Mr. Extracurricular – Benchly'sword

A Flawed Life

I remember getting into an argument with Mama Benchly when I was 7 or 8 years old and tantrums were the logical and normal choice of attack. The tantrum most likely occurred after Sisters #1 and 2 refused to include me in whatever it was they were doing at the time, as was their right and responsibility as older siblings. I pleaded with my mom for her to have one more child and to please make that child a boy. I wanted a brother to play with and my childhood thought process was able to gloss over the fact that such an age gap would have meant that I would have ended up being the one refusing to include a younger sibling in whatever it was I was doing. Mama Benchly’s response was simple: she and Papa Benchly had decided that all of the complications associated with my birth had meant that it would be greedy and dangerous for them to try for more.

Seven or eight years earlier, Mama Benchly was gardening in our family’s Champlain, NY yard one summer evening when her water broke. After rushing to the hospital 30 minutes away, and after a labor that lasted just 90 minutes, I entered the world. At first glance, it seems like the picture-perfect, normal delivery; however, a second glance shows that I gave them a scare by wrapping the umbilical cord around my neck as well as by having an irregular heartbeat. Add to that the fact that I was born with one less pectoral muscle than the normal baby, as well as the fact that a few short years later, two toes on each of my feet would have grown overlapping each other if it wasn’t for corrective surgery, and my parents understandably saw the warning signs written on their son’s pectoral-less flat chest: try for more and you might not be as lucky.

As you can imagine, considering how desperate adolescents are to fit in with the crowd by not sticking out of it, I had a difficult time coming to terms with my pectoral deformity. Though I always loved gym class, I dreaded changing into and out of my clothes in the locker room where I ran the risk of being exposed as a deformed imposter posing as a normal kid. (I’ve still mostly blocked out of my memory the times in gym when the instructor made our teams play “shirts and skins.”) And to be honest, finding peace and comfort with my deformity has been a lifelong struggle against which I often find myself losing. I’m still hesitant to remove my shirt in public, and while it took quite a bit of trust for me to reveal the deformity to past girlfriends (again, it speaks volumes about the kind of woman my future wife is, that I felt comfortable telling her about it on our third date), regardless of how much I’ve trusted my close friends, it’s 33 years after my birth and most of my readers (read: friends) will be hearing of it for the first time in this blog post. I imagine Sarah the L didn’t even know about it. So considering my age, it’s ironic to think that it took a juvenile insult thrown my way from an adult posing as an adolescent to help me come to terms with my deformity.

Like most kids in my generation who grew up loving baseball, trading baseball cards, and memorizing the statistics on the backs of said cards, I became an adult who finds pleasure in playing in a fantasy baseball league each year. And thanks to Mr. Extracurricular, I’ve had the pleasure of playing in a locally-based league for the past two years (complete with a live draft! [I know how this sounds, so don’t bother telling me]). We expanded the number of teams this year and in doing so we welcomed aboard a few friends and some friendly strangers. One of these strangers (for the sake of rhyming anonymity, I’ll call him Brat) beat a returning team in the first week of the season and then bragged about it on a message board (the fantasy baseball equivalent of trash talk). This week, after my team beat his team in what can only be described as a “thrashing,” I felt compelled to defend the aforementioned losing team’s honor by returning the trash-talking favor (word for word the way he had done so 4 weeks earlier). Brat responded by saying he wasn’t going to listen to someone who didn’t even have a pectoral muscle. Oh. (You see, evidently, Brat is friends with my exgirlfriend, she thought it appropriate to share this information with others, and Brat considers physical deformities as appropriate punchlines.)

Instantly, I was transported back to 8th grade swim class when one of my peers looked at my bare chest and asked me if a tractor trailer had plowed into it (I’ll give him retrospective points for his creativity). However, unlike that afternoon and all of the uneasy years that followed, after Brat’s insult, I didn’t feel the urge to hide or be ashamed. Instead, I actually felt proud of my deformity because, 33 years into my life and I’ve finally realized that it’s my biggest flaw, and that rather than focus their attention on having one more deformity-free child, Mama and Papa Benchly instead raised someone incapable of poking fun at deformities; someone of whom they could be proud. I won’t pretend that I’m flawless, or even close, but I’d like to think that thus far, I’ve lived a life of which my parents could be proud.

