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This Shouldn't
Have Happened
Whitney wound her way up and down the bleachers, but could not find Dillon. She couldn’t find Dillon’s friends. She couldn’t find any other members of Dillon’s family. But, the whole time she was looking, she was also very aware that almost everyone else was moving, too. At first, she tried to make a mental note of who was moving where and remember sections to revisit. But before she had made it halfway through the stands, so many people had moved that the list of sections to revisit included every section she had already searched.
Football games are long and filled with waiting. Whitney hoped that if she played it cool for the first quarter, she could try the search again after everyone had settled in. When the second quarter came, though, people only started moving more. Kids were racing up and down the stairs. High schoolers were sneaking off to smoke. Even the parents were getting antsy. Everyone seemed bored. She knew that she found the game boring, but she found all football boring. Hadn’t these people chosen to come to a football game? There’s no way the stands were full of people looking for an ex who borrowed their truck. So why weren’t people having more fun?
Whitney saw that the home team was losing 30-3 and wondered whether that was bad or not. She tried going through the audience a couple more times, but without any luck.
Sitting at the top of the bleachers, discouraged but not defeated, Whitney finally found some hope. She heard the parents in front of her say that they couldn’t wait for the marching band to play so they could go home. Watching the marching band preparing on the track beside the field, she started imagining just how many people in the stands weren’t there for the game at all. They were just patiently waiting to watch their child do a boring marching band routine. And then they would leave. Without those families, Whitney could find Dillon in no time.
But, Whitney was not going to walk through the stands again. She knew it wasn’t working and her legs could not take another dozen sets of stairs. Looking across the field to the almost empty visitors side, she figured out a plan. During halftime, Whitney walked to the top of the visitor’s bleachers and waited. As the band left and the athletes returned, Whitney used the zoom lens on her phone’s camera to sweep over the remaining fans while she sat still.
Despite her genius plan, Whitney still couldn’t find Dillon.
As she was about to give up, Whitney got a text from her best friend Maria. It said, “Holy fuck, why is Dillon in York?” The text included a screenshot of Maria’s phone. According to her Find My Friends, Dillon was in York, Nebraska. Whitney pulled up Find My Friends on her phone and got the same result. But York is almost two hours away? When did Dillon get all the way over there? And is Whitney’s truck there too?
Whitney didn’t know what to do. She had no way to get to York. She wasn’t even sure that she could get home. She felt like she was going to be stuck watching football for the rest of her life.
Walking down the steps of the bleachers, Whitney fell. She wasn’t hurt, but after the day she had had she wasn’t in any rush to get up. Seeing her lying still on the metal floor, three people rushed over to help her. They were:
Patrick (he/him, 24, very Catholic) - Patrick is the mayor of every room he walks into. He is never afraid to meet a new person and has yet to find a situation where he should defer to someone else. The youngest of a large family, Patrick spent his childhood playing with older siblings and an ever-present mother. When he got to high school and had to play with kids his own age, he found it incredibly dull.
The answer, he found, was to start drinking. Luckily, if you are a teenager who would like to start partying irresponsibly, there is no better place to be than a private Catholic school. It would have been safer to send him on tour with The Strokes.
At his Catholic college, Patrick announced that he wanted to be a priest. Already the acclaimed hook-up king of Gonzaga, his friends whispered about whether he would ever truly be able to maintain a vow of celibacy. The priests he befriended around campus, however, did not seem to share these concerns. They seemed excited that Patrick was living life vibrantly and enthusiastically and making the most of his youth. Perhaps this is because they knew that celibacy is not necessarily demanded of priests, only secrecy.
Patrick abandoned the priesthood after getting his first real girlfriend. The two got together at the end of their junior year of college but broke up after finding the distance between their respective grad schools too great an obstacle. Patrick had asked her to come to Creighton with him after only she had gotten into the program at Georgetown, but she told him it was too great an opportunity to give up. Some part of him still believed they would find each other again someday.
Mary (she/they, 26, used to be Catholic) - There is a point where intelligence is no longer visible. True intelligence, deep intelligence, they require uncertainty. Their owner comes to realize that most of what they understand is conjecture. They start to understand how the wheels in their mind turn and start to see the wheels turning in those around them. And what they realize is how little anyone really knows.
