Fish Tacos: The Night I Met David Sedaris

David Sedaris read at Ball State last March. After the reading I stood in line to meet him. Here is what went down.

My favorite part of the reading was that he visibly cracked himself up numerous times. I always get the feeling from reading his books that he’s just reporting the world as he sees it in a calm and unaffected way. That is definitely not the case. It was the second night of the tour and everything he read was new. He said he uses the tour to refine each essay into its final published version. You could see him making marks on the pages when he got a laugh from the crowd. In his next book, look forward to reading about the ridiculous lengths women will go to for communion-wafer nachos.

During the reading he mentioned that his longest line ever was eight hours, so people ducked out and came back rather than waiting the whole time. After the reading I heard the line was going to be two hours long, so I went and had a couple drinks. This turned out to be very useful, because I was not shy about talking to him and I did not run away or try to murder anyone while waiting in the line.

I promised the people I left behind at the bar that I would invite David to come back and have a drink with us. After that I called a friend who was waiting in the line and she said she still had about an hour wait left. So I took the opportunity to go home and put on more comfortable shoes. Also, I printed out pictures of the Amy Sedaris book that I scorched on the stovetop two years ago and wrote her a note on the back. I got back to the theater a bit before midnight. The lady in charge played a hilarious April Fool’s joke at midnight, saying he had to leave because there was a curfew. People were momentarily filled with rage. I still had a kind of long wait, but I read as I waited, and as I got closer I listened to what he asked others. He asked a woman if she would sleep with her fiancée’s father for $50,000.00. He talked to some students who had driven from Purdue about their majors. He asked people if they watched Mad Men and Gossip Girl. He talked to many people about fish tacos and suggested several times that there should be a TV show about guys making fish tacos.

I got to the front of the line around 12:45. There were no pictures allowed, and I thought I would try to convince him because there were so few people behind me. However, I completely forgot my camera and my phone, so that plan was cancelled. He got into a conversation with the girl in front of me about smoking. He seemed very proud to announce that he had given up smoking two years ago, then asked the girl her age. She said she was twenty, and he said, “I don’t want to hear about you quitting…” He stopped to think for a moment. “Yeah, you’ve got a good thirty years of smoking to go.” And the crowd laughed.

My turn! How exciting. It was late and I was a bit drunk, so when he asked me “What are you doing for Easter?” I said, “Oh, I teach English here.” He repeated the original question, and I said, “Probably just go to my parents’ house.”
“Where’s that?” he asked.
“Indianapolis.”
“Are you going to have fish tacos for Easter? It’s the traditional Easter dish.”
“I love fish tacos, “I said. “I would love to have them for Easter, but I would have to take that into my own hands. It would be my own responsibility if I want to have fish tacos on Easter.”

He asked me if I like my job and if I think writing can be taught. We ended up discussing what you can learn from writing teachers and what you can’t, which isn’t the conversation I was expecting to have. I interrupted him numerous times as he told me the tale of a former student who had lots of talent and a very tough life, but never pulled it together. I gave him my pictures of the burnt book to pass on to Amy. “I know you’re not a carrier pigeon,” I said, “but it’s funny and I think it would make a good design element on a cookbook cover.” He laughed, put the pictures in his pocket with a big smile on his face, then tapped the pocket so as to say, “Don’t fear, Rachel, these pictures will surely find their way to my sister.” I forgot to ask him back to the Heorot for a drink. I also forgot to ask him to do the Rooster impression, which he mentioned during the reading but didn’t actually do. It was fun anyway.

When I got home I looked to see what he wrote in my books. In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim: “To Rachel, We’ll always have fish tacos,” and in Naked, "To Rachel, I wish you were my writing teacher.” No words to describe that, just punctuation: !!!!!! He was very sweet and took his conversations seriously. He wanted to learn something about everyone he spoke to. It was definitely worth staying out until 1:00 a.m. on a school night.

The end.


The perils of a small kitchen.

A Concern: Burnout

Several years ago I set myself on the path to becoming a teacher of reading and writing, both passions of mine. And while I have had some wonderful experiences with students, I can't help but be disappointed at how much less reading and writing I do on my own as a result of the time and energy I spend in the classroom. My most prolific years as a writer were when I was in my early twenties, working at a one-hour photo lab and a dry cleaners. When I got home from those jobs, I rushed to the computer and wrote for hours. Now when I get home from school my mind isn't brimming over with characters and scenes. It's just tired.

Despite my sadness at the loss of that creativity, I'm not really willing to go back to sorting other people's laundry for a living. I've spent a lot of time in the last couple years thinking about what I could do instead and still don't have a good answer.

