In Search of Lost Time

The Evergreen State College

Author: chamic07

losttimeMichael 2015-05-10 15:49:19

May 10, 2015 /

Michael Chapman

In Search of Lost Time

5/10/15

Close Reading Essay

The passage that i picked details the relationship between the narrator and Albertine. It focuses on the neurotic and irrational tendencies that plague the protagonist. After vacationing to Balbec, the narrator returns to Paris with his new mistress Albertine, who is now living with the narrator and his family. The narrator has successfully separated Albertine from the band of girls in Balbec but he finds that new problems arise after they settle into life together in Paris. This passage directly relates to the Combray portion of Swann In Love. In Combray, the narrator as a young boy is obsessed with possessing his mother’s love. He is a sickly child and he relies on a kiss from his mother every night so that he can fall asleep. When his mother is too busy to kiss him goodnight he lays in anguish and he becomes obsessed with getting the comfort that she provides him. This is very similar in a lot of ways to the neurotic tendencies that the narrator displays in his relationship with Albertine.

My passage begins on page 18 with the narrator stating his complex feelings for Albertine,  “Without feeling to the slightest degree in love with Albertine… I had nevertheless remained preoccupied with the way in which she disposed of her time”. I believe that is a gross understatement of what is really happening. The narrator feels bored with Albertine and says he is falling out of love with her but he cannot help but feel that he must control and monitor all of her actions and movements, even the most trivial. The narrator even goes as far to enlist a female friend named Andree to be Albertine’s consistent companion so that he can know what she is doing even when she is out of his sight.  Albertine is remarkably passive to this intrusion from her new lover and she indulges the narrator. Albertine’s nature calms the narrative and he briefly believes that by having taken Albertine away from the bad influences in Balbec that he has cured himself of his neurosis. But living in Paris provides all kinds of new dangers for the narrator.  He believes that there is a part of Albertine that is inherently lustful and uncontrollable. He imagines her walking down the street and catching the eye of another lustful soul. On page 19 this scene is described by the narrator, “ In any town whatsoever, she had no need to seek, for the evil existed not in Albertine alone, but in others to whom any opportunity for pleasure is good. A glance from one, understood at once by the other, brings the two famished souls in contact”. He imagines causing pain to these unknown and maybe even non- existent perpetrators. The narrator sees Albertine as a sensual creature that is uncontrollable. These mental images which differ from the ones from Balbec are enough to send our narrator into a panic by which he states that  his phobia has returned revived. He vows to “ set to work, as with their predecessors, to destroy, as though the destruction of an ephemeral cause could put an end to a congenital disease”. Because of his renewed anxiety he decides to take Albertine for a trip to the countryside thinking that a change of scenery my help his nerves. He thinks that a change of scenery may help him because his negative emotions could be connected to a particular place, but just like he left Balbec for Paris he learns that his feelings are not tied to just one specific place. On page 21 the narrator says, “ In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality, alas, Gomorrah was disseminated all over the world.” Initially I think the narrator believed that he could sequester off Albertine and have her in his own world where he could control every aspect, but he is learning that this is not a possibility.

The Captive provides the reader with an insight into the mind of the narrator that is not found, in as much detail at least, in the other volumes. It shows the desperate lengths that the protagonist will go to in order to keep control over Albertine. This is even though he does not truly love her. In this section, he is reduced to having others spy on Albertine for him and he is not even ashamed of this. Although he knows something is wrong with him, he stills blames Albertine and her perceived flaws for his almost crippling phobia that she will leave him for another lover, possibly a woman.  Because of the previous reading and also from watching the film adaption of The Captive, I know that the narrator believes that Albertine is a lesbian and is actively involved in affairs with other women. I thought that it was interesting that he is so frightened by the fact that she might leave him for a woman, and this reminded me of the lecture on the origins of feminism in France. What I learned from that lecture was that many people were frightened by the rise of feminism and how that related to a change in gender roles. The idea of female homosexuality was a  frightening idea during this time period, because a lesbian was a woman who had no use for a male partner. This was very controversial at the time, because women were thought to need men to survive and also because the biological duty of a woman was to reproduce. I thought it was interesting that Proust tapped into this fear of the unknown that was felt by many men around the time that this book was written.

