For the past few days, I’ve tried to take care of my mom while she suffers through migraine headaches, and the subsequent symptoms of nausea and tension. I learned not to waste time trying to discern the genuine motive of nurses who receive training to treat patients with kindness and care, no matter what their own mood, in the middle of the night in an understaffed and lonely-looking intensive care unit. Somehow, life has to be simple. Like my e-mail account, getting hacked, autonomously sending Canadian drug solicitations to all of my friends. I had to delete this account, and suddenly, I loved the new freedom I found. One less connection, one less unnecessary vice. I also learned that weeks like this – like the week I’ve had – are bound to happen throughout this life, and all of them contribute to the ultimate weight of my backpack.
I returned home last night from the grocery store and plopped my backpack on the floor next to the love seat in my living room. It was heavy. Usually, I avoid important details like the weight of my backpack. I once had a supervisor, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, respond to my willingness to pursue sales management as a career chide me like a mother who knows me better than I know myself. She said, “Do you know those details that you don’t like?” At which point I laughed, and never forgot the lesson. I am cordial with details now, and I’m not a sales manager. I still, no matter what I do, have to try to be careful not to carry too much.
When I looked inside the backpack last night, I realized I had not one, but two copies of Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers, 6th Edition, taking up space, mass, and comfort. I removed them. I need these manuals to write well, to teach other students to write well, and ultimately fight through my job as a tutor with the sophomoric “shoot-from-the-hip” attitude in terms of my knowledge of English grammar, style, composition, and syntax. I need this book, but I don’t need two. With 615 numbered pages, of course Rules for Writers is heavy book. At 1,230 pages, I have one too many.
In the subsequent drive from my home in Herndon to my band’s practice space in Annandale, Virginia, I searched for a way to contrive a blog entry about the severe weight of this English composition tell all, which NVCC students know all too well. I thought about comparing its actual weight to its abstract weight – in the spirit of Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War collection, The Things They Carried. Writing clear English is important. Just as important, however, is balancing the ultimate importance of life with the pursuit of a balanced education. I realized I could not write about the physical weight of the book without stepping into the realm of stretched contrivance and sentimentality. I thought, “I could compare the Hacker manual’s actual weight to its metaphorical weight in terms of literate significance.” As I zoomed through the toll plaza on the way home, I gave up.
Today I cannot explore this idea further – at least not very well. I know that every NVCC student – or student tutor, for that matter – should mind the ultimate weight of a backpack. We need to be sure not to carry too much – or the unnecessary – wherever we go.