flying book club (theraputic edition)
Aug. 29th, 2005 01:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleOn my way to Las Vegas, I sat next to a young man who was leaving home for the first time. He was flying from Boston to Salt Lake City, as part of the trip between the small town in New Hampshire where he'd grown up, and the college town in Montana where he was about to start school. It's a long way to go, alone for the first time. His eagerness to talk with anyone remotely sympathetic inspired me to nostalgia and advice.
His summer job was awfully casual about safety precautions, and he fell off a ladder. I saw some of the remarkable scrapes and bruises that resulted, and congratulated him on what he told me was spectacular good luck. In one sense, it *was* lucky that the ladder slipped far enough that he only struck it a glancing blow...a slightly different angle of impact would have broken both his shins. But when a 17-year-old boy spends two months working with ladders, and nobody teaches him about ladder safety techniques or equipment, I want another word for it than "good luck." Limping off home alone, after a fall like that, doesn't seem particularly lucky either, unless a person has a strong aversion to doctors. I gave him the remainder of my little tin of Burt's Bees Res-Q-Ointment (herbal remedy for scrapes and bruises), which I had in my pocket. I also told him that universities generally had health services, where a student could walk in and get medical care for little or no money. If this month-old injury was still bothering him when the semester started next week, he might want to go in and talk to a doctor about it. He relaxed noticably at the suggestion.
I told him there were usually people in residence halls whose job it was to be available when somebody needs help. I mentioned that it was ok to consult them about any level or type of problem, that they could help you find all kinds of resources you probably couldn't find on your own, and that they didn't mind being asked about little things that weren't catastrophic yet. (I suspect they love it.) The examples I used were financial problems, roommate conflict, depression, drinking problems, and not being able to keep up in class. Somehow, this led to a moderately intense conversation about when it might be safe to talk about a desire to kill oneself. I found that "when it's safe to talk about" fit surprisingly well into "ten years after the fact," but not all of the conversation was on such a comfortable meta-level, from either side.
He isn't setting out to study something in particular, and learn other interesting stuff alongside, the way I did. He wants to "be a student" while he gets a sense of how the world works outside small towns in New Hampshire. While he meets people. While he does a lot of snowboarding. He has no clue how any of this works, except the snowboarding. We talked about how he might find people on campus with common interests, even if he has the bad luck to be assigned a roommate who doesn't like snowboarding. I suggested he read Pamela Dean's _Tam Lin_. I've reread it a dozen times over the years, and pointed lots of people to it, but this may have been the first time I was thinking in terms of Tina when I recommended it. (Not only Tina, of course.)
I also told him about _Orbital Resonance_. I wasn't thinking of the low-gravity sport analogous to snowboarding. I just said it was a really cool story about kids going to school on a space station, and I thought he'd like it. This was Tuesday, almost a week ago. I could talk about John Barnes without thinking of _Mother of Storms_ and flinching. I could talk about a John Barnes novel, one that has worldwide disaster in the far background, with a novel set in New Orleans on my lap, all without flinching. I don't know if I could do that now.
His summer job was awfully casual about safety precautions, and he fell off a ladder. I saw some of the remarkable scrapes and bruises that resulted, and congratulated him on what he told me was spectacular good luck. In one sense, it *was* lucky that the ladder slipped far enough that he only struck it a glancing blow...a slightly different angle of impact would have broken both his shins. But when a 17-year-old boy spends two months working with ladders, and nobody teaches him about ladder safety techniques or equipment, I want another word for it than "good luck." Limping off home alone, after a fall like that, doesn't seem particularly lucky either, unless a person has a strong aversion to doctors. I gave him the remainder of my little tin of Burt's Bees Res-Q-Ointment (herbal remedy for scrapes and bruises), which I had in my pocket. I also told him that universities generally had health services, where a student could walk in and get medical care for little or no money. If this month-old injury was still bothering him when the semester started next week, he might want to go in and talk to a doctor about it. He relaxed noticably at the suggestion.
I told him there were usually people in residence halls whose job it was to be available when somebody needs help. I mentioned that it was ok to consult them about any level or type of problem, that they could help you find all kinds of resources you probably couldn't find on your own, and that they didn't mind being asked about little things that weren't catastrophic yet. (I suspect they love it.) The examples I used were financial problems, roommate conflict, depression, drinking problems, and not being able to keep up in class. Somehow, this led to a moderately intense conversation about when it might be safe to talk about a desire to kill oneself. I found that "when it's safe to talk about" fit surprisingly well into "ten years after the fact," but not all of the conversation was on such a comfortable meta-level, from either side.
He isn't setting out to study something in particular, and learn other interesting stuff alongside, the way I did. He wants to "be a student" while he gets a sense of how the world works outside small towns in New Hampshire. While he meets people. While he does a lot of snowboarding. He has no clue how any of this works, except the snowboarding. We talked about how he might find people on campus with common interests, even if he has the bad luck to be assigned a roommate who doesn't like snowboarding. I suggested he read Pamela Dean's _Tam Lin_. I've reread it a dozen times over the years, and pointed lots of people to it, but this may have been the first time I was thinking in terms of Tina when I recommended it. (Not only Tina, of course.)
I also told him about _Orbital Resonance_. I wasn't thinking of the low-gravity sport analogous to snowboarding. I just said it was a really cool story about kids going to school on a space station, and I thought he'd like it. This was Tuesday, almost a week ago. I could talk about John Barnes without thinking of _Mother of Storms_ and flinching. I could talk about a John Barnes novel, one that has worldwide disaster in the far background, with a novel set in New Orleans on my lap, all without flinching. I don't know if I could do that now.
