Minimally Eschew

The gifts 22 has given me:

Two states, four homes, and a half a dozen fold out couches and futons where I’ve been able to rest my head for a day, a week, or a couple of months. Twenty-two has been a year of movement.
A blue notebook small enough to fit in my purse full of to-do lists with items that I’ve already done and doodles that left my fingers stained in ink.
Friendships with people from every corner of the country and from all around the world. Pen pals in South America and Facebook messages from Texas. People I can count on in every time zone and climate.
A pair of black knee high boots that have seen sun and rain and snow and sleet and obscenely dirty New York City streets. The toes have faded and peeled, and I’ve colored over them more than once with Sharpie markers.
A summer in Warwick where I learned that sometimes starting new is the best idea of all. A summer full of love and learning and adventure and discovery. Planning intense programs about Israel. Plunging toilets. Making friends and making memories. Starting terrified, ending satisfied.
Taylor Swift’s ‘22’ sung to me by at least a dozen different people.
A third grade Hebrew school classroom full of the funniest, strangest, most excitable kids I’ve ever met. Passover plagues charades and Aleph-Bet flashcard trivia contests. Sounding out prayers with letters we just learned and singing songs at the top of our lungs. A Saturday making sandwiches for a soup kitchen and a Friday service with a gospel choir. Laughter and love and lots of learning.
Confidence in my work. My writing. My editing. My photography. My organizing. My teaching skills. A feeling—at least some of the time-- that I know what I’m doing.
Dance parties. With friends, sometimes. By myself more often than I should admit. In cars and theatres. On tennis courts and in living rooms. Lyrics shouted loud and dance moves done without shame.
A seventh grade Hebrew school classroom full of loud boys making silly jokes and shy girls who are so smart that sometimes it scares me. Lessons about fair trade and homelessness and poverty and what the Jewish commitment to social justice really means. Seriousness when it’s needed. The wonderful joy I get to feel as I watch these kids think about things they have never thought about before.
More than my fair share of panic attacks.
Monday nights when I can’t be home, so I wander up and down 86th street until I can’t feel my fingers anymore. Time in Barnes and Noble- walking up and down the aisles and reading 15 books a chapter at a time, until the plots mix in my head and I can’t match the characters to their stories. Sometimes, , I’ll treat myself to a movie and some treats smuggled in from the drugstore next door using a purse large enough to hide anything I want. I’ll people watch for a while, near the subway stop. The commuters with their briefcases and the students with their overflowing backpacks. The parents navigating strollers through the busy city streets.
A haircut. Just one.
A hard drive full of Word documents. Some that I’ve sent out in to the world. Lots that I never will. Stories and essays and letters to no one. Bits of dialogue without any plot. Bits of plot without a story to make them work. Memories I had to write somewhere -- anywhere -- so I wouldn’t lose them to the failures of memories of time.
The best ice cream I’ve ever had, at a small shop overlooking the hills of upstate New York. A car ride to get there where we had to pull off to the side of the road because we were laughing too hard for anyone to be able to safely drive. Tears in my eyes and an ache in my chest from pure happiness.
A concert by my favorite band with one of my best friends. A chance to shout the lyrics to the song that has defined my life for half a decade as the band played it live and I jumped up and down on a floor sticky with alcohol, in a room full of people who understood how much that moment meant to me
Every emotion possible. Sometimes all at once.
A family who, as they have done every year, and I know will do in in all my years to come, has shown me nothing but love and acceptance, even and especially when I felt like I didn’t deserve it.

365 days. Not a day too many, not a day too few.

My father likes to say that the key to successful humor is “repetition, repetition, repetition.” He believes that jokes get funnier the more you hear them, and that repeated punch lines breed familiarity which breeds laughter. And as much as it pains me to admit it, my father is right. In this case. It’s why Who’s On First is still side-splittingly hilarious even after my first grade teacher made us diagram the field, it’s why Talladega Nights quotes will never fail to make my mother dissolve in to laughter, and it’s why watching Monty Python’s Holy Grail is about 300% better with friends who shout out all the lines.

So, when I make a joke I like to commit. It’s one thing to have a funny one-liner. It’s another thing to build a joke, through layers and repetition and possibly through the continual annoyance of your computer science professor.

Which brings us to turtles.

I’m taking a computer science class this semester. It’s two lecture periods a week, plus a Friday lab session where we learn about creating websites and Excel tricks and PowerPoint and whatever else the professor can think to throw at us. I’m not going to lie- I’m pretty good at it. I know my way around a computer, and it shows.

So the first Friday of the semester we all file in to the upstairs computer lab. My class is only seven people, so my professor had us all sit in the front row where she could keep an eye on the work we were doing. Our first assignment was to make a very basic webpage with our name, a picture, and a link to any website of our choosing.

I decided to link to the Google image results for “turtles wearing hats.” As everyone knows, turtles in hats are humorous and delightful; it simply made me happy. It didn’t make my teacher happy though. She was extremely unenthused.

How can you see this and not smile?

I found her lack of enthusiasm disheartening. But not disheartening enough to, ya know… stop.

So I committed. Instead of admitting that my teacher found my weird turtle joke not funny (or perhaps because my teacher found my weird turtle joke not funny), I decided I was going to turn all of my assignments in to things about turtles.

I made PowerPoints about turtles and outlines about why turtles are great, and presented research comparing the cost of turtle habitats at various pet stores. I committed, and I committed hard. My professor continued to find it all profoundly unfunny. I continued to find it all hysterical.

When it came time for our big lab assignment -- a series of connected webpages, containing a PowerPoint, pictures, and lots of links -- I knew immediately what my topic would be. Our teacher made us turn in an outline, and I got mine back with the comment “Jordan, this is very strange but not something I can technically take points off for.” Which is really all I can ask for, I suppose.

So I made my project about turtles. It was rudimentary and it was delightful. I worked very hard and I was very proud. My teacher was not amused. But I was. And that is what’s important. (That, by the way, is another my father’s true but annoying lessons: the most important thing is to amuse yourself. Others can never be fully trusted to do so.)

So I stuck with turtles, cracked myself up, and annoyed my teacher. But not to point of it affecting my grade. I like a good joke as much as anyone, but no matter how much I love turtles they aren’t worth failing computer science for.

UPDATE 3/10/16

I realized that when I posted this, I didn't include the screenshot of the email that spurred this whole thing. It is the best email I have ever received and ever will receive. Enjoy.

The Gifts of Twenty-Two

The Turtle Project