I emailed Brat a few minutes ago and mentioned that I thought his personal attack was uncalled for. I also wished him well this season and mentioned my envy at his foresight in adding a certain pitcher to his roster. I don’t know if he’ll respond but if he does, hopefully it’s to talk baseball. Isn’t that the normal thing to do?

Prose and Cons

Earlier this year, just as the summer sun was readying itself for its moment in the New England spotlight, Othello and I moved out of our cozy (read: tiny) Old North End apartment and into our current bigger (read: bigger) New North End home. The move, though a good one, has had an unexpected side effect: instead of walking to work each morning with my time occupied by thoughts of the next great blog entry, I’m forced to spend my morning commute distracted by other drivers and the morning radio’s news. Without that morning walk during which I habitually organized my thoughts on my life and the world around me and subsequently planned how to accurately and entertainingly present them in my blog, I’ve had a hard time compiling these anecdotes into entries worth reading. To compensate, I’ve changed my blogging habits, which is why I’ve spent many a recent evening patronizing Speeder’s, Sapa, and Dobra: three (mostly) quiet coffee and tea shops where I can research (via both the Internet and people-watching) and imbibe in the token Generation X-Y beverage. And so it was that I found my inspiration for this blog entry while seated in a somewhat comfortable chair in Sapa eavesdropping on a what-seems-to-be weekly discussion/debate group.

We love to debate, don’t we? In November, within a span of seven days, citizens of a New England state voted to ban gay marriage, the New York Yankees won a 27th World Series championship, a U.S Army major killed 13 people and wounded 30 others, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a controversial health care bill, and the infamous D.C. Sniper was executed by lethal injection, and though some of these events were more important than others (obviously), they all shared at least one common denominator: their ability to divide people into a heated debate. Whether you were for or against gay marriage, capital punishment, universal health care, the “Evil Empire” Yankees, or a “turn the other cheek” philosophy made popular by the conservatives’ right-hand man, Jesus, and whether or not you made any of these opinions known, it’s a safe bet you found yourself residing on one side or the other of each respective issue. I’d go so far as to say that you took opposition to your stance personally.

And then, as if there wasn’t enough controversial newsworthy material making its way through the airwaves and Internet lately, ready to divide even the closest-knit friends and families, Sarah Palin released her biography (I’d call it an autobiography, but let’s be honest here: her coauthor did the writing.) and it had the expected result: the stage-right liberals criticized her, the stage-left conservatives praised her, and the moderate audience made another bowl of popcorn to enjoy while watching this free entertainment play out on a national stage.

I’m sure my readers (read: reader) will not be surprised to hear that I wasted no time tossing my opinion into each discussion salad, nor will they will be surprised to hear that I didn’t always have the popular opinion. I debated the Boston Red Sox fan, Mr. Extracurricular on his view that the Yankees were an “evil” corporation like WalMart (my argument was that baseball is just a game and if you want to claim moral high ground for other teams, let’s talk about the Boston Red Sox’s all-white baseball team decades after the color-barrier was broken); I called this guy a bigot in a Facebook dialogue that featured him comparing gay marriage to the marriage of a man and a dog (Seriously? I thought that argument died with the fear of catching AIDS from a toilet seat!) (my argument was that government should never have gotten into the marriage business in the first place and that it should start recognizing “civil unions” instead of marriages; but in the mean time, I was tired of people playing the “God loves everyone … except you” card to justify their bigotry); I referred to Sarah Palin as a “moronic conservative woman” to which one of my conservative female friends called my view one-dimensional; and then, after not heeding every warning known to man (emphasis on man), I questioned the necessity of requiring health care plans to cover abortions unless the pregnancy is endangering the mother’s health or is the result of rape.

Considering the sensitivity of some of these subjects, I was surprised to discover the one that affected me the most was the Sarah Palin diss, simply because of my friend’s response. This friend of mine (I’ll call her Maine Girl) is an intelligent, conservative woman who is devoutly religious. I haven’t flat-out asked her, but I’m fairly certain that she voted for the McCain/Palin ticket last November (I don’t mean to single her out because she’s most definitely not the only friend of mine to make that claim). In her response to me, she said that she wondered if I was capable of seeing only one side to an issue (i.e., the liberal side). And that’s what bothered me: I wasn’t sure that I was.

