This isn’t just about beauty in the feminine sense, but let’s start there. It’s something that I’ve found interesting over the course of my relatively short life. The inverse relationship between beauty and insecurity. Everyone has them. But it seems that women and men who are universally considered “attractive” tend to be more obviously insecure than so-called average looking folks. I haven’t met someone who is seen and sees themselves as attractive and hasn’t show a sense of vanity or ego with it. From hair (or lack thereof) to nails and clothes to affect, it’s a pretty common theme. And it seems to get worse with age.

I’ve seen it firsthand. With my wife. With former girlfriends. With handsome guys suddenly finding themselves over thirty, thirty-five or forty with receding hairlines, bald spots or graying hair. Not to mention love handles. It’s a shame, because out of the span of an average life of seven or eight decades, we really stay in peak physical attractiveness for twenty or thirty years. Forty if we work hard at maintaining the physical plant. There’s got to me more to life than this.

And it’s not just the phenotypically gifted that show overt signs of worry. The mentally gifted do this, too. Oftentimes long before any signs of intellectual wear and tear are evident. When someone can no longer recall the Pythagorean Theorem, you know it’s all downhill from there, right? Of course, the beauty and the nerd in our culture have insecurities for different reasons — really two sides of the same coin. Attractive folks tend to be popular and often know only for how they look, even when they have other gifts. That could make almost anyone both arrogance and neurotically self-conscious. Plus, many people hate, actually hate, their highly attractive peers. That doesn’t help matters.

For the highly intelligent, the opposite is true, especially in the growing up years. The combination of pure analytical talent, heightened inquisitiveness, when combined with any critical thinking skills at all, makes them standout in the most uncomfortable of ways. Most folks prior to college don’t value these gifts, and in fact shun the folks who do have them. They’re uncool until college, then cool to exploit until grad school, and then envied once they make it to twenty-five or older. That could make even the most social awkward brainiac a bit nervous about themselves and others in their lives.

But what if a person is both beautiful on the outside and mentally gifted as well? Or at least, attractive with above-average intelligence? Beware of the person with multiple gifts and with the ability to hone them into skills. They can be arrogantly insecure on a scale that would scare the typically shallow — ala Tyson Beckford — or self-absorbed — ala Cornel West. They often don’t know whether their friends are their real friends or are hangers-on or are folks looking to screw them over in some way. Their enemies or foes tend to be obvious — at least at a younger age — and plentiful. With so many gifts, it’s no wonder folks blessed with them often feel like they don’t belong to anything or anyone, even with all of the success they garner in our world.

I’m overgeneralizing, of course. Because natural gifts aren’t evenly distributed. Parents play an important role in providing balance to the physically attractive or highly intelligent child-turned-tweener and teenager-turned adult. Peers who have more than coolness on their minds tend to help keep one’s head from getting too big or ego from being shattered into tiny pieces. Ultimately, having a vision for one’s life and the motivation and inspiration to live out that vision — based to some degree on one’s gifts and the guidance necessary for using them — is what keeps genius from venturing into insanity and beauty from total vanity.

I started writing this in response to the contradictions anyone can find in looking at Women’s History Month. Particularly the distance between feminist/womanist rhetoric about girls and women loving themselves loving themselves for who they are and not how they look and the everyday barrage of images about beauty and achieving it for others’ pleasure, if not for one’s own. Then I realized that this is an issue for women and men, boys and girls, regardless and because of race and socioeconomics. Then I thought that beauty isn’t the only insecurity folks who are blessed or gifted become neurotic about over time. Yes, we are all gifted in some way, but for folks who show some hint of talent at an early age, it can be a great burden. Let’s hope that we can find a way of losing some of this weight in time to enjoy our lives.

How’s the main line from Jon Secada’s ’93 hit “I’m Free” relevant to anything I have to say today? His often overwrought style — one that I still love, by the way — reflected my overwrought times fifteen years ago. It was this week in ’94 that I took and passed my PhD oral comprehensive exam. It’s not of particular significance in the whole scheme of things. Within six months of this exam, I passed my dissertation overview defense and officially became ABD (All [all coursework completed] But Dissertation [thesis]) at the ripe old age of twenty-four. Two years before, I completed my master’s degree in two semesters of grad school. The importance of this event, though, shouldn’t be weighed in degrees. It should be measured in terms of perseverance, determination and the ability to suspend reality.

It all started when I transferred to Carnegie Mellon in March ’93. I knew that I didn’t want to earn three degrees in History at Pitt, and I was a year into the doctoral program there at the time I announced my transfer to my then advisor Larry Glasco. I didn’t say this to him, but I had my eyes on things like fellowships, publications, conference presentations, teaching opportunities, and the academic job market when I made my decision.

