Volume 2, Entry 50: A Violent Exercise
Five years ago, on the first day of winter break, I saw Moana in theaters. I enjoyed it a lot, particularly the songs, but it also marked the first film in which my penchant for falling asleep at the movies became clear. I drifted off after Moana and Maui met up only to wake up in the middle of “Shiny” very confused about why a giant hermit crab was crooning on the screen.
But Moana was actually my second event of that first day of that break. Before meeting David and others at the theater for the 12:20pm show, I had joined about half of the math department to participate in an active shooter drill being run by the police on our campus.
I was in seventh grade when Jonesboro happened. That shooting was the first to actively frighten me. For one, it was at a middle school in Arkansas; I was in middle school and I was from Arkansas. But that was more eerie than anything; what truly scared me was the plan’s simplicity: the shooters pulled a fire alarm midday and began firing from the nearby woods as staff and students filed out. Forest aside, that mechanism felt horrifyingly possible; I could picture it happening with intense clarity. I had nightmares about it. There’s actually a recurring fictional school that I’ve seen in dreams since then that matches the Westside Middle School in my head. Jonesboro made me aware that large-scale violence was possible at school.
I was in eighth grade when Columbine happened and that one hit even closer to home. My godparents live in Littleton, Colorado, not ten minutes from Columbine High School. My godfather taught at a middle school that feeds Columbine; some of those killed were in his history class years before. His daughters were younger than me so there was no panic about them being present, but that thread of connection combined with the intense stories and urgent coverage on every channel left a strange scar on my mind matched only by 9/11. People laugh over 420 jokes today, but I have yet to disassociate that number from 4-20-1999.
It was those two events that most inspired me to instantly sign up for the active shooter training exercises. One degree away from two school shootings, I felt magnetically drawn to the event, like I needed to be there. Like I owed it to the people at Westside and Columbine to be there, and even more like I owed it to my own students and colleagues to be as prepared as possible should, God forbid, we ever end up in the same situation.
The exercises themselves were harrowing, no matter their staged quality. In the first exercise, a police officer dressed as a civilian walked into the quad with a replica assault rifle. He had been introduced to us volunteers in the MP room moments before but seeing him there, systemically moving and firing around our quad, sent my heart rate skyrocketing. We had to scramble between areas on the command of the officers present and I sprinted each time as though my life depended on it. I could never look at the “shooter” for long; my mind tried to block him out every time I did, like it was erasing his existence so I could pretend that he wasn’t there.
The second exercise affected me again. This drill involved a shooter moving across campus toward classrooms, fleeing from the response team. My group was to hide behind the science building. When officers in full tactical gear arrived, they ordered us to run to safety. Halfway there, though, another squad told us to get down with such stomach-churning realism that I dove and tore open my knee trying to comply. Staring at the ground, there was nothing but the sounds of what could have been real and blood pumping in my widely exposed ears while covering my head on the cold asphalt. It could have been real. My body reacted like it was.
(I wasn’t the only person who felt an intense realness throughout the morning. Two members of our department had hidden in the bushes behind the Band Room on the order from an officer; they were so focused that they stayed hidden and missed both the all-clear and the debrief while still crouching there, one of them on bad knees.)
All of this re-entered my mind yesterday morning as I talked with a student I know well before school. They were studying for their exam but also discussing a number of topics with me when the subject of the recent Oxford shooting came up. They and I talked about how scary events like that one are. They mentioned how many happen that we don’t even hear about.
I countered with how frightening it can be to see the faces responsible. Some, like the Sandy Hook killer, look like aliens, inhuman and incomprehensible. Seeing his photo instantly instills a cold unease in my body. I see that photo or hear that name and then remember looking over Michelle’s shoulder in the pod and learning about Newtown and then having to blink it away and return to second period. His image, among others, will forever frighten me.
But others just look like photos from a yearbook, mere faces that exist. Those scare me in a different way. I think this comes from my senior year in high school. I TA’d in a General Science class sixth period, sitting in the back doing my Calculus homework until there were quizzes to score, grades to input, or papers to pass back. For the first months, two of the freshmen sat back there at the lab station. One was a sweet kid who did well in the class; the other was funny but disengaged and failing. I talked to both of them regularly though; I liked both of them.
Then one day in the middle of the term, the second student vanished. He’d been laughing with me the previous day; he was gone for good the next, arrested for attempting to burglarize a local sporting goods store. Police caught him and multiple friends stealing guns and with written plans to shoot up the school.
Our school.
