Walking calmly toward your goals

Maybe all of this is the middle part of a magic trick

{Photo by nick on Unsplash)

A few years ago, I visited my high school to talk to their newspaper staff. My visitor’s badge and I ran into my former psychology teacher. She was a beloved figure when I was there, as well as a friend’s mom. An all-around nurturing presence, I’d say.

After a little small talk, she took my arm and said out of nowhere: “I know you want everything to be OK right now, and it will be, but give it some time.” Something Sphinx-like along those lines. No, I didn’t ask what she meant by this foundation-shaking burst of intuition.

This moment runs through my mind often. A fun thing about my 30s so far: I feel like I know more and less than ever at the same time. On one hand, I’m exhaustingly lost — professionally, romantically, personally. On the other, I’m a savvy old cockroach battered by, and thus attuned to, the tides of time.

At the intersection of lost boy and cockroach, I’ve figured out how much I need someone to tell me it’s going to be OK.

So, my eyes and ears are always open, alert for any little threads of wisdom that I can grab onto with white, pre-arthritic knuckles. If I notice enough recurring ideas, maybe I can collate them, and then God will hang a neon arrow over the right turn. Worst case scenario, I develop my pattern recognition abilities, like a chimp who learns the alphabet.

Two of my cultural faves recently gave me threads for the collection. I caught Brian Jordan Alvarez in conversation at Austin Film Festival, and a few weeks later, I saw Hanif Abdurraqib speak at Texas Book Festival. I went for creative advice but left thinking bigger. Hey, let a fella extrapolate.

First, Alvarez. His new FX comedy, “English Teacher,” is one of the best TV shows of the year. The 37-year-old has toiled in the content mines for years, notably with his web series, “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo.” He’s the only person to make a TikTok dance trend feel like appointment television. (I also interviewed him a few days after Austin Film Festival for an upcoming article; stay tuned.)

Some highlights from his convo:

• For a while, Alvarez thought that his DIY film projects prevented him from hunkering down to focus on his acting goals, but time proved the opposite. Success came from relaxing and letting life tell him to use all of his gifts, he said.

• Alvarez isn’t a research-based writer, he said. On writing the school scenes in “English Teacher”: “I just made it up.” Anything that’s wrong will get corrected down the line, he said. He just tries to come up with a good story. As a person of journalism school experience, an internal fact-checker slows me down every time I try to write creatively. By “slows me down,” I mean it stops me in my tracks like a venomous blow dart to the neck.

• Alvarez dropped this bomb and kinda changed my life: “Walk calmly toward your goals.” Isn’t that a nice thought? Make small moves, he said, and do less, more often. As my psychology teacher’s eviscerating read implied, I’m notoriously impatient. I want things to be better now. The slow-and-steady approach isn’t a new thought, but Alvarez’s phrasing clicked. There’s an agency to it that doesn’t feel reckless. I love to walk. Save me, cosmic Fitbit.

Next, Aburraqib. He wrote “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” other bestselling books of cultural criticism, and many wonderful poems and essays. At the Stateside Theatre, he shared a lot of pearls in 45 minutes:

• Abdurraqib’s always writing invites the reader into his passions, earnestly and without assumption. He just loves things easily and doesn’t want to be alone in that love, he said. The moderator offered: “That’s voice.” I also liked how Abdurraqib said he thinks about genre, in that he doesn’t at all. He’s in the pursuit of “beautiful and efficient language.”

• Before Abdurraqib starts writing, he asks himself what he’s afraid of — not to conquer it, but to be grateful for living with it. There’s a greater capacity for living alongside a fear of dying, he said. Also, offering yourself to others deepens your capacity for feeling: “I would be a diminished person without vulnerability.”

• At one point, the conversation turned to These, Our Times. Abdurraqib compared social progress to the mechanics of a magic trick. Referencing “The Prestige,” he said we’re in a prolonged turn, or the moment when something vanishes. The return of what disappeared — be it a bird or a more just world — is the whole point of the trick. We pull back what we can, while also letting go of our fantasies about what existed before. “How do I bring back a better world than the one that keeps vanishing?” Abdurraqib mused.

I’ve read over my notes from these talks, hoping they take me by the arm and tell me it’s going to be OK. Writing this, the value of the process seems like the pattern worth recognizing.

All my time filling up newsprint, talking to strangers about their stories, watching hundreds of movies, and yammering into your inbox? Perhaps it’ll be a calm walk, in the end. And if big-picture transformation is like a magic trick, maybe changing your own life is just a smaller sleight of hand, like pulling a coin from behind your own ear.

A high school psychology teacher can put it more succinctly, though.

One rad thing

Over Thanksgiving, I gave myself a reprieve from work watches to do a little pleasure streaming. “The Linguini Incident” came into my life, and I can’t believe I’d never heard of it.

Director Richard Shepard’s 1991 comedy stars David Bowie and Rosanna Arquette as unlikely masterminds who plot a heist from the hip restaurant where they both work. It’s peak zany indie. Bowie and Arquette romp through grungy New York City apartments. The restaurant set looks like a Deee-lite music video. You can feel the cocaine wafting off the script.

The cast is full of “hey, you” cameos, like Maura Tierney, Iman, Phil “Uncle Phil” Avery, and Kathy “Mimi Bobeck” Kinney. Marlee Matlin plays a bitchy hostess. Sublime.

It’s the best Parker Posey movie that Parker Posey wasn’t in. And no, I don’t know why it’s called “The Linguini Incident,” but I might’ve missed something. You can watch it for free on Tubi, Kanopy, The Roku Channel, and Pluto TV (and on the Criterion app, ya fancy).

Outbound messages

There I was, searching my tabs and browsing history for my favorite reads of the week, only to discover that I only consumed 1) a tutorial on how to make runny eggs, 2) multiple Wikipedia pages about comic book characters, and 3) Sandi Patty’s Instagram feed, because I was trying to figure out if she’s a Trump supporter. (Results inconclusive.)

To best represent the spirit of the segment, this week’s link is actually a video: Defunctland’s YouTube essay about the history of “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”

There’s not a lot of thoughtful analysis afoot, gumshoes. But as someone whose elementary school P.E. teacher let him play the “Carmen Sandiego” CD-ROM game in the office when I didn’t feel good, I watched every second and picked up some fun facts.

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Fine, if you need something to read: Vulture analyzed the finale upset on “The Great British Bake-Off” — or, as I like to call it, sweet justice. Read it here.