In a department where the average amount of time it took for a student to earn a PhD was fourteen years, I knew that there was next to no chance for me to get articles published, pick up a research grant, present at major conferences, or to teach my own courses in the next couple of years. Heck, three months before, Glasco had told me how disappointed in me he was because he thought I was doing an independent study course using quantitative data from census records. Except I wasn’t doing an independent study course with him! My advisor didn’t even know my course schedule! I knew that I needed to leave before I’d find myself living the rest of the ’90s and well into the ’00s as a Pitt History grad student.

I probably should’ve applied to UMich, NYU or UCLA to finish my doctorate. But I went with Carnegie Mellon because of one professor, Joe William Trotter, Jr. It would be the first time I was to work with a quality Black history professor, and he was a tenured one with a respectable research agenda at that. So after taking a grad course in African American history with him in the fall of ’92, I applied to go to Carnegie Mellon, and easily got in. I don’t know what it’s like now, but they only accepted six or seven student in their doctoral program a year, providing full funding (tuition and stipend) without a teaching schedule for the first year. By the time I told Glasco about my move, I was hopeful about my academic future and career prospects.

A full twelve months later found me more humble and more appreciative of the opportunities I had before me than I’d been at any time since the months after my homelessness episode in August ’88. I suffered through a year of sparse dollars, six weeks of post-Pitt unemployment, only to take a job with Allegheny County paying $6 an hour, and found myself within a week of being evicted from my apartment in July ’93. None of my plans for academic domination had worked out that summer, except for me passing my written comprehensive exams that May before I officially began grad school at Carnegie Mellon. Even then, the week of my exams was also the week I had root canal surgery on one of my front bottom teeth. I was on 800 mg of Motrin the day I took my exams.

It was a rough second half of ’93. I dedicated myself to God, church and being the best grad student I could on a $750 a month stipend. I thought for a while that I’d made a tragic error. Carnegie Mellon’s professors wanted to put their stamp of approval on me, so I found myself taking a couple of first semester grad school courses I actually took when I was at Pitt. My advisor called himself “running interference” to keep my publishing and other career ambitions in check. And the campus as a whole was about as exciting as the typically dreary and cold weather of Pittsburgh itself. By the beginning of November, I saw myself wondering if I should just get certified and teach high school history instead.

What happened instead was a combination of what I saw as providence and my determination to make something out of virtually nothing. I simply changed my attitude. I started praying more, casting my burdens unto the Lord, and whining a heck of a lot less about the situation. I kept reminding myself about being in worse situations with fewer resources. Most of all, I began to act as if I knew that everything was going to work out, that I would be free of coursework and grad school sooner rather than later. That carried me through the end of ’93.

The following semester started with me surviving the coldest and snowiest winter I’d ever known with sneakers with holes in them. I ended up taking out my first student loans since my first semester of grad school so that I wouldn’t have to eat chicken and rice three out of every four week. It was a pitiful and monk-like experience for me, those days of grad student life at Carnegie Mellon. I made a point that semester to spend much more time on Pitt’s campus, even sacrificing some academic time for time to hang out with friends and colleagues. At least once the temperature got above ten degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t realize how isolated I felt until I started studying and writing on Pitt’s campus again.

I managed to convince my paranoid advisor that I was ready to take my oral comps, as grad students like to call them. Trotter, of course, was worried that I wasn’t ready. True be told, I probably could’ve taken them before I left Pitt. But there were academic politics involved. I wasn’t a typical Carnegie Mellon grad student, and it had nothing to do with my grades. I was a free-thinker who didn’t adapt to the brown-nosing style of most of my colleagues. I hadn’t “paid my dues” and spent a full three semesters taking redundant courses before moving ahead with my doctoral thesis plans. I hadn’t gained the confidence of all of my professors. What I did in response was to put my foot down. I suggested that if that really was the case, then why am I here when I could’ve gone to another school — especially since Carnegie Mellon had literally accepted all of my Pitt grad school credits? In the end, my advisor worked it out. I was scheduled for a two-hour inquisition in mid-March.

I ended up with a group of professors who were and weren’t my biggest fans. One professor was a mealy-mouthed, Neo-Marxist type who expected her students to stick their noses as far up her butthole as possible. I had her for Comparative Working-Class History the previous fall (it was really US and Western European Working-Class History with a book on Russian women mixed in). I had my advisor for US and African American history, and another professor for History of Education. I spent my holiday break and the first two months of ’94 preparing for the comps, which, if I didn’t pass, would either have one more opportunity to take again — but not until the fall of ’94 — or I’d have to consider another potential profession.

