Tuesday
Sewanee has asked me to teach a “Composition and Literature” class, so tomorrow, for the first time in two years, I’ll be getting to know a new class. For a fleeting moment, it crossed my mind to give them a twitter questionnaire—“Never Have I Ever”—that has gone viral. I quickly realized, however, that I really shouldn’t be asking about their sex lives and drug use. So scratch that.
Still, I share it here, along with my own answers, so as to introduce new aspects of myself to readers of this blog. I promise that there’s a literary tie-in.
The questionnaire asks you to assign yourself a point for each of the activities you haven’t done. After that, it’s up for debate what the score means. If you get a high score, does it mean that you’re a boring person who hasn’t lived life to the fullest? If a low one, that you’re reckless and irresponsible? Maybe but not necessarily.
Anyway, feel free to take the test and tell me your score, as I will tell you mine (along with elaboration):
Instruction: Assign yourself one point for each one of the following activities you haven’t done:
1. Skipped school
2. Gotten drunk
3. Had a one-night stand
4. Taken drugs
5. Appeared on television
6. Gone skydiving
7. Fired a gun
8. Been on a cruise
9. Sung karaoke
10. Met a celeb
11. Skinny dipped
12. Smoked a cigarette
13. Broken a limb
14. Gotten a body piercing
15. Gotten a tattoo
16. Received a ticket
17. Gotten arrested
18. Gone ziplining
19. Been in a limo
20. Ridden a horse
Okay, so even though I’m a fairly buttoned-down person, I got a five, and the score would have gone lower if I’d ever sung karaoke (weird that I haven’t) and were a woman (in which case I would probably have pierced my ears). The other three are skydiving, smoking a cigarette (ugh!), and getting a tattoo. Since the last two are fairly minor, I’m not that far from a 1.
But lest I sound like a swinger—okay, so I probably don’t—I probably should mention that I only smoked pot once, which was right before seeing Casablanca (it was my first time) as a junior in college. All the way through the film, my foggy mind kept asking, “Isn’t someone supposed to say, ‘Play it again, Sam?’” Of course, no one does. When I emerged from the film, I was so angry that pot had messed up my first encounter with this classic that I vowed never to indulge again. Indeed, intellectual capacity is so important to me that anything that messes with it (like drugs) I regard with horror.
Same with getting drunk, which I did at a Carleton beer ball game my senior year. I had a terrific headache the following morning and kept gagging into the phone when my saintly Victorian grandmother (born 1886) called. (Fortunately she didn’t hear it.) So again, never again.
The one-night stand happened at Carleton but we didn’t go all the way, so maybe that doesn’t count. Although the so-called sexual revolution may have been underway, I was a lowly foot soldier.
More striking was getting arrested, which I did along with 80 fellow Carleton and St. Olaf students and professors. The occasion was the 1970 Kent State shootings, and we blockaded the Minneapolis induction center with the full intent of getting peacefully arrested. And so we were. Paul Wellstone, my political science professor and later a senator, was one of our group.
I fired a gun as a high school student at Sewanee Military Academy as part of their ROTC program and never again after that. I skipped school once, but that was on senior day at SMA, when the whole class skipped. (I stayed at home working on an essay.) I broke my leg playing wiffle ball (I leaped into a cedar tree to catch a ball) so that’s not exactly an instance of bold risk taking.
I’ve ridden a horse once, in Yellowstone, and went ziplining with Julia three years ago in the Smokies (because we’d never done it). I loved the ziplining and look forward to doing it again.
The television story is the most interesting of the lot. When I was in newly-liberated Slovenia in 1995, I was asked to read Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” as part of their Victory in Europe (VE) celebration. (I describe that experience here). The poem was chosen because Jimmy Carter sent it to Yugoslavia when Tito died. So that was really cool.
Okay, now for the literary part. When I first read the “met a celeb” question, I didn’t think I had. But then I recalled that I had had poet Lucille Clifton as a colleague for 15 years. Not only that but, because she invited all her friends to campus, I met and had dinner with Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver, Amiri Baraka, and Philip Levine. I have also been to intimate poetry readings with Joy Harjo, Amiri Baraka, Toi Derricotte, Robert Haas, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, W.S. Merwin, Mark Doty, Carolyn Forché, Li-Young Lee, and Naomi Shihab Nye. And a large reading with Toni Morrison. Sadly, I was out of the country on sabbatical when Denise Levertov came. So if poets count as celebs, I’ve met celebs.
On the other hand, my counting poets as celebs may make me as uncool as my various tepid transgressions. My relatively low score, in other words, is not like other low scores.