Meeting the new me

He's about my height, or maybe a little taller, with dark hair and
dark eyes -- kind eyes, but intelligent, searching eyes, so that even if he
isn't thinking anything terrible about you, you know he's taking in every
detail.

We're a lot alike, he and I. We both went to good schools -- he to
the University of Dallas, "which isn't as big as you think," he says. We
both left school not entirely sure what to do with ourselves and ended up at
weekly newspapers, first as reporters, then as editors. We both stayed there
long enough to realize this wasn't the way we wanted to spend the rest of
our lives.

That's where our paths diverged. I decided to leave journalism,
more or less, and become a teacher, a writer, a misanthropic curmudgeon. He
landed a job with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram -- the kind of big-city
paper at which I might've ended up working, if I'd ever had the guts --
met the girl of his dreams, and settled down. Would've stayed there,
too, but his wife took a new job in New England. He found a position with a
local daily newspaper -- the same one where I still work from time to time --
discovered the same quirks and oddities about it that I'd noticed, and
decided he wanted to do something else. As luck would have it, I did, too,
and that's why we're both here today: he's the guy who will be taking over
my classes and my duties as newspaper adviser at what used to be my high
school.

He's good. He asks all the right questions, and I notice as I
answer that he's listening both to the things I'm saying and the things I'm
leaving out: he's watching my posture, my tone of voice, not passing
judgment on what I'm telling him but absorbing it all, adding it up,
making sure all the pieces fit. He has the enthusiasm he'll need, and the
presence: he's a soft-spoken guy, but he strikes me as the kind of person
who can get his point across. He knows what he's getting into -- I've made
sure of that -- and he's ready for it. He'll do well.

I want to tell him everything about the job: making lesson plans,
grading essays, assigning newspaper stories, dealing with problem students,
dealing with problem administrators, spending time at newspaper layout,
getting to know the students. I want to tell him because it's something I
think he needs to know, and because this life I've created for myself during
the last five years is something I'm proud of, and because after today I
won't be living that life any more.

I've always resisted being defined by my job. That made a lot of
sense when I was the lowest-ranking clerk at TCBY, or when I sold porn tapes
and Nintendo games at a flea market for my friend's father, but it became
harder to do once I became a teacher. Teaching takes over every aspect of
your life -- even now, I catch myself thinking about a better way to explain
a particular concept in class, or an activity that my students would have
enjoyed, or the way two personalities would work together on the newspaper.
Now that I've turned that life over to someone else, I'm not entirely sure
what's left for me. What do I call myself? Am I a reporter? A graduate
student? An adjunct faculty member? A writer? Well, yes... sometimes.
Sometimes I'm all of those things, sometimes I'm more, sometimes
I'm quite a bit less, and most of the time I don't know who I am.

After all, if I'm not defined by my job, then what defines me?
My friends? Where I went to college? The area in which I live? The music
I like? My political beliefs? The way I look? My collection of odd habits,
beliefs, quirks, tics, and neuroses? My achievements? My failures?
My personal philosophy, such as it is? It's a lot to list on a business card,
and I don't think any of it captures what I mean when I think of me.

There's a book I've been reading lately -- "Writing in General and
the Short Story in Particular," by Rust Hills -- in which the author
discusses the relationship between character and action, and the difference
between fixed and dynamic actions. Fixed actions, the kind of thing a
character does every day -- what he eats for breakfast, how she interacts
with her friends -- are useful for establishing characterization at the
beginning of a story, Hills says. But dynamic actions -- the kind of
decisions that break a character away from his or her fixed actions and
change a life forever -- tell the story, and determine the kind of person
a character will become.

I like the idea that I'm defined by my actions, even if it seems the
only action I'm taking lately is saying "No." I've been turning down
invitations, job opportunities, things I used to do all the time -- playing
trivia, sleeping in on weekends -- because other things are more important
to me. I've had to choose which people in my life are most important to me,
because I no longer have the time to spend with everyone, and those have
been some of the toughest decisions I hope I ever have to make. I've even
been getting better about not doing whatever any woman in my life tells me
to do, despite what certain people think.

I like to think of each "No" as the stroke of a blade, cutting into
the muddled morass of my life, and shaping it into what I will become,
according to my design. It's possible, of course, that the blade isn't
shaping me at all, but merely peeling me, like an onion, and what will be
left over at the end is nothing more than the core, the person I always was.
Then again, maybe the blade is just cutting, and nothing more.

Of course, deciding not to head into Allston for trivia tonight
isn't the kind of life-altering decision that will enable me to define myself
once and for all. But Hills says each decision, however small, determines
the road a particular character will follow; taken together, all the choices
a character makes determines, and defines, who that character is.

So I'm the guy who once skipped meals to have enough money to buy
CDs, but am now holding off on purchasing my precious, precious music so
that I can pay for something even more important to me. I'm the guy who
chose to shell out a mint on a new transmission for his old car because I
believe some things are worth keeping around. I'm the guy who runs every
other day and is eating carrots instead of candy bars but still chugs two
glasses of Vanilla Coke in an evening. I'm the guy who gave up something he
thinks he did well so that he can do something at which he's afraid he's
going to fail.

Does that help? Do you know me now? Do I? I don't think so --
not yet, anyway. My story still has a way to go, yet, and I'm not sure I've
even reached the interesting parts. I'd skip ahead and tell you, but that's
not the kind of person I am