I have spent the last 10 years of my life passionately supporting the staple liberal points of view (gay rights, civil rights, social programs, less military, more education, peace, abortion rights, etc.), while patting myself on the back for being open-minded, and now I’m afraid that somewhere along the way, I lost sight of the justifications for one of the most important liberal commandments: Thou Shall Have Freedom of Speech. Sure, I’ve recognized everyone’s right to speech (e.g., when the Westboro Baptist Bigots visited my state earlier this year, I didn’t fight their right to be there), but I’ve done so with an attitude that listening to their speech wasn’t worth my time. And let’s not kid ourselves here: listening to the WBBs and the Facebook Bigot wasn’t worth my time except maybe for the opportunity each presented me to understand ignorance and hatred. But, not all opposing views are those of extremists and I need to remind myself that just because someone resides on the other side of the aisle, doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is wrong. And if I listened to the other point of view, I might learn something.

There is always, as Mama and Papa Benchly taught us over and over again, more than one side to the story. And even that’s not the whole truth because, in fact, in most cases (especially political debates), a good rule of thumb is to assume that there are at least three: your side, the other side, and the truth. So if it’s common knowledge that there are at least three sides to the story, why do we even bother debating? Why are we willing to debate our friends and strangers over a social-networking website; and travel 1,500 miles to protest for 3 hours; and organize a bunch of Craigslist strangers in a coffeehouse to discuss a weekly topic? To help me understand, I muted Van Morrison in my headphones and listened in on the discussion group.

The identity of the Sapa discussion group’s organizer was quickly revealed through his group moderation tendencies and his propensity to dominate the discussion: he was both Jim Lehrer and John McCain. He did not hesitate to share his anecdotes, which it seemed, had been carefully recited on his morning walks to work, and he did not shy away from bold and controversial statements (e.g., “unlike men, women just don’t appreciate anything that has to do with physics”). Like me, like Sarah Palin, like the WBBs, like Mr. Extracurricular, he wanted others to hear his voice and the message it carried, because, like all of us, he believed deeply in what he was saying. And like all of us, there were folks who disagreed (shame on them if they didn’t!).

After eavesdropping for a bit on Mr. Anti-Women-in-Physics and without the acquisition of any real evidence to support this theory whatsoever, I’m going to try to answer my own question: we debate because we believe strongly about something (i.e., life, health, death, and all the controversial subjects in between), because we are deeply afraid that our beliefs are wrong, because the only way to assuage our fears is to be surrounded by like-minded people, and because, in the absence of a like-minded support group buffer, we are desperate to disprove opposing points of view so that our beliefs can be validated. In essence, we are all insecure schoolchildren hopeful that we can convince others that we possess that all-too-elusive cool trait, and the way to do so is to be the proud owners of indisputably right and morally-sound beliefs.

Feel free to let me know if you disagree, and I’ll do my best to listen.

Migrate Love Story

This morning, I heard the honkings of the first geese of the season returning to their northern homes after a winter spent vacationing in the southern sun. Their appearance is one rung in the ladder that leads my community from the desolate depths of winter up and out to our long-awaited Vermont summer reward. After brunch with my friend, Gina, I ventured downtown to Uncommon Grounds, navigating through a flock of college kids who had migrated down the hill after a winter spent in their dorms. I even saw the obligatory fraternity brother wearing his shorts approximately two weeks too early, which is yet another rung in that ladder.

I’m now sitting in the back of the coffee shop at a table at which, 6 years earlier, I awkwardly made conversation with a blind date. The blind date didn’t lead to anything (as was often the case back then in that infamous 2003) except a string of more blind dates at other Burlington establishments. In fact, if hard-pressed, I’m sure I could think of a date for 90% of the restaurants, bars, theatres, parks, and barns in the area. Let’s face it: the longer you live somewhere, the easier it is for you to find the remains of past heartaches splattered like graffiti love poems on the walls of businesses. If you add in the heartaches of all of your friends, you’ll find every inch of town covered with the tags of exes.