The afternoon before the exam, I was trapped at Forbes Quad (now Wesley Posvar Hall) waiting for a late-winter downpour of sleet and rain to stop. I had no umbrella, and didn’t want to walk home or to Carnegie Mellon in the middle of the mess. I happened to have Jon Secada’s “I’m Free” on at the time. The rain stopped right in the middle of the song. Some clouds opened up and a gigantic rainbow appeared. It was the first time I’d ever seen a rainbow. I’m not kidding. This really happened, and it was a first for me. I took it as a divine sign that everything was going to be all right. And of course it was.

What I take away from this is that regardless of feelings, fears or circumstance, the ultimate thing that determines whether we succeed or not, make it or not, is us, our faith, our drive and determination. The signs are always there for us to see and act upon. The spiritual and mental resources are always available to tap into. It really is up to each of us to seize the moment, to take the right chances at the right time and in the right ways in order to make the near impossible possible and the difficult rather easy. We just have to free ourselves from ourselves, to get out of our own way and make what we want of our lives.

Far be it for me to comment on issues not directly tied to Boy At The Window…wait…who am I kidding! Everything I talk about relates to my manuscript somehow, even if the post is as loopy as a Berkeley, Greenwich Village or Takoma Park hippie walking around after dropping acid. I digress. I have some recent events to comment on, ones that are both amusing and disturbing. Like the difference between watching Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show last Thursday versus watching Bill Maher’s Real Time just 24 hours later. It was comic-turned-serious journalism at its best and worst, and just a day apart.

We all know the Stewart smackdown of Jim Cramer story. It might as well have been Pacquiao vs. De La Hoya from last December, only the ref would’ve stepped in after the second round instead of letting it go for eight. The reason it was such a slaughter was that Jon Stewart, for all of his irreverence and goofiness, cares about these issues. He certainly cares enough to study the material he needs in order to raise tough questions and poke fun at political and cultural issues simultaneously. Jim Cramer was about as prepared to respond to Stewart as I would’ve been — when I was nine years old! The Daily Show was already one of my favorite shows before the past week and a half of Stewart raging against the machine. Now I can safely keep the TV off of MSNBC — unless it’s Keith Olbermann’s Countdown — and CNN and only watch Comedy Central or BBC America for real news.

It also speaks to how little news we actually get from our cable news networks like CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FIX News, Headline News and so on. It’s no surprise that despite this past election cycle, most Americans have moved away from traditional carriers of news and endless oppositional commentary to looking up what they want on the Internet, and often through blogs at that. And since when is it news that good comedians are also very inquisitive and wonderfully smart people? From David Letterman to Richard Pryor, comedians get to ask tough questions because, in the end, a tough question is easier than their easiest joke. It’s in a good comedian’s nature to do so. I hope they’re paying Stewart enough money to stay on at least three more years.

Contrast Stewart’s brilliant performance to the one mailed in by Bill Maher last Friday night. Heck, saying that Maher mailed it in insults the US Postal Service. More like he barely showed up. Maher couldn’t remember the name of the conservative blogger he brought in to bite at Michael Eric Dyson’s ankles, couldn’t remember that Dyson’s been at Georgetown since the summer of ’07. Dyson’s a guest that Maher has on at least once in every split-season of Real Time since it’s been on HBO! Maher then spent fifteen minutes talking with Sarah Silverman about the Playboy Mansion. I love Sarah Silverman, but that segment couldn’t have been worse if Michael Richards was there interviewing Mel Gibson. Maher’s lack of preparation highlights the reality that even a talented comedian must work hard at their craft to stay at the top of their game.

But there’s more to this than simple sloppiness. Maher’s edge has dulled because Bush Jr.’s no longer in office, and President Obama has been pretty good so far. “Pretty good” compared to the previous resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is like comparing Julius Caesar to Nero. As much as there is to criticize Republicans, neoconservatives, or even the Obama Administration about, Maher had little to offer last Friday night. He didn’t even mention the Stewart-Cramer showdown in his monologue. At least it would’ve broken the monotony of his “New Rules” or tired “third rail” arguments about social issues and religion.

With Dyson and the conservative blogger, it was an attempt to spice up Real Time with a real good argument. Except it was much of the same oppositional bluster signifying nothing that Stewart has been so critical of in recent years. Plus, weren’t there other, younger folks available last Friday to talk more intelligently — or at least, entertainingly — about race or social issues or the future of American conservatism? Not that Dyson is old, at least physically. Intellectually, his ideas represent the early ’90s, the height of the so-called Culture Wars, and not an understanding of race in the early twenty-first century. Maher and company might have been better off with Kevin Powell, Rachel Maddow or — dare I say — Ross Douthat from The Atlantic Monthly on his show last week. Fresh faces, fresh ideas, more measured arguments. That was missing last Friday. I sense that this is a freshness that has been missing for at least a year.

