The Cross Country Team

Lumberton, North Carolina. Fall, 1994.

I am lying on my back, looking up at the sunny, clear autumn sky as we perform our stretches in the west end zone of the football field.

The cross country season is in full swing. Our meets are normally on Tuesdays, and so the coach has designated Wednesdays as our long run days. We do not have to push ourselves for time- for a fast run on Wednesdays- but the coach expects us to go eight miles.

As we stretch, Penny, a cute blond on the team, sits close to me along with her friend, Dawn. I try to start a conversation with her as the coach walks around.

"Are you taking a foreign language this year, Penny?" I ask.

"I'm in Spanish II," she answers.

"I'm taking French," I say. " My teacher says that French is a much more developed language than Spanish. English is more developed than either of them."

Penny does not say anything.

"For example, in English, the words 'brain' and 'mind' have two different meanings. But Spanish has no separate word for brain and mind. That language just uses one name, or so my teacher says."

Flat on my back, I can not see Penny's reaction, but she says nothing. The coach comes around and looks down at me with a curious expression.

After our stretches, we head out from the high school into town, on the designated route for our run.

I ran 10 miles not too long ago, and I really do not feel the need to go eight miles today. None of the guys on the team do. All the girls are running together, though, separate from us boys. They are ahead of us but within sight, putting in a good pace, trying to get the run finished in a reasonable time.

David, one of the guys on the team, says he knows a short cut that will slice about two miles off the run.

All the guys agree to go with him, and we make sure the girls do not see us as we take a right off the main road.

Of course, we arrive back at the high school well before the girls. The coach is waiting for us.

I expect him to make some comment about how fast we did the eight miles, but I can tell he does not care. In addition to cross country, he is the head basketball coach at the high school. This is more on his mind and is his passion. The best runner on our team joined in part because he wants a starting slot when basketball season starts.

When the girls do finally get back, we are standing around under a tree, waiting on them. The coach has gone inside the school for a few minutes.

The shock on the girls' faces amuses me. David sees the opportunity to needle them a bit.

"What took you all so long?" he asks.

For whatever reason, this sets Dawn off. She launches into a heated diatribe against us guys and how we cheated. She says we should be ashamed of ourselves.

David is as shocked by Dawn's reaction, and I have to laugh at his facial expression, too.

"I'll do it again!" he says to her.

***

From then own, Dawn is always fussing at David, no matter what he does. Dawn is a pretty girl, and it is entertaining to watch her get so worked up.

The coach notices how she seems irritated by David as well. One day after she has said something harsh to David, the coach speaks.

"You know what you need to do, Dawn? You need to get yourself a young man like that, and cultivate him."

I burst out laughing. The phrase "cultivate him," and the way it sounds in the Robeson County accent of my coach cracks me up.

Dawn turns and glares at me with venomous eyes.

***

About a year later, I saw Penny in a Waldenbooks in Fayetteville. I tried to speak to her, but I could tell now that our shared connection of the cross country team had ended, she no longer had any interest in interacting with me. Or maybe it was just that I could not think of any good lines to say to her in Waldenbooks.

I also saw Dawn some months later, out in town in Lumberton. She was going to walk past me without saying anything, but I spoke to her. She stopped and wheeled, breathing a bit heavy, like out of exasperation.

I had more confidence with Dawn, but all I knew to ask her was what she was doing after high school. She said she was looking into some community college programs.

That was it. That was all that I had in my head to speak. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought she gave me a look like I had missed an opportunity. She turned and walked away, and I never saw her again.

In the years since I ran on the cross country team, my instincts in knowing what to say to women has only marginally improved.

The Gap

My favorite place on the planet is Cullowhee, North Carolina.

That small town is home to Western Carolina University, where I spent five of the most important years of my life. I attended WCU from August 1995 through May of 1998, or three academic years. Then I dropped out of college for a year, before returning in August of 1999 and earning my degree in May of 2000.