This isn’t a new idea. For thousands of years, millions of smarty-pants have said that real knowledge is understanding what you don’t know. Yet, there is a difference between knowing the truth and acting like it. In almost every situation, people look to the confident to lead. And while some intelligent people can present a facade of assured know-how, idiocy and confidence are much better friends.
Mary’s parents were both professors. She spent much of her childhood wandering through the college library while they graded silently. When she wanted to learn a new skill (bowling, snowboarding, cooking, etc.), her parents helped her find the appropriate book and watched as she taught herself. In college, she was happy to return to her natural home, the college library. As graduation neared, she grew concerned with her distance from others. She decided to defer her acceptance to grad school a year and focus on making adult friends. But then, she found that task hard to impossible and was thrilled to return to academia.
Though Mary would never say it, she knows that the problem lies with everyone else. When someone asks her a question, Mary takes some time to think about her answer. She is remembering books she’s read, lectures she’s heard, papers she’s written. She is contrasting perspectives and looking for holes in the fundamental ontology of her argument. And that takes her about seven seconds. Pretty speedy. Yet almost no one she had met has had the patience for this pause. In fact, she found that most people responded better to conversational steam-rollers who were just waiting for their companion to stop talking so they could blabber instead.
In college, Mary had a philosophy teacher with whom she grew very close. He had spent time in a monastic order before leaving the church and spending a decade as a lumberjack. His life was full of thoughtful silences. Her seven second pauses were nothing. He would happily wait for her to think for as long as she needed. And together, they would have wonderful conversations both found incredibly joyful and edifying.
Mary saw that this professor’s peers would wait for him to speak. They did not interrupt him or ask if he was awake. He carried his silence with him. And yet, those professors did not extend that kindness to Mary. She hoped that this might change once she earned her Ph.D, but worried that the issue was not of professional status, but of gender.
So, Mary found herself left to do her best sorting through the failures of others.
Rebecca (she/her, 27, questioning Methodist) - When Rebecca was in middle school, the husband of her school’s High Ability Learning coordinator started calling her “The Absent Minded Professor.” He was helping the Science Olympiad team build a balsa wood propellor plane and noticed that every time Rebecca set something down, it was lost to her forever. Her mom was not thrilled by the prospect that strange men were coming into school to dunk on her pre-teen daughter, but Rebecca wore the badge proudly. Mostly, she was excited that the new nickname included the word professor. She already wanted to be a professor when she grew up, and, in her eyes, this was an adult who saw that future for her.
And it’s not like she wasn’t absent minded. She had always struggled to focus her attention. She wasn’t sure how other people managed. Everywhere she looked, she found something interesting. Following all those separate tangents and rabbit holes taught Rebecca about the world.
The internet came at a great time for Rebecca. From her bedroom, she could learn about the history of utopian Christian communes in upstate New York, read newspaper articles about anarchist bombings at the beginning of the 20th century, and listen to music from any band she heard anyone mention ever.
When she realized she was a lesbian, the internet was full of suggestions. It didn’t take her long to separate the sexual folktales of lying teens and the predatory lurking of malicious adults from genuinely helpful information. She found biographies of queer women, books of feminist theory she found directly applicable to her life, and communities of queer adults she could look forward to joining someday.
But, maybe most importantly, she found leather. She found pictures. She found instructions for leather care. She found collars and caps and jackets on sale. She found motorcycle ads with leather-clad women. She found avant garde films from New York in the 60’s filled with gorgeous leather jackets and cute gay guys. She found genuine leather porn. She found museums with online collections and personal blogs full of hyper-specific community histories. And when her moderately progressive church was not as interested in the symbolic connections between bootblacking and foot washing as she was, she found nerds online who did care.
Always following her own interests, Rebecca had found a way to learn about the world that also taught her about herself. And she knew a lot.
All three were grad students at Creighton studying theology. The three were incredibly close, sharing a vape and a bomb pop.
Once Whitney was safely off the ground and sitting on the bleachers, Rebecca asked if they could do anything to help. Whitney broke down in tears. This took all four of them by surprise.