Last summer, while she and I were experiencing our respective relationship heartaches, Sarah the L and I noticed what seemed to be a trend in our generation: all around us (i.e., friends, relatives, coworkers, friends of friends, new roommates, etc.), couples were breaking up. Even Ms. Darling and I bonded over our respective break-ups. There was no overlooking it; the Summer of 2008 was the Summer of Lovesickness. I asked Sarah the L recently if she had any theories as to why this happened. Jokingly (I think), she blamed Barack Obama. She said in a “year riddled with messages of ‘change’ and ‘hope,’” … people couldn’t help but wonder if they should upgrade their Bush for an Obama. She also thought the Summer of Lovesickness could be explained by a person’s reasonable tendency to respond to a friend’s “personal growth through trial” by reflecting on needed growth in his/her own life. Humans are impressionable creatures and for the same reasons a floor of college girls ends up on the same menstrual cycle by the end of a semester, a group of close friends most likely travels similar emotional-growth routes.

I posed this question to Sarah after a quick glimpse at an ex’s Facebook page (you do it, too) confirmed what I had long-before assumed: Hypothetical was now married (thus making her boyfriend’s Hypothetical now her husband’s Factual) and consequently, had become yet another in a long line of exes who had married the first serious boyfriend she dated after me (an ever-expanding sorority of women that also includes Widget, The Redhead, Stalker Girl, and The PT [it’s also worth noting that San Fran Girl and I never officially dated, but after our falling-out, she started dating the man to whom she’s now engaged]). This confirmed my long-standing belief that at some point in my life I had become Penultimate Man, the noble super-hero doomed to a life of boosting various women’s self esteems just enough for them to spread their wings and fly off to their future husbands. Considering I boosted Ms. Darling’s self esteem before sending her back to her stripper-loving ex, I wouldn’t be surprised if she got engaged to him within the year.

After spending a day contemplating my curse (aka, my exgirlfriends’ blessing), I asked Sarah what she thought it would take to become Ultimate Man. She wasn’t entirely sure because she has been dealing with similar demons, but she hoped one day soon she could rip open her shirt to show the world the blaze of UW (Ultimate Woman) across her chest, thus confirming my long-standing belief that she’s an exhibitionist.

Because I’m convinced that it is the perfect metaphor for every situation in life (including concerns about one’s penultimate tendencies), I’m yet again reminded of rock climbing. I haven’t talked about my adventures with rock climbing recently because after steadily improving for two months, my climbing skills have frustratingly hit a plateau. I should have known my progress would eventually decelerate: I have a history of excelling at a learned skill (e.g., guitar playing; mathematics; chess) only to reach my natural limit beyond which I can’t improve without prolonged resolute training, something my Benchly-of-Many-Skills, Master-of-None will-power has prohibited me from ever accomplishing. I’m determined to excel at this sport, though, and so I’m doing the only things in my control to ensure that that happens: consistent practice, and learning from other climbers. And as I direct my climbing questions to more experienced climbers, because I’m terrified of being Penultimate Man forever, I pose my relationship questions to my friends.

In addition to Sarah, I solicited love advice from CP and she responded with disbelief that I had asked her; she doesn’t consider herself an expert on relationships, though, she noted, her relationship had thus far survived 10 years. But truthfully, as much time as Sarah and I spend pondering how to keep love afloat, and as painfully educational as our break-ups have been, and as much success as CP has had at cultivating her love, and as much unsolicited advice as I’ve received in the last year, I honestly don’t think any of us have any idea of how to succeed at love with or without really trying. If you think I’m wrong, just look at our society’s divorce rates.

Uncommon Grounds is closing soon and I’m afraid, my dear readers (read: reader), that I don’t have an answer for you. I wonder if I ever will. And as I prepare to venture home against a gorgeous sunset backdrop (with views like this, can you blame the geese for coming back each spring?) while being serenaded with the sounds of college kids and geese, a bird that spends the majority of its life devoted to its “mate for life,” I can’t help but wonder if maybe I’m just looking for the answers in the wrong place.

