My final decision to bring this newsletter to life was a slow decision, and it only moved from theoretical to actual because of encouragement from a number of you back in December. Conversations with Dorothy, Layla, and Michelle in particular pushed the idea forward, and their inboxes were the first to receive it. Here on week 33—Nick Swisher’s jersey number, by the way—and with the previous 24 written amid the pandemic, I’m surprised but proud that I’ve continued to write something substantial in this format each week to share.
The concept of the newsletter, though, didn’t originate with anyone receiving the newsletter but with with two well-known sportswriters: Keith Law and Will Leitch. I’ve been reading Law, a former MLB analytics official and scout who writes for The Athletic after a long career at ESPN, since college, while Leitch, the founder of Deadspin who is a prolific writer, reporter, and author now, I only began following in the last few years. Both men are known for writing about sports but also their other interests: Law reviews books, board games, music, and movies on his personal site Meadow Party, while Leitch’s movie reviews were actually what first brought his work to my attention (and nudged my film hobby forward). Both men are very interactive with readers, too: Law does frequent open chats, and he has answered my mental health questions, praised my old Twitter username, and even left unsolicited encouragement on a failed blog I started years ago; Leitch responds to e-mails and hand writes letters in correspondence with readers such that I have my two responses in the drawer by my bed. These are all cool things that neither man needs to do, but both are generous with their time and the sheer volume of what they share outside their official job description is staggering.
More specifically, though, both also maintain regular newsletters. Law’s is less regular but features a short essay preceding narration about recent projects and a list of links to his writing; he shares about his own history with anxiety and travels in a way that feels like catching up with an old acquaintance in a restaurant (back when such was possible). Will’s weekly entry, on the other hand, appears like clockwork on Saturday mornings. He too includes an essay followed by a few regular features as well as links to all of his professional pieces that week.
Law’s typically provides me a ten minute-read followed by thirty minutes reading his chat transcripts, but Leitch’s is a longer read for me. I slow my pace to a point where it feels less like content consumption than correspondence, and, when I finish, I always click the little heart (he both uses, and is the reason I thus use, SubStack) and then I just walk around and think about what I read. I actually schedule my newsletter-writing day for Thursdays so that I am not influenced by Will’s story or focus when writing my own.
Devouring their more personal narratives regularly pushed me toward this format rather than a blog. Receiving their newsletters in my email certainly isn’t the same as receiving a letter from a friend...but it doesn’t feel that different to me. And, on those occasions when I do write directly to them, they always respond, which separates them from, frankly, many people I know personally. I have a hard time referring to them as Law and Leitch here, because I think of them as Keith and Will in my head.
This newsletter thing has been a great positive for me at an important time when connections became suddenly rarer and more distant (four hugs since March 10th!) and the credit really does go to them along with my gratitude.
Which makes what I did on Saturday night all the more questionable and embarrassing: I wrote an overlong, indignant letter to Will about something I found objectionable in his previous week’s newsletter.
Except...that’s not quite true.
I wrote an overlong, indignant letter to Will over a pair of quotation marks.
Ahem.
The punctuation in question appears amid a great piece reflecting about decisions Will made during college but inspected through the lens of a family man living under quarantine in a college town suddenly full of new college students starved for experiences. The sentence (and fateful marks) are unobtrusive and honest amid a paragraph in the final third of his essay:
I’m not talking about the me of today, the one terrified that his third and first grader are going to be locked in their homes staring at a computer screen for “school” at the worst possible stage for their development, the one who wants to keep his family safe, the one who stays up at night staring at the ceiling and worries about it all crashing down.
You would be forgiven if you don’t immediately understand what inflamed me about that sentence...because there’s probably nothing even mildly objectionable about that sentence. A father with younger elementary-aged kids laments the current state of things, expressing concern for his boys’ development while learning remotely. These are valid concerns that I am wholly sympathetic to, particular as someone who fully understands that the most lasting lessons from school are rarely the academic ones.
But...he describes it as “school” in quotes like this non-ideal iteration of education doesn’t count or like it isn’t real. I read this with those quotes and get a facetious “it’s a joke and futile and without value and let’s stop pretending this is school” vibe. It says all of the investment people are making to extract positive benefit from it is misguided and teachers are quack salespeople hawking bath water as miracle tonic and kids might as well ignore it and anyone giving hours to making “school” better is a Sisyphean clown with a boulder shaped like Google Classroom who doesn’t realize how pointless the whole exercise is because it doesn’t and can’t work.
