Whatever You Do, Don't Look Back

Today I spent a chunk of my afternoon helping my niece arrange her semester. Despite my warning, she waited until the last minute to try to register for her classes and then--surprise!--all the classes she wanted were filled up. I have to cut her some slack as it is only her second semester and she's kind of used to the high school hand-holding routine, but I'm still a little peeved because I did try to head that off at the pass by warning her that the classes she wanted (the basic levels of biology, chemistry, and English) were going to fill up fast. She managed to finagle her way into the chemistry lecture and a lab on Friday at 7:30 in the morning (gee, I wonder why that lab was open), but when I left her, she was planning to card into the English class.

Sigh. My niece is all of nineteen. I know I was just as stupid at that age, but I don't think I was quite so naive.

What was I doing at nineteen? Well, let's see. I had graduated from high school three years before. Like my niece, I was taking classes at the community college. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and I were about to make each other's acquaintance and I was about a semester away from getting battered--smashed nearly to pieces actually--by a class in Existential philosophy. I had a job--ugh--waiting tables. I had a car too, and on my days off I sometimes hit the road and wandered around the state listening to The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta and Paul Simon's The Rhythm of the Saints. One of Simon's songs, "She Moves On" was my favorite.

Feel the bite
Whenever you believe that
You'll be lost and love will find you
When the road bends
the song ends
She moves on

I was so restless then. I thought that restlessness might pass, that I might someday settle, settle down. But turns out that restlessness is an elemental part of my personality. Nothing's changed.

I'm struggling this week with that restlessness, and with discipline, with my lack of discipline, and I'm wrestling with desires so strong that they are sometimes indistinguishable from addiction. I'm glad, this week, that I don't drink anymore.

This week, I rewarded myself for sticking to my workout schedule by buying a handful of music from iTunes. I bought "She Moves On," of course, and a bunch of The Cure's old stuff, the stuff that reminds me of high school. Not that I wanted to be reminded of high school, but as long as I'm on the subject, I have to tell this story about my high school friend Nikki. You remember her, right? She's the one who I met over the holidays at, of all places, Chuck E. Cheese. Nikki brought her eight-year-old son with her, but her husband had to return to work just after Christmas so he couldn't join us.

As we sat and ate crappy pizza, I remarked on a teacher Nikki had a crush on in high school. She tried everything to seduce him and I never heard how that ended and it's twenty years later so I just asked her, "Didn't you sleep with that guy?" She said she hadn't (which I believe) and that led to a discussion about the people we knew who had slept with their teachers in high school. (Yes, even twenty years ago high school students were sleeping with their teachers and, in some notable cases, with their friends parents.) Nikki was very, very disapproving of this suddenly, remarking on how exploitative those kinds of relationships are. And I? I just barely managed to hold my tongue.

See, here's the thing:

After high school, Nikki went off to college in Virginia and we wrote back and forth occasionally. This was in the days before email (yes, I am old) and our letters were few and far between, so most of the news I got about her was from her mother, who I saw from time to time. In her freshman or sophomore year of college, Nikki met and married Mark. I met Mark once, when he came out to visit her family. Mark was a smart guy, and about a year after they were married, he had a chance to go and study in Germany. Here's where the fun begins. Mark went off to Germany, and Nikki stayed behind to finish up her degree. She was probably about twenty-three or twenty-four by this time and almost finished with her undergraduate degree in art history.

One day she walked into a coffee shop and saw a lithe, little, blond haired fourteen-year-old boy and she fell in love with him. She went home and called Mark long-distance and told him she wanted a divorce. Mark was shocked and he called Nikki's mother and Nikki's mother went to Virginia to make sure that Nikki hadn't gone off the deep end. (This is all what Nikki's mother told me, which means that it's probably worse than it sounds because that's what Nikki told her mother and we all know the editing process that happens between real life and what mom hears about real life.)

Nikki couldn't be disuaded that this fourteen-year-old boy was the love of her life and she actually did divorce Mark and begin to court this little kid. Her grandmother had died not too long before and Nikki had inherited about $10,000 and she used part of that money to buy the kid a new skateboard and an electric guitar and amplifier. Wasn't long before they were sleeping together. He was a freshman in high school, and she dated him all through his high school years. I'm sure you can picture the fourteen-year-old boy with his twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, right? Right. Hardly exploitative.

Very, very shortly after the kid turned eighteen, they were married. He was an eighteen-year-old child groom and she was, by then, a twenty-eight-year-old bride. That was some wedding, let me tell you. About half the guests were barely out of high school--some of them were still in high school--and half the guests were disbelieving mid- to late-twenty-somethings like me.

Two years later, they had their one and only kid, and eight years after that, Nikki was sitting across from me in a booth at Chuck E. Cheese, disgusted by the idea that her eight year old might be six years away from meeting some woman who might want to exploit him, perhaps even sleep with him.

Ah, woman. Thy name is hypocrisy.

And Today Too

Everyday miracles like laundry and satellites.