One tidbit that’s got a lot of commentary last week is a What do you think blog post titled “Should L.A. ban food trucks from parking on city streets? Tell us what you think.”. The post itself doesn’t offer much info on the proposed bans. The only real information is contained in this paragraph:

One proposal from Councilman Tom LaBonge asks city staff to study what other cities have done and to look into prohibiting trucks from parking at metered spaces in commercially zoned areas. The other calls for a report on the creation of specially designated catering-truck parking zones.

One of the repeating themes in the comments against food trucks is that food trucks are unfair competition for brick and mortar restaurants because they don’t have to pay rents. Another theme of the comments is that food trucks are a major public health problem because they’re unregulated. In theory this latter point is simply inaccurate and irrelevant because food trucks are permitted and inspected by the county public health department. In reality there almost certainly are a fair number of trucks out there that aren’t inspected so it’s not actually a crazy concern. However, I believe that food trucks display their permit so spotting an unpermitted one should be doable.

The fairness theme, though, is a fascinating one to me. The argument seems to be that it’s unfair to established restaurants in an area that the food trucks come in and lure away customers. On the surface–assuming that the trucks do follow the same food safety procedures as restaurants–the fairness critique strikes me as almost comically misguided. If I open a restaurant and am doing well until another restaurant opens down the street is that unfair? Of course not, it’s business. It may be personally tragic if my restaurant fails because the new one lures away my customers but at no point would it actually be reasonable for me to argue that all new restaurants should be banned because their competition is “unfair.”

The fact that the food trucks are using public parking spaces does complicate things a bit. We’re talking about commercial areas so it’s not like it’s a complete end-run around zoning laws, but it does potentially create density problems because effectively you’re adding businesses on the outside of the sidewalk in addition to those on the inside of the sidewalk. Additionally, the use of public sidewalk for interactions with customers (including waiting in line, ordering, waiting for food, and in many cases eating) is somewhat different than simply opening a restaurant next door to an existing one. (Except my experiences with certain chains in Westwood and Pasadena pretty clearly demonstrate that crowds milling around out front and blocking the sidwalk are not solely a food truck problem). I’m certainly not going to argue that food trucks are perfectly equivalent to restaurants or should be considered in that way. The ability to pick up and go where the demand is definitely gives a food truck an advantage over a restaurant. My argument is simply that the success of cheap, mobile food demonstrates that there are ways that established restaurants aren’t meeting consumer demand, and from a certain perspective if the demand is there it’s perfectly reasonable and fair that someone would step forward and meet it. Indeed I’m not sure what could be more fair.

Reading these critiques got me thinking about fairness and what it means to people. Life isn’t fair. There are an immense number of social structures in place that mean that how hard you have to work to succeed in the world depends a lot on where you’re born, who your parents are, and what resources are available to you. And that doesn’t even get at luck. Luck isn’t fair but it’s a major driving force in human life. So how do we think about “fair” when it comes to the formation of policies? Is it fair to use policy to try to correct the disadvantages that accumulate in a given life due to other policies? Is it fair to use policy to redistribute the wealth that people accrue in part due to luck (which we could call unfair accrual) and in part due to skill (which is perhaps fair accrual)? Is it fair that skills differ across people? That last question starts to take you down a Harrison-Bergeron-style rabbit hole.

So to what extent does it make sense to ask whether policies are “fair”? I would argue that it’s fundamentally impossible to correct all of the unfairness of the universe through rule and law. Does that mean that it’s a nonsensical concept when crafting laws? It certainly seems that many people would like for our laws to be “fair”. But are the there boundaries on that?

It is clearly true that the U.S. is a wealthier country than many others in the world and if you are lucky enough to be born to parents in the U.S. rather than parents in say, Zimbabwe, your chances of being healthy and well-educated are greater. Now, even if we argue that wealth in the U.S. was generated through skill rather than luck, it still is true that any person born today will benefit from the existing wealth (or lack thereof) in their country. Unless you believe in a deity with a plan who micromanages every aspect of human existence, you have to admit that whether you’re born in the U.S. or somewhere else is pure luck. So is it fair for U.S. policy to be focused on continuing to increase the country’s wealth? Certainly there are cases when we can argue that policy decisions are unfair in the sense that they create new disadvantages. But most people don’t look at policies that simply reinforce the existing advantage of having been born in a country that is richer than others as unfair. Even people who are for fairly radical redistributions of wealth typically do not argue for averaging out the standard of living globally.

