Off Plan

It took a long time for me to find my place on the playground. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I actually had kind of a difficult time making friends when I was a young tike. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was because my hair was cut short and I wore my brother’s hand-me-downs. For most of the first through third grades my classmates had trouble deciding if I was a boy or a girl. Maybe it was because I spent my pre-school years playing with my brother and the other neighborhood children. Friends were pre-packaged and convenient. Before school I never had to “make” them, and therefore it took longer for me to learn how to initiate friendships.

I have a smattering of playground memories that pretty much sum up my social ineptitude during this period of my life. In one scene I’m huddled close to the school building on a cold day. I’ve curled up in a ball and wrapped my puffy winter coat around my knees. I proceed to toddle back and forth on the sidewalk while exclaiming, “Look! I’m a midget! You should try this!” in an attempt to amuse my teacher (who is also standing close to the building). But my teacher is not amused. She is busy rubbing her temples and telling other children not to “tattle” on each other. She has no interest in becoming my midget friend.

In another scene, I’m sitting alone in a giant cement cylinder on the playground. I have become so engrossed in the process of making a Spartan-like sand colony for a community of ants that I completely miss the bell and forget to come inside when recess is over. When I finally emerge from the cylinder, the playground is desolate. I sheepishly return to the classroom, humiliated and ashamed, and discover that my third grade teacher has arranged for the entire class to sarcastically chant, “Good afternoon, Alice!” in unison. I make it to the end of the day, and then I walk home crying.

Then, there’s a smattering of memories in which I attempt a few athletic playground activities: a couple of precarious swats at the tetherball (a Medieval playground device that practically lynched any child who came within 30 feet of it); an attempt to climb to the top of the jungle gym, which was quickly abandoned when I got four feet off the ground and discovered I was afraid of heights; and a few dismal passes at a game of four square. I know four square is the most simple-minded game ever invented, but I’ll be damned if I ever figured it out. “No, it touched the line, Alice!” the other kids would scream, “You’re out! You have no clue what you’re doing!”

Interestingly, these playground experiences didn’t end at Slater Elementary School. I encountered them again in college.

When I went to C.U. Boulder, I applied to the journalism school and decided to major in advertising. I wasn’t particularly passionate about advertising, but I thought it was intriguing, it had a creative flair, and it seemed like a reasonable job source. In actuality, I majored in advertising because I was too chicken to get a degree in the subject I really loved: English. There were no jobs for people who had English degrees (other than teaching) and I certainly wasn’t going to become a teacher, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t completely crazy.

The capstone course for my bachelor’s degree was a class called “Advertising Campaigns.” The course was held in Macky Auditorium, which was a very old, ornate building with stone walls and broad, wooden staircases. It smelled of antique carpet and scholarly discourse. Had I been an English major, it would have been a great place to wear glasses, quote Whitman and stock up on self-importance. But when it housed the advertising campaigns class it was nothing more than a den of nightmarish stress.

Basically, the purpose of the campaigns course was for the university to sucker each advertising student into paying $1500 in tuition so that they could pimp out our services to local businesses. The professor chose our campaign groups in order to simulate a real world work scenario in which you never get a say in the people you work with, and most of your co-workers are self-righteous jerks who spend all their time at the coffee machine and never pull their weight on projects.

Several groups in our class were matched with stimulating clients: a skateboard manufacturer, a travel agency… one group even got Illegal Pete’s and a semester’s worth of free burritos. My group got saddled with a law firm comprised of mind-numbingly boring engineering patent attorneys. To make matters worse, there were all kinds of legal restrictions about how a law firm could advertise its services. If I recall, they weren’t even allowed to have a logo. For nine weeks my group worked on their campaign, and I think all we generated was a line item in the yellow pages that denoted their firm name, address and phone number. We also suggested that they establish a web site. Due to the publicity restrictions, it was a site comprised of plain, black and white html text that also listed the firm name, address and phone number.

But it’s not the campaign I remember most. It was my group. They hated me with the red hot passion of a thousand suns. This was a serious problem for me emotionally, because after nursing my elementary school playground wounds I spent many painstaking years convincing everybody in my life that they should like me. And while I sometimes irritated people (like my roommate) with my stealth hug attacks and my impromptu sock puppet shows, by and large most people DID like me. But, for whatever reason, not this group.

The class took place from 6:00 to 8:30 PM. Though I was completely worn out from working all day and going to school full time, every Tuesday and Thursday I came to class with a smile – sometimes even bearing muffins. But the second my group mates caught sight of me the women would roll their eyes and the men would turn away and avoid me. One evening, when a few of them went outside to smoke, I was coming back from the computer lab and I happened upon them while they were talking about me behind my back.

