Cleaning Out

I've made no secret of the fact that I've been all about the reality shows this summer. Frankly, there's not that much choice: summer viewing alternatives are baseball, game shows, repeats, or the kind of shows variously described as "gritty" or "quirky"... and none of the above score highly in the rankings around here (keeping in mind that in a group of two, the only "majority" vote is unanimous).

I always postscript the bit about reality shows with the bit about, "but only the quality ones." I should point out that even PBS does reality shows; what's more Quality than that? As a fan of the Quality Reality subgenre -- I pledge, no Flavor Flav here -- I'm already looking forward to the next season of Project Runway; till it gets here I was interested to check out Tim Gunn's Guide to Style.

If you're not a fan, Project Runway is a contest for aspiring fashion designers, and Tim Gunn (a professor at the Parsons School of Design) is the resident mentor and den mother who dispenses sage advice (often saving the contestants from themselves). He's fascinating to watch; he projects such an aura of warmth and caring, and he's the living embodiment of the phrase "constructive criticism".

His new show is a weekly fashion makeover: helping style-challenged women find a look that works for who they are. In the "preview" episode, he dealt with a 41-year-old mother/professional (which sounded vaguely familiar) who was trying to dress much younger, with extremely embarrassing results.

She was also holding on to a dress she wore when she was 21. She had no intention of wearing it again, and it didn't even fit with the rest of her misbegotten wardrobe, but she was keeping it because it represented her youth. Tim eventually convinced her that she wouldn't move forward with The New Her until she let go of the old her, and the dress/talisman.

The show really came home to me the other day at the recycling center. The weekend before we had been cleaning out a storage shed at camp -- OK, she was cleaning; I was sorting through "my stuff" As Directed -- when we came across 2 boxes of books I've been hauling around for 10 years.

They were math textbooks, a remnant of my previous teaching career; the cliche' is "a previous life", but really not that much of an exaggeration. It was, after all, 10 years, not to mention 3 homes and 2 states. I hung onto them for so long because...

Sorry to say I'm at a loss for a punchline there. I have no idea why. It's not like I was going to wake up one day and say, "You know what? I take it all back, I really should be a teacher," although with my dearth of imagination, if I failed at this career, it's unlikely I'd be able to think up a third one.

I had also kept a lot of papers, tests, projects, and notes from my college and graduate math classes. These of course were fragile, inscribed as they were on papyrus with a quill pen dipped in the juice of crushed berries, but I looked through a few nonetheless. In so doing, I discovered something perhaps astonishing, at minimum disheartening:

I was a lot smarter back then.

I found stuff, written in my handwriting, that I had clearly understood at that time -- material that to my 2007 eyes might as well have been written in [insert incomprehensibility cliche' here]. I should hasten to add, none of the profound stuff came from my teaching career; I spent most of that teaching 0-level courses (that's a zero). I told a friend that just the other day and she said, "I didn't even know they had 0-level courses." Oh yes, yes they do; believe, and tremble.

Obviously I haven't wrestled with higher-level math for a number of years, and I'm sure that if I just immersed myself for awhile I'd be right back blah blah blah yeah sure you would.

I think maybe I spent too many years with a subscription to TV Guide, and too much time talking to 3-year-olds (and have you ever seen a Strawberry Shortcake video??? I lose 10 IQ points every time I hear the theme song). No, my friends, that ship has sailed for ever and ever.

As always, I have no intention of being unduly self-effacing. I can still count my change at the checkout, and I have held a job which requires me to interact more or less equally with fearsomely bright adults. And I do have 90+ pieces of evidence that I can write a coherent, albeit over-punctuated, English sentence in a style best described as witty-ish. But I can say with a comfortable degree of accuracy that my days of aspiring to be "intellectual" are in all likelihood past and gone.

So that's how I found myself standing in front of a dumpster (recycling container, please; I'm not trying to fill up the landfill) emptying two cardboard boxes of old texts and even older papers and notes. It became for me almost a ceremony of laying aside the past and embracing who I am now: a middle-aged guy, wife & 2 kids, good job; fairly well-read, semi-informed, not a Nobel-prize-winning mathematician... but I'd like to think smart enough from most angles.