Digging Through the Button Jar

“Don’t worry,” she said, peering through the glass.  “If you die, we’ll just get new ones.”

I was there when my friend said this.  It was a cold comment, worthy of a femme fatale from one of my stories.  But I wasn’t concerned; I only laughed.  Because I am just as cold-hearted?  No, because my friend was talking to fish, and as cute as they are, it’s hard to love fish.  Besides, she bought them on a whim for less than a dollar each.

Context is everything.  This rings especially true for a writer.  As a writing project I’ve assigned myself, I’m going through all my old journals (I’m currently on volume fourteen) to see if any of the ideas inside inspire me.  And I am finding a great deal of inspiration.  These journals are riddled with half-ideas—newspaper headlines, quotes that caught my eye or my ear, pictures that intrigue me, recorded dreams.  But they’re only half-ideas because I don’t know where they fit yet.  A line of dialogue doesn’t mean anything unless you know who said it and why; a character doesn’t matter until you know where they come from and why they are the way they are.  Indeed, the reason I am a writer is I have a need to know the whole story.

My journals are like button jars.  The only reason to have a button jar is so that someday, when you need a replacement for that one lost button, you might find something that fits.  But until you do have the need, that empty space, those buttons are just decoration.  I have a wonderful character, Genevieve, that very villainess I mentioned a moment ago.  Her mother killed her fiancé, because she thought that he made Genevieve weak.  In retaliation, Genevieve killed her mother, but she continues to follow her mother’s belief that women define their own moral code and wield power through control over men.  All this is fascinating, but a stagnant picture of a person is only interesting to me for a short time.  (Maybe that’s why I was always so quick to get bored in museums.)  To hold my interest, the character needs to move, grow, change, evolve or devolve.  What happens to Genevieve?  How does she use her ill-gotten power—for good or for evil?  Does she ever meet a man she can’t control?  Who would he turn out to be?  All of these questions remain unanswered, and as long as they do, Genevieve is just a black and white button in a jar.

I write stories so that I can find out the whole.  Characters, ideas, lines and phrases—all these things only matter to me when a story gives them their true place.  That is when they come alive.

Sincerity?

I’ve never considered myself beautiful.  I’m close, maybe, but just a shade too round-faced, with my skin not enough like porcelain and my eyes a smidgeon too squinty.  This is not self-pity talking, I promise—I’m quite pretty enough for my own esteem, and beauty will only fade as time goes by.  Still, it’s been a long time since anyone aside from my mother called me beautiful.  Or it had been, before I walked into the laundromat this week and attracted someone’s attention.

He straightened up as I came in, an older gentleman in a white t-shirt and jeans, and his eyes widened.  “Wow,” he said.  “You are so sweet and beautiful.”

Now, I was probably overdressed for this errand.  I’d put on my new white shirt with the black lace down the arms, my bright blue pants, and my high boots.  My face was made up and my hair was fixed, because sometimes I don’t like to feel like a slob.  I was looking pretty good, and I knew it.  But it was still nice to hear it.  At first.

I thanked him, and the compliment did warm me.  People don’t usually say such things with such fervent honesty.  Most of them are honest only when it will not put them into any vulnerable place, or when it will benefit them.

“Really,” he told me as I moved past him to put my clothes in the dryer.  “You must be married.  Beautiful girls like you are always married.”

I laughed and shook my head.

“Really?  Then you must have a group of boyfriends.”

“No,” I said, laughing with a little more trepidation.  I focused on my clothes as they flopped into the dryer.  “Haven’t found anyone worth it yet.”

“Really?  That’s a shame,” he said.  He was still looking at me.

Suddenly the admiration wasn’t so welcome.  I found myself wondering if there was anyone else in the building, though I didn’t want to look and find out. 

He offered to take me to dinner, said he would love to do it.  “I own my own house,” he told me, smiling.  I laughed as if he were joking.  I couldn’t meet his eyes, and I moved away as soon as I could.  And still his eyes followed me.  He didn’t look away even as he was leaving, not until the last minute.