Journals 1-7

May 5, 2015 /

Michael Chapman

 

Journal 1 March 31- I have just started reading Swann’s way and so far I am enjoying it. I think that the detail that the narrator goes into describing personal relationships is fascinating. I have never read anything like Proust before. Reading Combray makes me think about my own experiences as a child and makes me think back on times that I spent with my own family and the very minute details that made those times important to me. It makes me think back to my trips to Oregon when I was a young boy. Reading this has made me look back and think critically about things that I have not really thought about in years and in some cases ever. Another interesting aspect of the reading is the detail the narrator goes into while explaining his own childhood experiences. This was a new experience for me because I do not think that I have read anything before that delves into the mind of a child quite like Swann’s Way does.

 

Journal 2 April 4- I really enjoyed watching boyhood in class this week. I found it very interesting and I found a lot of the comparisons to my own childhood growing up in the 90s and 2000’s. In some ways I kind of saw myself in the main character. I think this was because of the experiences that we have both shared. I really identified with the main character in many ways. One thing that really struck me from the film was the technology and how it progressed throughout the movie. There was scene where he is playing a Gameboy and I thought that I was probably doing the same thing around the same time period. I thought the way that the movie used technology was really on point with the time period. I remember playing that Gameboy for hours and how cutting edge it felt at the time. As well, I thought that the music was very well done. There is a scene when the main character is riding his bike with friends and the hip- hop song Soulja Boy was playing and it reminded me of my freshman year in high school when this song was extremely popular. It was and still is just a horrible song but it really had a way of transporting me to the past. There were other examples of music in the movie that were really important to exact periods but I am having trouble remembering them.

 

Journal 3 April 7- I have continued my reading of Swann’s Way and I have found the narrator’s Aunt Leonie to be a fascinating character. She is so grief struck by the death of her husband that she believes that she herself is physically ill and on the verge of dying. From this I made a direct connection to how the narrator feels about himself and how he becomes to feel like an invalid in the eyes of his parents. It seems that he may have inherited the same hypochondria as his aunt. I personally connected to this feeling because I was also a somewhat sickly child, I suffered from really bad asthma attacks when I was young and I still feel like that same boy even though I am now 22 years old. On a different note the part of the reading that discusses the character Vinteuil and his love for his daughter was very sad and I definitely felt for his character even though he was portrayed as being somewhat of an off putting person.

 

Journal 4 April 10- I really enjoyed watching The Stories We Tell this week. I thought that it was very well done and had a lot of emotion in it. I though it was a very interesting premise for a documentary. I thought that the way Sarah Polley explored and deconstructed her family experience was heart wrenching on many levels. It definitely took a lot of courage for her to set up this whole project and then have it open to the public audience. The movie really made you feel for Sarah, her family and her desire to learn more about where she came from. I think it is very natural and important for a person to have a definitive narrative about their life and you could see throughout the movie how important this project was to her and her family. A scene that was especially poignant and gripping was the scene when her older brother talks about losing his mother. Even though I have not had any experiences similar to that I found that particular scene to be the most moving in the documentary.

 

Journal 5 April 14th– I have found it interesting to learn more about Swann. We met him early in the book and I found him to be compelling from the start, so I was eager to read more about him. The relationship between Swann and Odette is fascinating. Swann is hard to place, he is an aristocrat but in some ways but he seems to disdain the aristocracy that he belongs to and feels more at home among more common folk. Maybe this is a reason why he is attracted to women of a lower class than himself, which would explain his growing infatuation with Odette. Their relationship is fascinating and complex. In a way it seems that Swann’s love for Odette is one sided. It is obvious that he loves her but the way in which he loves her is more like the love of an object than the love of a person. He does not view her as an equal but as something to be possessed, which can be typical of men in general. It was interesting for me to see the relationship unfold because I became interested in learning more after Gilberte and Odette are introduced in Combray, in the scene when the narrator and his family are walking across Swann’s property. Swann to me seems to be a vain and insecure man if he puts that much stock into just one woman. I understand the importance that women play in a man’s life, his confidence, his contentedness, but Odette does not truly love Swann and because of this he is a fool. But I can relate because I have previously felt reliant on a woman for happiness, which I admit is inherently weak.

