Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 238

Mohawks and Jessie Eisenberg

During my April vacation from teaching, I had the honor of traveling to Canada to teach storytelling on a Mohawk reservation. The Mohawk nation is paying Mohawks to learn their native language from a fellow Mohawk and native speaker who is also a world-renown native language expert.

Their goal is to preserve the Mohawk language and prevent it from fading away. 

The Mohawk language is unlike any of the European languages. The sentence, "I love you," for example, contains half the letters as the actual word "love." It's a language that constructs words from bits and pieces of other words, so it's impossible to you traditional language instruction when teaching it to new speakers.  

The man who hired me has developed his method of instruction over the course of 25 years after using it to teach himself the Mohawk language. He is a truly extraordinary human being.  

I was hired to help his students tell better stories. His hope was that in telling better stories, they might be more enthusiastic about using the language and would enjoy listening to one another more. 

As I stood before his class, ready to teach, I found myself thinking, "In the summer of 2011 I went to New York to tell one-and-only-one story for The Moth. Today I'm about two hours north of Toronto, on a Mohawk reservation, being paid to teach storytelling to Native Americans."

It's crazy where life can take you when you dare to do something difficult and frightening. When you refuse to stand still. When you insist on challenging yourself. 

Last night I was in New York, attending the book launch party of friend and podcast host Mike Pesca, when I saw the actor Jesse Eisenberg waiting for an elevator with his wife and child. Having read the chapter of Pesca's book that he had written, I stepped over to say hello and congratulate him on his success. After exchanging stories about former NBA player Dan Majerle and the video game NBA Jam, I quickly discovered that Eisenberg knew exactly who I was from my appearances on Pesca's podcast and talked to me about some of the stories he liked best. 

"It's you," he said. "The storyteller. I thought you'd be something else. You look so normal."

He was incredibly sweet and generous with his remarks.

I was a little starstruck.

Once again, I found myself thinking, ""In the summer of 2011 I went to New York to tell one-and-only-one story for The Moth. Now I'm chatting with Jesse Eisenberg about my time working at McDonald's and my methods for teaching storytelling to the masses."

It was a night I'll never forget.

And I'll never forget my three days of teaching on the Mohawk reservation, either. I met some extraordinary people, learned a great deal, and left with a new name. 

A Mohawk name:

Rakaraweyenhen

"Teller of great stories."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

Do the hard thing. Do the seemingly impossible thing. Never become complacent. Never stand still. Always look for the next hill to climb.  

Mike Pesca wrote his first book. I've started to perform standup comedy.

There's no telling where either of these new paths will take us, and that is a wonderful thing. 

Constantly frowning and avoiding dogs at every turn

Grammar is important, especially when it comes to the design of memorial plaques. Ignore a few basic rules of grammar and you could end up with this:

A woman who both never saw a dog in her entire life and never cracked a smile.

Quite the departure from what this foundation was presumably intending. 

When I asked my nine year-old daughter to read this and tell me what she thinks of Nicole Campbell, she said, "A grumpy, dead person."

The best way to rewrite this plaque is probably this:

In loving memory of
Nicole Campbell
Who never saw a dog that didn't make her smile

"Who never saw a dog without smiling" also works, but I like the seemingly irresistibility of dogs that the first option implies. 

Either is far better than portraying Nicole Campbell as some unsmiling monster who managed to avoid dogs for her entire life. 

When the words are important and permanent, you need to get it right. 

The Trump administration has been the most type-ladened organization that I've ever seen. Not only is Trump's Twitter feed ("official statements" according to his press secretary) filled with capitalization, spelling, and punctuation errors, but typos abound in this administration.

Just last week, Sarah Huckabee Sanders read a statement containing this:

“Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people.”

Unfortunately, the "has" was supposed to be "had."

Big difference. 

A statement from Sanders’s office on the death of former first lady Barbara Bush was dated April 17, 2017, a full year prior to her death.

A White House press release last May said that Donald Trump was traveling to Israel to promote “the possibility of lasting peach.” 

A lasting peach sounds great, but not quite as good as lasting peace in the Middle East. 

An ever-updating list of public typos and spelling errors, verbatim, from the Trump White House, can be found here.

 My favorite so far is Trump's official inauguration portrait. At a time when he was forced to lie about his lackluster inauguration attendance and his post-inauguration parade route was so visibly devoid of human beings, Trump released his portrait containing a typo so obvious that you had to wonder if anyone in the new administration had a brain. 

I am competitive, which means I might be a jerk but also other important things

I had no idea that highly competitive, super serious tag was a thing. 

And what a thing it is...