Note: He says none of this. He believes none of this, besides that Zoom is a pale approximation of a day spent running around a playground making friends and learning to learn amid the wiggles from a fellow small human being whose smile requires no accounting for WiFi connection. There is nothing objectionable here about Will or Will’s words.
But that message I conjured from those little quotation marks was too strong, because other people I know won’t stop sending me that message I embedded into Will’s punctuation. And those people just ignore me when I counter their point. They are loud and, sadly, they are everywhere, and I can’t really unload on them.
So I unloaded on Will.
...
Fine.
So I unloaded on Will over a park of quotation marks.
I like to think I was eloquent in my rage. There were definitely good points about optics, since people railing against the current logistics of school may read into those quotes as a dismissal of both the product and the people forced to engineer it, but it was a totally emotional argument. Interestingly enough, I didn’t need to stand up for myself against those quotation marks’ implication because, while many things are tedious and much harder than before in this remote learning world, I’ve been training for this awhile; back surgery and video solutions taught me the ropes, I’m still working closely with people I am fully comfortable with, and those spring BC office hours and daily attendance forms proved that there was value in this “school” he described if I mined the right areas.
Truly, I think my leap to defense was more in support of those teachers who are learning everything from scratch, from new programs and apps to faceless interaction, often while caring for kids not unlike Will’s own. It’s an impossible situation that should be hopeless (given we had less than a month to really get ready for this format), and yet...it’s happening. Nothing is hiccup free, but we are one week into school—no quotes—and kids are learning, things are different but not without value, and those teachers for whom this isn’t natural continue to work their tails off to put that noun in the middle of his quotation marks. I still can’t overcome my anxiety for our department’s group chat, but there have been thousands of texts sent about everything from Zoom bombers to attendance mechanics to mastering the numerous video platforms that have become our classrooms. Yesterday there were 97 messages exchanged between first and fourth period, troubleshooting and laughing and commiserating and advising.
And their classes continue. They are different from before and not what anyone among us wants—even me, who was prepared for this both it was necessary—but they’re working because teachers everywhere have decided to blow up all that they know and sacrifice even more time to invest in “school” so that it can feel even a tiny bit like school. This isn’t said to induce guilt in anyone but because it’s the truth other people refuse to hear: this is school now. There isn’t some other option we’re overlooking or some idea we just refuse to try; this is the optimal path when any case of COVID-19 on a campus or in a classroom will shut it down, interrupting any educating and interacting that might have been, and sending us right back to Zoom except in disarray rather than as a matter of course.
This is what we have. Let’s challenge ourselves to not treat it as “school” but as school. Because it is school.
But that is neither here nor there, because the truth of my words to Will do not justify their existence. This letter was getting flustered by traffic and biting the head off your brother. This is an ump blowing a call and the coach flinging an empty water bottle into the fence. This is screaming in the dark when your emotional balloon is full and there’s no one around to coax out the real things bloating it from inside.
I can’t hide from the truth: I, righteously but wrongfully, took out my anger on someone I admire and consider a role model rather than anyone or anything truly igniting my frustration. And I need to apologize.
Will, by the way, literally replied to my message at the crack of Georgia dawn the next morning. He clarified what he meant, talked about his kids and his valid concerns for what they’re missing; he apologized for what I took out of his punctuation, even though he really didn’t need to since, of course, he meant no disrespect. The man expressed gratitude for his sons’ teachers and wished me luck with the school year. It was a sizable, thoughtful response to my substantially over-reactive, misdirected rant over the implication of two measly quotation marks. Will is the kind of person who would respond to a message like mine with introspection and support, rather than delete it and move on with his complicated and claustrophobic-but-loving life.
I owe him an apology, of course. I woke up Sunday morning (before his message arrived) and felt the urge to immediately compose one. The dissonance of treating someone badly morphs into intense guilt for me, and the thought of dissolving a relationship over my own error tears me up. The only way to combat that, I’ve learned, is to apologize when I am wrong but sometimes also when I might not be; such a choice demonstrates that I value the other person more than my own pride, which is the truth. (It wasn’t always true for me, but what matters is that it’s true now.)