 

Journal 6 April 17th– I found the Sorrow and the Pity to be a fascinating look inside World War 2 France. A part of the film that I found of particular interest was the men of the French Resistance. I found their accounts of war- time France to be particularly compelling. The way that they described the war was a narrative that I was not previously familiar with. I definitely had a stilted view of the French during this time period; I thought they were all a bunch of pushovers because France was under German occupation. But after hearing of the trials and tribulations of the French Resistance fighters it really made me reconsider what I thought I new. These guys were total bad asses, they fought and died for what they believed in. It was also interesting to hear the German perspective of wartime France. It is easy to demonize the Nazi’s but they were just people to and it is hard for me to believe that they were all evil. It is fascinating to think of the mentality of the German’s because what they did was heinous. I would like to learn more about the German and Nazi mentality and how this happened. Growing up it World War 2 felt like a million years ago but as I have gotten older I have realized that people haven’t changed that much in the last 75 years, so it is just crazy to think about the realities of the Holocaust. In the scheme of things this all happened not that long ago.

 

Journal 7 April 22nd– I have just started reading Within A Budding Grove and so far I have found it not as engrossing as Swann’s Way, I found Swann in Love particularly engrossing. The first ten pages were interesting. The conversation between M de Norpois and the narrator’s father was interesting because it is just gossip about Swann. For me the train ride to Balbec was a little tough to get through.

Book Report Boarding School Seasons by Brenda Child

May 5, 2015 /

Michael Chapman

In search of lost time

4-29-15

Book Review: Boarding School Seasons by Brenda Child

 

In her book, Boarding School Seasons, author Brenda Child fully explores the history of the federal governments attempt to assimilate Indian youth into American society through boarding schools. Through the use of school records and letters from parents, students, administrators and bureaucrats, Ms. Child pieces together a compelling narrative of the experiences of young Indians who in many cases were forcibly taken from their families, homes and tribes and forced to study at these schools. The author is of Ojibwe descent, the Ojibwe are a tribe of Indians who make their home in the Great Lakes Region and because she is interested in exploring her tribal identity she mostly (but not exclusively) focuses on the Obijwe experience at two federal boarding schools, the Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Flandreau School in South Dakota. The time period that is focused on in this book is from the 1880’s, when the first boarding school was opened, to the 1940’s when the last boarding schools were permanently shut down.

This book is composed mainly of letters and focuses on a couple of different themes that are separated into different chapters. Themes that are explored include illness and disease, homesickness, deplorable conditions of the schools, forced child labor, loss of tradition and culture and the bureaucracy that regulated and controlled the boarding schools.

In the chapter entitled From Reservation to Boarding School the author discusses the origins of families sending their children to boarding schools. By the end of the 19th century most Indians were put on reservations. Previously these people had travelled from place to place, hunting and foraging to survive. When they were put on reservations some of them were promised land so that they could farm for subsistence. A lot of the land that they got was not fit for farming and the land that was, was sometimes stolen by timber companies or the government. The late 1800’s were a tough time for native peoples in America. Previously they had always had meat and fruit, but this was no longer the case. Because of this dire situation many families were looking for a way to feed and clothe their children. A lot of these people had no other choice but to send their children to the boarding schools where they believed they would be fed, clothed and receive some form of education.

The quality of the education that Indian children received at the Boarding Schools varied greatly. The schools mainly focused on basic education and vocational training. Male students learned skills such as blacksmithing and carpentry while female students learned home economics such as sewing. Learning to speak, read and write English was a main focus at the boarding schools. This proved a great challenge to many of the students who barely had any exposure to the English language before enrolling. Some Indian students had very positive experiences at the boarding schools. They enjoyed being off their reservations where their future looked bleak. There was also a sense of community among the Indian students even though they were from different tribes. In the early 1900’s many male students participated in team sports such as football. This gave them a since of pride in being Indian because they could relate it to their experiences playing sports on their home reservations. But the majority of the students did not enjoy their times away from home and were likely to run away back to their reservations if provided with the opportunity. Being away from their families and tribe proved too much for many Indian children and they either got their parents to remove them from school (if they were able to, sometimes the schools forbade the parents from taking their own children out of school) or ran away. Going to the boarding schools required that the children, some as young as six or seven years old, leave home for years at time without even the opportunity to visit. For many Indian families it was impossible to have their children come home for the summer just because of the sheer costs of the travel arrangements. In the early 1900’s it cost anywhere from thirty to forty dollars for a child to come home on the train, this was at a time when the average annual income for an Indian family was less than one hundred dollars.

