``What do you do for fun?''

Fun?

I know I've heard that word somewhere before.

This question is always hard for me to answer. There are not a lot of things in my life that I think of as being ``fun,'' and ``fun'' is not something I really look for in life.

Oh, dear. That sounds terribly serious, and yet I'm definitely a playful guy. Well, it's hard to explain.

In terms of ``fun,'' what comes to mind are a few of the women who have been in my life over the past few years. These women have been an exception in my life, because they are people that I do often have fun with. And what's more, they find me fun, which is really a source of amazement to me. Anyway, they include my ex-girl friend Sue, my best friend in the world Sarona, and finally my friend Petra, with whom I once had a relationship that can't be described briefly.

Putting these exceptions aside, though, what you have to understand is that by temperament I'm an intellectual. I get interested in things, and usually when I get interested in something, my interest is fairly obsessive. (In fact, I've had to learn to exercise a certain amount of self-discipline about what things I allow myself to get interested in.) So I spend a lot of time learning about things. This may involve a lot of reading (although I don't read as much now as I did when I was younger, but a lot more than I did four or five years ago) and it may also involve taking classes.

There was a time in my life (from about the time that I started graduate school until I left the University of Kansas in 1977) when my main obsession was mathematics. Since that also had professional importance for me, for quite a while I was willing to sacrifice a lot of my other interests for that. That's no longer the case, and the reasons for that being so are would require a rather lengthy discussion, which belong more appropriately on another page. Suffice it to say that now my obsession with mathematics is mostly with trying to figure out how to teach it more effectively. (And even so, I'm not always a great teacher on a day-to-day basis.)

Among my current obsessions (or at least intense interests) are psychology (especially Neurolinguistic Programming), movie-making, literature, and literary criticism.

I'm not expert on any of these subjects. In fact, it's becoming rather obvious to me that an essential part of my make-up is to be a perpetual dilettante. And I'm not completely convinced that there's anything wrong with that.

The only thing is, I never quite realize that I'm a dilettante at the moment I'm obsessed with something. Ten years ago, for instance, I would have been quite ready to go back to graduate school and become a clinical psychologist, if I'd thought that I had the stamina for it. Now, I realize that I would never have liked being a practicing psychologist -- at least not one with conventional credentials.

Okay, but back to the subject of fun. I've made it sound like I spend most of my life reading books and occasionally going to classes, and that's not true at all. In fact, it's really a source of frustration to me that I don't get nearly enough time to do the reading I want to.

Several weeks ago, I sent email to a friend in San Francisco describing an interesting encounter I'd had one evening. She wrote back, ``Well, I'm just glad to hear that you're not rotting away in your apartment.''
Well, there are periods where it does seem like ``rotting away in my apartment'' is a pretty fair description of my life. But on this particular occasion, I was able to immediately send her return email showing that for every one of the past ten days I had had some scheduled late-afternoon or evening event to attend.
The truth is, though, I don't like to be that busy. I like to have times when I can spend most of the evening by myself and read. Or even watch television.

So what else is it that do I do?

I go out and drink and my neighborhood bar, Anna Bannana's. It's about four blocks away, so I can walk. (One of my major character defects is that I don't own a car. [smiley]) I suppose I ought to classify that under ``fun,'' but the truth of the matter is that a lot of the time it's pretty damned boring.

Actually, what I do most often at Anna's is to fall into my accustomed role as the Watcher. For those who know about the Enneagram, I seem to be a pretty definite type Five. And so at Anna's (or other bars, for that matter), mostly I just sit quietly and watch.

Several years ago, I was sitting in Anna's bored, watching the local news on the television, which I couldn't hear because of the jukebox. I was trying to figure out what the story was that went with the pictures they were showing and thinking about the fact that the television news is also much more interesting with the sound turned down. And it suddenly occurred to me that what I was doing at that moment is what I spend most of my life doing: just watching the world and trying to figure out what's really going on. Trying to make sense out of things without knowing the real story, and yet knowing that the real story is probably much more boring than the possibilities I imagine.

Every once in a while, though, something very crazy will happen in Anna's. And that's the main reason I like bars. (See the Snapshots page for some examples.)

I also go to strip clubs sometimes. How often depends on whether I'm friends with a particular dancer, and whether I can afford the money. Over the years, I've had some extremely interesting encounters with dancers, and have become very good friends with a few of them, although never quite becoming involved in a romantic/sexual relationship with one. (The dancer I came closest to getting into a relationship with was a thirty-eight year old Italian woman who wound up being found strangled in her hotel room before we ever managed to have a date. That put a damper on my interest in going to strip clubs for quite a while.) Heavy drug and alcohol use and abusive boy friends are facts of life for many dancers in the clubs. However I've also known some who are vegetarians and drink mostly fruit juices and have quite healthy relationships.