I want to play this game, which should come as no surprise to people who know me well.

I like competition. I thrive on competition. 

My favorite form of storytelling is the slam. Stand on a stage and tell a story so a team of judges can determine if my performance was best. In fact, if given the choice between being paid to perform in a beautiful, thousand-seat theater or tossing my name into a tote bag at the back of a bookstore with the hopes of maybe competing in front of 200 people for free, I'd take the latter almost every time.  

My favorite card game is poker. Match wits against an opponent with actual cash on the line.

If competitive yoga was a thing, I suspect that I'd be a full blown yogi by now.  

When I was living in Brockton, MA in the 1990's, I competed in an underground arm wrestling league. Though I was not close to being the best arm wrestler on the circuit, I was only beaten once in my two year career. I wasn't always able to pin my opponent (in fact, I rarely pinned an opponent), but I became famous for always managing to wrestle to a draw. 

I couldn't stand to lose.  

And although I am a winning storyteller and poker player, I don't need to be good in order to enjoy the competition. I am a terrible golfer who routinely plays with excellent golfers. It is rare that I do not finish in last place in my foursome, but I return to the golf course again and again, ready to compete each time.  

I can't imagine not keeping score, and I refuse to play with a handicap. If I can't win straight-up, then I don't get to win.  

In college, I would try to not only score the highest on tests, but I would also tried to finish the test first, viewing speed as a positive attribute and knowing that if I finished quickly enough, I might demoralize my fellow students and bend the curve in my direction. 

Terrible, I know. This didn't mean that I would help my fellow students study or offer strategies and tips to be successful. Just like in poker or storytelling, I'm happy to help my competitors perform better through instruction, advice, and counsel. 

Hell, I'm publishing a book containing many of my storytelling secrets. You should preorder it immediately, by the way. 

But when it comes time to actually compete, I'll do anything short of cheating to win, and if that means finding a way to demoralize an opponent, I'll do it. I want to win every time. 

My mother told me time and time again as a child that "Everything is not a competition," but with two siblings and two step-siblings, it was fairly simple to turn almost anything into a competition.

Climbing. Running. Eating. Biking. Rock throwing. Sledding. Handstands. Pushups. 

I even turned seemingly benign activities like shoe tying, drawing, dishwashing, and splitting wood into competitions.

I would compete against my brothers to see if I could fall asleep faster than them.

In school, I worked like hell to be the fastest reader in class. The most accurate mathematician. The most fluent speaker of French. The best pole vaulter.   

One could argue that I was turning everything into a competition in a desperate attempt to get the attention that I so desperately wanted but so rarely received. In a world where no one was ever looking in my direction, I was just trying to find a way to turn the heads of my parents and my teachers. 

Others might argue that I'm just a competitive jerk. That may also be true. 

But what I also know is that I read exceptionally fast, and that was an enormous asset when I finally made it to college as an English major.

I can fall asleep almost instantly.

I paid for our honeymoon through poker winnings.  

My success at The Moth has led to opportunities to speak, perform, and teach around the world. It helped me land a book deal. It resulted in the launch of Speak Up. It changed my life in incredible ways that may have never happened had I not been so hell bent on winning story slams and perfecting my craft.  

And even though I almost never win on the golf course, some of my best and most favorite memories with my friends have taken place while trying to get that little, white ball in that terrible, little hole. I've even written a memoir about a summer of golf that will someday find its way to bookstore shelves.

So perhaps I'll find my way to a competitive tag tournament someday - hopefully just as intense as the tag on the video but perhaps with people a little less like superheroes and a little more like ordinary human beings.  

A former student's advice on avoiding procrastination

A former student visited my class last month to offer advice to my fifth graders as they prepare to embark on their journey to middle school.

His advice was fascinating:

In order to avoid procrastination, fill your life with after-school activities. Do as much as possible. Sports, drama, student government... anything and everything. Pack your day with excitement and adventure.

In this way, he explained, your time to complete homework and study will be limited. You'll have very specific and defined times each day when you can get your work done, and as a result, you will be forced to do your homework and studying during those times.

My former student's message is this:

When we have large amounts of free time available to us, we procrastinate. If we eliminate or restrict the amount of free time we have each day, we'll have no choice but to use that free time wisely. 

Kind of brilliant. Right?

A dose of 1850's racial politics to start my day

Five minutes ago, at 5:34 AM, my nine year-old daughter, Clara, walked down the stairs, sat beside me, and the first words out of her mouth were these:

"Hey Daddy, I was reading about Harriet Tubman yesterday, and I was wondering:  Why did the northern states agree to pass The Fugitive Slave Law even though the north wanted to abolish slavery?"