My school.
I got along well with the kid. I prodded him to do his work. I laughed with the kid. I called him by the ironic nickname he requested. I said goodbye to him each day as he left. He was a freshman, just like so many of the players I coached. He didn’t care about school but I didn’t judge him.
And he wanted to shoot up the school.
Elk Grove’s expert who organized and led that 2016 training event and each post-drill discussion would eventually return to our campus to brief the full staff about active shooter preparedness. There were two things that stood out to me among the information he shared. The first was that school shooters aren’t victims of bullying or confused human beings—they are sociopaths. They are broken, inhuman monsters that are wired wrong. But that sat weird with me when he said it because the freshman hadn’t seemed inhuman to me.
I’m not sure which is more frightening.
My pre-finals discussion with the student continued though. I shared about that freshman who spent the rest of high school in juvenile detention. They responded that their parents had experienced a school shooting firsthand during high school. A friends of theirs was even killed in the violence. They confessed to being interested in the story but never asking or researching it because it might bother their parents, not to mention make all of their story feel much more real.
After finals, I came home to wait for the treadmill repairman to arrive but my thoughts remained on school shootings. The freshman’s face remains so clear in my head; so do the faces of so many of the killers from Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland and Oxford. There was nothing I could do about any of this, particularly at home while school was still in session, so I decided to research the shooting my student had described that morning. I knew where their parents were from and figured out a rough age window. Using a comprehensive database online, I quickly located the incident in question.
The clinical language of the article in question did not mitigate how much it affected me. Reading the story, I got hooked on one word: “fatal”. The killer on their parents’ campus had, after shooting others, taken aim at a junior girl only to have a sixteen-year-old classmate push her out of the way. In awe of his heroism, I read the line multiple times before that one word finally sunk in. He had taken a fatal bullet to the head. He had saved her, but he had died saving her. He was sixteen.
Was the girl he saved my student’s mother? Was the sophomore hero her parents’ friend, the one they lost in that shooting that keeps the topic from ever being explored in their family? The former I choose not to find out, because the thought is terrifying. They are someone I’ve known for years, that I talk to—really talk to—every single day. I can’t contemplate the idea that they might not exist, particularly at this point in their lives.
But I also can’t help but think that, no matter whether her mother was that junior or another person fleeing the violence, that sophomore gave his life for my student too, directly or indirectly. He didn’t have time to think about it, but his decision made possible lives like my student’s. He would never see the fruits of his sacrifice, but his sacrifice made their life possible. I stood there and cried thinking about it as I read the summary and I’m crying writing this now, so grateful to this sophomore for allowing my student’s parents to live. To experience the joy they felt this week. That their family felt and celebrated with them. That I felt for them. That joy could have been one blinking act of sacrifice and heroism by a kid who couldn’t even fucking drive away from never happening.
And then I’m also thinking about the other thing that the shootings expert told us at the end of his presentation. In the heat of a moment of crisis like that, he leveled with us, our brains don’t work properly; therefore we have to decide how we will respond beforehand. What are we going to do if some monster is opening our door? How will we respond if we are the only thing standing in its way?
There’s no right answer or wrong answer, he said. He would never make that choice for anyone. But we should choose our answer now while our heads are clear. We should be ready.
I decided that day what I would do. In a way, I think I’d already decided, but I officially chose there. I have rehearsed it many times in my head, preparing for a moment that I hope never happens but that I will be prepared for if it does. The scary thing is how clearly I can see it happening, how simple and possible it all seems—it always seems—that I would be called to act on my decision. How tragically inevitable it seems that staff members might have to act on those decisions we made in a vacuum five years ago.
The cost of the decision I’ve made is obvious. It is a sacrifice to forfeit everything afterward, no doubt, yet it is a choice that I am wired for. It is a purpose for the hole that exists inside me. It would be an immense cost but I can and will pay if I have to. I wrote the check five years ago.
But yesterday brought me further solace in that premeditated sacrifice. I got to see my student celebrate this week because they were born to parents who survived a school shooting because of the supreme, split-second sacrifice of a sophomore who, decades ago, traded all of his life for generations of others’. My joy ripples from his sacrifice. A person I love exists because of his instinctual heroism.
I hope I never have to do what he did; I hope no one does. But I have seen what a gift like his can do and I will pay his gift forward if called upon.
This is all a horrifying hypothetical today, in the safety of my own home with the school secure as our winter break begins. There is no decision to make today. There is no sacrifice. But please allow me to offer that sophomore two words in closing here in case there is nothing after this.
