Author Archives: Spencer J Smith

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Refresh Yourself

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I spent my weekend hanging out with high school seniors. Hopefully, there will be pictures forthcoming. I think there’s something really refreshing about hanging out with the life stage immediately below you. The refreshing part about it is that life stages are really fluid and so their problems are your problems except different enough that you have solutions for their problems. That’s all a bit confusing. Let me explain.

I have a brother. His name is Ty. He’s wonderful. He’s my best friend. Our relationship is pretty simple. When we were little, we fought. When I got to high school, we started to respect each other, but didn’t feel like we could talk to each other. Then when he got to high school we became equals, peers. And that’s how it is now. And we talk, quite a bit. And that’s very nice.

When we talk now, his problems are my problems and vice versa. Both of us are trying to figure out how to juggle school, extracurriculars, and a social life. Both of us are trying to figure out what our next life stage is going to look like. Both of us are trying to figure out how to be more self-confident and how to navigate relationships.

But we deal with these problems in very different ways. Part of this is because we are different people. But another part of it is because we are at different points in our lives. Right now, I have a tendency to complicate things. And so when I hang out with my brother and his friends, they make me simplify everything. And right now, Ty and his friends have  a tendency to simplify things. And so I try to help them gain more perspective on a problem. (I don’t know if that’s helpful or true, but I pretend like it is.)

And that’s all very refreshing. It’s refreshing to know that the game always kind of stays the same, and it’s just your own convoluted brain that changes. It’s refreshing to know that there are people who care about you no matter what happens.

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Aelred Haters Gon’ Hate

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I wrote a while back about Aelred and his spiritual friendship. I like friendship; I like writing about it; and I like seeing and experiencing it. But I’ve been thinking about Aelred quite a bit. He has kind of been following me all around, pointing out good examples of love and friendship and bad examples, and keeping me on the straight and narrow. I like that about Aelred: he’s so loving and wonderfully helpful.

There’s something else I really like about Aelred, though. (Besides the fact that his Feast Day is on my birthday! Yeah, that’s right, we celebrate the life of the greatest friends of all time with our friends on my birthday!) When he was writing and teaching and being awesome in the twelfth century, there were some people inexplicably who didn’t like him. I guess this makes sense. No one goes through his whole life without having some haters. And, as everyone knows, haters gonna hate.

The common practice during the twelfth century was to respond to the haters. You did this by writing long and scathing tracts to your haters about why they were wrong and you were better. Some writers, like the always-angry-and-melancholy Abelard, spent the better part of their careers responding to the criticism from these other writers who were never going to agree with anyone anyway. Kind of a useless endeavor, if you ask me. And in Abelard’s case, it cost him to forget about this wonderful girl Heloise who was a keeper if there ever was one.

Anyway, I’m digressing and airing nine-century-old grudges.

Aelred never responded to his haters. And I’m sure, at the time, it felt like all of the world was against him because when you are a public figure and you have haters, it feels like those haters are everyone. But somehow, Aelred pulled through it. He didn’t lash out, and he kept reminding himself, I suspect, that there were plenty of people who loved him. His writing shows it.

Like with most people, Aelred eventually died, but his writing has survived. We have writing from a lot of writers from his time. The cool thing about writing from that time is that they didn’t divorce their personalities from their rhetorical voices so we, as modern readers, easily make judgments about what kind of people they were. And here’s the moral of this story: Aelred, because he was never bitter, never hateful, never spiteful and always loving, is beloved today. Readers read him and feel like they could easily crack open a fresh one with him. And so now, in 2011, Aelred’s haters don’t matter. Because haters die too, and if you don’t respond to them, the record of them dies as well.

How do you deal with haters?

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Catch that Panther Pride

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I am writing from home this weekend. I hail from a very special community that exists in southwest Ohio. This weekend is Homecoming. The high school is on fire with school pride. I love high school pride. It is one of my top favorite things. A lot of people think it’s fake or phony or something, but I think that is mostly because you read Catcher in the Rye in high school. In Catcher in the Rye, everything is phony. So we can’t trust that.

School spirit can be a really cool thing. It unites people. It energizes them. It drives creativity. When I was a senior, one of my good friends got elected to Homecoming Court for the first time. We were all really excited, but the thing was that he was the voice of our class. One day, I’m pretty sure he’s going to host The Price is Right. He was supposed to emcee the halftime show, not be in it. And so the school had to find a replacement. They asked me to do it, and I accepted because I had a public speaking course that semester, and I was pretty sure that talking in front of a classroom was the same thing as talking in front of a football stadium.

It wasn’t.

And there are all of these pictures of me looking a little bit awkward. But I think if you listened to a recording of the halftime show, you would find that I may have done relatively well. And I loved it. I loved every minute of it.

I bring all of this up because this story is the first time I was asked to be THE MAN in a situation. If the halftime show had failed, it would have been on me. But it didn’t. And this whole experience was brought about because of school spirit.

I have one legitimate little brother, but I really have three little brothers who are all seniors at my hometown high school. And I got to see today how good school spirit has been for all of them. I went to the Homecoming pep rally. My real brother was dressed up as a cheerleader. And my other two brothers rapped. And it was great. But everyone was surprised. (Not so much about my cheerleader brother; people expect things like that from him.) But multiple teachers approached me during the day and said, “I didn’t know Zach and AJ rapped.” My point is that perhaps these teachers would have never known if not for school spirit.


What’s your Homecoming story?