Today’s episode is guest hosted by Jason Schneiderman.

Transcript

I’m Jason Schneiderman and this is The Slowdown. 

Vocational tests in high school are becoming less and less of a thing. In my parent’s generation, the joke was that they were all told to become forest rangers. I mostly remember taking a vocational test in high school, because the test suggested that I become a florist or an airline attendant. I had been expecting diplomat or college professor, or something I would never have thought of, and instead I felt like I’d been put in a box of gay stereotypes from the 1980s. 

Aptitude tests are now mostly about one’s innate style of work. I took one recently and while I had expected my results to say that I’m a natural leader who is driven by what’s right, the results said that actually my top priority is for everyone to get along, and that my secondary preference is for nothing to change. I was shocked, but the more I thought about it, it’s true. I do hate change and I do want everyone to get along. The test worked—it showed me something about myself that I didn’t want to know and forced me to think about my inability to control what’s coming. 

We take these tests to plan for the future, one we have all sorts of hopes for. But what really happens is often a surprise.

In today’s poem, the poet looks at what it means for things to change—what it means to live in the present and to plan for the future—and how painful and destabilizing it can be when what we expected, planned for, worked for, and dreamed of—is suddenly taken away. 

To the Friend Who Is Crying on the Phone
by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

              for Muriel

Once, a man I thought I 
loved assumed love was a thing bound
to the future, an obligation that lay
ahead rather than the rarest swelling now

& he said when I think of the future
I have to admit there is not future
& while I’m sure he meant to say “no 
future” the not made his statement Boolean,

the future as true or false rather than less possible
& more possible, & that is also the difference 
between time & space, god & the devil, matter
& antimatter, heaven & the counterpart

to heaven, all of them theories
of love. In pitch dark it comes: faith
is a feeling rooted in hopelessness. & so I refuse
a world cut into brutal black

& white halves when all god 
has ever been is a field imagining
itself, an infinite grey coast forming
morning color; how a woman left

for dead will fist a root from the bank
& pull herself out of the river;
like the baby born in a bomb
shelter between nations; or the elder

remembering the original names of time;
like a scorpion overcoming his
nature to cross the water on faith alone—
this too is love:

The crane that surrenders to winter’s last 
light. To accept the not future
as another kind of now, and hold in 
the tide that tosses & swells & swells

& swells yearning to reach the edge 
of a cliffside that was once a low coast
at the beginning of the world; the letting go
is easier when even the sea must dream its mirror;

& when time starts over, the future will be behind us but
love, like god, will still be here

"To the Friend Who Is Crying on the Phone" by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Used by permission of the poet.