So where are the lines? Personally I find myself thinking that there are a lot of legal structures in this country that are profoundly unfair but that fairness is not the grounds on which to reject those policies. I find that the more I think about policy the more I find myself thinking that life is unfair and luck and its lack play hugely into the advantages and disadvantages any individual faces. I’m against policies that compound the disadvantages that may come with who your parents are or where you were born but I’m not against them because I think they’re unfair. I’m against policies that compound disadvantage because I think they limit our growth as a society. I think they create a class of people who can’t live up to their potential and we all suffer for that. For instance I think the current system of funding for education, one that relies to large extent on the revenue from property taxes to fund schools, is profoundly broken because it gives children in wealthy communities a big advantage over children in non-wealthy communities. Sure that’s not “fair” but it’s also to my mind, unwise, because it lowers the overall education level of the population. Schemes for funding education that tied funding less to the community would be unlikely to dramatically lower the educational outcomes for middle and upper class communities, because kids in those communities already have lots of advantages in addition to well-funded schools. Moreover I’m not at all convinced that quality of education is a zero-sum game. That is, I don’t think that you have to lower the quality of education in some places to raise it in others. Maybe you keep the amount of money being spent on education constant you do to a certain extent. But I would argue that it’s likely that a more even distribution of funding might actually increase quality in some places more than it decreases it in others, thus raising the overall quality of education. I don’t advocate that because it’s more “fair.” I advocate it because I think a well-educated populace benefits everyone.

It seems to me that the question of how to regulate food trucks is really a question about use of public space and nothing else. Clearly there is a niche being filled by these trucks. Are the benefits from that large enough to outweigh the sidewalk crowding, parking, traffic and litter issues that come with selling food from mobile trucks parked in commercial areas? I don’t know the answer to that but to my mind asking about fairness doesn’t get us very far here.

I went to college in Madison, WI, which has a huge pedestrian population. It is, however, also very orderly. In fact, as a sophomore I wrote an argument for anarchy in my political theory class that basically made the case that centralized government wasn’t really necessary because social norms (and their accompanying societal sanctions) could achieve the same ends. I cited as examples the orderly progression of students up and down Bascom Hill (which has two main sidewalks and is incredibly crowded but mostly avoids pandemonium because on both sidewalks there’s two streams of students who avoid colliding by keeping right) and dorm elevator behavior (don’t you dare take the elevator to the 3rd floor unless you’re crippled or sick to the point of near death). The point was less that these were important examples than it was that these were totally self-organizing example. It was sort of a silly, simplistic political argument, but for a 19 year old who was absolutely NOT an anarchist, I think I made a reasonably solid case, particularly given that this class was my first experience in arguing for things I didn’t actually have an emotional attachment to. I have since realized, however, that the argument worked only because I was a sophomore at UW. Had I been a UCLA sophomore I couldn’t have possibly argued that self-organization leads to outcomes nearly as orderly as rules imposed from the outside, no way, no how.

I really do love a lot of things about LA but I spend a lot of time out in public grumbling to myself “why don’t these people get out of the way. One could argue that this is merely the shock of moving from a small midwestern city to a large over-crowded metropolis. And I’m sure that to some extent that is an explanation. However, in Madison I lived in the extremely dense downtown area and I’d hazard a guess that my daily experiences there actually brought me into the presence of way more people than my daily life in LA does. Even Target on the weekend can’t really hold a candle to the UW campus between classes. The truth is I think the difference is cultural. I think people in LA simply don’t pay attention. I think many people here think they’re entitled to walk through life without taking into account other people’s needs. In short, I think people here are RUDE! And it annoys me. A lot.