Maher’s problem is part of a larger problem with the media over the past ten or fifteen years. If you listen to standard radio and watch TV news and cable edutainment long enough, you hear the same voices and see the same faces. You know what Pat Buchanan’s going to say ten minutes before he say it. You’re ready for Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post to take his pregnant “Uuuhhh” pauses before he actually opens his mouth. You’re sure that Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala will spin like crazy for their ideological perspective before you’ve stopped brushing your teeth in the morning. When’s the last time someone new and under thirty has made a big splash as a journalist, commentator, writer, or intellectual in the media of the media? Bottom line: the media elite — that’s anyone with an established name in publishing, TV, radio, cable, Hollywood and music, and to a much lesser extent, the Internet — spends so much of their time talking to themselves that they’ve long lost touch with what the rest of us see, think and say.

That’s why Stewart is so refreshing. He and his staff, through humor, sarcasm and actual intellectual curiosity, have their fingers on the pulse of many Americans disenchanted with this sorry state of media affairs. It’s part of the reason why I started this blog. I hope that Maher brings his “A” game in the coming weeks. Or this will be yet another show I’ll have to skip.

“Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,” the main refrain from the Broadway play and movie Rent begins and continues over and over Seasons of Love.m4p. Defining life by your loves sounds like a good idea. Given that we’re a week away from the official start of spring, and that this time of year is a literal season of love, including marriages and procreation, it started me to think. By all of my calculations, the next few days mark forty years since my father and mother conceived me, in their season of love, in the Age of Aquarius.

I wonder, what life must’ve been like for them back then. It was the spring of ’69, and Nixon had only been in office for as long as Obama’s been so far. We were only four months away from the Moon landing. We were only a few months removed from the assassinations of King and RFK, and only two months removed from the end of LBJ’s time in the White House. We were only two months into a cultural backlash that would lead to an age of neoconservatism. Say what you will about the Sixties, at least this protest-laden period. Against Vietnam, imperialist pigs, the military industrial complex, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and socioeconomic inequalities. The fact was, ’68 was the height of liberal consciousness, and ’69 was the slow but steady move to the right for most in the US.

Being a twenty-one-year-old woman only two and a half years removed from living in Bradley, Arkansas and living in the greater New York City area must’ve been a Sinatra-style “kick in the head.” Or being a twenty-eight-year-old Black man working as a janitor for the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan after growing up in rural south-central Georgia must’ve been a daily head-swirler. These unlikely New Yorkers/Mount Vernonites were my soon-to-be-parents back in March ’69. They already had a kid, named Darren. For those of you who are Bewitched fans (you know, Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick York/Dick Sargent), yes, my older brother was named after the main male character. Born in December ’67, Darren was still a mere toddler when I was conceived. My mother was just twenty years and six weeks old when she gave birth for the first time. As my mother has said many times over the years, “I wasn’t no teenager when Darren was born.” To which I’ve said, “So what?”

My mother and father met because both needed respite from the daily grind of being in a strange and unaccepting world. They were both treated as country bumpkins, as people who couldn’t handle New York’s hustle and bustle. They talked too slow, didn’t have the “warder” or “warda” for “water” accent, and didn’t dress like African Americans in New York either. They found some comfort in Mount Vernon’s South Side, where many a Black from the South moved to get away from the Bronx or Brooklyn in the ’50 or ’60. Of course, there was still the elitism of a more established Black Mount Vernon community, of folks who looked and sounded like they were from New York.

My mother and father met at a juke-joint — what we would call a hole-in-the-wall club now. There, they hung out with other Blacks who recently migrated from North and South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi and other places further south than Washington, DC. They had mutual friends, folks a bit older than them. Matter of fact, folks around my age now in some cases. The Johnsons, the Farmers, folks with “names” like Lo, Ida Mae, Callie Mae, and so on. It made them feel more at home, made them see Mount Vernon’s South Side as an island in a sea of chaotic urban living. They met and became involved. I guess having shyness and awkwardness in common helped them develop their relationship. Within thirteen months of their first meeting at a bar, my mother had given birth to Darren.

By the time I was conceived, my mother and father were in a full-fledged relationship. They were living together, working their jobs at the Mount Vernon Hospital and the Federal Reserve Bank, raising my older brother. It sounds pretty good just thinking about it. Back then, even my father’s occasional weekend drinking was both normal and manageable. Despite the changing that were coming to their — and my eventual — world, they must’ve been hopeful, thinking about a future where they could work hard and provide for Darren, me and for each other. I can’t help but think that they must’ve been in love, that they saw themselves as two people from a different world making it in New York while making Mount Vernon their home.