“Alice is such a pain in the ass,” one woman said.

“I know. She has no clue what she’s doing,” another one joined in.

I was right back at four square.

Completely stunned, I locked eyes with one of the women while she puffed smoke out of her mouth. This was a scenario that would have bothered most decent people. I know that on the rare occasions when I’ve been caught talking about someone behind her back, my face bursts into a volcano of shame and my butt starts sweating. But not this woman. She just stared me down cold like Medusa – completely devoid of guilt.

I honestly cannot remember what I did to make myself so abhorrent to my campaigns group. I ended up with a decent grade in the class, and I always pulled my own weight. If anything, I was an over-achiever when it came to group projects. Of course, now that I’m older and more self-actualized, it’s pretty obvious that I was simply out of my element. The advertising career path did not fit my personality or my skill set. The people in my group were the type of people who went on to be very successful in advertising. That industry is completely cutthroat and there is a 5-6 month turnover for most of the creative jobs. The best copywriters and creative directors scratch their way to the top and they don’t care whose eyes they have to claw out along the way.

Because of my experiences in the campaigns class, I had an inkling early on that advertising wasn’t going to be a fit. So why didn’t I just change my major? The answer is simple: I had a plan and I was too scared to deviate from it. I had to finish what I started, because at the time I wasn’t brave enough to come up with something new.

I worked in the advertising/marketing industry for a little over four years. It was a decent career and it helped me develop as a writer, but it never became part of my soul. Then the most amazing thing happened: I stumbled into teaching. While volunteering for an inner-city youth ministry, I started to notice that even my most difficult times mentoring high school students were more fulfilling than the best times at my job. In 2002 I went back to school to get my secondary teaching license and my master’s in education. I had no idea if it would work, but I didn’t over-think it.

When I walked into my first English Methods class in graduate school, I encountered an eclectic array of overwhelmed literature dorks with brassy senses humor and absolutely no sense of fashion. These were my people. I knew it the instant I walked into the room. Several of those colleagues became some of the closest friends of my life. They were simply vital during those formative years of teaching (which was a lot like boot camp only it lasts three years instead of eight weeks, and all of the people you work with are dangerously high on Mountain Dew and hormones).

I relished my coursework and my teaching practicum. The first time I stood in front of a group of students, I knew it was exactly where God wanted me to be. It was never part my original plan, and eight years later I’m still climbing a pretty steep learning curve, but for me the classroom is (as Frederick Buechner put it) “the place where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Last week I saw a new movie called “The Adjustment Bureau.” It was an interesting commentary on this concept of life plans. The hero and the heroine (played by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt) discover that their entire lives have been planned out by a mysterious organization led by a “chief” who may or may not have been God. This chief plans out each person’s life, and the Adjustment Bureau is responsible for making sure everyone stays “on plan.” If someone deviates from the plan, they introduce little scenarios (such as spilling a cup of coffee or missing a bus) to get them back on their designated course. Somewhere toward the middle of the movie there was an extended metaphor that involved fedora hats and doorknobs. I got a little confused at that point. But there was one part I did like: when Matt Damon and his love interest went off plan, they had to sacrifice what would have amounted to a great deal of fame and fortune for them both. But then something spectacular happened – they created something new.

And that’s exactly what happened to me on the playground all those years ago. When I couldn’t find my place in any of the established games, I invented a new one. It was called “the laughing game,” and it took place around this nebulous piece of playground equipment that was basically just four feet of wooden fence with two cement posts on either side. The premise of the game was this: a group of about four girls would sit on one side of the fence looking completely stoic. Then the comedian would perform some kind of skit and, if she could make the other girls laugh, she won. It took me six years to come up with my own game, but once I did I always won. And people always wanted to play it with me because I made them laugh.

Brilliant things can happen when you go off plan. When I was 18 years old I planned to become an advertising executive and work on Madison Avenue in New York. I was going to have Italian shoes and a briefcase and an apartment on the upper east side. Instead, I became a high school teacher. I have five minutes to eat lunch, and everyone I work with is going through puberty at exactly the same time. But every day I get to teach people how to express themselves, and I have a special talent for making them laugh when they feel discouraged or soul sick. That’s worth more to me than Madison Avenue.

So, I guess when I look back on my life, I’m most grateful for the things that didn’t go according to plan. It’s only when we go off plan that we allow ourselves to forge new paths and explore uncharted territories. When we stop reading maps and start making discoveries, that’s when we become truly fulfilled. That’s when we become truly brilliant.