Take for instance one morning last week when I walked into the office kitchen to rinse out my coffee cup in the sink. The kitchen was crowded with a group of people waiting for the conference room to open up. Our kitchen has a large table in the middle and to get to the sink requires walking around the table. A woman was standing at the table directly in front of the sink. “Excuse me,” I said. Rather than scooting down the empty table far enough that I could stand fully in front of the sink, she shifted slightly to her right. “Oh well, at least I can now reach the handle on the faucet” I sighed to myself and set to washing my cup, while leaning slightly to actually be holding my cup over the sink (and then leaning more dramatically to reach the pile of paper towels to dry it). Then I turned to leave, only to discover that another woman had filed in behind the table such that my way out was completely blocked. Fortunately the table is just far enough from the wall that two people can pass comfortably. That is, they can if one of them makes an effort not to be standing directly in the middle of the available space. I walked toward the woman. “Excuse me” I said as I reached the point where I had to pass her. And she responded by swaying ever so slightly forward. She did not move her feet to step forward so I could pass. She did not step around the end of the table so that I could pass without even having to turn sideways to do so. Simply put, she did not get out of the way. I squeezed behind her as best I could, thinking the whole time “really? really you feel so entitled that you cannot bother to step forward six inches to make someone else’s life easier?” One might argue that she was so engrossed in her conversation that she did not hear my “excuse me.” I would respond to that by pointing out that a) being so absorbed in your own stuff that you don’t notice your effect on other people is itself rude, rude, rude* and b) she did respond, ever so slightly, to my entreaty, just not by getting out of my way.

(* yes, of course, I also find myself frequently in situations where I have lost track of my surroundings and accidentally put myself in the way. It’s an unavoidable thing in a crowded world. The difference, though, is that I realize it when the other person gets within excusing distance, at which point I apologize and I MOVE)

If this were an isolated sort of incident I would not make sweeping indictments about the courtesy levels of my fellow Angelenos. However, the days I work in the office, I walk about four blocks from where I park my car to the office. That’s 4 blocks, twice per day, 3 days per week (plus a walking to lunch on days when I don’t bring my own or go to the burrito place half a block away). The sidewalks in Westwood are wide but have many trees. This means that practically speaking much of the sidewalk is only two people wide. As result I find myself frequently stepping aside when I get to tree because I am being approached by people walking two abreast who show no sign of dropping back to single file so that I can pass without being knocked aside into the break in the sidewalk where the tree is. Never is this met with an “excuse me,” a “thank you,” or even a simple smile. It is as if it is perfectly natural to people that I would stop walking, and step aside to accommodate their passage. I can forgive this for tired mamas wrangling strollers and toddlers. But hear me, self-absorbed twenty-somethings walking with friends: you do not get a pass. You are simply being rude.

Again, this is not a story of a couple of isolate incidents. I was finding myself stepping aside, or significantly altering my path on this walk every single day. (And let’s not even talk about the guy who stood directly in the middle of the sidewalk on a dark rainy evening; did not move when I spoke that treasured phrase of passing, forcing me to brush against a wet tree to slide past him; and then, nearly immediately after I passed started following me to the parking garage, having apparently finally woken from his reverie and decided it was time to go home, without thinking for even a moment that suddenly starting to follow a woman toward a parking garage in the dark might scare her half to death). And we’re talking here just about the 4 blocks I walk between office and car. This pattern does not count the shopper who stops directly in the middle of the aisle to answer his cell phone, with no regard for those who might be walking behind him. Or the shopper who parks her cart in the middle of the aisle, leaving barely room for a person to walk around it, and certainly no room for a person with a cart to do so.

I have finally decided that I’ve simply had it and will not put up with this nonsense any more. And I am trying to train myself to walk the streets as if I am entitled, as if I am so important that I cannot be bothered to deviate my own course to accommodate the needs of anyone else. In short, I am trying to train myself to be rude. I set out to where I’m going, staying to the right, and walk a straight line. The effect is somewhat enlightening. First of all, I find it extremely uncomfortable not to deviate my path when approaching people who are obviously heading either straight for me, or too close to my own path to conform to my notion of comfortable distance. I have not yet had anyone collide with me but frequently people pass much closer than I would like. I did encounter one guy who appeared to be performing almost exactly the same experiment as me, except instead of keeping right, he kept left, meaning that we encountered each other on the edge of an otherwise empty sidewalk. He appeared to see me but made no move to actually deviate from his course. I was tempted to take the game of chicken to its conclusion out of pure curiosity but swerved out of his way for a couple of reasons. 1) I really dislike physical contact with strangers, particularly men, and slamming headlong into a strange guy on the sidewalk would not just be rude but would also trigger all my other body and space issues. But, more importantly, 2) my major complaint is with people–particularly small groups of people–who take no care to leave room for other people such that you have to stop and step aside to let them pass. Given that he had left the entire rest of the sidewalk free I couldn’t very well tar him with the same brush. And so I stepped into the middle of the sidewalk and walked around him.