Just how I wanted to start my day. 

I'm starting to think that she reads too much. 

The old fashioned way of breaking up is the right way to break up

When I was a kid, you had to break up with your romantic companion in person. If I even suggested to my friends that I might break up with a girl over the phone, I would be vilified. 

I like this. I support this.

Back then, breaking up with someone was civilized. Still difficult and fraught with emotion and distress, but accomplished with a modicum of dignity. You weren't allowed to spend time being naked with another human being and then just end the relationship with a phone call, voicemail, or text message.

You had to do it face-to-face.

It wasn't always easy.

I was once dumped in the middle of a high school dance. 
I once drove three hours to New Hampshire just to break up with a girl.
I once broke up with a girl, got back together, and broke up her again in the same night. 

I once broke up with a girl on a Saturday night, knowing full well that we were supposed to be visiting my grandparents on Sunday afternoon. After breaking up with her, she offered to accompany me to my grandparent's house anyway, knowing that my grandmother liked her a lot, was looking forward to seeing her, and didn't want to upset my family with our sad news. 

Crazy. Right?

And it wasn't an easy breakup. She was upset. Enraged, even. A little blindsided. Still, she found a way to awkwardly muddle through the day with me for my grandparent's benefit. 

Today people often break up with their romantic partners via text message. Or tweet. Or email. Or worst of all, they simply ghost the person. They stop returning calls. Ignore emails. Never respond to text messages. 

People break up with their romantic partners today in the same way Trump fires administration officials:

He tells others to do it for him. He waits for them to see it on CNN. He tweets their termination to the world. For a guy who became famous for firing people on reality TV, he's a damn coward when it comes to terminating employees in real life.  

Don't be like Donald Trump when breaking up with a romantic partner. Don't act like a damn coward when breaking off a relationship. Do the hard thing the hard way. The old fashioned way. The right way.  

When my children begin dating at the ages of  28-34, this is what I will tell them. I'm going to make damn certain that they understand the importance of treating their romantic partners decently, even if that romantic relationship has come to an end. 

Ending a relationship via text message is the act of a coward. Ghosting a romantic partner is indecent and pathetic. You don't get to have fun while being naked with another human being and then treat them poorly when it's time to move on.

I'm old fashioned that way. 

I did a backbend. Now I can do anything.

I did the impossible this week. I did a backbend. 

Maybe you know me well and would agree that this is impossible to imagine. Or maybe you don't know me as well and think that a backbend hardly constitutes a significant achievement. 

Either way, it was a moment I'll never forget, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.

I was wandering around the playground at recess earlier this week when I saw some students, including a pair of twin sisters, doing backbends.

From a standing position, they bent all the way down and all the way back up.

I joked with them that a backbend was no big deal and I could do one whenever I wanted. When they challenged me to do one, I came clean and admitted I had never done a backbend in my life and never would.

That was all these girls needed to hear. In an instant, they were surrounding me and encouraging me to try. I laughed again, assuring them that I was not built to perform a backbend, but they persisted, insisting I try. Eventually I agreed to attempt the first step - raise my hands over my head and look backwards - thinking this would placate them.

Instead, it emboldened them. Through a level of persistent positivity and a torrent of encouragement that I have honestly never experienced before in my life, they continued to insist that I try. They did not harass or taunt or tease. They simply expressed an unwavering conviction that if I tried, I would succeed. 

I fell. They helped me up. I fell again. They spotted me, two girls on each side, wisely fleeing when I started to collapse. One girl took an elbow to the head and shook it off like it was nothing. Over the course of 15 minutes, I went from a man who would never do a backbend in his life to a man trying like hell to do a backbend because the positivity and encouragement of these girls had pierced my belief that this was impossible.

They had turned me into a believer. 

Then I did it. Starting from a standing position, I reached back and continued bending until my feet were on the ground and my hands touched the ground behind me.

I couldn't believe it. I had done something that I had thought impossible just minutes before. I had thought it impossible for my entire life.

I've been walking on air ever since.  

I know. It doesn't seem like much. And I've certainly done difficult and even seemingly impossible things before.

I managed a McDonald's restaurant full time while simultaneously attending college full time, (earning degrees at two different schools and finishing near the top of my class), launching a business, working part time in the school's writing center, serving in school government, and writing for the school newspaper.

Honestly, I don't know how I did it. I was just so happy to be off the streets and making my dreams come true that I would've done anything to succeed. The work seemed like nothing compared to all that had preceded it.

Even more impossible, I somehow convinced Elysha Dicks to love and marry me. And to keep on loving me more than a decade later. A woman who I desperately admired from afar but never dreamed of dating somehow agreed to spend the rest of her life with me. 