My father wasn’t a great looking guy back then. He’s not particularly attractive now, although he’s in great shape for a sixty-eight-year-old. My mother was a healthy looking six-foot woman in her time. So it wasn’t likely physical attraction, or at least that alone, that led to their relationship and eventual marriage. It had to be that common bond, the practicalities of semi-urban living and working and raising a young child. It must’ve been an exciting time for them, likely the most exciting time of both their lives. It’s just that there needed to be something more and something less in their lives. The baggage from their growing up in the segregated South. Their inferiority complex around being migrants to the largest city in the country. My father’s alcoholic path. Their lack of post-high school education.

None of that mattered in the spring of ’69, though. It was their season of love. I was a result of that season. Their hopes and dreams, love and loss. I hope, at least for my own sake, that another season of love is in store for me, even if they both have long thought that their season of love ended with the ’60s.

Off and on over the past eight years, like the progressive I generally am, I’ve threatened to move to Canada if things in this country didn’t improve for all of us average citizens. My idle threat became more than that after Bush’s win in the ’04 election against Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), a win that shouldn’t have been, given Kerry’s credentials. After that, I actively pursued jobs in Canada, mostly academic positions at the University of Toronto or the University of British Columbia. But even with a doctorate, or maybe because I have one, it’s not as if there’s tons of unfilled jobs in Canada where they’re in need of someone with a Ph.D. in History whose worked in academia and in the nonprofit world on education reform and social justice issues. It’s not like there aren’t experienced Canadians who could fill those jobs. So I swallowed hard and hoped that the ’08 would bring change to a better president and better times.

We do have a better president, one whose entire campaign exemplified change. “Change you can believe in,” as a matter of fact. Now that we have President Obama, his emerging policies and his administration’s heavy level of activity on all front, we at least have half of my equation fulfilled. We don’t have better times, though. In fact, things are as bad for average Americans now as they were a quarter-century ago, when welfare became my mother’s last option to keep us off the streets of Mount Vernon, New York. Despite our economic struggles, our family is no where near that frightening scenario. But it’s also obvious that we may be in for a longer ride of financial stress than we could’ve anticipated a year or two ago. My question is, should we think about moving to Canada or somewhere else now?

Conventional wisdom — which isn’t wisdom, by the way, it’s acting on what other “smart” folks say — would say no, since this recession is a global one. Meaning that there’s a scarcity of quality jobs all over the world, not just in the US. That’s only part of the truth. The ability to obtain a job is a function of the combination of “whats” and “whos.” As in “what you know,” “what you bring to the table in terms of education and/or experience,” and as in “who you know.” What I know in general is enough to qualify me for many mid-level jobs, even ones outside of the nonprofit sector and the university world. What I bring to the table educationally and experientially is enough to qualify me for fairly senior jobs — or at least low-level senior management positions — at small colleges, some universities, and in the nonprofit world in general. Who I know, however, has always been a concern, even when the people I have come to know have written letters and served as references on my behalf. And that’s in the US. Would they be helpful in me finding a job in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, or even say, London or Paris.

That’s the rub, I suppose. If I were to look for work overseas, I would be in a truly global competition, one that someone whose talent is as overpriced (in this country, at least) as mine might have trouble winning. Combined with my lack of social networks outside of the US, there wouldn’t be anyone on the receiving end of my c.v. and cover letter who would feel compelled to do anything other than to file my packet with the rubbish. Or even worse, lose it in a pile that would serve as the annual winter festival bonfire at the end of the year.

Still, given the state of the American economy, our politics, our civility, our education, it’s still something to think about, check out, mull over, and actually do as things get worse before or until they get better. Vancouver’s weather is typical of the Pacific Northwest, and only a couple of hours from Seattle. On the other hand, I’d be 2,500 miles from relatives on the East Coast. Toronto’s a happening multicultural metropolis, with one in six Canadians living in its metropolitan area. But like much of Canada, it’s cold for long stretches of the year, and really is a truly warm city from May through September. London and Paris, New Zealand and other places have distances, language, climate, cultural and other barriers for this well-traveled-within-the-states individual to overcome. Much less my wife and son.

I’m not afraid of the possibility, though, and will keep my eyes open for an opportunity, if there is one to be had. One of the greatest myths that American perpetuate is that we are the greatest country — not only on Earth, but in the history of human existence. With the recent steep recession, the media types keep saying, “This is a land of opportunity. Everyone wants to come here.” At face value, the statement isn’t exactly incorrect. There’s a reason why 300 million people live in this country today, including about 200 million Whites. Let’s not get carried away, however. Even during the height of European immigration to the US, this time about 100 years ago, as a matter of fact, one in six immigrants left. It might have been a land of opportunity, but those immigrants who left obviously didn’t see it that way. Out of 33 million European immigrants who came to the US between 1870 and 1920, it meant that about six million flew the coop, so to speak. Roughly half of them went to other countries, including Mexico, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru.