I find it fascinating how uncomfortable it is for me to not step out of people’s way and how little effort other people seem to go to get out of my way. In most cases it would be trivial for one of two people walking abreast to slow their pace slightly and drop behind their companion for a moment. This almost never happens. And, as I have noted, no one has actually run into me but I am astounded by how close they come. I have also noticed that my patience for groups of people standing blocking the sidewalk (particularly at lunch outside restaurants) has dropped to zero. My “excuse me” as I try to get through no longer contains even the slightest hint of sweet courtesy. The tone is pure “pay attention and get out of the way.” But Friday I saw a guy who clearly was more fed up than me with the lack of courtesy displayed by others. A group stood in front of restaurant, taking up the entire sidewalk. The guy was approaching the group from one direction and I from the other (but he was closer). When he came to the edge of the group he paused. The guy at the boundary swayed slightly forward but did not actually move and so as he walked past him he elbowed him in back. I’m not a shover and I don’t aspire to become that rude. Trust me, though, I thought about it when the guy who’d just been elbowed–and had stepped forward when the elbowing happened–stepped back into his previous space immediately after, resulting in him being completely in my way when I reached him seconds later. And, of course, he did not move to let me through. Maybe it’s because I so dislike physical confrontation. Maybe it was because the guy was a lot bigger than me. Or maybe it was because I was full of tasty sushi and mostly content with life. But I settled for barking “excuse me” and when he didn’t move I broke my own rules and deviated from my path, and made use of the area around the adjoining tree to get around him, seething the whole time. Clearly, I still have a lot to learn if I want to achieve LA levels of rudeness.

This morning traffic was particularly light and it was a lovely sunny morning.   I eased into the left lane and relaxed into my drive.  Just after cresting one of the big climbs, I glanced down at my speedometer, and then up at my rear view mirror.  And cursed.  Fortunately, particularly light traffic means you don’t have to fight your way through 5 lanes when you get pulled over.

I am, as a rule, polite to people in general.  I am, however, particularly polite to cops.  To be perfectly honest, cops (and pretty much anyone else who routinely carries a gun) scare the bejeezus out of me and thus politeness is a way to try to speed up the process of getting out of their presence.  So, I pull over to the shoulder of the road, prepared to accept the ticket I so clearly deserve as politely as possible.  There was simply no arguing it.  I was speeding.  Significantly.  I know the ticket is going to be ugly but I figure it’s my own fault and there’s not much I can do about it. And so the conversation went something like this:

We exchange “good morning”s and he asks me why I was going so fast.  I reply a bit sheepishly that I wasn’t paying attention (and this is mostly true.  Though a more wholly true answer is that it’s a beautiful stretch of road, there was no one in front of me, and I was going downhill).  He asked for my license.  I gave it to him.  Still smiling and cheerful.  He asks me if I still live at the address on my license.  I tell him no.  (note to self, add a notecard with my current address to my wallet for these sorts of occasions).  He asks if I’ve ever gotten a ticket before.  This is where I sort of stumble.  “No,” I say “well, not here.  I got a ticket in WI once, years ago.”  Then he starts giving me a lecture about slowing down, noting that people drive this stretch of road very fast and there are lots of accidents.  He then notes that he caught my speed on a downhill and says “Do me a favor and slow down” and hands me back my license.  “I will,” I say, “thank you.”  As he’s walking away I wish him “have a nice day.”

And thus he gets back in his car and I sit for a moment, processing the situation.  Did he really just let me off with a warning?  Really?  I was going fast enough that this seems truly impossible.  But he gave me back my license.  And the end of the conversation sounded unequivocally like the end of a conversation.  So I decide that I have in fact been let off with just a warning and set about trying to pull into very light (but very fast) traffic from a dead stop, which isn’t fun since I don’t have as much visibility as I’d like.  Cop pulls out after me, passes me, and goes on his way while I continue to drive at exactly the speed limit in the far right lane.

This is a mostly unremarkable story.  Polite woman who drives too fast gets pulled over, is given a warning instead of a ticket, and goes about her day incredibly grateful for her good fortune.  However, I mentioned this incident on a message board I frequent and noted that I had no idea how I got out of the ticket.  One guy responded that it was likely because I was polite and respectful and added “I wonder if that would have spared Henry Louis Gates Jr. a world of hurt.”

