So, I am driving back to school after lunch, and all along the small side street are trees, despite it being early February, that have yet to totally give up the ghost. There are still brown leaves clinging to the withered limbs, and on the radio is the Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again.” Just before it comes on and just before the leaves distract me, I was thinking about String Theory and Neuroscience, two of my strange, recent hobbies that have preoccupied me lately. I cannot seem to get enough books to read on the subjects. Wait. What? String Theory? Neuroscience? But I am an English teacher. Those seem like odd topics for an English teacher. Shouldn’t I be thinking about Wordsworth or Dante or Shakespeare?

But, I guess you could say I am not your normal, typical English instructor, and, in fact, I have always defied categories and labels. I remember in high school I was always the smart kid, the one who threw off the curve because he got all of the questions right, even the ones we were not supposed to get and even all of the bonus questions. But I was definitely not the nerd, either. I was also semi-athletic. I might not have been the football jock, but I did play sports. I had strong legs, great speed, and wonderful leaping abilities, so what I lacked in upper body strength I made up in leg strength. And that eventually equated to a strong ability to run, and then coupled with endurance, that enabled me, relatively speaking, to be the best athlete at the school. I say that tongue-in-cheek because, despite the fact that I was not the star quarterback, the typical-looking athletic stud, and I was definitely not the first one picked in pick-up games, I was the only athlete in my class to get a scholarship at a DI school, so, in relative terms, that did make me the best athlete.

But I still defied categories even more because I did not dress like everyone else either. At a time when the school uniform was adidas or Nike high tops, jeans, and Izod Lacoste polo/tennis shirts, I wore triple-pleated baggy pants and pointed jazz shoes. I was also the only white guy with a pierced ear that many of my classmates had ever seen. Because of the way I dressed, one classmate said I dressed “like a nigger.” I remember that we were in music class, and I just stood up, looked him in the eye, and punched him in the mouth. I now see him popping up on Facebook every now and then as a friend of friends, and I would not be surprised when he actually tries to “friend request” me. That is about the right mentality of Facebook.

So, thinking about things like String Theory and Neuroscience would not be that out of character for me even though I am an English teacher.

But the clinging brown leaves distract me, someone stopping at an imaginary stop sign when she really has the right-of-way and waving me on distracts me, and the haunting voice of Annie Lennox on the radio distracts me. I think I am more distracted by Annie Lennox. I think about when that song first came out, and it was very different than anything that we had ever heard. It, too, in a way, defied categories. Of course, that is relative. I would not say that it was as different as something from the Dead Milkmen or The Screaming Blue Messiahs. It still had a little bit of pop value to it, but it was different enough to make us stop and pay attention and realize that it actually spanned over our notions of categories.

So all of the distractions pull me away from my String Theory thoughts, and I start to think about why an English teacher would even think about something that scientific. Most English teachers cringe at math and science, but then again, most of the English teachers I know are fine with their categorized life, and I start to think that most of us really are. We seem to hate being labeled yet we gravitate towards those very same labels. I get so frustrated seeing friends pop up on Facebook, and they are so stereotypically right wing. They say the same things, are fans of the same pages, and seem to fit very well into a neat little niche. But the same goes for so many people I know on the left. They seem to be fine with the Volvo-driving, latte-drinking image that the right has portrayed for them. And proud of it.

The irony is that I was once a chemical engineering major, but I thought all of my classmates were nerds, only thinking about isotopes, but now my colleagues would not even know what an isotope is and would not even care. We often seem to reject other people putting us into categories, but then we do nothing to stop that from propagating. We revel in it. We are our own labels. We create our own labels and then feel fine filling those same labels. We often do not seek outside of that label and even reject anything that might clash with that label, that might upset our own little universe, our own little balance. To my English colleagues, I always think, would it kill you to put down your classical literature every once in a while and pick up a book by Mary Roach? You do not have to leave Moby Dick and The Sun Also Rises behind because they are wonderful pieces, but, maybe, just once, venture outside yourself. Dare to defy categorization.

Currently in my graphic novels class, a class that gets askance looks from my colleagues because it is not classic literature and it is something else that pulls them away from their nice, nifty, neat little world, we are reading Craig Thompson’s Blankets. In the novel, the main female character, Raina, falls in and out of love with the autobiographical main character. One of my students was put off by this and wondered if Raina was just scared of experiencing the unknown. She was used to her grunge buddies back at her big city high school, but Craig dared to pull her out of that comfortable world, that comfort zone. Her world was soft and warm with the labels that she lived. Maybe that is it. Maybe we just get too comfortable in a categorized world, and we just do not want to be bothered to be pulled out of it. Maybe we just revel in that known warmth and do not dare venture outside of that.

Maybe we are all like a vacillating Raina.