Now, I don’t want to be unfair.  The poor man may very well have been joking.  He was significantly older than me, and he didn’t look at all as if he could harm me, much less have wanted to.  His compliment may very well have been sincere.  But the way he said it made me very uncomfortable, even frightened.

I think it’s a shame that we have as much trouble reading one another as we do.  Did he know how unwelcome I found his advances, however gentle?  Was he even aware of my discomfort?  Too often, I think, men don’t even realize how disturbing their admiration can be.  This man’s compliment, after all, was immediately followed by an expectation of something in return, and I think it’s a shame that he felt the need to press himself forward.

In the end, it was a harmless experience, but a sobering one.  I hope that if I ever have sons of my own, I can teach them to be sincere and selfless in their praise.  It is possible—or at least I very much hope so—to tell a girl she is beautiful without phrasing it as a favor she should return.  Maybe if more men did this, we would have more women believing themselves to be beautiful. 

How to Find The Circumference of An Idea

Higher education in America is a mess.  I don’t think anyone would disagree with me on that score.  Just look at the statistics of student debt, or the comparisons between the American system and some of those abroad.  I have been out of college for two and a half years now, and I can reasonably expect to be making loan payments for the next eight years.  That’s if I keep on schedule—it will be longer if at any point I have to defer.  And I’m one of the lucky ones.  I remember the panicked expressions on my classmates’ faces at the end of senior year when we attended those mandatory loan meetings.  Some of them faced twenty thousand dollars of debt or more.  In the current economy, where a college degree doesn’t guarantee you a well-paying job (I’m still working in a restaurant), that’s a huge number.  And tuition prices are only getting higher.  Now, there might be any number of reasons for this, and I’m no economist to speculate on what those might be.  But even I can read the alarming line graphs I see online and in the papers. 

The government is trying to deal with this, inasmuch as the government can.  President Obama has instituted a debt forgiveness program that allows students who enroll this year to pay only ten percent of their income on student loans, and after twenty years all debts are forgiven.  As for the universities themselves, a new program is expected in time for the 2015-16 school year that will rate universities all over America and assign them financial aid according to those ratings.  Universities are up in arms about this, saying that there is no way of quantifying an education, and that deserving universities will slip through the net cast by the government rating tests, having a terrible impact on the quality of higher education.

I agree that it is next to impossible to measure the value of an education.  I wouldn’t give up my liberal arts degree for the world—if I could do it over again, I’d do it exactly the same way.  But I do admit that it doesn’t make me employable at first glance.  The problem is that federal programs like this require a homogeneous standard that can be measured, and education simply isn’t homogeneous.  Every student wants something different and needs different things from the school and its professors.  This is true at the lower levels, too—standardized tests may give the government the numbers and statistics it wants, but it doesn’t help those students who are dyslexic, or have learning disabilities, or who are kinesthetic learners.  All of these students may be brilliant in ways that don’t come up on the tests, and a good college education can give them the tools to hone that brilliance.  What happens if those good colleges are missed by the tests that only measure graduation rates and graduate income levels?

On the other hand, something has to be done.  A system that bankrupts its students for an education that they need to survive in the world is a system that needs to be changed.  Perhaps other factors could be added to the ratings list—range of options offered to each student, or number of awards received by professors, or even student happiness rankings.  Though these things are harder to measure, they are vital to the value of an education, and they have as much to say about the quality of a university as dollar signs and percentages.

The glory and the downfall of mankind, in my opinion, is how different we are.  Every human being on the planet has a little bit of a different idea as to what’s important and what needs to be known.  Our education is what teaches us those different ideas, and I would hope the government would remember that it’s not what our schools teach us that’s important, or at least that that’s not the only important thing.  What is the most vital thing a student has to learn is how to think for him- or herself, and I learned that in college.  I'd hate for younger generations to never have the chance to learn it at all.  

Some of the websites I looked at for this post: http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education/ensuring-that-student-loans-are-affordable

https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/charts/public-service

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Neil_Fleming.27s_VAK.2FVARK_model

Also an article in Time, the April 28, 2014 issue, entitled "Should US Colleges Be Graded by the Government?" written by Haley Sweetland Edwards

Photo credit: https://searchingeyes.wordpress.com/tag/education-assessment-comic/