The schools themselves were rundown with broken-down facilities. Many of the schools did not even have adequate space for the children to sleep. It was not uncommon for two children to share a single bed housed in a room that held as many as thirty beds. The children also did not have adequate clothing. They usually only had one set of clothing for the whole school year. Frustrated parents would commonly write the administration at their children’s school as to why their children came home with fewer clothes than they left with. A main reason that Indian parents sent their children away to school was because they believed that the children would at least be guaranteed enough food. In many instances this was not the case and the children became extremely malnourished because of their meager and unhealthy diets. It was rare for the children to get fresh fruit or vegetables and sometimes milk was not even available. A typical meal for a student consisted of meat, bread or potatoes and gravy.

Illness and disease were also very common at the boarding schools because the children shared such close quarters and did not have the means to maintain proper hygiene. Tuberculosis was the most prevalent disease that affected the children but they were also affected by trachoma and measles. It was estimated that during this time period one in eight Indian children suffered from tuberculosis. Because of school policy and over enrollment, sick children were often not separated from the healthy children, which only worsened the situation.

The case that the author makes for the book is that even though there were some positive aspects of the Indian schools overall they failed at their two main goals. One was to assimilate the children into modern American society; the second was to provide them with an education that would lead them to a fulfilling life where they could support themselves. Now the author does make the case that in some cases the schools were a success, but from what I learned from reading this book is that it seems to have been am overwhelming failure.

I enjoyed reading Boarding School Seasons. It helped me experience what it must have like for these children to be taken away from their families and thrown into a strange, harsh world. I particularly enjoyed the insight that it gave me into Native American family structure and culture during this time period. The only criticism I had of the book was that I felt it relied too much on letters to tell the story and get information across. Some of the letters that were included in various sections did not seem to me to be especially relevant and feel this somewhat detracted from my reading experience.

 

Journal 1- 7

May 5, 2015 /

 

 

Journal 1 March 31- I have just started reading Swann’s way and so far I am enjoying it. I think that the detail that the narrator goes into describing personal relationships is fascinating. I have never read anything like Proust before. Reading Combray makes me think about my own experiences as a child and makes me think back on times that I spent with my own family and the very minute details that made those times important to me. It makes me think back to my trips to Oregon when I was a young boy. Reading this has made me look back and think critically about things that I have not really thought about in years and in some cases ever. Another interesting aspect of the reading is the detail the narrator goes into while explaining his own childhood experiences. This was a new experience for me because I do not think that I have read anything before that delves into the mind of a child quite like Swann’s Way does.

 

Journal 2 April 4- I really enjoyed watching boyhood in class this week. I found it very interesting and I found a lot of the comparisons to my own childhood growing up in the 90s and 2000’s. In some ways I kind of saw myself in the main character. I think this was because of the experiences that we have both shared. I really identified with the main character in many ways. One thing that really struck me from the film was the technology and how it progressed throughout the movie. There was scene where he is playing a Gameboy and I thought that I was probably doing the same thing around the same time period. I thought the way that the movie used technology was really on point with the time period. I remember playing that Gameboy for hours and how cutting edge it felt at the time. As well, I thought that the music was very well done. There is a scene when the main character is riding his bike with friends and the hip- hop song Soulja Boy was playing and it reminded me of my freshman year in high school when this song was extremely popular. It was and still is just a horrible song but it really had a way of transporting me to the past. There were other examples of music in the movie that were really important to exact periods but I am having trouble remembering them.