A few years ago, I used to like to go to a restaurant/bar in Waikiki called the New Orleans Bistro. They had a small jazz combo which would play from around nine or ten every evening until about one in the morning. It was an ``intimate'' place with friendly bartenders and waitresses. I also made some friends amongs the customers. The jazz groups played the kind of jazz I like and it was conducive to the kind of mood I seek when I go out to drink (although not to the sort of craziness I sometimes find at Anna's, and which I also value). Unfortunately, it had to close a few years ago when the economic situation here was very bad for restaurants and the rest of the tourist industry.

I also go to a lot of movies. This includes a lot of the major releases, but movies in foreign language films are likely to be my top priority. (But only European languages. I never have quite got the hang of Asian films.)

My friend Petra says that I like films for ``wannabe intellectuals.'' I guess that's a pretty fair characterization. (She, on the other hand, likes movies like ``Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.'' But every time I tell her, ``We're very different,'' she says, ``I don't see why that's so true.'')

This spring (1996), I've been taking a class in French cinema taught by Professor Emily Zants. This committed me to watching ten French films on videotape. But I actually wound up watching another ten or so that weren't assigned.

Taking this French cinema class was a revelation, in that I realized that this University, which so often seems like an intellectual wasteland, actually has a quite excellent audio-visual library. (Due to a gift of a whole lot of money from some donors named Wong.) So I can now check out videos and systematically watch all the most important films of most major directors.

This fits in well with my growing interest in film-making, which started as a result of attending the seminars on cinematography given here each fall by Roger Ebert (together with some famous cinematographer) as part of the Hawaii International Film Festival.

The summer school here also offers brief non-credit courses every summer taught by visiting film-makers, and during the past two summers I've taken courses in such subjects as screenwriting, cinematography, and film editing.

Recently, I've been going twice a month to a ``Poetry Slam'' here. It's not much of a ``slam,'' actually: people are very tolerant of each other's efforts. (A few years ago, they used to have a panel of three judges at each slam, who would assign scores from 0 to 10. But this being Hawaii, where everyone is ``nice,'' the judges almost never gave any score lower than 8, so that became rather pointless.)

Another thing I've been going to off and on for many years now have been what are called Mark Groups given by More University, as well as some of their courses in relationships and sensuality. More University might be considered a commune -- some people would call them a cult. Anyway, they are mostly headquartered in Lafayette, California (Bay Area), but there are a large bunch of them here on Oahu.

The More University people have their own set of beliefs, which I have sometimes found a useful point of view, and sometimes found annoying. Anyway, the Mark Groups are not exactly support groups, and definitely not group therapy, and not encounter groups in the usual sense of the word, but they're a little like all of these. I go because it's sometimes a good way to meet people that doesn't involve drinking, and I like listening to people talk about their lives and their problems.

A somewhat similar group I've been going to for about a year is the Polyamory Group which meets at the Unitarian Church. At first, I was reluctant to go to that group, because it seemed rather inappropriate that someone who is so seldom in a relationship even with one partner should go to a group devoted to discussing relationships with multiple partners. But my friend Sarona found out about it and got me to go one of the times when she was visiting Hawaii, and I discovered that I was far from the only singleton who attended. It's turned out to be a good place to make friends.

I also frequently attend a seminar in human sexuality (``The Pacific Center for Sex and Society'') chaired by Dr. Milton (``Mickey'') Diamond in the Medical School. Mickey sometimes refers to this seminar as a floating crap game -- one can never be sure who will show up. The range of subjects discussed is enormous. We once had somebody give a talk on the sex life of (as I recall) snails. A graduate student in anthropology who used to attend gave a presentation on menstrual customs among Pacific islanders. And a videotape distributor once came to discuss the adult videotape industry. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not.

Several times in recent years I've managed to inveigle my way into creative writing workshops from the English Department. I took the graduate fiction workshop from Lynne Sharon Schwartz in 1993, from Steve Heller in 1995 and Ian Macmillan in 1996. These involved me in writing two stories during the semester and, the second time, writing a book review on a collection of short stories by Alice Munro as well. It seems to work fairly well as far as motivating me to write fiction, and I find it interesting to get to know graduate students in the English Department. I've already taken poetry workshops from Frank Stewart and Morgan Blair, and during my 1997-98 sabbatical I am taking courses in novel writing offered through UC Berkeley Extension and taught by Lewis Buzbee.

(I am suddenly struck by the fact that it's rather bizarre to start out talking of ways to have fun and end up by talking about writing. Any writer who claims that writing is fun has got to be a serious psychotic, and one should keep one's distance. I guess it's true of all of the arts that being seriously involved in them involves an enormous amount of hard work and only a small amount of fun, but writers seem to have a much more miserable time doing what they do than any other kind of artists -- except maybe, from what I hear, comedians.)

October, 1997: It occurs to me that another activity I should have mentioned is working on my web site, both the mathematical sections and the personal part. It don't usually think of this when I think of fun, but since I don't get paid for it and certainly get no encouragement for it, I guess it must be fun.

April-May, 1996