We were even less hospitable for Asian immigration. Between the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other quotas on Japanese immigration, many Chinese and Japanese went to other parts of Asia (including Singapore and Indonesia) and to Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and Argentina at the same time. Freed Blacks in the nineteenth century — not to mention escaping African slaves –and Black intellectuals in the twentieth left the US for enclaves in Toronto, London, Paris, Amsterdam, even Berlin. All of these groups, however small, saw the US as less a place where hard work and opportunity meant a successful life and more a place where they were being held back from achieving their dreams.

So not everyone’s coming here to work and stay, even when one accounts for undocumented (mostly Latino and especially Mexican) workers. Certainly those who are coming here to do more than wash and fold hotel linens, slaughter and render cows and pigs, and pick strawberries and plant pine trees aren’t staying for the long haul. The brain drain that drew Indian, Chinese, and African immigrants to the US after ’65 has slowed in many cases over the past two decades, especially in the first two cases. So much for the idea that everyone who comes to the US is welcome and that they too can enjoy the American Dream if they do come.

I’m not sure I want the American Dream as it stands today. I don’t want a huge house or a gas-guzzling SUV. I want a modest home with a hydrogen full cell powered automobile. I don’t want to have to work upwards of 100 hours a week to generate enough income to pay for my son to go to Harvard. I’d prefer working 35 or 40 hours a week, with state-sponsored health care and vacations, and my son to go to college for free. And I’m willing to pay 60 percent of my income in taxes to have that peace of mind. I want meaningful work that enables me to grow as a person even when I’m in my sixties. I don’t want to move from one dead-end job to another in pursuit of something that only existed for the majority of Americans between the end of World War II and the beginning of the OPEC crisis in ’73.

Wow, I guess I’m a socialist now. Last I checked, though, the US Constitution is a living document, and the Founding Fathers never intimated that it was a document for greedy capitalists or power-hungry communists or evangelizing Christians. It was meant to be flexible, not rigid. If those in power keep us from having that flexibility in our lives here in America, maybe I should really come up with a long-term strategy for living in a place that does provide that flexibility for its citizens and visitors.

A Facebook friend of mine recently commented in her status update that she was “amazed by just how long an impression can last. Human nature is interesting…” True that. Two years ago today was my last in-person interview for my manuscript Boy At The Window. Over the course of five years, I’d made a half-dozen trips to New York alone for interviews, not counting trips to visit folks and family in Georgia and Florida, California and other parts of the South, between ’02 and early March ’07. I interviewed people I liked, one person who was once my ultimate crush, and people I thought were mean-spirited and as unlikable as any humans I’ve met since my Mount Vernon days. To a person, they all commented about how much I smiled, or that I “had a great smile,” or I seemed “content and in my own world” during my middle school and high school years.

My smile. My smile? My smile! That’s funny on so many levels that I could write another book about the assumptions that we as Americans make about ourselves and about each other. One of those assumptions is that if someone isn’t walking around kvetching all of the time or looking like life has beaten the living daylights out of them — and they occasionally crack a smile — that things were generally all right. I knew I hid a lot with my face, eyes and mouth while I was in school. But if I took what my former classmates were saying about my smile to its logical conclusion, I’d have to say that I had the acting chops of Edward Norton. Maybe I should give an agent a call!

The character played by Brian Dennehy in the ’85 surprise classic Silverado — ranked by critics as one of the best modern-day Westerns — said, “No tellin’ what Paden’s gonna care about.” He was referring to Kevin Kline’s character, who seemed to walk around with a blank smile on his face. It was a smile of concealment, a smile that was meant to hide emotions and ideas that could get you hurt or even killed. The only time that smile left his face was when it was time to defend others. The reason Cobb could never tell what Paden would or wouldn’t care about was because his smile hid his fear, his love, his sense of self-preservation, his anger, and his sense of right and wrong.

More relevant and immediate to those of you who somehow haven’t seen this instant classic is the movie Finding Forrester. Rob Brown played a teenage character caught between two worlds. One was his world of the South Bronx, gritty and hard, one where options for success are few. Basketball, from the point of view of his friends and older brother (played by Busta Rhymes), was the character’s way out. The other world was a world created by his writing and, inadvertently, by his brain, providing a path for success that no one in his life, including loved ones, could imagine.

