how to love a brother

These are in no particular order.

1. Slumber party in your room. At the age of four or five, your brother adores you. You read to him and play Trouble with him. He does not want to sleep in his own bed tonight. Your floor will do just fine, the floor parallel to your bed. He will sleep, snoring, in his Toy Story sleeping bag. You sketch him as he falls asleep not because you are creepy but because you are nine and love to draw and need a subject. He serves just fine on many a drawing occasion.

2. Play Barbies together. Don't hate him when he bites all the hair off of the Mike Barbie (teenage boy) and leaves teeth marks in the skull. Go with it. Tell Stacey and all her Barbie palls that Mike's sporting a new look. Let the GI Joe and Barbie go out together in the tractor. They can take the convertible out another night.

3. Offer to clean his room, paint his room, rearrange his room. He will like it, theoretically, but will bar you from entering his room with his very own arm. He will knock you down if he has to. You will not enter his room, he says. But you will, and you will sketch a new layout. You will make his dream of street walls with screeching tire marks in places come to life. You would dust his dresser, if he wouldn't notice, and put all of the quarters laid out in a football formation into the neon green piggy bank you bought him. Because he kind of trusts you, he will let you help him rearrange his room once. Not again. Not because he doesn't like your concepts but because the concept he did let you carry through was too good.



4. Take him to a K-State football game for his birthday. But make him buy both tickets. It's not that you don't enjoy football and spending time with your brother when you now live 134 miles apart--you do--but you don't enjoy spending $55 per ticket on 3 hours of your life. Let him hang around the stadium for as long as he wants after the game. Let him play your Game Cube when you get back to your apartment and stay up all night watching who knows what. Drive him back the next day and wish he'd like school enough to want to go to college near you.

5. Play defense. After your dream of becoming a basketball star dies (because you're five feet tall and clumsy running with the ball), defend him on every shot he tries for on the driveway. Challenge him to shooting contests from the middle of the yard, from the porch. Assist him in dunks; toss him the ball at the perfect height at the perfect moment. Photograph him flying into dunks on the playground. Buy him a basketball for his birthday. Buy him a ball return thing for the rim. Buy him an indoor miniature hoop that goes over the door and watch him use it until his palm is twice the size of the ball. Keep throwing him the ball.



6. Try to kill him. Out of love for being an only child, push him in his infant walker to the ledge of the basement stairs. Give it another nudge and watch it/him tumble to the bottom. Good riddance. Hear your mom's screams as she catches him before the walker actually goes a notch down and be relieved that your brother is still there and that he won't remember this because he's too young. Do not kill your brother.

7. Buy him birthday gifts. When no one else does, keep buying him things like iTunes gift cards and sports stuff and t-shirts and those movies he loves. Help him pick out a big screen tv and arrange his new living space in your parents' basement because you know that he wouldn't do it for himself. Buy him birthday gifts not because he needs anything but because you want him to know you still know him.



8. Hug him. Even though he's now ten inches taller than you, much more muscular, much quieter, and much more wealthy, think "aw" when he leans over to hug you and says "Thanks for coming." It doesn't happen often. You try not to be too loving-sibling-like because you're a girl and it can too easily get on his nerves. You let him do his thing, and sometimes he comes to you, big sister, and that is when you remember why you like each other, why you get along, why you wanted to take him on his first plane ride and big city trip to Chicago last summer. Not because he was a good travel companion (bless his heart, he's not) but because you wanted him to experience life outside of Kansas and life off the ground. Hug him, and rub his buzz-cut head for the way it's felt for the last sixteen years. Text him because that's how he gets and gives all his messages these days. A text can do the hugging. But not really.

Happy twentieth birthday to my brother.

like baseball

"And what the great American game of baseball seems to me to demonstrate most obviously is that those who 'have what it takes' must nevertheless work hard at their craft all the time and that many who might have been judged not to 'have what it takes,' through hard work at their craft, can also perform well. Recent years of World Series and league championship games have shown us great hitters and pitchers hitting and pitching badly while players we've never heard of perform beautifully. What veteran baseball players and writers know is that constantly working hard will produce a respectable batting or earned run average, a stack of pages of substantial literary value, an acceptance from a good journal.

"I am not describing a method of achieving happiness. I am describing what seems to me a necessary and healthy way for a few people to carry out their lives; happiness has nothing to do with it. What seems to me the only legitimate goal of any would-be writer is to achieve a circumstance of ongoing work, the serenity to carry out the daily writing and revising of what poems, stories, or novels are given one to write. On those rare occasions when one's serenity seems about to collapse, I recommend that one step out into one's back yard and vigorously spit."

--from "Let's Say You Wrote Badly This Morning" by David Huddle

I don't much care for baseball. I don't know what a batting or earned run average is. I don't really care to know. But Huddle compares athletes and writers here, in this piece anthologized in The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays. It's the having what it takes--the making yourself work to have it. I'm still struggling.

At this point there's a three-way tension. Teach well--write a kick-ass thesis/book--get thyself prepared to get a job (as in a career) next summer. I can't let the teaching down, and I have to figure out what I'm going to do with my 2010 self. I want to write, to shut it all out and write. How do you write in the moment? Live in the moment?

Here's my working list of goals for my work, in content, language, and totality:

Metaphor

Zest

Contradiction

Philosophy

More explanation to come.

open spaces

"Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us. My grandchildren will probably use space shuttles for a honeymoon trip or to recover from heart attacks, but closer to home we might also learn how to carry space inside ourselves in the effortless way we carry our skins. Space represents sanity, not a life purified, dull, or "spaced out" but one that might accommodate intelligently any idea or situation.

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as a filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but, being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already here."

--from "The Solace of Open Spaces" by Gretel Ehrlich.

The essay as site: literature and philosophy. I read it and I love it and I want it and I want to do it. Somehow, I'm still hesitant to take the philosophical step. I'm building my references here. SRS, Gretel Ehrlich, Anne Fadiman, EB White,