'm running out of space here. Let me try to sum up. I've paid a considerable price for my various personality quirks. I'm ridiculously well-educated (PhD, Mathematics, 1992) but can't stand looking for a ``real'' job and very likely couldn't hold onto one even if I could get it. Hence the three different jobs I mentioned earlier.

It's sort of a contemporary cliche that computer skills are the key to good jobs. Hah! I pick that stuff up really easily. What good does it do me if I can't pass the interview? No, the really important thing is presentation. Sincerity. When you can fake that, you've got it made.

So: there's a lot of room in my personality for improvement. Still, change is difficult at best. Even if it were easy, I'm not sure just what or how much I'd change. Maybe it seems like I've been beating myself up here . . .but the bottom line is, I'd rather be me than have to be anybody else.