 

Journal 3 April 7- I have continued my reading of Swann’s Way and I have found the narrator’s Aunt Leonie to be a fascinating character. She is so grief struck by the death of her husband that she believes that she herself is physically ill and on the verge of dying. From this I made a direct connection to how the narrator feels about himself and how he becomes to feel like an invalid in the eyes of his parents. It seems that he may have inherited the same hypochondria as his aunt. I personally connected to this feeling because I was also a somewhat sickly child, I suffered from really bad asthma attacks when I was young and I still feel like that same boy even though I am now 22 years old. On a different note the part of the reading that discusses the character Vinteuil and his love for his daughter was very sad and I definitely felt for his character even though he was portrayed as being somewhat of an off putting person.

 

Journal 4 April 10- I really enjoyed watching The Stories We Tell this week. I thought that it was very well done and had a lot of emotion in it. I though it was a very interesting premise for a documentary. I thought that the way Sarah Polley explored and deconstructed her family experience was heart wrenching on many levels. It definitely took a lot of courage for her to set up this whole project and then have it open to the public audience. The movie really made you feel for Sarah, her family and her desire to learn more about where she came from. I think it is very natural and important for a person to have a definitive narrative about their life and you could see throughout the movie how important this project was to her and her family. A scene that was especially poignant and gripping was the scene when her older brother talks about losing his mother. Even though I have not had any experiences similar to that I found that particular scene to be the most moving in the documentary.

 

Journal 5 April 14th– I have found it interesting to learn more about Swann. We met him early in the book and I found him to be compelling from the start, so I was eager to read more about him. The relationship between Swann and Odette is fascinating. Swann is hard to place, he is an aristocrat but in some ways but he seems to disdain the aristocracy that he belongs to and feels more at home among more common folk. Maybe this is a reason why he is attracted to women of a lower class than himself, which would explain his growing infatuation with Odette. Their relationship is fascinating and complex. In a way it seems that Swann’s love for Odette is one sided. It is obvious that he loves her but the way in which he loves her is more like the love of an object than the love of a person. He does not view her as an equal but as something to be possessed, which can be typical of men in general. It was interesting for me to see the relationship unfold because I became interested in learning more after Gilberte and Odette are introduced in Combray, in the scene when the narrator and his family are walking across Swann’s property. Swann to me seems to be a vain and insecure man if he puts that much stock into just one woman. I understand the importance that women play in a man’s life, his confidence, his contentedness, but Odette does not truly love Swann and because of this he is a fool. But I can relate because I have previously felt reliant on a woman for happiness, which I admit is inherently weak.

 

Journal 6 April 17th– I found the Sorrow and the Pity to be a fascinating look inside World War 2 France. A part of the film that I found of particular interest was the men of the French Resistance. I found their accounts of war- time France to be particularly compelling. The way that they described the war was a narrative that I was not previously familiar with. I definitely had a stilted view of the French during this time period; I thought they were all a bunch of pushovers because France was under German occupation. But after hearing of the trials and tribulations of the French Resistance fighters it really made me reconsider what I thought I new. These guys were total bad asses, they fought and died for what they believed in. It was also interesting to hear the German perspective of wartime France. It is easy to demonize the Nazi’s but they were just people to and it is hard for me to believe that they were all evil. It is fascinating to think of the mentality of the German’s because what they did was heinous. I would like to learn more about the German and Nazi mentality and how this happened. Growing up it World War 2 felt like a million years ago but as I have gotten older I have realized that people haven’t changed that much in the last 75 years, so it is just crazy to think about the realities of the Holocaust. In the scheme of things this all happened not that long ago.

 

Journal 7 April 22nd– I have just started reading Within A Budding Grove and so far I have found it not as engrossing as Swann’s Way, I found Swann in Love particularly engrossing. The first ten pages were interesting. The conversation between M de Norpois and the narrator’s father was interesting because it is just gossip about Swann. For me the train ride to Balbec was a little tough to get through.