After a quick little cry, Whitney gave the quickest explanation of her situation she could. She was relieved to find that her new friends were asking questions and offering suggestions. Her worry that she was burdening these strangers melted as she saw their sincere investment in her story.
Then, the grad students took their turn. They explained that as theology post-grads at a Catholic college, they were always picking up odd jobs with strange Catholic groups around town. The money is never great, but it is easy enough to fit into their busy schedules of studying, writing papers, working as teaching assistants, and donating plasma.
Today, they were at the football game to set up two inflatables on the sidelines. One was a giant dove and the other was an inflatable tube dude sky dancer with green fabric, silver eyes, and a black hat. The school’s colors were blue and yellow and Mary explained that the color scheme had something to do with the vestments worn by the order of St. Gregory, but insisted many times that she thought the order was stupid. She pointed out that Rupert Murdoch, the Brexit Party’s immigration spokesperson, and the British television pedophile Jimmy Saville are all part of the order. With every negative mention of the Catholic church, Patrick winced.
Desperate to change the topic, Patrick asked Whitney where she was going next. She explained that she didn’t know. According to her phone, Dillon was in York, Nebraska. But Whitney isn’t sure that Dillon is with her truck. And even if they were, Whitney had no way to get to York. She figured she’d wait until all the cars left to see if her truck was there. If not, she’d call Maria from the empty parking lot.
Patrick was having none of this. Telling people what to do is really Patrick’s thing, and he saw that this was his time to shine. He told Whitney that she should ride back to Omaha with him and Mary. He explained that they were going to a movie and she could come if she wanted. And if she didn’t want to go, they would drop her off first.
As if awaking from a daze, Rebecca started, “Oh, York, great! I’m driving to York tonight. My partner is an adjunct professor at York University and we’re gonna go on a hike tomorrow. I can take you out there if you want. You can rent a car or just come back with me Sunday or something. Apphia and I are very flexible.”
“Wait,” Mary said, “I thought Apphia worked at Doane.”
“No, it’s York. She was considering Doane, but the offer at York was better.”
Mary shrugged and all attention returned to Whitney. Whitney responded that she hoped her truck would be in the lot once everyone left, but that if it wasn’t she might take them up on their offer.
Whitney watched the cars file out after the game while the grad students took down the inflatables, folded them, and put them in the trunks of their cars. Whitney walked around the emptying parking lot. Her truck was not there.
Should Whitney:
Football games are long and filled with waiting. Whitney hoped that if she played it cool for the first quarter, she could try the search again after everyone had settled in. When the second quarter came, though, people only started moving more. Kids were racing up and down the stairs. High schoolers were sneaking off to smoke. Even the parents were getting antsy. Everyone seemed bored. She knew that she found the game boring, but she found all football boring. Hadn’t these people chosen to come to a football game? There’s no way the stands were full of people looking for an ex who borrowed their truck. So why weren’t people having more fun?
Whitney saw that the home team was losing 30-3 and wondered whether that was bad or not. She tried going through the audience a couple more times, but without any luck.
Sitting at the top of the bleachers, discouraged but not defeated, Whitney finally found some hope. She heard the parents in front of her say that they couldn’t wait for the marching band to play so they could go home. Watching the marching band preparing on the track beside the field, she started imagining just how many people in the stands weren’t there for the game at all. They were just patiently waiting to watch their child do a boring marching band routine. And then they would leave. Without those families, Whitney could find Dillon in no time.
But, Whitney was not going to walk through the stands again. She knew it wasn’t working and her legs could not take another dozen sets of stairs. Looking across the field to the almost empty visitors side, she figured out a plan. During halftime, Whitney walked to the top of the visitor’s bleachers and waited. As the band left and the athletes returned, Whitney used the zoom lens on her phone’s camera to sweep over the remaining fans while she sat still.
Despite her genius plan, Whitney still couldn’t find Dillon.
As she was about to give up, Whitney got a text from her best friend Maria. It said, “Holy fuck, why is Dillon in York?” The text included a screenshot of Maria’s phone. According to her Find My Friends, Dillon was in York, Nebraska. Whitney pulled up Find My Friends on her phone and got the same result. But York is almost two hours away? When did Dillon get all the way over there? And is Whitney’s truck there too?