In August of 2007, I came back to WCU as a student in the Master of Arts History program. After assessing the job market for people with history degrees, however, I decided to leave after a year and enroll in law school. That appears to have been a wise decision, though I had a blast in Cullowhee.

Western Carolina University and the surrounding towns- Cullowhee, Sylva and Dillsboro have a wonderful, magical place in my mind. My undergraduate years at WCU were the most important in forming who I am as an adult. A decade after that, the lone year in graduate school is still the happiest year I have had in my life so far.

Even now as I type these words, though, I do not want to write about my experiences at Western. The memories are too intense, and I think that frankly I have suppressed most of them just so that I can focus on getting through my days in the present.

I would not do the memories or the magic justice, sitting here at a desk in Florida. If I ever get the chance to spend a significant amount of time in Cullowhee again, then I am sure the old emotions will come flooding back and I will want to record them.

But for now the memories are just too happy, too sad... too "raw" for me to put myself through such an exercise. I said August 2007 through the summer 2008 was the happiest span of my life. I lived life like I wish I had done as an undergraduate. So I do not want to try and revisit that extreme high. It would be too painful to come back down.

In turn, September 1997 through the spring 1998 in Cullowhee was the most painful year of my life. I grew my hair out, got an ear ring and tried to grow a beard. One of my best friends from WCU refers to it as the year that I decided to be a pirate. It was the year before I dropped out. I remember going to a hockey game in Fayetteville over the Christmas break in 1997 with my dad, brother, and my uncle. I overheard my uncle comment to dad about me, "He looks wiped out."

That was the year I lost faith in a god that loved us, and I truly began to understand what loneliness meant. I do not care to revisit my discovery of those dark places, either.

So there is a gap in this blog about my experiences- a very significant gap. The first blog I ever wrote was for the Graduate Student Association at WCU, when I was there in 2007 and 2008. That captures some of what the happiest year was like for me, but only a small portion.

I could spend an eternity exploring that time. The smell of the buildings at Western, the way the trees and plants looked in different seasons of the year, the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter there, the extreme beauty of how young we all were then, how I changed in that place, and so much more. And so much more. But there is no going back, unless a heaven exists. It makes my chest feel like it is going to explode as I type this draft on a Saturday evening.

I have to stop. There will just be a gap. It was a total of five years of my life. Five years now, in the present, will pass by very quickly, I believe, without nearly the significance. Those five years at Western, though, were the most important and most treasured years of my life. It is too hard to write about them.

The Irrelevance of iPhone Shell Shock

Millbrook K-12 School, Raleigh, North Carolina. 1983.

It is my group's turn to do exercises. Today, these exercises will be on the new computers. It hurt my feelings a bit when, a few weeks ago, the teacher did not assign me to the first group, supposedly the smartest students in my first grade class. I have been placed in the group of second smartest students. She did not tell us how she was classifying the groups, of course, but I know. The first group is ahead of mine on the number of exercises completed. My group is ahead of all the others.

I sit down in front of one of the computers, looking at the big blue screen while the other students in my group take their places as well. It is the first time that I have ever seen a computer in person or touched a keyboard. The teacher's aide, a lady with dark red hair and thick glasses, sets up the program for me. It is a series of spelling exercises.

A cartoon, computer graphic image of a bare, pink skinned foot appears. Five dotted lines are below the picture- the spaces to type in letters- and an automated voice says, "Ankle. Spell ankle."

I type in the letters slowly in the five blank spaces, searching for them on the keyboard. A...N...K...L..E. Then I press the "enter" key.

"That is incorrect," the voice says. "Spell ankle."

Confused, I type in the word again. a...n...k...l...e.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

A...n...k...l...e.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

Maybe the computer is wrong, I think. So I try an incorrect spelling.

a...n...k...e...l.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

I raise my hand in frustration.