Thank you.
Content Consumption
FILM
tick, tick…BOOM! (2021)
A musical about writing a musical sounds self-important, the theatre equivalent of an Oscar nominee about making movies. And tick, tick…BOOM! indeed features some of that “art matters” mindset that grates in lesser works. But here those lines and moments are at once about dramatic art but also about purpose and passion and grappling with the clock counting down on all of us and summoning the courage to stare down expectations and failures and the time they swallow and keep moving forward. This is a joyful origin story for RENT and biopic for its creator set in the tragedy of life’s finity. // Jonathan Larson (Andrew Garfield) is a struggling artist on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday. He’s spent years laboring through a sprawling, story-of-our-times musical but never been closer to his big break than the present, with a workshop set-up to court investors. But turning thirty brings questions about Larson’s future: should he keep writing and living a life of waiting tables and rejection and financial insecurity or should he move past ambitious dreams and move with his dancer girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp), channel his skills into a lucrative advertising job offered by his longtime friend Michael (Robin de Jesus), or keep scratching and clawing for the slim hope of breaking out and fulfilling the promise of his songwriting talent? // The beauty of tick, tick, BOOM! lies in the truth fed to us within the first two minutes: Larson does make it big with RENT but does tragically young. This isn’t the story of his death but of his contending with the passage of time. Turning thirty is an obsession for him; he knows where greats of the musical theatre were at that age but he also questions his own priorities as he watches both Susan and Michael set aside their creative pursuits in favor of stability. Larson oscillates between the euphoria of progress and the agony of falling short, of getting so close to the success he believes is out there only to find a door has closed or never really opened in the first place. Larson desperately wants his work to matter and resonate and speak to and for his generation but he can’t gain traction. This is about musical theatre but it’s unbelievably universal too, especially as a viewer precisely as old as Larson was when he died. // But the musical here also works, a glorious story about the creative process and finding the grit and confidence to create. I applaud tick, tick…BOOM! for distilling an artist’s story into an accessible film, with songs about expectations and musical creation and even finding inspiration in a busy Sunday brunch glorifying musical theatre with theatricality but also serving the story. The film looks and sounds great doing all of this led by an affecting, vulnerable performance by Garfield (who learned to sing for the film); it indeed comes across as a labor of love by the filmmaking team led by director Lin-Manuel Miranda. And, for those viewers who know and love RENT, there is a steady stream of breadcrumbs that lay the foundation for what would become Larson’s defining legacy. // I learned the existence of tick, tick…BOOM! from a YouTuber I watch who described it in glowing terms as a moving film for him as a theatre kid. Far from a theatre kid myself, I worried that it might not translate for me, but those concerns were unfounded. The film stirred up big emotions and left me singing along with multiple songs after Netflix rudely interrupted the credits with an unrelated trailer, but it also prompted me to turn off the TV afterward and just think and reflect on being 35 and knowing that was all Larson got. I suspect my age, my affection for RENT, and the moving video that introduced me to it all play a role in my powerful viewing experience here, but this is a well-made movie musical regardless with a phenomenal performance by Garfield and a lot of great things to say regardless. I loved it.
King Richard (2021)
Produced by the Williams sisters, I had held back from watching King Richard, afraid that I would find a an Oscar-bait hagiography. In the most cynical analysis, I suppose that is what King Richard amounts to, but yet it is also a compelling sports film in which Will Smith disappears into the titular role. // Richard Williams (Smith) has a plan for his two youngest daughter: make them tennis stars and millionaires who will want for nothing. This plan would seem unlikely for a family of seven in Compton, but Richard’s hustle combined with the driven work of his wife, Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis) position Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) for success. Richard grates on everyone he meets, contradicts himself constantly, and actively holds back Venus as she edges toward professionalism, but his unwavering love for his daughters always shines, even as they begin formal training and pro careers. // While the story King Richard is built around is a story of a family, the film’s success revolves around Smith’s portrayal of the Williams patriarch. There is clear reverence in the script here for Richard, but Smith manages to capture the nuance well. Richard is family-oriented, fiercely protective of his daughters, and constantly learning and lobbying for them…but he is also grating, overbearing, and one-minded, a constant thorn in the side of the sisters’ elite coach Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal, having fun). Smith’s Williams gets beat up and laughed at but always ends up giving a powerful speech to one of his daughters—and, with a lesser performer behind them, this could have been saccharine and cringey, but Smith delivers it all movingly, ensuring Richard is always complex and flawed as he pushes his daughters toward their joint destinies. // And making the film watchable are its sports movie roots that let this portrayal of a complex man build toward something. Knowing the ultimate destination here—Venus and Serena become all-time greats and influential millionaires—doesn’t sap the story of drama as Venus sets out on a collision course with professional tennis. I’m not an avid tennis fan, but the matches and practice I saw looked great with some fantastic angles that felt authentic, and the culminating face off of the film dripped with drama even though it was but a blip in the sisters’ career. In a story that is otherwise a structural mess building to an endorsement deal, hitching the script to convention sports and underdog story beats serves it well. // I anticipate Smith will garner an Oscar nomination for this. Richard is the compelling part of this film and Smith’s portrayal Carrie’s the film. Beyond his performance, the film is imperfect but moving and well-choreographed and shot tennis-wise, making it an enjoyable watch to learn more about two of the greatest athletes of my generation.
