Homework/Summerwork

On asking for homework and summers spent working by choice

I almost didn’t write to you angels this week, but that would mark a first after eight weeks in a row, and guilt/superstition/duty turned into a gun that marched me over to my keyboard. The gun isn’t so scary, now that I’m here. It’s more like a water gun than the killing kind. Just in time for summer!

And I’ve always filled my summers with work.

I performed in summer stock theater, worked as a camp counselor, filled every June through August with minimum wage jobs and the unrequited crushes therein until it was time to return to school and work there for free—or, as was the case in college, at great financial cost to my family.

‘Summer vacations’ under capitalism are great luxuries, I know; but 1.) a boy can dream, and 2.) what I’m wondering about are the times I’ve filled the long beautiful days of summer with jobs and work not from financial need, but from something else.

I’m working on a project with my best friend and writing partner that requires a deep dive into journals from when we went to high school together, [redacted] years ago. As she flipped through, I spied something fascinating she’d written all those years ago: Dan is complaining that we weren’t assigned any homework.

So I was that kid. [Psycho violin screech] The kid who asks for homework.

It’s so humiliating, so cliché, that I cringed. But then I was like, God: What did I need? I knew the answer. I needed to prove myself. I wanted to be graded and seen as impressive in lieu of being chosen romantically, or seen as valuable in the ways boys typically are. I needed to be assigned value by someone outside of myself, someone who knew better — a benevolent lesbian grading papers on Anne Sexton, for example.

So the problem isn’t so much wanting homework, it turns out. It’s wanting grades.

Another best friend and recovering chronic people-pleasing perfectionist once offered me this helpful phrase: Cs get degrees. A mantra designed to remind those of us who suffer from overachievement syndrome that an average performance can still lead to the same success, open the exact same doors as those who toiled toward perfection. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good is a phrase that springs to mind.

And it turned out to be true what they all said: no one has asked to see my 3.9 GPA since risking a 5150 hold to accomplish it. Those many sleepless nights, fawning and peacocking for professors, self-flagellating to this day for the B that cost me my 4.0: a mandatory painting class (?) that required a child alcoholic (me) to rise before dawn to cross town to a warehouse where an adult alcoholic handed us blank canvases and crusty brushes and said good luck — a cruel metaphor for college itself.

I had a vision of this coming summer that might change. I pictured space and freedom, my first real summer vacation in years to do the homework that I gave myself, but now it turns out I may have an opportunity to go back to school. This is a good problem to have, and one I can only speak about in vagaries for now — but I’m left wondering at this riddle: the part of me that chooses work in front of a screen when the sun is shining, despite not having been in school for 13 years (though, I kid you not, virtually every other night since graduating I’ve gone to school in my dreams).

In lieu of an answer to the riddle I’ll share this, from my husband, who knows me too well. Here is his marginalia on the fresh novel pages I panic-printed and handed to him recently:

Speaking of, I have some big book news coming soon, and I’m so excited to share it with you all. Until then, I appreciate you joining me in this strange, un-graded place.

Love,

Dan