The teacher's aide comes over, a small and sour frown on her face. I do not think she likes me that much, as I do not like school. It was much better when Mom taught me at home. I did not have to go to kindergarten because she taught me at home, and this is my first year of being in a classroom and being around other students.

"I am trying to spell ankle, but it keeps telling me that I am wrong," I say to her.

"Well, type it in again," she says.

She watches as I press the keys a...n...k...l...e. Then I press enter.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

I look up at the teacher's aide. Now she looks confused, and I feel vindicated.

She leans over and tries to type the word in herself.

"That is incorrect. Spell ankle."

"Go have a seat back at your desk, " she says. "I'll see if I can fix this."

I walk across the classroom back to my desk, and watch as she tries to get past the "ankle" screen to no avail. She calls over the regular teacher, Mrs. Hawkins, and the two of them try to figure out what is going on. Meanwhile, the students on the other computers type away, and I get an anxious feeling that I am being left behind.

The teacher's aide ends up turning off the computer, and I do not get to do any exercises that day...

Thus begins my rocky relationship with technology and computers.



***

Present day.

One of the reliefs of my new job in Live Oak is that I do not have an iPhone.

I work hard here, putting in much more than 40 hours per week. A difference between being a government lawyer and a lawyer at a private firm, though, is that when I leave the government office, the work stays there. My mind is free to think about other things if I choose. That is rarely the case in private practice, where you always have to be ready to take a phone call and make money for the firm.

Last year, I held a job in sales. As part of our company issued gear, I was given an iPad and an iPhone. I used the iPad for one day, but decided that it was not as user-friendly as my lap top computer. I put it back in its box and never turned it on again.

The iPhone was necessary, though, given the nature of the job. Answering emails quickly was vital, and I answered more than I care to count on the iPhone, punching away at the small screen with my thumbs.

Emails came in at all hours of the day and night- from my boss, from students (customers). The pinging sound that the iPhone made when a new email came in slowly but surely began to grind on my nerves. Each time I heard that sound, it was like being hit with anxiety pellets.

In my job here in Live Oak, there is a prosecutor and some members of the court who have their iPhones set with that same sound when they receive an email. I hear their phones go off when I am sitting in their offices or perhaps the hearing room. Each time I hear it, I get a slight nauseating feeling.

World War I veterans would laugh at me for using the term "shell shock" in the title of this blog entry.

Computers have made my life better in many ways. I like the internet, Facebook, and Youtube. Writing this blog would obviously be impossible without computers.

But there are many things about computers and smartphones that make me feel stress and unhappiness, too. I do not like text messaging, tweets, iPads and iPhones.

What I have discovered though, is that no one cares what I do not like about computers and smart phones. I feel like I am the only person on the planet who prefers to stare out a window as opposed to messing with an app on an iPhone. If I do not participate in the newest wave of technology, then I run the risk of quickly becoming irrelevant in my job and even in social circles.

So far, anyway, this job is very satisfying in that I still get to work with printed books and printed files. I hand write my notes on a legal pad. Westlaw and the internet provide important research functions, but I am lucky in that the vast majority of my time consists of face to face contact with people, working with paper and pen, and working within my own creativity with the facts of the case in front of a judge or jury.

It is a refuge from the pellets of anxiety being lobbed at me, a foxhole to protect against the strange and unpleasant electronic sounds of an incoming shell...I mean incoming email.

Love Bugs

Present Day

After my usual Friday night at the Brown Lantern Bar in Live Oak, and then my Saturday morning sleep-in, I got up and went for a run.

My most common route is to jog about a mile and a half south down highway 129, to where the sidewalk ends heading out of town. At that point, the road becomes two lane through the swamps, woods and farm fields for twenty-five miles or so until you reach Branford, an even smaller town than Live Oak, at the southern end of Suwannee County. I turn around and come back when the sidewalk ends, though, which makes for approximately three miles total that I jog.

On this day, I noticed that many love bugs were flying about. They hit me in my face, chest and arms as I ran. I made note of the time of year- early September- and it reminded me of the first time that I had ever seen bugs like that.