losttimeMichael 2015-04-06 17:57:25

April 6, 2015 /

Michael Chapman

Turning Point

In sixth grade I started attending McClure Middle School. McClure is a public middle school located in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle where I grew up. It is made up of an old red brick main building and old decaying portable classrooms scattered across the edges of the school. When I started school there I had friends from the previous elementary school I had attended that was also located in Queen Anne. The kids that I was friends with from that school had pretty much the same family background as me. They were upper middle class kids from stable two parent families that also lived in the neighborhood. McClure was different in the fact that it drew kids from all over the city. When I went there in the early to mid 2000’s it was very ethnically diverse for a school in a ninety percent white neighborhood (though recently they have stopped busing in students from South Seattle, so the racial makeup of the school has changed to more represent the neighborhood). Like other schools, McClure had honors classes for the perceived smart kids and what were termed “regular” classes for everyone else. This was tracking at its finest. Academics were never my strong suit even then and I was placed in the regular classes. The thing was, that the honors classes were filled with all of the upper middle class kids from the neighborhood that I had been friends with, while the regular classes were filled with kids from all over the city. When I went to class on the first day of sixth grade I realized I had been separated from all of my elementary school friends, who for the most part all ended up in the same homeroom class.  I remember at first that this was kind of devastating for me. I had thought that I would be in class with my friends but I quickly learned that we would be separated for the majority of the day. I remember feeling shocked, saddened and embarrassed over the fact that I was not in the honors classes. I remember going home that week and being mad at my parents asking why I wasn’t in honors?. But I got over it and over the course of that first year I made friends with the boys (because we would have been only twelve years old when we first met) who would become my best friends for the next 5 years. There names were Will, Andrew , Keiran and Zolton ( who for the record is the only one of any of these people that I have kept in touch with and I still consider one of my closest friends)  and we were all in Mr. Fielder’s home room class.   Mr. Fielder was a great teacher and just a fascinating human being. He loved music and would devote a lot of class time to teaching subjects that interested both him and his students. He was an older fellow I think he turned 62 the year that I had him. He also had tenure and was approaching retirement, so he really just taught us whatever he wanted, whether it was how to bet on horse racing to teach algebra or rock n’ roll history. That was a great year and how I met all of these guys that I would end up spending a considerable amount of time with. This was the first time that I was a part of a real adolescent male friendship group. The years between 12-18 are a particularly interesting time in that during these years the most important people in your life are your friends. For me the world stopped and ended with my group of friends. What they thought of me was how I based my identity during this time period. Shortly after this group emerged, Will found his place as the leader of the group. Will was a bully, probably the worst bully I have ever known in my whole life. He mercilessly bullied his friends and other classmates alike. He also controlled our group of friends like a fascist. If he was mad at you he would literally excommunicate you from the group for months or weeks. He had so much power that for the most part (excluding Zolton, who was too good hearted to ever follow any of Will’s malicious acts) the whole group would follow his lead and not talk to you (except talking shit of course).  It was weird because when I first met him in sixth grade he was nice enough. We really bonded over music and that we were both learning how to play guitar. Will progressed steadily over the next couple years into a really hateful mean person. By high school his actions had become totally out of control. But before high school another person that I need to mention is Maddie M.T. Maddie M.T. has two last names but I am going to leave them out because it doesn’t really matter and she always went by Maddie M.T. Madeline must have been extremely popular name to give your daughter in 1992 because there was like 5 or 6 Maddies in my grade and they all went by Maddie this and Maddie that. Will and I both met Maddie M.T. at the end of seventh grade and we both quickly became somewhat infatuated with her. She was a really cool, smart, beautiful girl who could hang out with the guys and she quickly became part of our group of friends. We had a lot of good times with Maddie M.T. stretching into freshman year of high school. I will say that I was totally in love with her as much as 13/14-year-old boy can be in love with a girl. Will, even in middle school was pretty aggressive towards girls and by high school he had gotten even worse. He was very charismatic and was always the king of manipulating girls to do what he wanted. He had this skill, he would make girls feel like shit but on some level they would actually respond to it. It was pretty twisted. I went to a different high school than most of my friends from McClure for freshman year but I still stayed in touch with all of them.  After freshman year I transferred to Ballard High School where most of my friends from McClure went. By this time Will had been rebuffed by Maddie so many times that he figured he was never going to get anything from her and that he might as well make her life into a living hell. By sophomore year Will was at his peak of being a bully. He would bully and harass anyone he could but a lot of the time it was either focused on Maddie and her friends or members of our own group of friends. This continued into junior year, which would be my last year at Ballard. By this time we were all experimenting with drugs and alcohol, so a lot of our time would be spent driving around Queen Anne in one of our parents cars drinking, smoking weed and just generally causing trouble. This was when Will started convincing us to start vandalizing Maddie’s house. Writing this sounds ridiculous because I can’t imagine ever doing something like this to someone I cared about but high school was a weird time for me. Will would get us all drunk and then convince us to go egg Maddie’s house or do something else super messed up. We would have literally followed Will off a cliff when we were all drinking, he was that charismatic and I think his charisma only increased when we were all inebriated. I would never participate in the actual vandalism and most times I would try to convince the others to not do it, but I was still there and so I guess I am just as guilty. One night we were all hanging out at the Seattle Center drinking and smoking clove cigarettes from what I remember. I remember us drinking for hours and then I left to walk home. Later that night I woke up to find my phone ringing and that I have a bunch of belligerent, furious messages from Maddie. I figured they must have done something awful but I didn’t know what. That next morning I found out that Will and a couple of other friends threw a brick through Maddie’s mom’s car window. I remember just thinking that this was so messed up and wrong that they had done this for literally no reason. This ignited a small firestorm in our neighborhood and Maddie’s parents got involved and it turned into an epic shit storm. Maddie told her parents how Will had been harassing her for years and that he was pretty much the only one that could have done this. Nobody got arrested but there were threats made and it was just a super unfortunate, totally unnecessary situation. I never talked to Maddie again. After this I decided I needed to break ties with Will and all of these other people. I started thinking about all of the bullying that I had been a part of just by default because I was friends with Will. I started to feel guilty. I realized I never again wanted to be part of a social group like the one I had been a part of for so long. I wanted to be independent and to make my own choices based on my own morals. I felt like in that group I had no control to be myself without being criticized.  I became conscious of how negative a group mentality could be. After junior year I enrolled in community college and never looked back. This was a turning point for me because I realized that I could be myself without being part of a group of people that defined me.

