Why I do the things I do

I teach four high school classes during the course of an average day.
Most of it seems to make some kind of sense at the time. In between, if I'm
not writing college recommendations, or correcting papers, or meeting with
guidance counselors, or running weird little errands -- like today, when I
tried for the third day in a row to make hotel reservations for my
journalism class' upcoming trip to New York -- I'm calling up people for
interviews in my second job as freelance reporter.

Because it's Tuesday, I spend an hour after class at the gym, then
rush over to my parents' house to feed and walk the dog, take a shower and
eat dinner. Then I'm off to teach my night class at a local community
college -- my third job -- which gets out just in time for me to rush home,
stick the tape in the VCR, and set it to record "Smallville." That done, I
can throw some laundry in the wash, grab a milkshake and my notebook and set
about banging out a magazine article about what there is to do after midnight
on the South Shore (I can summarize it for you here: Not much).

I can't really complain about the amount of stuff I do, because the
truth is, I don't really have to do any of it. I don't have a family or
even a cat to support, and the money I make freelancing barely covers the
cost of my income tax (as I discovered today, when I opened up the package
from my accountant), so the things I do after 2:45 p.m. are essentially for
my own amusement. Even my day job as a teacher is something of a luxury
-- from a purely practical point of view, there are a lot of other things I
could be doing that would make me a lot more money with a lot less effort.

I've been reading, among other things, "Batman Unmasked: Analyzing
a Cultural Icon," which is Will Brooker's Ph.D. thesis on
Batman. First of all, it frosts me that not only can someone get away with
writing a doctoral dissertation about a comic book super-hero, but that
someone else came up with the idea before I did. At least it wasn't the
Flash. Second, I'm intrigued by Brooker's examination of Batman's
origins. Apparently, for the first six month's of Batman's career
(Detective Comics #27-32) there was no explanation of why Bruce Wayne would
dress up like Dracula and beat the crap out of criminals; he was just doing
it for the hell of it.

"In November, though, the event which turned Bruce Wayne into the
Batman was finally revealed... four frames tell the story, following from
the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne... [and since then] almost every
self-contained Batman 'graphic novel' since Frank Miller's Batman: The
Dark Knight Returns of 1986 has sought to tell the same story again, with
a fresh angle or treatment." (Brooker: 2001, 53-55)

Maybe it's just the frustrated writer in me, but I'm sometimes
tempted to ask why it's necessary to determine the motivation behind what a
fictional character does. It seems almost subversive, and therefore
seductive, to say (as one of my freshmen said today when discussing a poem
by Emily Dickinson) "Maybe there's no meaning behind it at all. Maybe she's
just saying the things she says because she's completely insane." After
all, it makes perfect sense to me that someone would want to put on dark
clothes and run around at night alternately scaring and clobbering people;
why complicate things by making the poor guy an obsessed loner dedicating
his life to stalking criminals in order to assuage unresolved Oedipal guilt?

The trouble is (and ironically, this is a result of my having grown
up reading Batman comics) when I see a solution that seems too neat, too
simple, too easy, I begin to wonder whether I've fully investigated the problem.
As I told my student, "It's entirely possible that Emily Dickinson was
insane, but the fact that your classmates have found ample evidence in the
text to support other readings of the poem suggest that those readings
cannot be so easily dismissed." Batman wouldn't be an interesting
character without the monomaniacal desire for justice that motivates
everything that he does; it's possible to read his character without this
interpretation, but then you end up with something as shallow as a Joel
Schumacher movie.

Similarly, there are probably reasons why I've chosen to do the
things I do with the time I have. Maybe there's something I'm trying to
accomplish. Maybe there's something I'm trying to avoid. Or maybe, like
Emily Dickinson and possibly Batman, I'm completely insane. In any case,
I suppose I'd better look into the reasons behind my behavior, if I ever
want to have any hope of becoming an interesting, fully-developed character
in the story of my own life. Is there ever another reason for doing
anything?