I don’t know why, but my teeth are not really white. Not really. I don’t drink coffee or much dark soda, which are the only two things I know that really stain teeth. My dad’s were sort of yellow, too, before he whitened them.

In any case, they’re not much whiter now. Those freakin White Strips hurt, man. Add that to the fact that I can’t remember to do anything for more than two days in a row, and there’s a recipe for a 101 Failure. I started on my latest kit about two weeks before the wedding, hoping to get through at least half of a box. Nope. No go. Every once in a while I start it again, thinking that that’s just Day 1 of the next half, but I never remember, and doing it for just one day doesn’t do a damn thing anyway. So slightly yellow teeth, you curse me. (Maybe I should get the manual…)

I have to get them at least one shade whiter, or else this is a bust… (at least in the literal terms of the goal, as stated in The List.)

Love,
msb

From Jimmy Corrigan

A few years ago, when I was still in college and decided to be a writer instead of a lawyer, I took a class on basic literature studies. As a part of the curriculum, we read a graphic novel by Chris Ware called Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. And I loved it. It was strange and quirky and hard to read–I can’t find a decent picture of any of the difficult pages, but you can sort of see it in the one I’ve put up here. I hadn’t read a graphic novel since the Maus books years before, and I was excited about all the things it could do. There wasn’t much comic-bookiness about it; it was just the story of a kid who grows up and that kid’s family history. And the questions in this literature studies class were whether it was a “real” novel, whether it was literature or of one of the the less-austere “genres,” how, generally, such a thing as Jimmy Corrigan should be received.

Anyway, I wanted more of this graphic novel thing, but not too much, because I wanted to write non-graphic-novels and I didn’t want to lose my focus, man. So I decided to look into Chris Ware some more and see what came of it. Well, the Acme Novelty Library came of it. That’s a series that he did, in the fashion of comic books, I suppose, but without the regular super heroes, etc. Just awesome drawings about people who might or might not have maladjustment issues. That series was trimmed and anthologized, in a “best-of” way, I believe, into the Acme Novelty Library book. And my sister purchased that for me for my birthday a while back.

So I have my second book by Chris Ware; now all I have to do is read it.

Love
msb

My #34 (Truly help a student) doesn’t really conform to the rules of the 101 in 1001 Big Idea in that it’s not very specific. You might ask, What does “help” mean? And rightly so: there’s no criteria for it; its ambiguity is contrary to the very notion of a 101 list, which is–at least in my mind–to establish a set of reachable goals. Goals that traditional resolutions, such as the New Year kind, in their audacity and fairly preposterous life-changing, revolutionary breadth, fall far short of establishing.

And then I went and put on #34 (as well as a number of others, I believe you might have noticed).

So. Here I present an argument as to why I have, indeed, accomplished this goal.

Background information: I established #34 thinking that I had plenty of time to do it–and I was right; I had exactly 1001 days. I would be working at my school’s writing center during that period and, hopefully (see #52), teaching on my own. Turns out I don’t need to have completed #52, although I might offer an update of #34 upon the completion of #52.

I worked at the writing center for about 12 months, and in that time, I have nominally “helped” hundreds of students. They came in with papers they’d written, or assignments for papers they hadn’t, and we talked about what they wanted to say and how well they had said it. Most of the time it was fine–not a job I would ever really apply to do full-time ever again, but something I think I was good at and enjoyed on a moderate level. Writing is, after all, MY LIFE!!!!!1.

But there are a few students who I believe I helped more than most. And that’s what I wanted to do here: help someone with something more than a paper, or at least with understanding something that would go beyond whatever it was they were working on that day. In rough chronological order:

Student #1, Last fall (several times). A girl whose name I cannot spell, but which is pronounced Phone, came in several times to work on papers for her Freshmen Comp class. We worked on all sorts of things, and I enjoyed it when she came in. Phone was always happy and enthusiastic, and even if it took her a while to catch on to things, she did catch on, and she was excited when it happened. We conducted a few surveys in the WC to see how people were responding immediately after consultations, and on one of them–they were anonymous, but I’m sure it was her–wrote “Matt is the best!”

Student #s 2, 3, and 4, the Powerpoint Girls, also last fall. These three freshmen were in that same Comp class and had to give a presentation on an essay they had all read. They’d discussed it a bit in class, I think, and the three of them knew what the author was trying to say well enough to create this OK Powerpoint presentation on it, but it wasn’t all that exciting. And their discussion of it wasn’t all that deep. So we talked about the article (I can’t remember what it was about) and it came out that they actually didn’t understand it very well, because even though they picked up on his premise and understood the layout of his argument, there were too many jumps in logic for them to follow along with him. They told me what these jumps in logic were, fairly clearly I thought, but hadn’t discussed them anywhere in the Powerpoint. And so, very simply, I told them to talk about why the author messed up and how saying that is a perfectly valid thing to do. These girls, being freshmen, were astounded, I think, and they left seeming pretty excited about what they were now going to do. Namely, tear the author a new one.