"Life is what happens to you…"

On the drive to the climbing gym the other night, while Mr. Extracurricular and I caught each other up on the happenings of our respective lives, I silently planned the climbs I was going to attempt that evening. Considering that each new trip to the gym carried with it an improvement from last time, I planned to conquer a personal-best 8 routes this time. And after a quick start up the white route and an equally quick (and efficient) trip up the red one, I tried my hands (and feet) at the black one in the corner, which was set one level higher than the beginner level. And that’s when I fell off. Disappointed but not discouraged, I next attempted an easier green route that had always seemed made for me. And then I fell off that one, too. Then the light blue one and the green one proved too challenging and I had to cheat a number of times on an easy blue one. I ended up leaving the gym with a bruised ego, a battered body, and the need to run home as quickly as possible to wash away the night with a hot shower. My plans did not come to fruition. (On a related note, Mr. Extracurricular’s plans also fell through when he realized the orange route he had not yet completed and which was proving to be his nemesis, had been replaced by another route.)

In the beginning of, at the end of, and even during my past relationships, among the number of things I’ve been called (including sensitive, over-sensitive, a leader, a follower, anxious to the point of creating an imbalance, etc.), the one that stands out the most (read: for the purpose of this blog entry) is “a planner.” And depending on the context and my mood, I’ve been known to take this as both a compliment and an insult. What I won’t question is whether or not it’s true; it is. Whether it’s the directions to Sister #2’s house for Thanksgiving, or a detailed itinerary of the hotels I’ll be staying at in England, or the iPod playlist started early in the year that’s called simply Possible Super Mix Songs, or the fact that I carry a first-aid kit on even the smallest hikes, or the fact that I’ll rent two or three different movies because I’m unsure of which one my movie date will want to watch, or when I run around town looking for the right flowers and dog bone, hardly a day passes for which I haven’t been preparing some sort of plan. Some exes found this annoying. Others thought it was cute and complementary. One even thought it was cute, annoying, and complementary.

I’m sure the Trash Heap would have a junior-high-school field day with this, but off the top of my head, I have no idea why I want my life to be so structured. It’s not like I was born on my due date or anything; I was early, with so much energy the doctor said my parents should just put shoes on me and let me walk home. And it’s not like my childhood had any major traumas that might force someone to desire stability in his/her life; it was your basic son-of-a-preacher-man life that was equal parts consistent and unpredictable. And it’s not like I spent my adolescence swimming in an abnormally large pool of plans; like everyone else, sometimes I had plans and sometimes I didn’t. So then what? We’re all reflections of our parents, right? Well, a thorough investigation of the Benchly house reveals the same varied qualities as the rest of my life: a checklist for every grocery item imaginable, printed out and used each and every trip to the grocery store, sitting beside a messy stack of random papers that may or may not have been placed there during the Clinton administration. Whatever the reason, I am who I am, I’m not going to change, and you can love me for it or not. Your choice.

The reason I bring this up is because lately I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time (even by my standards) thinking about plans, both made and broken. In the past month, I’ve made plans to spend time with pretty much every friend and/or loved one within driving distance (read: 3 hours or less). I’ve even made a handful of new friends (which is a big deal for me) and am beginning to include them in my plans. You see, I got pretty lazy about making plans with friends after Labor Day and have been trying for the past month or so to make up for it. As I’m sure you know, spending time with friends and loved ones is great therapy for the soul. And sometimes it’s comforting to sit back and think of all the people in this world who think of you every now and then. Doing so reminds me of a belief I heard once that a person’s spirit lives on so long as someone is alive to tell his/her story.

Also, in the past month, I’ve been doing my best to learn how to accept when plans change. To paraphrase one of my all-time favorite Douglas Coupland quotes, “sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about not having plans.” It’s incredible to think that this latest obsession with plans is the direct result of one plan that didn’t come to fruition: I had a cozy picture of a Thursday night in winter, waiting all day to finally be able to lay down on the couch to watch the newest episode of LOST, speculate about what’s going to happen the next week, and then fall happily to sleep. I’ll still be able to do this; just not the way I originally planned. And I’m planning to one day be OK with that.