But I decided not to let myself off the hook so easily. I know I had a point in what I unnecessarily wrote to him, and I felt it was important to carry with me during this first full week of school. Responding to the group chat is still beyond my reach—not sure there’s medicine for that—but when problems popped up, I sent direct messages with fixes and support, even to individuals I haven’t yet officially met. I ignored a potentially-baiting text from someone rather than give them attention better spent on finishing problem set solutions and grading homework promptly on Google Classroom. And I decided I need to publicly acknowledge what I did by writing about it here, even though, contrary to his name, Will won’t read this.
But that’s okay. Because this essay is for me. I mean, it’s for all of you and to maintain the sensation that I am still connected to all of you, but this is ultimately my writing exercise. This is how I grapple with my error in a way that puts it on display so that I can own it, but also so that it lets me channel it into a lesson. Other people I care about and love read this, but so do random internet people, so writing this lets me also share the legitimate righteous fuel behind my anti-quotation mark crusade. Both my remorse for my message and the legitimate truth that led to it need to be said.
But an apology to Will is between me and him, and it should suit my connection to him less it becoming as self-serving as my original message. So I will hand write it and mail it to him.
And, because I have chosen a good role model in him, he will probably write back. Again.
Content Consumption
FILM
Scary Movie (2000)
Watching a juvenile, irreverent parody of the horror genre should be fun. Horror movies are rife with contrivances that make eyes roll when executed clumsily, and a movie aiming to generate laughs from the inside has potential. Wes Craven’s Scream did precisely this. Scary Movie saw Scream, became obsessed not with subversion of a genre but imitating Scream, and then ratcheted up the seediest elements of a teen-centric film to their grossest points. I can appreciate the fourth wall-breaking elements of Scary Movie, and it did have its funny moments; the scene when they hit the creepy old man, he gets up unharmed, and the teens ignore his strong health to dispose of his very forgiving (and alive) body made me laugh. This scene was funny, taking a dark scenario from I Know What You Did Last Summer and twisting it into a gag. This was a rare treat, though: the majority of Scary Movie opts instead for juvenile jokes that merely take scenes of Scream and add grosser, dinner elements. These choices can and do land when they parodying dark horror (Shannon Doherty’s locker room scene is also great) and offering meta commentary on the genre (the “teens” lament how horror movies cast obvious adults as teens) but they fail when simply parodying Scream because Scream is already satire! I imagine a movie like this is meant for the cultural moment and enjoyed with immature fans on a rowdy Friday night in a packed theater but...yeah, it sucked. It’s moment passed for me. (Shout out to an almost-unrecognizable Anna Faris as the Neverland Campbell central character.)
Ya No Estoy Aquí (2019)
A melancholy film that conveys a powerful loneliness, Ya No Estoy Aquí follows seventeen-year-old Ulises (Juan Daniel Garcia Treviño), the leader of the Terkos, a band of young cumbia music fans in Monterrey, Mexico. Ulises and his crew stand apart from the world; their stylized hair, their attire, the distinctive dance—all emulate anachronistic cultures in a way that seems exotic to tourists but leaves them on the outskirts of society, both culturally and physically at their glorious hangout that overlooks the city. Ulises wants nothing more than to listen to cumbia and dance cumbia, slowing the songs down to a crawl that offends even native Colombian fans, but when he pisses off a violent gang (over, what else but their insulting of cumbia) he escapes to New York and finds a new loneliness without his Terkos. Beautifully shot amid a fascinating city with elevation changes and bridges and labyrinthine corridors, the setting often evokes Ulises’ own struggle; he’s trapped within the city by people who don’t hear what he hears and amid dangers that lurk when drugs are involved. That the film weaves his present and past together creates a sensation of disrupted time and place, and that is Ulises’ dilemma: he doesn’t fit in these other worlds until his headphones go in and he can ignore others’ voices and rhythms. Ulises must ultimately decide between his own safety abroad and his longing for the only sense of belonging he felt, but, to its final haunting shot, Ya No Estoy Aquí refuses to grant its protagonist lasting peace.
I’m exhausted at this point, but I’m not out of gas. There have been successes already, and there are things I’m looking forward to even. But there is also that exhaustion that for not is simply exhaustion but threatens to become stress. But it isn’t for now so I can simply try to ride the wave and develop positive routines.
For now.