Student #5, Esther, last spring. Esther was working on an application essay for medical school. I hate application essays. There are so many different ways to write them, and the students really don’t like hearing that. They want to be told exactly what to do and how to do it, or else they leave angry and never come back. But Esther wasn’t like that. She was very into the experimentation of it all, was never wedded to what she had written just because she had written it, and it was a lot of fun. There isn’t any big inspirational story here; she came back probably six times or so, and between each session she would work on the essay and make it better until we got to the point where the only things to really “fix” were the little grammatical ones. Which is exactly what the writing center is all about! Yay!

Student #6, Natasha and the Matt Method, this summer. Natasha was working on an essay on a novel for some class that should not have required its students to write essays on novels. Political science, I think, because the essay had to discuss how the novel was politically Platonic, which confused the hell out of her. And I had no idea what a politically Platonic novel was, really, so I was kind of stumped. But we talked about how her class discussed Plato and his philosophy (I figured it had something to do with the Republic, and she sort of remembered having to read that). So I just gave her a basic approach to try–list all the characteristics that Plato designates as good things for a government or society to have, and then list all the characteristics of the society in the novel, and then connect the characteristics in one column to the ones in the other. Not a mind-bending strategy, I didn’t think, but she came back in a few days with a written essay, all excited because my idea worked. So well, apparently, that she was now calling it the Matt Method. So there you go. I think I should patent it. Or whatever.

Student #7, George, this summer. George was working on a handful of short essays for medical school. These ones were a bit easier to handle than the bigger application essay is because they actually gave him questions to answer. So we went over the essay that he thought was his best. He had put most of his energy into that one, since it was the only mini-essay that that particular school required. And it was a mess. He had been reluctant to come in, he said, because he was nervous about losing his personal voice, so I trod gently at first. We went over general ideas for the first half of the session and kind of revamped the whole thing. Then he told me he wanted to go over it with a fine-tooth comb rather than doing the same general-idea thing for the rest. And so we picked apart every phrase that didn’t quite make sense and ended up with a pretty different essay in terms of language, but seemingly the essay that he had intended to write. I think he was pretty excited when he left, or at least aware of what he needed to do for the other essays to make them a bit better, as well. And when he left, he said, “You are damn good at what you do.”

Thus, Weblog Superfans, I am calling #34 complete.

Love
msb

For a very long time, my favorite crappy/awesome ’80s TV show has been MacGyver. I don’t know why; it might have been the amazing hair. In any case, I loved it. Once, when I was fourteen and was on a school trip in Kuala Lumpur, I watched an episode of MacGyver dubbed over in Malaysian. True story.

So imagine my ecstasy when, after years of Angus-less-ness, I was wandering around the TV section of Best Buy and came across the first season of MacGyver for only like $30! That’s, like, a dollar and some cents for every episode! How could such a devoted fan say no?

I think I maybe should have said no.

I mean, don’t get me wrong–MacGyver really is the greatest of the crappy/awesome ’80s TV shows. Knight Rider? C’mon, it gave us decades of David Hasselhoff. Only the Germans should be pleased about that. The A-Team? Whatever. We’ve seen the motley-crew vigilante bit before, and better done. Twenty-One Jump Street? Seriously…cops impersonating high-school students? How is that not too creepy to be good?

But anyway, MacGyver did not hold up well over time. It has become preposterously cheesy. TV nowadays has much higher standards, and so anybody interested in watching old shows with any kind of entertainment in mind other than nostalgia had better look elsewhere.

For instance, nobody (probably) would tolerate an actress playing an Eastern European in one episode, and then in the very next episode, using that same actress to play a brand-new (non-Eastern European) sidekick for the hero. Which is what happened to Elyssa Davalos, who played MacGyver’s opposites-attract partner, Nikki Carpenter. But even those people who might let that casting slip-up go would be a bit perturbed, I think, when that sidekick character, whom we have grown to accept lukewarmly, suddenly disappears. Which is what also happened to Elyssa Davalos/Nikki Carpenter.

But that’s just the beginning. Soon after Nikki leaves (might there be a connection?) the show suddenly turns crappy. (Again, though–not to beat the dead horse too much–it was still a crappy/awesome show to begin with.) Instead of taking his assignments from Pete Thornton and the Phoenix Foundation for Research, he takes them from the freakin’ Challenger’s Club, a place that turns Cuba Gooding, Jr. away from his crack-dealing gang and keeps teenage hookers off the streets. WTF? What happened to spies and explosions and near-death experiences? Shouldn’t a former Special-Forces agent be a bit more involved in, say, government-classified stuff? Military intelligence? Top-secret overseas missions? We don’t need another friggin after-school special!