It’s an interesting response to me in part because when incidents like the one with Gates happen one of my first reactions is always something along the lines of “well, yeah, what did you think would happen if you copped an attitude with the police?”  Which is not to say that I think the arrest was in any way legitimate.  Just that it didn’t surprise me, particularly.  But Chalicechick makes the, very reasonable in my opinion, point that being rude to cops isn’t actually illegal and that the likely consequences of being rude to cops varies according to your skin color.
And indeed, I suspect that the likely consequences of being polite and respectful to cops varies too. Who knows why I managed to land myself a warning instead of a hefty ticket. Probably being polite had a lot to do with it but I suspect that the fact that I look totally boring and law-abiding (no matter what stereotypes you employ) had a lot to do with it too. And of course there’s the dumb luck part.

Perhaps it’s a sign I should buy a lottery ticket. But I think I’ll stick with just feeling generally cheerful and fortunate. (And, of course, driving more slowly)

*(As an aside I have to note that any such figure who responds to personal pleas for aid that I could fathom would probably spend all his time shouting “if you children don’t stop your whining and bickering, I swear I’m going to turn this universe around.  I mean it!”)

My hope, then, comes from my faith in humanity.  Which is to say, people got us into this mess so people are going to have to get us out.  It’s small hope indeed but I maintain it by willfully not thinking too much about the messes we make and instead focusing on the good and the beautiful.  I studied inequality and poverty long enough that I’d be an ugly person to be around if I didn’t compartmentalize my knowledge of human ability to build ugly hierarchies into a neat little box with a label reading “really not our best quality but not the sole defining bit of human nature.”

And so, this brings us to lunch.  Whatever horrible things you may be able to blame on humanity, you have to admit that the invention of the burrito makes up for it just a little.  And so I sat with my burrito at my normal lunch hangout when a Spanish-language version of “Unchained Melody” began playing on the radio.  This lead the gentleman at the next table, who I mentally refer to as Westwood Local Crazy Dude, began regalling the women at the table in front of me with the story of how the song was written about Chino prison.  WLCD works for a local small store–if one of the previous rants of his I overheard is to be believed, I haven’t taken to fact checking–and fond of harping on the negative aspects of current U.S. society and economy.  Today was no exception and his lecture on “Unchained Melody” soon divolved into commentary on incarceration rates in the U.S. (higher than any other industrialized country and many fascist regimes as well), the ranking of California schools compared to other states (last, according to him) and divorce rates (68%, again according to WLCD).  Fortunately, since I was sitting behind WLCD I could giggle to myself at his ramblings (none of which ever really strike me as patently false, just inappropriate for the setting) without getting drug into engaging with him.  Meanwhile his audience just wanted to get back to their lunch but he continued on his tyrade on the ills of America.  One of the women pointed out “well if you don’t like it, you can leave.”  This lead him into a line of criticism beginning with “no one else wants us” and ending in some horrible world in which 1/3 of American teenagers are drug addicts.

Meanwhile it lead me to thinking about the “if you don’t like it you’re free to leave” response to political criticism.  While I think it is perhaps a perfectly reasonable answer to negative diatribes from a neighboring table while one is lunching, it isn’t typically a reasonable answer in real discussions.  Of course there are situations where leaving really is the right response to unhappiness with a system.  But too often both the directive “if you don’t like it leave” or the threat “Screw you guys, I’m going home” are used to block–or in the case of the threat to avoid the effort of making–actual constructive criticism.

And so my thinking circles back to California and the question of where exactly it is this hand basket is heading.  The current state of the budget, paired with other doomsday thinking (like how long can we survive on borrowed water), does have me wondering about how badly I really want to stay here.  I think in at least the short term B. and I are committed to staying.  If nothing else, home ownership makes the prospects of leaving more complicated.  The current state of the state, though, has me wondering if I shouldn’t be giving some serious thought to where else I might be happy.  At the same time, though, if I feel so strongly that “if you don’t like it leave” isn’t the right answer to criticism, does that perhaps suggest that there might be better ways to respond to my fears about the state’s future than looking elsewhere.  A thought to consider, I suppose, as I continue to ask myself what I want to be when I grow up.

p.s. I’m getting over a nasty cold.  To help fight off some remaining congestion (primarily in my ears, which is worrying me since it feels much like the early stages of an ear infection) I took some Sudafed this morning.  Of course because I am otherwise thinking of myself as no longer “sick” I consumed exactly as much caffeine as I normally do on work days (2 to 3 cups of coffee in the morning and a diet coke with lunch).  The combo has left me a touch, uh, wired.  So if this post is touch flippant and scattered it’s because … oooh, shiny!

