Nostomania
So much is about to change and you know what I'm doing? I am downloading a new copy of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer soundtrack. I pine silently for the ethical and social simplicity of my adolescence, which I am rapidly leaving behind for an uncertain adulthood. It gets you by degrees. First you move to your own place, then you start caring about wasted electricity (and not for fun environmental reasons), then you somehow think about retirement, finally you find yourself plucking out errant white hairs. I'm pretty sure death follows fast, but you don't know since senility gets there first.
As socially maladroit as I am sure the following statement will seem, Buffy was a reliable staple of my high school years and into college, a gel-coated archetype. If she could deal with the man to whom she lost her virginity immediately becoming a soulless monster, who was I to sob over a girlfriend that simply cheated on me with my friend? When I battled college professors with terminal passive aggressiveness and an overactive red felt pen, she was rallying her energy and troops for a professor who truly wanted her dead. In the fifth season, Buffy jumped from a tower, sacrificing herself to save her friends and family. Mere weeks later, my friend Todd hung himself without such lofty hopes. I honestly no longer remember which death seemed more real, or who got the lion's share of my tears. Buffy, like some procrastinating Christ, came back after three months, a summer of rest. Todd did not. Buffy was the convenient metaphor around which things found a context and, at its worst, was a momentary diversion and escape, if not a passion play teaching morals bereft of desert dust. Just a few weeks ago, I saw someone wearing a shirt reading "What Would Buffy Do?" and realized that I didn't know anymore. I lost the hair. I graduated three times. I wear a suit jacket to work and can converse lucidly about classroom discipline. I am no longer a shadow of that sixteen-year-old boy whose adrenaline pumped Tuesday nights at eight and I miss him.
The show and character dealt with adult issues: the death of a parent, acting as an adult, menial jobs, and the like; it was not merely "monster of the week" as was so often the pat derision of critics who refused to get past the title. Over the years since it went off the air, I've been privy to more than a few issues without Buffy holding my hand an hour a week. Shaking the hand of a retired and retiring Catholic priest and agreeing to work for him, I try to find the foreshadowing, try to imagine what Buffy would be anticipating in accepting a job as an English teacher at a prep school for kids with learning disabilities and rich parents. A new Hellmouth to contrast with the sylvan? Some kind of demon worshiping cult among the faculty? And I realize, not for the first time, that Buffy isn't the star of this story and she wouldn't be in the position to accept a low salaried English teaching job offset by the free room, board, and benefits.
This handshake begins a new life tens of miles from familiarity, far enough that I am isolated, but not so much that I can't be at my parents' home or with my friends in an hour.
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| "Somebody's getting married!" |
This school stressed its conservativism repeatedly, first when I dared to wear an earring to the interview (a tiny hoop in my ear and only because I forgot I had it in; I wear minimal jewelry to interviews). That my earring is forbidden is nothing. That my haircut is not short enough for their likings quite another, but it can be resolved with some effort and compromise. So we come to Emily. The dominant morality of the school forbids unmarried cohabitation in order to "not set a bad example for the children." Heaven forefend the children be exposed to domestic partnership without legal entanglement. I argued as well as I could, trotting out deathbed promises to Emily's father (I left out promises to Quest). What it came down to is that the school did not require proof, just our solemn assurance. Emily and I don't trust anything not in writing and the principal was not about to commit this act of Christian charity to anything but the wind, so we are getting a certificate, gold bands, and a ceremony presided over by Zack. Since Universal Life Church ordination -- which several of our friends have as it is free and requires little work on the new reverend's part -- does not allow marriages in New York, we will be getting handfasted on a beach in Jersey. There will still be a real wedding at some later date, but this beach ceremony read by an atheist will be enough to make Emily feel she is not lying by living at the prep school.
Three huge life changes in a month. Others would break down, but I feel I am coping well. And if I'm not, I have insurance to cover my therapy.
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