Anyway. My #6 is to finish watching all the MacGyvers. (I think I forgot to mention that I kind of bought the entire series.) It might be a bit tough, at times, especially those episodes in which MacGyver travels to the Old West or Arthurian England. (Seriously.) But I will do it, and I will survive, and it will be crappy/awesome.

Keep you posted.

Love,
msb

Some things have come up that might preclude a clean completion of much of my 101 List. Most of them are school related, since I’m busier than I thought I would be and am taking Novel Workshop instead of Short Story Workshop.

Actually, the novel thing is what really throws things for a loop. #9 (Submit 10 stories to magazines) and #10 (Get a story published) were two on the list that I thought I really could do, and should do, to start to get my name out there in the writing world a bit. But they were sort of contingent upon writing short stories fairly constantly throughout my grad-school career, or at least two of the three years. And now that I’ll be working on a novel all of my second year (the Novel Workshop is a year-long course), it makes sense to keep working on it in my third year for my thesis. So that means that I’ll be writing few stories for the next two years.

I’ll have to rethink at least these two goals, although a few other ones might be affected as well, at least tangentially.

Love
msb

I could have sworn I wrote about this already, but I can’t find it. A few weeks (months?) ago, I read The Human Factor by Graham Greene for one of my unread books. It’s a spy novel that was intended to be a more realistic/literary spy novel than the more popular ones of the day–it was written in the 70s, I think. Those other kind were generally more exciting super-spy-type books, such as the James Bond series by Ian Fleming.

(Fleming, by the way, was a fascinating guy. He served in the Royal Navy during World War II as an intelligence officer, I believe, and was involved in some of the spy-raid planning that went on. I vaguely remember him working on Operation Mincemeat, which was a strange scheme to convince the Germans that the Allies would invade Europe via Sicily instead of France by taking a dead guy, sticking fake invasion plans in his pocket, putting him on a plane, and dropping the plane someplace where the Germans would find it. It worked, believe it or not.)

So. The Human Factor was based on Greene’s own work with British intelligence, apparently. It concerns this dude named Castle, who works a mundane job for MI6 in London but used to do slightly more “exciting” things in South Africa. Castle’s current unit is the Africa unit, and he works with another guy whose name I can’t remember. But, wouldn’t you know it, the Africa unit has a leak! And since there are only two guys who work there, it doesn’t take long for things to get dangerous….

What’s interesting about this book is the way Greene draws out the tension in scenes that, seemingly, are about regular, mundane office interactions. There are a bunch of these scenes in a row, and each on its own doesn’t seem to add much to the plot. But when there are so many pages of direct dialogue, it becomes clear pretty quickly that there’s more going on than just paper shuffling. I found myself reading this novel as closely as I read Hemingway or Carver, who make the reader do a bunch of the “interpretive” work, for lack of a better word. And it’s not like there’s no action at all; people die, guns go off, minor characters become major ones, barely referenced events and operations become more important than some of the more-discussed ones.

I’ve read a bunch of Greene’s short stories, and most of those were before his intelligence experience, so this was a fun shift in subject matter. It’s not a great copy, just a cruddy little mass-market paperback, but it’s worth keeping, I think. I can see myself re-reading it in bits and pieces to see how he worked the tension in the early dialogue-filled chapters. And it’s something to try if you like spy novels but are getting bored with the formulaic ones that are always so rampant.

Soon, something on #34…

Love,
msb

As I related some days ago, I have lately taken a wife. A common precursor to the day of the marriage itself is an evening of merriment attended by the bridegroom and his good buddies–that is, a bachelor party.

Mine was, indeed, a good time. My brother–who also served as my best man–organized the thing, along with one of my groomsmen, whom I have known for about eight years. Other friends also came. Luckily, the timing of it fell on one of the nights of a three-game homestand of the Washington Nationals, whose trials and tribulations on the baseball field I have followed with increasingly cynical passion for the last few years.

Thus came the completion of nos. 25 and 53 on my 101 in 1001: Go to a baseball game with the guys, and Go to a Nationals game in the new park!

It really was fun. We tailgated in the parking lot of RFK (they made me shotgun a beer, which was a bit sloppy–but not nearly as much as everyone expected, I think) and then took the free shuttle to Nationals Park. On the walk from the shuttle to the gate, we were given a crapload of free stuff–ice cream bars, Cracker Jack, music downloads, etc–from random people with silly shirts on. I also saw my wife’s college roommate, which was odd and scary. (She’s kind of bitchy sometimes.) One of the guys might have taken pictures, and if I ever get them I’ll put them up here. But right now you’ll have to take my word for it.