"…still my guitar gently weeps."

Contrary to popular belief, when I think back to my time spent at the University Whose Name Shall Never Be Said, my memories are primarily positive: the PFLAG skit with Little Amie, the road trips with Ms. Parker, downhill skiing in jeans and sweaters with True, etc. Included among the countless memories is the long-overdue day on which I mastered the world of irony. And in an ironic twist, this triumph occurred not in the classroom for which I was paying (and still am paying) for my education, but rather in the viewing of the film Reality Bites in which a character explains that irony happens when the actual result differs from the expected result. These thoughts were on my mind last night as I reached for the last rock of a rock-climbing route (the white one for the one of you keeping score at home) that had, in previous attempts, proven too difficult for my amateur (read: not-exactly-in-shape) skills. But since irony considers the sequence of events leading up to the result, first let me back up a bit.

When it comes to dating, I wouldn’t exactly place myself in the same league as a Casanova, but I have had my fair share of girlfriends and thanks to the wonderful Internet, most of them have had the pleasure (or pain) of finding their (nick)name in my blog’s print. For the most part, I’ve never considered this a bad thing. However, thanks to said wonderful Internet’s ability to archive everything, I worry that my past is going to start coming back to haunt me. I saw it when one girlfriend became jealous of the Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and I saw it again when another future girlfriend questioned the sincerity of my words.

It’s an honest question: how sincere could a guy be when his written words from relationships long gone are similar to the words coming out of his mouth in the present? I’m sure you’ll agree when I say that things said in current relationships are almost always unintended carbon copies of past relationship sweet nothings (who can go 15 years of dating without repeating some feelings along the way?). But only the fools stupid enough to blog their feelings get caught duplicating love and heartache. The closed-off souls who don’t share their feelings never suffer this fate. (I suppose an alternative solution is to date someone who shows no interest in your blog whatsoever, but what fun is that?) My most recent relationship, built on a blogging foundation, had to deal with this question of sincerity in the beginning before grabbing the next rock and pulling itself up to bigger and more relevant topics (read: when life gets in the way and love becomes complicated).

It’s hard to imagine what life would have been like had I not walked down Church Street that fateful summer day, and some would argue that it’s not worth the time and energy spent wondering. You can’t change the past; you can only deal with its consequences, make the most of the present, and put yourself in a position to enjoy the future. So regardless of why it happened, what happened happened and, through a series of mostly-related (emphasis on related) events, led me to join a local rock climbing gym to go climbing with my new friend, Mr. Extracurricular. Two weeks ago, I nearly backed out of a planned climb but I didn’t and the rock climbing walls kicked my butt for it by letting me complete only one route. Last week, against my instincts to stay home and not exercise, I went back and completed two routes and vowed to come back to do better. Last night, I found inspiration in the unlikeliest of people and completed six routes and found myself halfway up a route set at the next level.

As is often the case, in between climbs while giving our arms (and for me, my fingers) a rest, Mr. Extracurricular and I talked about the different challenges we face while climbing. I always feel a little embarrassed having a discussion like this with someone whose challenges are tackled on routes that are 3 or 4 levels more difficult than the ones I attempt, but Mr. Extracurricular humors me nonetheless. Now that I’ve learned to use my lower body more and my upper body less, for me, aside from building up strength and endurance, my biggest challenge is simply staying on course. Because multiple colored routes are entwined together on the wall, I often find myself skipping a challenging handhold on my route and instead opting for an easier one not intended for me. And so, if/when I reach the top, I’ve inevitably taken an unintended route. With this in mind, as I grabbed that final white rock, I wondered if I was being ironic. (I think because the outcome and the expected outcome were the same, I wasn’t.)

Although there’s no irony to be found in the rock climbing walls, it could be argued that the last four months of my life have been ironic simply because the expected outcome was never realized. While climbing to the top, I stumbled, the rocks moved on me, I reached for the wrong holds, and now I find myself perched high on the wall on a different course, looking up at a final rock I can no longer see. But I know it’s there and I’m not going to quit climbing simply because my instincts tell me to let go.

It’s hard to imagine how my life will change because I chose to join the rock climbing gym, but as always, I look forward to the climb.