TELEVISION
Seinfeld (1990-1998)
The nineties were ages four through fourteen for me, which meant that I both grew up in the nineties and missed all of the major cultural moments that weren’t kid-oriented. This includes Seinfeld, a sitcom about nothing that revolves around four goofy New Yorkers. My best friend got me to watch the pilot years ago, but it wasn’t until November when I actually decided to push past that on Netflix. What I found was a show that has aged horribly but not at the cost of its comedy or watchability. It is silly, pointless, and full of caricature and, with a few exceptions, I enjoyed letting be my background noise for the past month. // Jerry Seinfeld (himself) is a success New York stand-up who spends his free time hanging out with his neurotic buddy George (Jason Alexander), egotistical ex-girlfriend Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and wacky neighbor Kramer (Michael Richards). Every episode offers new wacky hi-jinks involving some combination of the four as well as the revolving cast of recurring characters and guest stars. And…that’s basically it. This is a show about nothing that delights in eschewing meaningful arcs and will-they, won’t-they drama; yes, there are seasons where circumstances change, with George’s engagement and hiring by the New York Yankees being the most prominent. But no relationship or mess ever lasts here except for the core four’s. // Had I watched this in the nineties, ninety percent of the humor would have gone over my head. This is an adult show to be sure, edgy for that era but far softer when watching now. None of Jerry, George, Elaine, or Kramer is written as a great person—we love them, yes, but they are utter fools and shallow jerks—but their edginess and unlikability pale in comparison to, say, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the show that feels most like a spiritual successor to Seinfeld. The difference is that I did root for Seinfeld’s crew whereas I laugh directly at Paddy’s Pub. // Where Seinfeld soars is in its comedic construction, with nearly every episode tightly crafted around its gags. Relatable situations become recurring conflicts, throwaway lines bubble up again and again. Writer and producer Larry David improves upon this with Curb Your Enthusiasm, a series that attacks the very social norms and scenarios that Seinfeld mines for laughs, but Seinfeld is far more accessible and watchable than the HBO series. I hate laugh tracks but Seinfeld’s didn’t both me because of how perfectly timed everything was. Living alone, I rarely laugh out loud watching anything but I often did during Seinfeld. // This is a show that could not have timed it s existence better either. Landing in the nineties, it is fairly progressive in its politics but definitely had episodes and scenarios that are crass and regressive to modern eyes including homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and a tendency to make characters of color objects of humor rather than characters. While many have aged poorly, one moment truly infuriated me though: Jerry’s final monologue in episode 3.15 “The Suicide” in which he…yeah, no, I’ll just stop there and point out that it’s something that I think should be cut from the episode and that left me rethinking my stance on censoring old media. But so many of Seinfeld’s premises are grafted around miscommunication and misunderstanding that just doesn’t translate the the smart phone era. (I often would finish an episode and try to rebuild its story in 2021; many were outright impossible.) // The last thing I’ll say about Seinfeld is that I was blissfully unaware of its existence during the nineties except for one thing: its finale. We still received TV Guide at the time and the hype for that finale was huge. I remember, then, overhearing so many people complaining about the finale afterward and never understanding why. Well, it may be 23 years later, but I get it now—oh do I get it. There was no way to end a show about nothing that would have been satisfying without compromising its vision but the finale might be the worst I’ve ever seen (full disclosure: the How I Met Your Mother one didn’t actually bother me). In that way, I’d like to thank Seinfeld’s shitty finale for reconnecting me with my nineties roots and letting me feel a part of a cultural landmark that I had otherwise missed.
I am relieved to be finished with this quarter.