The game itself was both boring and exciting. It was a pitcher’s duel between Jason Bergmann, who can really shut the bad guys down sometimes, and Dan Haren, who is a pitcher in the major leagues, which means that the Nationals will, invariably, suck against him. But it was scoreless until late–both pitchers had a no-hitter until at least the 4th inning, I think–and then the offense came out. The Diamondbacks (the bad guys) scored a few, the Nationals came back to tie, the game went into extra innings, the Diamondbacks scored a few, the Nationals came back to tie, the game kept going, the Diamondbacks scored a few, the Nationals came back a little bit, but they didn’t tie. Which means they lost. Which sucked. But hey, that’s what you get when Jim Bowden is your GM.

The rest of the night is irrelevant to this Account. Suffice it to say that there was drinking, full frontal nudity, beer, and alcohol. The morning required orange juice and gentle voices.

But I’m OK. And I’m married now. And I’m two items closer to 101 nirvana.

Love,
msb

Recently, my lovely wife was informed, rather tersely, that she will have a job for the next six months, which potentially makes my #8 irrelevant. That one was on there because she was working far, far away from Richmond and so was having trouble making contacts and finding jobs to apply for. (I don’t actually know how true that is, since she and I didn’t talk about it too much, it being a somewhat large source of stress.) But I wanted to help, because then it might go faster, and I might have a nice person to kick at night when I dream about soccer, or something. (You know, as opposed to a mean person who might kick me back. [Kidding, darling.])

Anyway, she’s set up for the next few months, and potentially for the six months after that. Essentially, she’s got a six-month option that her employer could choose to pick up at the end of her first six months of slavery. Much like the options that baseball players have on their contracts sometimes. Except those baseball players’ options include salaries regularly over $5 million, which Keds’s option does not. Bummer.

Love
msb

It’s done.

Really, this was kind of a cop-out addition to the 101, since everything was already in motion by the time I made this impossible and demanding super-resolution list. What it really meant was, “Don’t do something so insanely stupid that I fuck everything up.” And I didn’t! Good for me! I mean us! Because marriage means two people!

I’ve been looking over other things on my list and have found several more for which I can create a weblog entry, and they will be appearing in your Google Reader soon. Keep in touch!

Love
msb

Here’s a story.

When I was seven, I was hopelessly gifted with normal eyesight. If my teacher were writing something on the blackboard, I saw it all the way from the back of the classroom. If I were reading a book, the words jumped sprightly off the page with the most mundane clarity. If I had to see something else or whatever, it happened. Etc.

But then I turned seven and a half. Suddenly, things were not quite so clear. My mother took me to the eye doctor. “You need glasses,” he told me. And so my life went to pot, although I didn’t quite see it that way at the time (as it were).

I liked having glasses. My entire family had glasses, except for my sister, but she was younger and adopted, so there was no guarantee. I fit in, sort of. So I got the biggest plastic piece of faux-tortoise-shell crap ever made into eyeglass frames and stuck them on my nose with the greatest pride ever associated with youth-onset low myopia.

But then I figured it out: glasses suck. They get in the way of everything. When my eye itched, I poked my lens accidentally and had to clean the stupid thing–and in the meantime, my eye still itched. I was a catcher on my baseball team, and when I flipped the mask off on a close play or whatever, my glasses sometimes went with it (although sometimes they didn’t and got shoved into my eyes instead, which hurt some). Plus, the ladies weren’t digging them. And so, in sixth grade, I got contacts, and my world was made ever so much better (although the ladies still didn’t dig me–well, the good ones didn’t, anyway, not for a while).

I wore contacts pretty much every day for about five years. And then I stopped, senior year of high school, for pretty much no reason. I was a lazy jackass; that was probably part of it. And I didn’t wear them again for a long time. But when I tried them again, they were seriously uncomfortable because they dried my eyes out so much. And I haven’t been able to wear them for long periods of time (like, more than an hour or two) without getting seriously itchy.

But I wanted to try them again to see how they worked, and I am pleased to inform you, Weblog Superfans, than I have accomplished this goal–I have contacts again! I’ve only had them for a couple of days, but they’re supposed to be the most comfortable kind out there (you might have seen the commercials), and I was given an antihistamine eyedrop to take care of some of the dryness (apparently it’s at least somewhat allergy related, but that’s a whole other 101 List Item). So I’ll let you know how it goes.

Other things: I got more teeth-whitening strips, these ones the super-concentrated kind so I’ll only have to wear them for a few days before seeing the brilliant results that the box ever so convincingly promises (#83). Also, I tried to teach my near-niece the word “ahoy,” but it didn’t take (#57). Layta!

Love,
msb