Eight Ways of Getting Started
Model:
Why We Crave Horror Movies
By Stephen King
I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better-maybe not much better, after all. We’ve all known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching, people who have some hysterical fear-of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop…and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves tenth row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmares.
Why?
1. On Dumpster Diving
ByLars Eighner
I began dumpster diving about a year before I became homeless. I prefer the word scavenging. I have heard people, evidently meaning to be polite, use the word foraging, but I prefer to reserve that word for gathering nuts and berries and such, which I also do, according to the season and opportunity.
I like the frankness of the word scavenging. I live from the refuse of others. I am a scavenger. I think it a sound and honorable niche, although if I could I would naturally prefer to live the comfortable consumer life, perhaps – and only perhaps—as a slightly less wasteful consumer owing to what I have learned as a scavenger.
Except for jeans, all my clothing comes from Dumpsters. Boom boxes, candles, bedding, toilet paper, medicine, books, a typewriter, a virgin male love doll, coins sometimes amounting to many dollars: all came from Dumpsters. And, yes I eat from Dumpsters too.
2. Me Talk Pretty One Day
ByDavid Sedaris
At the age of forty one, I am returning to school and having to think of myself as what my French textbooks calls “a true debutant.” After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich.
I’ve moved to Paris in order to learn the language. My school is the Alliance Francaise, and on the first day of class, I arrive early, watching as the returning students greeted one another in the school lobby. Vacations were recounted, and questions were raised concerning mutual friends with names like Kang and Vlatnya. Regardless of their nationalities, everyone spoke what sounded to me like excellent French. Some accents were better than others, but the students exhibited an ease and confidence I found intimidating. As an added discomfort, they were all young, attractive, well dressed, causing me to feel like Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show.
3. On Being 17, Bright, and Unable to Read
By David Raymond
One day a substitute teacher picked me to read aloud from the textbook. When I told her, “No, thank you,” she came unhinged. She thought I was acting smart, and told me so. I kept calm, and that got her madder and madder. We must have spent ten minutes trying to solve the problem, and finally she got so red in the face I thought she’d blow up. She told me she’d see me after class.
Maybe someone like me was a new thing for that teacher. But she wasn’t new to me. I’ve been through scenes like that all my life. You see, even thought I am 17 and in junior high school, I can’t read because I have dyslexia. I’m told I read “at a fourth grade level” but from where you sit, that‘s not reading. You can’t know what that means unless you’ve been there. It’s not easy to tell you how it feels when you can’t read your homework assignments or the newspaper or a menu in a restaurant or even notes from your own friends.
My family began to suspect I was having problems almost from the first day I started school. My father says my early years in school were the worst in his life. They weren’t so good for me, either. As I look back on it now, I can’t find the words to express how bad it really was. I wanted to die. I’d come home from school screaming, “I’m dumb. I’m dumb—I wish I were dead.”
4. Something’s Off
ByRobin Marantz Henig
A stinky old conch shell is what finally convinced my husband that I had lost my sense of smell. He was horrified to see me stick my nose right into the opening of the shell festering on our friends back porch, something he couldn’t bring himself to do because the rotting stuff inside was so revolting. Jeff had been listening for months to my complaints about not being able to smell, and I think he found the whole thing mystifying—and maybe slightly annoying. The conch shell showed him.
I felt vindicated, sort of. But mostly I felt vulnerable. Smelling is what told me not to eat spoiled egg salad and to stay clear of skunks. Without it, how could I know where danger lay?
5. Supersize Me: It’s Time to Stop Blaming Fat People for Their Size
ByAlison Motluk
Whether it is undertakers introducing a new range of extra-large coffins or airlines planning to charge passengers by the kilo, these days our ever expanding waist lines are rarely out of the news. It is hard to ignore the fact that body shape had changed dramatically over the past few decades.
In 1992 about 13 percent of Americans were clinically obese. Only 10 years later that figure had rocketed to 22 percent, and in the three fattest states, Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia, it was over 25 percent. As the UK, Australia, and many other Western countries follow the U.S. lead, the epidemic of obesity is now seen as one of the developed world’s biggest public health problems.
It is tempting to blame fat people for the state they’re in. But health officials have recently begun to focus on a different culprit: the so-called “obseogenic” environment. In the United States, goes the argument, the prevailing culture actually promotes obesity, making an unhealthy lifestyle the default option.
6. No More Pep Rallies!
By Etta Kralovec
Everyone agrees that we’ve got to improve academic achievement in America’s public schools. So why is it that school districts distract students from core academics with a barrage of activities – everything from field hockey to music, drama, debating and chess teams? And there’s more: Drug education and fundraising eat away at classroom time. All manner of holidays, including Valentine’s Day, get celebrated during the school day, as well as children’s birthdays. These diversions are costly. They consume time and money.
Here’s a bold proposition: Privatize school sports and other extracurricular activities, and remove all but the basic academic studies from the classroom. Sound like sacrilege? Look at what these extras really cost.
7. The Handicap of Definition
By William Raspberry
I know all about bad schools, mean politicians, economic deprivation and racism. Still, it occurs to me that one of the heaviest burdens black Americans – and black children in particular – have to beat is the handicap of definition: of what it means to be black.
Let me explain quickly what I mean. If a basketball fan says that the Boston Celtics’ Larry Bird plays “black,” the fan intends it – and Bird probably accepts it – as a compliment. Tell pop singer Tom Jones he moves “black” and he might grin in appreciation. Say to Teena Marie of The Average White Band that they sound “black” and they’ll thank you.
But name one pursuit, aside from athletics or entertainment, in which a white practitioner will feel complimented to be told he does it “black.” Tell a white broadcaster he talks “black,” and he’ll sign up for diction lessons. Tell a white reporter he writes “black,” and he’ll take a writing course. Tell a white lawyer he reasons “black,” and he might sue you for slander.
What we have here is a tragically limited definition of blackness, and it isn’t only white people who buy it.
8. The Company Man
By Ellen Goodman
He worked himself to death, finally and precisely, at 3:00 A.M. Sunday morning.
The obituary didn’t say that, of course. It says that he dies of a coronary thrombosis – I think that was it -- but everyone among his friends and acquaintances knew it instantly. He was a perfect Type A, a workaholic, a classic, they said to each other and shook their heads – and thought for five or ten minutes about the way they lived.
The man who worked himself to death finally and precisely at 3:00 A.M. on Sunday morning – on his day off – was fifty-one years old and a vice-president. He was, however, one of six vice-presidents, and one of three who might conceivably – if the president died or retired soon enough – have moved to the top spot. Phil knew that.