Last weekend I had a bit of a reality check: when you teach something, often your own practice of it can suffer. I know because I've lived it. Yet I've jumped into this yoga teacher training with nothing but enthusiasm and optimism.

Why I am taking the risk of sucking all the joy out of another passion? Is it possible for me to use this awareness to prevent burnout? It has made me start scaling back all the "big plans" I was making for teaching yoga. I'm going to start small and stay small until I can see how teaching is affecting my own practice.

I'm back!

I woke up on January 1 feeling happy and hopeful—already I know that in 2010 I will turn thirty, become a yoga teacher, and see Mariah Carey (for those who don’t know, she’s my favorite). And that’s just in the first five months. My last big transitional phase was extremely painful, but I have a good feeling about this one.

When I started this blog in May of 2007 it was a way of goofing around and communicating with friends. I had just turned twenty-seven. I had a newly minted MFA in Creative Writing and a whole bunch of anxiety about what would become of me. By June I had decided I would move to Chicago and see what kind of job I could find. It seemed like a good plan because I was familiar with the city but had never lived there. It was new without being completely foreign—a manageable leap.

I never moved to Chicago. Everything that happened that summer was foreign and unanticipated. In June, my mom, who was forty-nine at the time, nearly died because of misdiagnosed (and therefore untreated) colon cancer. I changed my plans. I would live at home and help her recover from her surgeries and take her to chemo and radiation. If I could find a part-time job, great. If not, I’d worry about employment when she was back in good health.

Unexpected event number two: a week before school started, I was hired to teach a full-time load at a university about an hour away. Stunned and happy, I rented an apartment and threw together a couple syllabi.

I decided that I could still nurse my mom through chemo while doing my first real job and living an hour away. By the end of the academic year my Mom was still alive and my students had done all the requisite assignments. But I was emotionally and physically exhausted, and the stress I carried around with me hadn’t helped when it came to making new friends or settling into the community. I joked with a couple students before class one day that I was looking for a reputable physician who would be willing to put me in a medically induced coma at the end of the semester. When I went to visit grad school friends that summer, I realized that my mantra, “I’m not myself this year” was an understatement. My personality had completely disappeared. Even though I had hated it, I decided to go back to my job for another year. I didn’t think I had the energy to find another position, and at least I would know what to expect.

I had kept up the blog because it was a way to feel like I was communicating with friends even though we were far away from each other and caught up in endless games of phone tag. By the time I started my second year of work, my interest faded and I left the blog un-updated.

Now it’s halfway through my third year at the same job, and those early days seem very far away. This isn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to say about challenges, but if I could, I would change a lot of things that happened that year. My Mom and everyone who loves her suffered a lot. Despite the well-meaning people who try to make lemonade out of the situation, I don’t think the ways we learned or grew from the experience were worth it.

So here I am on the cusp of another transitional phase, and the blog is back. I’m comforted that I can see some of what’s coming, and I’m being optimistic about the parts I can’t anticipate.

It's Learnin' Time

I leave in two days for my first weekend of yoga teacher training (there are eight three-day weekends total, all four hours away in Chicago). I’m a little afraid of being a student again. I went to an info session for the teacher training in November and got a little taste of the nerves I’ll be encountering. One part of the class is “looking at bodies,” where each student models the poses of the day so that we can see how proper alignment looks on different people.

A woman volunteered to model downward-facing dog pose. The trainer asked what could change to make it a fuller expression of the pose. Her hands and feet are too close together, I thought. Any past professor or classmate of mine would say that I’m always a willing participant in class, but instead of speaking up I choked down the words.

“Could she move her hands and feet farther apart?” someone asked.

The answer was yes. When the woman stepped her feet back we watched her back lengthen out just as it should.

I hope that I can remember that moment the next time I’m too terrified to speak.

**

The fear of being wrong isn’t my only problem with “looking at bodies.” I love it when a yoga teacher comes around and taps my foot a little to the left or encourages me to bend a little further into a pose. But a whole class of people looking at me? Again, terror.

I realize this is an odd sentiment coming from someone who regularly stands in front of a room full of twenty-five college freshmen for seventy-five minutes at a time. In that situation I have everything planned out and I know a lot about the subject. In this case, I’m the student, and I’m not thrilled about the scrutiny. My hope is that I can muster up some bravery the first few times and it won’t seem so bad after that. Failing that, I will remember that sometimes it hurts to learn. One of the best parts of yoga is learning to accept yourself wherever you are. It seems easy when it's just me. Now I'll have to learn to make it easy while under the gaze of others.