More than that, though, I find myself longing to write.  I find myself trying to imagine putting together a story that would grip readers.  I find myself sinking into that feeling that there is a poem at the tip of my pen waiting to be born.  But, despite this, I fail to bring pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).  I bought a notebook for poetry and a journal.  Both are still nearly empty.  I reopened an old poetry project.  I copied and pasted a few lines, moved a few things, wrote a draft of a poem that I think fits into the series.  But ultimately I have done almost nothing to reclaim the reality of writing.  It has been some 10 years since I thought of myself really deeply and primarily as “poet.”  Now if you asked me to describe myself I don’t think it would even make the list.  I feel the need to change that but I’m not sure how.  I don’t think I will ever publish novels.  But I would like to at least write poems.  I would at least like to again feel that words are friends welcome to drop into my home at their slightest whim.

Perhaps to that end I will try to organize my old poetry that I like into an online collection (as it used to be on previous iterations of my web spaces).  Perhaps I will succeed in writing here more, as I keep telling myself I should.  At the least I will continue to read and to long for words, with the hope that by inviting myself into their homes I will open the door for things to flow the other way.  And I’ll stick that poetry notebook back in my purse where it belongs.  Maybe I’ll even fold it open for a few minutes with pen in hand first, just to see what happens.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a great deal wrong with factory farms and how we get our meat, milk, eggs, cheese, etc. (but I think there’s a great deal wrong with how most people get their vegetable matter too). Here’s the thing, though, animals play a pretty important role in feeding people.  In fact, in some climates a local diet that includes no animal products would be pretty much impossible.  Animals have the power to take things that we can’t or won’t eat and turn them into things we can and will eat (as a tremendously oversimple example, cows turn grass into milk).  Arguments against eating meat for environmental reasons inevitable cite the number of acres necessary to produce food for a given animal versus the number of acres necessary to produce an equivalent number of calories from beans or other high protein plant product.  Those are compelling arguments, but the thing is that they only work if you assume that all the land that would be used to feed the livestock could be used for agriculture.  In practice the way things are set up now that assumption is usually true.  Most animal feed is grown on land that could be used to feed people.  However, if you want to be “sustainable” our current system of heavily irrigated and artificially fertilized agriculture doesn’t fit the bill.  And once you start trying to produce the vast majority of food locally, in most areas you’ll find bits of land that aren’t well suited to agriculture for whatever reason but can produce things that animals can eat.   And I suspect that many people trying to live off small acreage would find that supplementing your soybeans with eggs (and the occasional chicken old enough to not be a good layer anymore) is a good use of space.

Of course the problem with these arguments is that sustainability is pretty much a pipe dream given our current population levels and lifestyles.  Current agriculture is based heavily on cheap oil.  Our day-to-day lifestyle in this country is based heavily on the availability of cheap calories.  There may be technological advances in the future that allow us to continue to produce sufficient cheap calories to allow most of a population of the current size to spend most of the day not worrying about procuring and preparing food but in the meantime pretty much nothing about our lifestyle is sustainable.  Meat probably isn’t even likely to be the worst of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for trying to eat lower down the food chain and paying attention to the source of your food and all that stuff that populates your life.  But eating organic and local isn’t going to save us.  Not even if we brow-beat others about how unsustainable eating a single chicken and a pound of ground beef per month is.