Turning Point

April 6, 2015 /

Michael Chapman

Turning Point

In sixth grade I started attending McClure Middle School. McClure is a public middle school located in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle where I grew up. It is made up of an old red brick main building and old decaying portable classrooms scattered across the edges of the school. When I started school there I had friends from the previous elementary school I had attended that was also located in Queen Anne. The kids that I was friends with from that school had pretty much the same family background as me. They were upper middle class kids from stable two parent families that also lived in the neighborhood. McClure was different in the fact that it drew kids from all over the city. When I went there in the early to mid 2000’s it was very ethnically diverse for a school in a ninety percent white neighborhood (though recently they have stopped busing in students from South Seattle, so the racial makeup of the school has changed to more represent the neighborhood). Like other schools, McClure had honors classes for the perceived smart kids and what were termed “regular” classes for everyone else. This was tracking at its finest. Academics were never my strong suit even then and I was placed in the regular classes. The thing was, that the honors classes were filled with all of the upper middle class kids from the neighborhood that I had been friends with, while the regular classes were filled with kids from all over the city. When I went to class on the first day of sixth grade I realized I had been separated from all of my elementary school friends, who for the most part all ended up in the same homeroom class.  I remember at first that this was kind of devastating for me. I had thought that I would be in class with my friends but I quickly learned that we would be separated for the majority of the day. I remember feeling shocked, saddened and embarrassed over the fact that I was not in the honors classes. I remember going home that week and being mad at my parents asking why I wasn’t in honors?. But I got over it and over the course of that first year I made friends with the boys (because we would have been only twelve years old when we first met) who would become my best friends for the next 5 years. There names were Will, Andrew , Keiran and Zolton ( who for the record is the only one of any of these people that I have kept in touch with and I still consider one of my closest friends)  and we were all in Mr. Fielder’s home room class.

