Yesterday I had a Google video chat with a group of Portland high schoolers who had been assigned to read and react to “Exposed” by the teacher of their Media Criticism and Analysis class. As a graduate of Montgomery Blair High School’s Communication Arts Program, which included many classes in Media Literacy that are directly responsible for I would say probably 50% of my (and fellow CAP grad Bennett’s) warped-brainedness — on the first day of high school, I remember, our Media Literacy teacher gave a lecture on the distinction between “skepticism” and “cynicism” that did not stop anyone present from becoming some of the most prematurely jaded consumers of media ever — well, anyway, as a CAP grad, I was naturally sympathetic to these students’ concerns. Even though they had mostly trashed me on their class-mandated blogs. UPDATE: They had only sort of trashed me in comments, not in blogs or blog posts. See teacher Jordan Gutlerner’s response, and my response to his response, below.
Many of them had thoughtful responses to the content of the article and saw past the strange fact of its being about the phenomenon that it was enacting. But a lot of them talked about my “compulsive need for attention.” Some other students’ assigned blog-post critiques of my article that I have read have been bracketed by introspective posts about the details of their own lives, a juxtaposition that never fails to make me giggle. Over years of narci-googling, I can’t even tell you how many times I have stumbled across a blog post about what a narcissistic attention whore I am, followed by another post about the details of someone’s breakfast, or marriage, or tastes in music.
Our video chat demonstrated a similar range of thinking-depths about personal blogging and its consequences. The students had clearly all been assigned to ask me questions, so some of the questions were obviously motivated less by genuine curiosity and more by the need to scribble something assignment-fulfilling during a stolen minute at lunch (eg, “What four people, living or dead, would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?”) But some of the questions were great. There was a question about trolls that was particularly great, and another great question about the future of privacy. And one girl said she had resisted the idea of starting the assigned blog that was part of her classwork, because she hates having other people read what she’s written. Obvs this sentiment is so alien to me that I was pretty much dumbfounded, but of course what I ought to have said was, you know, not everyone needs to have a blog. Please, everyone, feel free to not have blogs! I think she ought to have been able to opt out of the assignment, like when the vegans in biology class get to go to the library while everyone else dissects frogs.
Her question pointed up the odd fact that I still can’t seem to properly explain why I write so often in this venue, rather than privately scribbling my thoughts in a notebook or a Word document and waiting until they gel into something “more substantial than a blog post.” Of course, I do those things — those things eventually added up to a book, though increasingly I have no idea how I managed to pull that off –but more often I do this. Why? The answer ultimately might be as simple, and as complicated, as: Knowing that someone — at least one person — is guaranteed to read what I have written is the only thing that gives me the ability to structure my thoughts in a certain specific way. I guess that means I am “addicted to attention.” That might be one of the things that it means.
Next a girl in a very cute printed dress asked a question about, has there been a time recently when you experienced something and wanted to write a blog post about it but hadn’t been sure whether you should, or not, and I found myself going off on a tangent about something terrible that happened when I was in Mexico.
Please stop reading here if you would not like to read about a terrible thing.
I was walking down to the front office of the place we were staying, still wet from the ocean, returning the boogie boards I had borrowed. RC and I were done playing in the ocean and lying on the beach for the day; we were going to take showers and then ride our rented bikes up Tulum’s beach road to go to a yoga class, so I was walking up the gentle rise of white sand that constituted the parking lot of Posada Lamar and just as I crested this hill a small child suddenly darted out into the street that runs parallel to the beach and was hit by an oncoming Jeep.
The child flew through the air and out of the scope of my vision and the Jeep crashed into the sign that marked the entrance to Posada Lamar.
All of this happened in approximately one millionth of the amount of time that it takes to read the preceding paragraph. Then time froze for a second and I froze with it.