I have to admit that in some ways this was a very hard movie for me to watch even though the abuse of the student was never made explicit (nor was it ever demonstrated unequivocally that it even happened).  As a high school student I was sexually harassed by a teacher (only touched inappropriately once–and in a way that he might have been able to claim was accidental though it clearly wasn’t–but habitually the recipient of unwanted attention).  I fought to avoid it in my own ways, which did not include officially reporting any of the incidents.  In part this was because the ickiest of the behavior took place before their was a specific policy in place for the reporting of inappropriate behavior.  In part it was because the teacher in question was extremely popular and I knew standing up to him would leave me even more ostracized than I already was.  In part it was because even though his behavior was clearly inappropriate and intentional to me, it would have been trivial for him to argue that his behavior was accidental or being misinterpreted.  I resisted where I could but mostly spent four years of my life with my arms crossed tightly across my chest taking one step back for every step he took into my space, mentally scanning the space behind me lest he back me into a trophy case.

And I think it is that question of institutional reception of complaints that made Doubt so hard for me to watch.  In some sense I ultimately didn’t really care if Father Flynn was guilty in the movie, because the figure of Sister Aloysius so dead set in her conviction, and her willingness to use what small power she has however she can to get him out, is so gripping.  There were plenty of people who could have been that sort of institutional advocate for me.  For the most part I don’t blame them for not doing so.* But I do sometimes wonder what would have happened had there been someone willing to take up the fight on my behalf. I’m not entirely sure that it would have made a wit of difference. I’m not sure I would have been able to bring myself to put myself through the sort of fight that would have been required. And I’m not entirely convinced that the end results would have been worth the effort. Of course Doubt doesn’t exactly leave one feeling that such interventions are guaranteed to be useful anyway.

The movie is interesting in its character development, though I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure I believed any of the interactions. I also wasn’t quite sure I liked being left at the end of the movie with no solid answers. I suspect that the writers’ intent in the titling of the movie was not to describe the feelings one might feel when asked if they liked it. Then again maybe my annoyances with the film were rooted more in the subject matter than the telling of the story itself.

* The exception to this is the guidance counselor who, when I started trying to talk about some of what had happened in the previous years said “unless you want to file a formal complaint, I don’t want to hear it.”  Certainly I understand that the statement likely stemmed from the frustration of having a teacher who was widely known as a dirty old man allowed to remain because no one had the courage to deal with it.  But I was 16 years old.  Trying to bully me into action was hardly the right way to deal with the problem.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

But what of the art of quitting? It is much like the art of losing, I think. But I am realizing lately that though I thought perhaps I had mastered the art, quitting is not easy. And it is not contained simply in a single act. But, like Bishop’s losing, it is an art that can be mastered. And in the end, I think I can conclude that like losing, quitting is no disaster. Even if it has taken me years in some cases to convince myself of that (much longer, I might add, than it took to convince myself that any of the things I have lost in the past were not disaster).

I think I was in my late 20s before I ever quite anything important. There were jobs I left for other jobs, of course. Projects I handed over to other people. And of course there were things I did earlier in my life that I stopped doing as I got older. Those were acts of quitting, I suppose, but they weren’t conscious acts. I did not wake up one morning and decide to quit playing the clarinet. Nor did I, one afternoon, decide to quite writing poetry. When I started college I did not decide that I would quit reading fiction. I just simply couldn’t find the time for years on end.

The first really important thing I quit, consciously, intentionally, and with a great deal of emotional angst was the church board. The second major thing I quit was the church itself. That decision process actually took a very different form, which I will discuss in a moment, and chronologically might be said to have come after the third major thing I quit, which was graduate school. Effectively in the span of two years I quit my association with the two institutional structures that had nearly completely defined my life since moving to L.A. I broke those ties intentionally. And, though, I do not regret any of these three decisions, they were much bigger decisions than the simple words “I quit” can possibly convey. And I am coming to realize that it is only the first of these decisions that I can talk about without feeling I need to justify it, though in many ways that decision is the most complicated to really explain completely.

I quit the church board because I was overwhelmed, exhausted by institutional politics, and needed to focus on school. That was the story I told, anyway. And no one ever faulted me for it or delved much deeper. In reality I quit for those reasons and because my life had been falling apart in some very specific ways for a couple of years before then and I desperately needed to extricate myself from a series of situations that were preventing me from putting the pieces back together. After leaving the board I continued in my role as treasurer for the church for about a year and a half. During that time I went to services progressively less often. Eventually I only went when I had to due to my role as treasurer.