 

Mr. Fielder was a great teacher and just a fascinating human being. He loved music and would devote a lot of class time to teaching subjects that interested both him and his students. He was an older fellow I think he turned 62 the year that I had him. He also had tenure and was approaching retirement, so he really just taught us whatever he wanted, whether it was how to bet on horse racing to teach algebra or rock n’ roll history. That was a great year and how I met all of these guys that I would end up spending a considerable amount of time with. This was the first time that I was a part of a real adolescent male friendship group. The years between 12-18 are a particularly interesting time in that during these years the most important people in your life are your friends. For me the world stopped and ended with my group of friends. What they thought of me was how I based my identity during this time period. Shortly after this group emerged, Will found his place as the leader of the group. Will was a bully, probably the worst bully I have ever known in my whole life. He mercilessly bullied his friends and other classmates alike. He also controlled our group of friends like a fascist. If he was mad at you he would literally excommunicate you from the group for months or weeks. He had so much power that for the most part (excluding Zolton, who was too good hearted to ever follow any of Will’s malicious acts) the whole group would follow his lead and not talk to you (except talking shit of course).  It was weird because when I first met him in sixth grade he was nice enough. We really bonded over music and that we were both learning how to play guitar. Will progressed steadily over the next couple years into a really hateful mean person. By high school his actions had become totally out of control. But before high school another person that I need to mention is Maddie M.T. Maddie M.T. has two last names but I am going to leave them out because it doesn’t really matter and she always went by Maddie M.T. Madeline must have been extremely popular name to give your daughter in 1992 because there was like 5 or 6 Maddies in my grade and they all went by Maddie this and Maddie that. Will and I both met Maddie M.T. at the end of seventh grade and we both quickly became somewhat infatuated with her. She was a really cool, smart, beautiful girl who could hang out with the guys and she quickly became part of our group of friends. We had a lot of good times with Maddie M.T. stretching into freshman year of high school. I will say that I was totally in love with her as much as 13/14-year-old boy can be in love with a girl. Will, even in middle school was pretty aggressive towards girls and by high school he had gotten even worse. He was very charismatic and was always the king of manipulating girls to do what he wanted. He had this skill, he would make girls feel like shit but on some level they would actually respond to it. It was pretty twisted.

I went to a different high school than most of my friends from McClure for freshman year but I still stayed in touch with all of them.  After freshman year I transferred to Ballard High School where most of my friends from McClure went. By this time Will had been rebuffed by Maddie so many times that he figured he was never going to get anything from her and that he might as well make her life into a living hell. By sophomore year Will was at his peak of being a bully. He would bully and harass anyone he could but a lot of the time it was either focused on Maddie and her friends or members of our own group of friends. This continued into junior year, which would be my last year at Ballard. By this time we were all experimenting with drugs and alcohol, so a lot of our time would be spent driving around Queen Anne in one of our parents cars drinking, smoking weed and just generally causing trouble. This was when Will started convincing us to start vandalizing Maddie’s house. Writing this sounds ridiculous because I can’t imagine ever doing something like this to someone I cared about but high school was a weird time for me. Will would get us all drunk and then convince us to go egg Maddie’s house or do something else super messed up. We would have literally followed Will off a cliff when we were all drinking, he was that charismatic and I think his charisma only increased when we were all inebriated. I would never participate in the actual vandalism and most times I would try to convince the others to not do it, but I was still there and so I guess I am just as guilty. One night we were all hanging out at the Seattle Center drinking and smoking clove cigarettes from what I remember. I remember us drinking for hours and then I left to walk home. Later that night I woke up to find my phone ringing and that I have a bunch of belligerent, furious messages from Maddie. I figured they must have done something awful but I didn’t know what. That next morning I found out that Will and a couple of other friends threw a brick through Maddie’s mom’s car window. I remember just thinking that this was so messed up and wrong that they had done this for literally no reason. This ignited a small firestorm in our neighborhood and Maddie’s parents got involved and it turned into an epic shit storm. Maddie told her parents how Will had been harassing her for years and that he was pretty much the only one that could have done this. Nobody got arrested but there were threats made and it was just a super unfortunate, totally unnecessary situation. I never talked to Maddie again.

After this I decided I needed to break ties with Will and all of these other people. I started thinking about all of the bullying that I had been a part of just by default because I was friends with Will. I started to feel guilty. I realized I never again wanted to be part of a social group like the one I had been a part of for so long. I wanted to be independent and to make my own choices based on my own morals. I felt like in that group I had no control to be myself without being criticized.  I became conscious of how negative a group mentality could be. After junior year I enrolled in community college and never looked back. This was a turning point for me because I realized that I could be myself without being part of a group of people that defined me.

 

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The Evergreen State College
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