But soon time unfroze again, and again a lot of things happened at once: the women who worked at the hotel came rushing down the hill, dialing the hospital on their cell phones and praying and wailing. The child’s mother scooped her up off the pavement and carried her to the side of the road where I could see her, and there she held the limp child and rhythmically pummeled her stomach, exhorting her in Spanish to (I think) breathe. Time had unfrozen but I had not; being frozen, I couldn’t run down the hill and tell her NO DO NOT MOVE SOMEONE WHO MIGHT HAVE A SPINAL INJURY, PUT HER DOWN AND DO NOT MOVE HER, because, as I said, I was frozen and also because I don’t speak Spanish and I was a lifeguard a long, long time ago and no longer trust my ability to perform CPR or know when it is appropriate. After another few moments that seemed like a few hours the child and mother got into the front seat of one of the many taxis that spend the day zooming up and down the beach road honking at potential fares and zoomed off in the direction of the hospital. I rememered having seen the hospital as we turned off the highway onto the beach road on the day we’d arrived; just a small stucco building, painted white, not much bigger than the average-sized American house where I grew up. Passing it on the road I had idly wondered what it was like inside, what people were treated for most often in this second-world village/hippie beach resort town; dehydration and food poisoning and bad acid trips, most likely, like in the medical tent of an outdoor rock festival. And now this child was going there to die, or was maybe — it had looked like it, but I was far away and had no way of knowing — already dead. “That car was going so fast,” I kept saying, even though to the other people standing around were not reacting to my presence in any way, I was in the background of this scene in exactly the same way as the bougainvillea and the palm trees and the waning afternoon sun and the crashing of the waves behind us.
I waited until the cops came to take away the girl who’d been driving the car, because before they’d arrived (it took them forever) it had seemed like she might leave. Her boyfriend had arrived on a scooter. She was crying; at one point she turned her face and puked into the tropical foliage and broken glass at the front of her smashed Jeep. Good, I thought. Puke, cry. Bitch. Murderer.
After the cops came I went and got RC and we stood there for a few minutes as RC quizzed the hotel staff in her high-school Spanish about what was happening, and no one knew, and eventually we went up to our room, a bungalow about twenty feet away from the spot where the accident had taken place — from our porch you could see the wrecked Jeep — and we still had just enough time to make it to the yoga class so because there was nothing else we could do except sit there and watch, we went.
It was the worst yoga class I have ever taken. The teacher, perhaps used to teaching vacationers he would never see again, did not bother to try to develop any sort of rapport with the students — he didn’t even ask at the outset of class about any chronic conditions or injuries. And then he taught this motley group of vacationers, whose experience with yoga probably varied from I-have-a-regular-practice to this-is-the-first-time-I-have-done-yoga, an intense and bizarre breathing-centered practice that included warmupless intense hamstring stretches, moves that seemed cribbed from the Bad Romance video — literally no one could follow the class or do even half of the exercises. The teacher also kept giving instructions that women should begin their twisted poses on a different side than the men. “Ladies, take your left arm … Us guys, start with the right arm …” he kept saying. At one point he slipped up and said “Girls.”
I thought maybe I would walk out of the class but the idea of the awkwardness of explaining my reasons for having walked out to the possible non-English-speaker at the front desk stopped me, and also as terrible of a teacher as this guy was I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. If someone walked out of a class I was teaching (which hasn’t happened yet, but very probably might!) I would cry for days. So I didn’t walk out. Finally the asana part of the class, such as it was, concluded with a long guided meditation. By now the class’s lack of enthusiasm was so apparent that it had even become apparent to the oblivious, terrible teacher, who led the meditation as if he was halfheartedly reading it off an index card (we had our eyes closed so he very well may have been). We were instructed to imagine a pure white light radiating from us to a person we loved, then a person we didn’t know, then a person we hated, then the entire universe. I skipped this annoying bullshit and instead thought, “Please let that child be alive. Please let that child be alive. Please let that child be alive,” over and over and over and over again. At some point it occured to me to wonder who, exactly, I was requesting this favor of, and how and why I expected that entity to fulfill this favor when that same entity had allowed the child to be hit by a speeding Jeep in the first place, and then luckily before things got too ontological the class was finally over.
“Any news of the child?” Ruth asked in (to me) impressive Spanish as we walked back through the entranceway of Posada Lamar. A witchy, heavily eyelinered woman who, it never became clear to us whether she actually worked at Posada Lamar or was just an itinerant masseuse, told us that she had called the hospital and that the child had needed stitches but was otherwise okay. We walked back up to our room. “Do you believe her?” I asked RC.
We decided that we were going to choose to believe her. We went on about our vacation. I thought about what had happened, I am still thinking about what had happened. I thought then that I would probably write about what had happened, when I got back to the US and my computer, and I tried to figure out why I was going to do that but I had no answer, and I still have no answer.