Whitney didn’t know what to do. She had no way to get to York. She wasn’t even sure that she could get home. She felt like she was going to be stuck watching football for the rest of her life.
Walking down the steps of the bleachers, Whitney fell. She wasn’t hurt, but after the day she had had she wasn’t in any rush to get up. Seeing her lying still on the metal floor, three people rushed over to help her. They were:
Patrick (he/him, 24, very Catholic) - Patrick is the mayor of every room he walks into. He is never afraid to meet a new person and has yet to find a situation where he should defer to someone else. The youngest of a large family, Patrick spent his childhood playing with older siblings and an ever-present mother. When he got to high school and had to play with kids his own age, he found it incredibly dull.
The answer, he found, was to start drinking. Luckily, if you are a teenager who would like to start partying irresponsibly, there is no better place to be than a private Catholic school. It would have been safer to send him on tour with The Strokes.
At his Catholic college, Patrick announced that he wanted to be a priest. Already the acclaimed hook-up king of Gonzaga, his friends whispered about whether he would ever truly be able to maintain a vow of celibacy. The priests he befriended around campus, however, did not seem to share these concerns. They seemed excited that Patrick was living life vibrantly and enthusiastically and making the most of his youth. Perhaps this is because they knew that celibacy is not necessarily demanded of priests, only secrecy.
Patrick abandoned the priesthood after getting his first real girlfriend. The two got together at the end of their junior year of college but broke up after finding the distance between their respective grad schools too great an obstacle. Patrick had asked her to come to Creighton with him after only she had gotten into the program at Georgetown, but she told him it was too great an opportunity to give up. Some part of him still believed they would find each other again someday.
Mary (she/they, 26, used to be Catholic) - There is a point where intelligence is no longer visible. True intelligence, deep intelligence, they require uncertainty. Their owner comes to realize that most of what they understand is conjecture. They start to understand how the wheels in their mind turn and start to see the wheels turning in those around them. And what they realize is how little anyone really knows.
This isn’t a new idea. For thousands of years, millions of smarty-pants have said that real knowledge is understanding what you don’t know. Yet, there is a difference between knowing the truth and acting like it. In almost every situation, people look to the confident to lead. And while some intelligent people can present a facade of assured know-how, idiocy and confidence are much better friends.
Mary’s parents were both professors. She spent much of her childhood wandering through the college library while they graded silently. When she wanted to learn a new skill (bowling, snowboarding, cooking, etc.), her parents helped her find the appropriate book and watched as she taught herself. In college, she was happy to return to her natural home, the college library. As graduation neared, she grew concerned with her distance from others. She decided to defer her acceptance to grad school a year and focus on making adult friends. But then, she found that task hard to impossible and was thrilled to return to academia.
Though Mary would never say it, she knows that the problem lies with everyone else. When someone asks her a question, Mary takes some time to think about her answer. She is remembering books she’s read, lectures she’s heard, papers she’s written. She is contrasting perspectives and looking for holes in the fundamental ontology of her argument. And that takes her about seven seconds. Pretty speedy. Yet almost no one she had met has had the patience for this pause. In fact, she found that most people responded better to conversational steam-rollers who were just waiting for their companion to stop talking so they could blabber instead.
In college, Mary had a philosophy teacher with whom she grew very close. He had spent time in a monastic order before leaving the church and spending a decade as a lumberjack. His life was full of thoughtful silences. Her seven second pauses were nothing. He would happily wait for her to think for as long as she needed. And together, they would have wonderful conversations both found incredibly joyful and edifying.
Mary saw that this professor’s peers would wait for him to speak. They did not interrupt him or ask if he was awake. He carried his silence with him. And yet, those professors did not extend that kindness to Mary. She hoped that this might change once she earned her Ph.D, but worried that the issue was not of professional status, but of gender.
So, Mary found herself left to do her best sorting through the failures of others.
Rebecca (she/her, 27, questioning Methodist) - When Rebecca was in middle school, the husband of her school’s High Ability Learning coordinator started calling her “The Absent Minded Professor.” He was helping the Science Olympiad team build a balsa wood propellor plane and noticed that every time Rebecca set something down, it was lost to her forever. Her mom was not thrilled by the prospect that strange men were coming into school to dunk on her pre-teen daughter, but Rebecca wore the badge proudly. Mostly, she was excited that the new nickname included the word professor. She already wanted to be a professor when she grew up, and, in her eyes, this was an adult who saw that future for her.