If you had asked me at the time I would have told you I was taking a break. I couldn’t bear to really “leave.” It was my home in many ways. After I resigned as treasurer I ceased going entirely. Again, I thought of it as a break. There were things about my relationship to the church, and to some of its members, that I needed to work out. I honestly believed that I would go back. I’m not sure when I started to realize that I wasn’t going back but slowly I have had to come to terms with the fact that the reasons I ultimately left outnumber the reasons I stayed exponentially. In some sense I stayed because I didn’t know how to leave, because I had never quit anything big before. And in some sense I failed to ultimately frame my leaving as such to myself because I wasn’t sure how really to define myself in relationship to it. So much of my identity was tied to being a Unitarian Universalist and to being a member of that particular church that I didn’t really know how to define myself without it. Plus there was a great deal of trauma that came with my time there that I think I really didn’t want to face. Some of it was trauma from various things having to do with the institutional structure of the church and being in a power role there. Much of it was trauma of problematic interpersonal relationships that I simply lacked support to deal with. Looking back at things it is clear to me now that the right way to deal with those traumas was to leave, to learn the life lessons of how they happened, and try to protect myself from them in the future.

By clear to me now, I mean that in the past week I have realized that I am not going back. Period. I am not taking a break. I am not a former member who might go back. No. I quit. I am not sure when I quit. Did I quit 3 years ago when each Sunday morning would come and I could not will myself to get out of bed, get dressed and go, because I needed “just a little more time” to deal with things. And the thing is that I needed to come to that before I could move on? Or did I quit last week when–after a conversation in which I revealed much about certain aspects of the deep emotional pain that caused me to leave in the first place–I was driving home and suddenly had the thought “I’m not going back. I’m just not.” I think really it was then that I quit. At least it was then that I found myself feeling free enough to start thinking about visiting churches again. Because I think I needed to really really believe that I was not going back before I could feel justified in looking elsewhere for that home.

Obviously those two instances of quitting were complicated and the consequences took awhile to shake out completely in my life. Quitting grad school was different in some ways and the same in others. Everyone working on a PhD thinks about quitting. If they say they haven’t then they’re probably lying (maybe not, but I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone sincerely tell me they’ve never thought of quitting). But there is a great deal of shame that gets tied up in actually quitting, particularly when you’ve been at it for awhile. I quit the summer after my sixth year of graduate school. I was already a year past the department’s guidelines for when you’re supposed to take the oral exam defending your dissertation proposal. I essentially had until fall quarter to put together a proposal. And I could have done that. But one day it suddenly occurred to me that not only did I not want to but I didn’t have to. It was a complete and total epiphany. I couldn’t wait to leave the social event we were at so that I could tell B. that I’d decided to quit (he was considerably less excited by this revelation than I was). I will admit it took me considerably longer to tell other people, like my advisor and my boss. And there are lots of people that I never told at all. Indeed many of the people I went to graduate school with probably don’t know that I left, unless they heard it from one of the few people I did tell.

I don’t regret the decision. And really I’m not ashamed of it. I did what I needed to do for me. In some sense I “failed” but really only in the sense that I failed to force myself to continue doing something that was making me miserable just because I could continue doing it. I have no doubt in my mind that I could have successfully finished my dissertation had I wanted to. But ultimately it came down to the fact that I didn’t want to. And I couldn’t come up with a single good reason why I should put myself through something that was making me miserable in those circumstances.

Why then am I only now starting to openly talk about the decision outside my circle of close friends and family? In part it is because it is an easy decision to explain to people who aren’t in academia. It’s harder to explain to those that are. And it is particularly hard to explain when the answer to the question “so what are you going to do now” was a resounding “I don’t know.” Ultimately I don’t really know what I’m going to do in the long-term. I have ideas. I have dreams. I have aspirations. But in the short-term I have two research jobs that I enjoy a great deal and give me a great many of the things I loved about being in grad school without also weighing me down with the things I hated. Plus they pay me and give me health benefits. So you know, win-win.

I woke this morning from a dream about extricating myself from one of the aforementioned personal relationships that was related to my leaving my former church (see how I did that?). And as I woke the words that popped into my head were “it’s time to shed dead weight.” In many ways quitting was an act of doing exactly that. Some relationships, some processes, some expectations can be fixed when they are problematic. But sometimes you find yourself doing things that simply no longer make sense. You find yourself trying to finish them only because you started. And that is the time to practice the art of quitting. Walk away. As with losing, at first it may look like disaster but in the end, the art of quitting’s not too hard to master.