Brown’s character did what I actually did twenty-five years ago. He hid his talent, he hid his emotions, he hid his dreams and ideas. If it weren’t for his stumbling into an intervention on the part of Sean Connery’s character — not to mention his older brother in the end — Finding Forrester would be my story prior to ’85. Either way, Brown did the greatest job of holding his face as a permanent blank slate, as if unfazed by an atomic bomb blast. His eyes, though, were always a give away of emotions, from sadness to anger to sarcasm and laughter. He’s a great actor, even if few others in Hollywood or elsewhere recognize it.

My emotional—or rather, emotionless—story is a bit of Kline’s character and a bit of Brown’s character. I obvious did a good job, so good that the brainiacs that I went to school with hardly ever picked up on my facade. I don’t recall smiling that much during the Humanities years. I was deliberate with my facial expressions. I had a sarcastic “No shit!” look when I sniffed naivete or bullshit. I cracked a smile when others were in a cheerful or unhappy mood, either in admiration or to help them smile as well. If anyone had cared to notice, the only times I truly smiled were the times I laughed out loud, or the times I couldn’t help but act goofy, or when something I had heard on radio had momentarily put me in a good mood. Otherwise, the “smile” I had on my face was an almost perpetual facial expression, a smirk really by the time we’d reached eleventh grade.

It was my way of controlling and concealing my emotions. I wanted, needed them under control really. You could say that by the time I was a junior in high school that I’d gotten used to disappointment and the realities of abuse, poverty, an overpopulated family and an unrelenting sense that I didn’t belong to anything or anyone important other than my Christianity—and even that was beginning to wane. Yet I had and I hadn’t. My expectations of others was typically low, to the point where I trusted only a small circle of folks with the tiniest bits of information about my life, my hopes and dreams, my attractions and distractions. And if I expressed these outside of this circle, it’d be like someone had jumped me and knocked me to the ground, the rejection felt so great.

Of all people, it took my late AP American History teacher Harold Meltzer to begin the work of pulling out of me the real me, the fragile, delicate yet tough when and where it mattered me. The me that had given up on 616, Mount Vernon, high school, Humanities, and most of the people I went to school. The me whose hopes, dreams and talents were more expansive than I had ever dared to believe, at least up to that point. He began a conversation that would last for eighteen years, and only ended when Meltzer died in ’03. He began it by asking me, “How you’re doing Donnie?,” and didn’t allow me to get away with a bullshit answer. Meltzer was weird, eccentric, and other things that others suspect but won’t mention. But he was also caring, giving, bitter yet still sweet.

Even when he died at the all too young age of sixty-six, he was less apathetic than many of the people I interviewed for Boy At The Window. Even though I approached the project keeping an open mind about my former classmates, their apathy remains my lasting impression. To be fair, some of my ex-classmates have changed for the better. Many of those are on Facebook, sharing pieces of their lives. Still, it’s a shame to think that in an era of apathy and disinterest, that many of the folks I grew up around skew that scale, making the average kid from the ’80s look like an Obama volunteer by comparison.

It’s early March, and there’s not much positive to report on these days. Unemployment’s high and rising, and the ice caps are melting. It’s a great time to talk about something really serious, like music, for instance. I’ve often discussed how music has provided an emotional boost for me during the worst of times. This time is no exception. Except that with iPod and iTunes, I don’t have to just conjure up the music or wait for a few days to hear a song in rotation at a music station, like I did in the days before I owned a Walkman. I can span thirty years of music awareness, sometimes all at once, just by pressing play.

This does cause some dissonance, though, especially if I were to roll down the windows in our Honda Element. That’s likely because playing Elton John, Isley Brothers, Coldplay, Soundgarden, Eminem, Brenda Russell, Sam Cooke and Celine Dion in sequence would stop the average person in their tracks. And living in the DC area, I’ve gotten some weird looks out of pedestrians and other drivers with my music pouring out of the car (I really don’t have it that loud!).

So on a really warm first weekend in March, at least on the East Coast, I’ve decided to go in sequence to discuss some of my songs of early March over the years. These aren’t necessarily my favorite songs, at least not overall. But they do provide a sense, I think, of the changes I’ve gone through since I was nine years old.

1. “This Is It” – Kenny Loggins. After Michael Jackson’s frightful press conference in London this week, I should maybe refrain from mentioning this song. We can still wipe this one clean from the dethroned King of Pop’s stains, though. I first heard this song in March ’79 during my self-appointed exile from playing outside (after being grounded for six weeks over the holidays for running away from home). Its combination of jazz and pop rhythms, not to mention Michael McDonald on background vocals, is what attracted me to the songs, even though I didn’t know that at the time.