It was the beginning of the fall semester at Florida State Law in Tallahassee, 2008.

These bugs were freaky looking to me then. Two were attached to each other, flying in different directions and unable to separate. I asked someone (I cannot remember whom) what they were, and was told that the government had synthetically designed them be mosquito eaters. The design did not go as planned, though, and the two-headed creatures escaped to multiply and multiply.

I actually believed the story and repeated it a few times before I looked them up on line and found out otherwise- that they were common "love bugs."

While the creatures sort of got in the way during my run on Saturday, they also brought back a pleasant memory.

The fall of 2008 was an exciting time for me. It was the start of a great three years of school, a new city, and a lot of new people. The bugs were everywhere in September 2008 in Tallahassee, but they were just part of new and fun experience- like Spanish Moss in the oak trees, or orange palm tree fruit, or Florida State football. I did not mind them in September of 2008, or in September of 2013.

Too Much Orange Juice

Present Day.

I just got through doing five jury trials in five days. Prior to landing this job in June, I had been out of the courtroom for a year, so it felt good to pick a jury again and break out all of my trial materials.

Obviously, this was a busy week. I stayed in the office late, working on the cases and not sleeping much. I am lucky, though, in that I can take it. I can do this job and do it well, and it does not take a heavy toll on me...

Orange juice can be one of my favorite drinks. If I have not had it in a week or so, I can almost feel the healthy energy pouring into my body when I down a glass.

As nutritious as it is, I can also tell when I have had too much orange juice to drink.

For one, it is not as refreshing. My body is not craving it. Also, I can feel and taste the acidity of it. My tongue begins to get sore. If I continue to drink it, tiny ulcers will actually form in my mouth from the acid.

The same can be said of alcohol. I will never become an alcoholic. The warm, fuzzy feeling of a "buzz" is something that I enjoy as much as the next person, but I can also tell when I have put too much alcohol into my body over a period of days. First, it is an ache in my head, like my brain is being pickled in alcohol. When I get to that point, my tongue and stomach also both begin to reject the taste and the feel of it going down. Each sip seems like I am ingesting poison, and I have to stop. It becomes impossible to reach the "buzz," and sometimes it takes a couple of weeks to get the alcohol out of my system and where I can enjoy a drink again.

The analogy carries over to the jobs that I have held. Studying in law school was actually fun for me. Learning a new concept was like drinking a glass of orange juice when I was thirsty.

But the real world of law firm billing puts it all in a different form. Concepts of law are jammed down your throat, and you have to spit out product quickly, hour after hour, day after day without time for your mind to rest or think about anything else.

It is much like being forced to drink glass after glass of orange juice, every day. And the way my mind and body react to that kind of job is much the same as they react to too much orange juice or too much alcohol.

There are people (perhaps most people, in fact) who can take that kind of work environment without much difficulty. They also seem to be able to handle alcohol better than me... Unfortunately, many of the girls I was attracted to in years past could go out and get intoxicated on a nightly basis, with no apparent effect on their day time activities. They found guys to match, of course, and I found myself on the sidelines without many ways to relate to them.

The point of these comparisons is to say that my current job with the Public Defender's Office is different. You can pour on the case load and the trials, and it does not phase me. It is stressful with someone's life and future in your hands, of course, but it is a different sort of bodily stress than what I felt in the billable hour system, or working under a sales quota, or working for the Post Office.

It does not bother me that I wake up in the morning having dreamed all night about this job. I still get a good night's sleep if I am dreaming about a case. It does not exhaust my mind and body the same way as it did when I worked at the Post Office and had dreams about it, too.

So, I was aggressive this month in going to trial. Being aggressive makes me feel like I am doing a good job, though it kicked up a dust storm.

I like where I am at and what I am doing, and I hope to be able to continue to do it. I also hope that I am not giving everyone else too much orange juice to drink.