Monthly Archives: June 2012

the problem of deservingness

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It’s sunny in Vancouver.

That statement deserves its own paragraph. It’s sunny in Vancouver, and over the past few days I’ve been the recipient of much kindness: comments and notes and messages from friends that arrive without warning and make me wonder what I’ve done to deserve them. I’m crediting the sun.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept of deservingness. In class, my students and I discuss the ongoing conversation about student entitlement. We talk about the difference between deservingness and entitlement. What does the university owe you? I ask them. Who deserves high marks? They have lots of smart things to say about degree inflation, their immigrant parents’ expectations, the value of a number on a piece of paper.

But I also think about deservingness as it relates to love and love stories.

“You deserve to be happy,” my dad said to me once, when I confessed to him that I wasn’t sure if I should stay in my relationship.

“No I do not,” I snapped back.

What I was trying and failing to say was not that I thought I should be unhappy, but that I didn’t think deservingness was part of the equation when it came to love.

My friend Lisa’s award-winning essay about grief, living and dying, and happiness articulates a lot of the feelings I’ve had about deservingness but struggled to articulate. She talks about her father’s death, the addition of tumors, the subtraction of life. “Things are always being added, taken away,” she says.

And this is just it: Life gives us what we get. Regardless of what we deserve. Continue reading →

make good art

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Today my dog is sick. My apartment smells like spearmint-scented cleaner and dog poop. And I can’t leave. Or I can but I won’t because I don’t want to clean up after a sick dog twice today. So here I sit on the couch, summoning olfactory fatigue.

Confined as I am, I decided to jumpstart my creative process with a little inspiration. Typically, I am wary of advice and I’ve long suspected that anything created with the sole purpose of being inspirational is, by definition, uninspiring. I’m thinking of the books we kept on our coffee table when I was kid: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (and it’s all small stuff) and All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I may tend toward optimism at time, but even the titles of these books make me want to scream. All the stuff is not small! Some of it is big. And terrible.

You know what inspired me to become a more-relaxed person? The Big Lebowski. Oh man! I thought to myself the night I first watched the movie, I am so very un-dude. And then I put some real effort into doing something about it. It’s a beautiful example of something that is inspirational not by design, but by default.

Because I respect you, I will not post a youtube video of, brace yourself, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: The Musical. But I will warn you: If you are curious enough to google it, wait for a day when your apartment does not smell like dog shit. One’s stomach can only bear so much.

Still, I was inspired while sitting on my couch today. And I thought it was worth sharing. It’s a long video, but if you have time–or if you are stuck on your own couch–one that’s worth watching. Yes, Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech was written with the intention of inspiring a room full of art students, but he never sacrifices honesty for simplification.

In case you’re on the fence about watching, here is, from my purple love seat, the bit I like best today:

Remember whatever discipline you’re in […] whatever you do, you have one thing that’s unique. You have the ability to make art. And for me, and so many of the people I’ve known, that’s been a lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones. And when things get tough this is what you should do: Make good art.

Now I’m going to try to make some art. If it some of it is good, even better.