2010-2019

We finished watching all of the episodes in the HBO series, The Newsroom (2012-2014) created by Aaron Sorkin. I am sad to say that it was not renewed after the third season and I can see why. The show is about a news crew made up of complex characters trying their best to report unbiased investigative journalism, as they compete with everyone-can-be-a-celebrity culture, corporate profit margins, and advent of social media “reporting”.

The irony is that the show didn’t get renewed for the very themes it was highlighting. This made me sad because the show has some of the finest writing I have come across in any show–in fact, each episode is nothing but dialogue. That’s a demanding order and yet each episode delivers. The writing in True Detective is spectacular as well but it has that element of solving a heinous murder-mystery in addition to the dialogue.

Watching that show made me reflect on the last decade and social media’s impact on everything. Here are two short clips from the last season when the Social Media infection had spread beyond the respiratory system of our humanity to the brain.

After the show, I actually missed all the characters like one does after time spent with a good book. The show also made me realize that when I was younger I thought the kind of camaraderie the news team in the show had is how most schools operated. They had a common vision and were driven to do the right thing; everyone in an educational institution was committed to learning and growing. The last decade of my life has consisted of hunting for a school where one can actually teach and that has shown me otherwise. At best, each teacher is on her own; at worst, they will find a way to come after you if you are actually teaching. Public, private, charter, middle, elementary, high school, rural, urban, doesn’t matter. The worst part is that majority of people in the U.S. don’t know this reality even if they know someone in their families who is an educator. I am not one to blame teachers–the programs that are training them should know better and they should start by saying everyone is not cut out to be a teacher, just like if you can’t stand the sight of blood, you should avoid becoming a nurse or a surgeon. The part that concerns me the most is that no where do I read about the decline in parental responsibilities. I will read about the literacy wars, the new trends, the new embezzlement scandal, social justice-social media activism, but not a peep about what social media has done to parenting.

On a more positive note, the fellowship portrayed between the characters in the show did remind me of my ULWS writing group. I thought such friendships were a thing of elementary schools (something I never experienced) or in films. And this is coming from someone who has been tremendously lucky in friendships. But that’s the last of my three-part series. The first one was about ULWS which you read last week, here. This one is about the last decade.

When you have had a blog since 2009, you truly see the utility and ineffectiveness of lists. Especially those “ten-things” lists. Ten things I learned in the last decade. You realize you are always learning and unlearning and learning. Ten things I wrote. You realize that you wrote a lot but not as much as you would have liked. Ten things I read. You realize you read a lot and yet there is always more you didn’t even know about. Also, having a blog means that you have a cheat sheet for your reflections. What can you say that you didn’t in 2010? You notice that you are often repeating yourself. You are repeating yourself. Also, that you can’t find the post you wrote in 2010 in which you were reflecting on the beginning of a new decade. 

It’s been a lot of life and living this last decade. Life I define as things that are not in my control: the 2008 recession, state of education in U.S., children who were ten years old in 2010 are now twenty and on social media and driving (and making me a very defensive and grumpy driver). Living is how I have navigated life. 

I moved into 2010 with many intentions, for better and worse, those visions manifested. This last decade was filled with I-never-thought…and yet…

I never thought I would get married (this was not an unsettling thought but a matter-of-fact choice) and yet I got married in this last decade to a very patient, supremely intelligent, extremely disciplined and gifted artist. I have a lot of wonderful traits but living with me is not easy although I am fairly easy going. I am a Tiramisu of contradictory behaviors: I can be quite unpredictable at times although my students would say I am one of the most reliable adults they know. I am also moody and I can be very okay with melancholy despite holding onto hope. And somehow he loves me. That being said, because we are both artists and both need a lot of space, living together has been an adjustment. I never thought I would meet someone like him, primarily because I didn’t think anyone like him could exist in the same time and space as me, someone who navigated the world with the same moral compass as me.

I never thought I could or would leave New York City—in fact most of my decisions in the last two decades were based on that love—but with the Mayan’s prediction of the world ending in 2012, I too was expunged out of my world that was New York. Not long after that my sister and my brother-in-law moved there to wrap up their medical residencies. Her New York was not my New York and her New York is no more either. That is perhaps always been New York. It shapeshifts as soon as you enter the dream. Now, like Lahore, it’s a place inside my head that see-saws between fiction and memory. 

I never thought it would be so hard to find a school where you can actually teach; it took me a decade to find one and it is still no walk in the park. It should not take anyone a decade to find a place where they can teach. There should not be one such school for every 500,000 people. I don’t have a high tolerance for dysfunction as it is but especially so when it comes to creating literate citizens. I kept moving; I refused to settle. The reward is the mountain top; the reality is I am exhausted after having reached there in 2018. 

In 2019 my father-in-law passed away. His absence has been a perpetual lesson in what we think we are going to miss about someone and what we actually miss. And the distance between the two is a canyon that can only be crossed by staying up all night. I never thought I would miss him smoking his pipe—I hated it—but now all I think about is him standing at their front door, one foot in the house, the other out, the screen door half open, looking at a plant in the front yard or a memory, as smoke from his pipe would dissolve into the sky. Last night I had a dream where I had e-mailed my mother-in-law something and she replied “We…” and my dream-brain was like, she can’t possibly mean “we” because my father-in-law is not “here” and then I heard his voice, clear as can be: I am right here. He had a wonderful distinct voice and I woke up upon hearing it because I thought he was there. I miss him. 

In 2013 I independently published Collection of Auguries, when I only had readers of this blog, and knew of no writing community nor anything of the publishing world. I only knew stories and I had to put them somewhere. 

I completed Bread Loaf School of English in 2019, “giving up” every summer since 2015, but “giving up” doesn’t feel the correct choice of words because I was getting so much in return and in many ways my relationship with Bread Loaf will continue. I enjoyed all three campuses: Vermont, New Mexico, and Oxford. 

What I have been most grateful for in the last decade are my family (I include my in-laws here) and my friends. It’s always complicated to write accurately about family so I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that I wouldn’t be where I am without their emotional and financial support. This last decade was very trying because I made a commitment to a “writing and reading kind of life”.  

I also don’t like to talk or write much about friendships because I make friends easily and I am okay with their transient nature and don’t think twice before cutting someone out of my life if a person is toxic or disingenuous. This is not to say I don’t think about people from time to time or miss a friendship that no longer exists. I do but it’s seldom. I am not very nostalgic about people; places, yes, especially the disappearing places, but people, I understand they come and go in our lives. I know a lot of good, creative, wonderful people who are very busy so my expectations are different than most people’s. I also have a big family and we are all very close and I am sure this influences my expectations. There is only so much time. Moreover, I am married to someone I enjoy talking to and who listens to me and we are never out of things to discuss. There is only so much time. 

All that being said, I never expected some of my closest friends to gather in Philly to celebrate my 40^th. Why? Well, because schedules, lives, traffic, jobs, children, and they all don’t live in Philly. I just choose that as central location because New York City is just too unaffordable. These friends have been with me since teaching, law school, writing, not writing, and life and Life. They are okay if I write; they are okay if I don’t write. 

Who could imagine or ask for anything more? And yet, Life.

In November of 2018, I had the opportunity to attend University of Limerick’s Winter School and Sarah Moore Fitzgerald changed the course of my life by introducing me to a group of people who would become my second family in Ireland. They are exceptionally gifted writers and some of the best people on this planet. I can’t imagine my life, writing or not, without them. They remind me that people make a place home. More on that, next time.

Here is to a new decade: in the words of poet Mary Oliver, let us all “Be ignited, or be gone.”