Astounding.       

Compared to those achievements, a backbend might not seem like so big a deal, but you would be wrong. The actual backbend might not be as momentous as my other accomplishments, but the way I had been transformed from a nonbeliever to a believer through relentless support and endless positivity was astonishing to me.

The way those girls encouraged me was inspiring.  

They had gotten me to do something that I never thought possible. That many people thought impossible. 

I'm never going to forget that moment in the grass beside the tree. I walked away thinking about all the other possibilities that I had closed off from my life, wondering what other impossibilities I need to tackle.

I did a backbend under a tree on a spring day, and now I feel like my potential is boundless. 

Pain and fear and joy all wrapped up in a stone

Here's a game I used to play as a kid which strikes me as fairly stupid today:

My friends and I would gather handfuls of stones, ideally a dozen or more in both hands, and stand back-to-back-to-back in an open area. A beach was ideal, but a gravel driveway, a lawn or field adjacent to an ornamental bed of stones, or any similar location would do. 

We would then countdown backward from ten as if we were launching a rocket, and at zero, we would shout "Blast off!" Then we would throw the stones into the air as high as possible and run as fast as possible, trying to escape the impact zone before the stones returned to Earth. 

Your success in avoiding being struck by stones was highly dependent on the trajectory of your friend's throw. If he managed a nearly vertical launch, your escape was all but assured. But if one or more of your co-conspirators launched his stones at an angle or sprayed them in an arc, escape was a 50/50 proposition at best.  

Those stones hurt like hell when they struck our heads. 

It was so fun.

The one modification to the game that we wanted to make but never did was the painting of the stones so that each person could be assigned a specific color. Then we could've determined whose stones hit which person and kept some kind of score.

Instead, we accused our friends of bad throws based upon a complex formula involving who we hated the most at the moment, who looked the most guilty, and who was the easiest to unjustly persecute. 

I know it all sounds stupid and dangerous and tragically un-fun, but it was a joyous game filled with laughter, fear, pain, hilarity, suspense, and high stakes. 

It was a stupid, stupid game, but rarely have I had so much fun. 

I don't see it.

I'm constantly told that Clara is the spitting image of Elysha. 

I don't see it. I've never seen it.

People are always dumbfounded when I say this. But my explanation is simple:

When I see my daughter, I see a little girl who loves to read and draw, still calls me "Daddy," skips joyously across the lawn, and makes a mess of every room she occupies.   

When I see Elysha, I see a beautiful, funny woman who I can't take my eyes off who I always want to make out with regardless of the circumstances.

Of course the two never look alike to me. 

Right?

Don't be selfish. Tell a story.

I tell people to tell stories a lot. I know. It's my clarion call.  

But allow me to say it again. 

Last Wednesday night, I performed in The Moth GrandSLAM at the Cutler Majestic in Boston. My plan was to take the stage and tell a story that was a lot more humor than heart. It was a story about meeting my girlfriend's father for the first time and trying desperately to bridge the gap between his traditional, hulking masculinity and my inability to do anything traditionally masculine. 

"He's the kind of guy who can take down trees, and if necessary, put it back up again. I play Miss Pacman on Friday nights at the arcade and read Shel Silverstein poetry."

A funny story, filled with amusing contrasts and healthy doses of self-deprecation, but not something that pulled at heartstrings.

I honestly didn't think it would be a winning story.

Then something amazing happened. It shouldn't have seemed amazing in retrospect, since these things happen all the time, but I still find myself surprised every time. 

Three young men approached me at different times during intermission and at the end of the show to tell me how much my story had meant to them. In each case, these were men who struggled in environments where traditional masculinity is prized above all other things. Each young man described himself as someone who did not represent traditional masculinity in any way and often felt unappreciated and even unloved as a result.

Each of these men were so grateful for my story. One of them was teary-eyed as he spoke to me.  All three hugged me before stepping away. 

This is why we tell stories. This is why authenticity, honesty, and vulnerability are so important. I take a stage planning on telling an amusing story about soft hands that can't change the oil in a car or repair plumbing, and I unexpectedly touch the hearts of at least three people in the audience that night. 

I tell a story that, in the words of one man, "means more to me than you'll ever know."

"I needed this more than you could imagine," he told me. 

You never know who is waiting for your story. You never know who needs your story. You never know when something amusing or incidental or seemingly benign will touch a heart, change a mind, and perhaps make a real difference in the life of a human being.

We tell our stories for many reasons, but perhaps the least selfish reason of all is the possibility that something we say might make a difference in the life of another human being.