I wandered lonely as a Seattleite

On my way to class, I held my cup of coffee in my left so my palm covered the mouth. Otherwise the coffee mug would have filled with rain water. But rain in Seattle is not like rain in the Midwest. “When it rains, it pours,” they say; the weight of that statement evaporates once outside Missouri. In the Pacific Northwest, the saying should go, “when it rains, it dribbles, slightly.” The irony of the characterization has to do with my first question this morning: “What’s a cliché?” (their paper was filled with them), and “lo and behold,” I couldn’t think of one; I stood there, “dumb as a doorknob.”

The next question referred to my lesson from yesterday: How to think critically. I have never received a formal education on thinking critically; my entire education, in general, has been about thinking critically. But I never sat through a lesson on how to do it. In my department’s rubric, it says my students need this skill, but what book actually tells you how to do it? No one method exists; despite that, I have constructed a lesson on how to see the abstract meaning behind material objects. First we compile a list of abstract nouns; then, as a class, we come up with abstractions that correspond to five or six different corporeal things like a skyscraper, a book of Shakespeare, and a cruise ship. Unfortunately, as we ran out of time, I only briefly filled them in on how to transfer this process onto the page. So I explained:

When you’re writing your cultural study, you want to observe something around you in your everyday life. The important part is telling your reader what that observation means. For instance, this morning I was walking to class in the rain and thought, Seattleites don’t use umbrellas [they all nod their heads]. The problem is you can’t stand up straight when you walk in the rain (otherwise you’ll be blinded), so you have to stoop and walk—shielding your sight. So every Seattleite is walking hunched over like they’re melancholy or morose [I perform my sad Charlie Brown walk]. Therefore, one could deduce that because of their weather, Seattleites possess a natural, melancholic disposition, as opposed to the average Midwesterner who walks briskly, head-up high, and waving enthusiastically [I perform my George Bailey/typical character from Norton Wilder’s Our Town—both of which, of course, have horribly repressed undertones].

In this presentation, I wanted to show them how they can take a small, but significant cultural phenomenon and derive some abstract meaning from it. Not only that, but it kept my students well entertained.

What is interesting about the Seattleite, though, is his/her likeness to Wordsworth. Although the head is constantly pointed down—in that downward stare, the Wordsworthian ascends to the height of a cloud. From the sky he possesses a “bird’s eye view” of the minute things in the world, as if he actually remained on the ground, staring at the earth before his feet. The paradox points to small actions, but big ideas. I suppose the real question to be asked still: would a Seattleite write such boring poetry?