And it’s not like she wasn’t absent minded. She had always struggled to focus her attention. She wasn’t sure how other people managed. Everywhere she looked, she found something interesting. Following all those separate tangents and rabbit holes taught Rebecca about the world.
The internet came at a great time for Rebecca. From her bedroom, she could learn about the history of utopian Christian communes in upstate New York, read newspaper articles about anarchist bombings at the beginning of the 20th century, and listen to music from any band she heard anyone mention ever.
When she realized she was a lesbian, the internet was full of suggestions. It didn’t take her long to separate the sexual folktales of lying teens and the predatory lurking of malicious adults from genuinely helpful information. She found biographies of queer women, books of feminist theory she found directly applicable to her life, and communities of queer adults she could look forward to joining someday.
But, maybe most importantly, she found leather. She found pictures. She found instructions for leather care. She found collars and caps and jackets on sale. She found motorcycle ads with leather-clad women. She found avant garde films from New York in the 60’s filled with gorgeous leather jackets and cute gay guys. She found genuine leather porn. She found museums with online collections and personal blogs full of hyper-specific community histories. And when her moderately progressive church was not as interested in the symbolic connections between bootblacking and foot washing as she was, she found nerds online who did care.
Always following her own interests, Rebecca had found a way to learn about the world that also taught her about herself. And she knew a lot.
All three were grad students at Creighton studying theology. The three were incredibly close, sharing a vape and a bomb pop.
Once Whitney was safely off the ground and sitting on the bleachers, Rebecca asked if they could do anything to help. Whitney broke down in tears. This took all four of them by surprise.
After a quick little cry, Whitney gave the quickest explanation of her situation she could. She was relieved to find that her new friends were asking questions and offering suggestions. Her worry that she was burdening these strangers melted as she saw their sincere investment in her story.
Then, the grad students took their turn. They explained that as theology post-grads at a Catholic college, they were always picking up odd jobs with strange Catholic groups around town. The money is never great, but it is easy enough to fit into their busy schedules of studying, writing papers, working as teaching assistants, and donating plasma.
Today, they were at the football game to set up two inflatables on the sidelines. One was a giant dove and the other was an inflatable tube dude sky dancer with green fabric, silver eyes, and a black hat. The school’s colors were blue and yellow and Mary explained that the color scheme had something to do with the vestments worn by the order of St. Gregory, but insisted many times that she thought the order was stupid. She pointed out that Rupert Murdoch, the Brexit Party’s immigration spokesperson, and the British television pedophile Jimmy Saville are all part of the order. With every negative mention of the Catholic church, Patrick winced.
Desperate to change the topic, Patrick asked Whitney where she was going next. She explained that she didn’t know. According to her phone, Dillon was in York, Nebraska. But Whitney isn’t sure that Dillon is with her truck. And even if they were, Whitney had no way to get to York. She figured she’d wait until all the cars left to see if her truck was there. If not, she’d call Maria from the empty parking lot.
Patrick was having none of this. Telling people what to do is really Patrick’s thing, and he saw that this was his time to shine. He told Whitney that she should ride back to Omaha with him and Mary. He explained that they were going to a movie and she could come if she wanted. And if she didn’t want to go, they would drop her off first.
As if awaking from a daze, Rebecca started, “Oh, York, great! I’m driving to York tonight. My partner is an adjunct professor at York University and we’re gonna go on a hike tomorrow. I can take you out there if you want. You can rent a car or just come back with me Sunday or something. Apphia and I are very flexible.”
“Wait,” Mary said, “I thought Apphia worked at Doane.”
“No, it’s York. She was considering Doane, but the offer at York was better.”
Mary shrugged and all attention returned to Whitney. Whitney responded that she hoped her truck would be in the lot once everyone left, but that if it wasn’t she might take them up on their offer.
Whitney watched the cars file out after the game while the grad students took down the inflatables, folded them, and put them in the trunks of their cars. Whitney walked around the emptying parking lot. Her truck was not there.
Should Whitney:
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