It sounded good, it reflected my mood, and it introduced me to “White music” in a way that wasn’t filtered by my mother, stepfather or by my neighbors. I had many adjustments to make. My mother’s second marriage to my idiot stepfather. My mother’s pregnancy, ending my monopoly on her time (it ended two years earlier, but the pregnancy confirmed it). This internal need to be academically on point. I became a somewhat serious learner for the first time.

2. “As” – Stevie Wonder. I’d been introduced to his all-time great Songs In The Key of Life through vinyl and radio for years by the time March ’82 rolled around. We all have, actually. I was five or six listening to this music at one of my mother’s parties or off the radio. I’ve only come to appreciate Wonder’s genius more as time has passed. But with the magic of my first true and real crush twenty-seven years ago, “As,” a song I’d only heard a few times before, became my theme song off and on for the next few months. Nine years later, March ’91, I borrowed Songs In The Key of Life from a Pitt friend whom I was attracted to at the time. “As” didn’t become my theme song for that crush. It reintroduced me to an album that I hope survives this age.

3. “Africa” – Toto. “Hmm,” I’m sure you’re wondering, why Toto, and why “Africa,” with all of its potential racial implications? Because the song’s about the lusts of people who in their attempts to stereotype a continent, they end up stereotyping themselves, part of an interesting theme in pop culture’s treatment of Africa in the ’80s, wouldn’t you say? That said, there’s some real context here that isn’t academic or theoretical. My first crush had ended, the end of ’82 and early ’83 left me and my family a shambles financially and otherwise. And the best music on at the time was early New Edition (gag me with a spoon), Rick Springfield, and The Time? Given my range of choices, it wasn’t hard to like Toto or “Africa.” I did, and I still do. It served as musical grist for my mental mill. It was a channeling of energies for the goal of academic excellence and remaining on an even keel at home, even as we fell into welfare poverty.

4. “Kyrie” – Mr Mister. It was the beginning of March ’86 that this not-so-great song by this not-so-great duo reached #1 on Billboard’s Top 40 for pop music. I liked the song for obvious reasons, at least to me. I could relate to the lyrics, as those last few years in my life had been pretty rough. While not completely reflected in my grades, I realized that if I wanted to go to college on a scholarship, I’d need to raise my game at least one more notch. “Kyrie” became my theme music for that.

If anyone cares to remember, most pop music on either side of the racial divide was about as serious as a five-year-old after drinking orange soda and eating a Snickers bar (I’m talking about me, not Noah – I would NEVER do that to my son ;)). So a pop song about a higher power watching over me through every step I’d take, well as a Christian without a country, I couldn’t ask for anything more. It helped that I actually liked the guitar riffs and could run to it.

5. “Piano In The Dark” – Brenda Russell. Part of being me is to be eclectic, which was why even I was surprised when I found myself liking this song. It was such a serious song during such silly times in music. I was a semester and a half into my Pitt years, and already I found my music tastes changing. The channeled anger from my crash and burn with crush # 2 that had sustained me for the first few weeks of the Spring had dissipated by early March ’88. With the warmer weather of that first Spring Break came also some sense of sweetness. I felt better enough about myself by then. Between Richard Marx, Michael Bolton, Michael Jackson (yeah, well, what can I say), Anita Baker, Salt ‘n Pepa, Kenny G, and others, I found myself beginning to find my self, my voice again. Some of that voice is contained in Russell’s “Piano In The Dark.”

6. “You Can’t Deny It” – Lisa Stansfield. By March ’90, with my first CD system (it was a boom box with high speed dubbing), I understood myself to be eclectic, and so did my friends. I no longer felt weird about the wide variety of music I liked, even when occasionally clowned about it. The ’90s finally had arrived, and with it came more and, in my opinion, better music to listen to and consume. Lisa Stansfield was the first “new” artist of the decade for me, and even though some of my female friends played her ad nauseum, I fell in love with this song because it was so fresh and different from much of the music from the late ’80s.

7. “Beautiful Day” – U2. I skipped over most of the ’90s because most of my musical discoveries in that decade didn’t occur in March. Plus, once I started grad school, I was constantly inundated with different kinds of music. By the end of the decade, I was so consumed with work and writing and a new marriage that I didn’t pay as much attention to music as I should. I knew full well that U2 had released a new album in October ’00. But I didn’t snap up the new CD, wasn’t listening much to the radio, and was working upwards of 120 hours a week while finding a new job. Luckily I “discovered” “Beautiful Day” before it was too late to enjoy it.

It reminded me of all of the hopes and dreams of my past, my past crushes, my heartbreak and my deepest joys. It reminded me to remain hopeful about the future, even if things do look bleak at the moment. God knows we need that more than anything right now.