Filling the Skills Gap

Thoughts on writing, dismantling ego, and rising to a challenge

For the past few months, I’ve been really trying to challenge myself creatively.

I wanted to write an essay that was rooted in an experience, substantiated by research and theory and academia, and I wanted it to have style, flare. I wanted it to be The Nanny goes to college (which I guess is sort of the rough concept of Legally Blonde) but with some specific weight given to the passion I felt for the subject matter itself.

I realize now that I overthought the project. In having a vision from the jump for how I wanted this project to look, sound, and feel, it stunted the execution of it like a parent decorating a nursery with baby blue soft masculine OshKosh B'gosh baseball paraphernalia for a future delicate tenderqueer. I had too many expectations, got too excited for what could have been a moment of “genius” for me artistically because as much as I hate to actually admit it, I like opportunities to prove myself.

Well. The egg’s on my face.

I wrote 3 different starting drafts of this essay and each were varying degrees of shit. I felt bored even writing them at a certain point, unable to find quite the right balance of research and voice and style. I read other authors, I referenced the source material again. Nothing. And this morning I sat down to try and dig into a draft of it again, and reading it through, I realized that it was done. This essay was done.

And it was so bland. It was way too wrapped up in its own self importance that even the shining moments of prose (and there were plenty, I am proud to say), didn’t really salvage the ship. Ol’ girl sank like the undead corpse of Rasputin–tragically petrified, unable to totally die even though we all knew she wasn’t recovering from this one.

But the ideas were there. My passion for the subject matter is, too. I had been writing about this exhibit at The Field Museum here in Chicago called, Traveling the Pacific.

For those who don’t know about it, I don’t blame you! It isn’t advertised. You can’t find it on the Field’s website. Its entrance is relegated to this somewhat dimly lit area between a small exhibit on falling asteroids in North America and a VR spaceship experience. It’s a strange corner of the seemingly forgotten.

Traveling the Pacific itself is an edutainment experience that takes visitors “traveling” to different islands of the South Pacific to experience what life is really like there. A sort of call and response to the old exhibits of yore with glass cases and stuffed elephants. In 1986, museum admin noticed that foot traffic was down and so they brought in Michael Spock who pioneered the immersive exhibition style during his time at the Boston Children’s Museum in the 1960s. Bringing his skills to the Field, he caused a lot of internal uproar when he took the exhibit the Field was already working on featuring the museum’s enormous collection of Melanesian artifacts, and reshaped it by replacing the lead anthropologist as head of the project with an exhibition designer—hugely controversial.

This is where Traveling came to life.

During her travels across the Pacific, Phyllis Rabineau, the exhibition designer, had a vision for the exhibit to be something closer to the Jack London-style experience she had. Guests couldn’t just read about these places and see artifacts, they had to feel what it was like to be there. So she created the exhibit (open since 1989) we have today–taking guests on a sort of Epcot-style tour of Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea and the Huan Gulf, and finally Tahiti.

It has atolls and outrigger canoes and street markets and beach landscapes. It has enormous, ominous lava flows and palm trees abound.

It’s been called evocative, Disneyfied, exoticizing, immersive. The whole gambit.

But what I wanted to write about was the Crunch Bar that’s been sitting in the Tahitian market display for (verified through later logo research) 30 years—untouched, like much of the rest of this exhibit, since it opened in 1989. I was inspired by the feeling walking through this exhibit. It’s like walking through a travel agent’s brochure in the mid 1980s. It’s fascinating, not particularly for the information it intends to convey, but for what it doesn’t.

It struck me that, neglected to the context of time, this exhibit has become a sort of meta exhibit on American consumer culture in the 1980s thanks to its incredible attempts at creating a sense of felt “place” among guests while being guided primarily by the market motivation to bring Americans into the museum. “Hindsight sort of performs a half life equation on this exhibit and reveals a truer nature of the thing with each passing year”, was kind of the driving idea.

In writing the essay, I was trying my best to braid together the relationship between market motivations, exhibit architecture, consumer culture, time, foreign policy, felt experience, and some academic theory for good measure. I was trying to write about how the Crunch Bar in the mock marketplace window was emblematic of all of this.

I probably could have achieved something with it, and I very well might still. But I think for the time being I want to put this project on the back-burner. I don’t think I’ve failed this project, but I do think I’ve identified a skills gap in myself that I need to fill if I’m to take on something of this scope to the level I would want its execution.

I think that’s healthy.

I think it’s very good to set challenges for yourself and learn that, actually, you’re not up to snuff yet. You have work to do. That’s the challenge part. I know that I could write something I would feel accomplished with on this, but I cannot yet. There’s still work to do.

I don’t often share much about my process as a writer, with others much less on the Internet for others to partake in, but I felt compelled to this morning when I read that shit draft. I laughed a little because I had thought this opening on draft 2 was soooo solid. Set in stone. If nothing else worked in this essay draft, this. Was. It.

Alas. It was shit. And that’s when this moment of more genuine inspiration struck—at the bullet to the brain of my ego.

In the meantime while I learn how to write for the ideas I have, here are some parts of different drafts that made me happy and that I saw potential in:

“It is post-Christmastime in Chicago. Hopefulness and expectation are still too far out of reach despite the days getting theoretically longer. I try to reinforce the rhythm of a day by forcing myself on petty errands—the gym, the bookstore, etc., but the sky, as gray and inconceivable as cigarette ash once being alight, prevents that. The wealthier among us flee the annual brush with purgatory to places like San Juan, Puerto Rico and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with their lush beaches and opalescent waters. It is, to quote the documentarian, Bruce Brown, “endless summer.” Paradise Island of the mind.”

“Taking in the set design, my eyes travel up the length of this impressive display. The palm fronds at the top just graze the ceiling. If you look hard enough, you can see the track lighting and the building's HVAC poking through the canopy.”

“To step through Traveling the Pacific is to take a stroll through a late 80s travel agent’s itinerary, and that sense of tourism can’t be by anything but design. One needn’t look further than the name of the exhibit to prove that point.”

“I determine that this bar has sat in this display case in this petrified town since the exhibit’s opening. The textbook-ready vendors and teens, too. By the butcher’s booth, the true miracle of the Miracle Whip sold by an older woman is that it managed to be the only thing that betrayed the illusion—a yellowing, splitting, spent totem that reminds visitors that time has indeed passed here. There’s an awful, alluring discomfort to standing here. It’s like standing in an abandoned amusement park—you can feel the ghosts of the past moving in a place that, staking its flag in modernity, tried to fight death, but instead created a moment, a time capsule of the American consumer at the end of one millennium and beginning of another. For how better to know America than through the ways in which it views other parts of the world?”

“The answer is in the first thing guests see outside the exhibit—a mock-informal, weather-battered sign welcoming guests to their journey—and the last thing they see in it—the backlot-standard Tahitian marketplace complete with “residents” and “vendors” speaking a colorfully stilted pastiche of French, Tahitian, and English. The effects of colonization are clear and felt on the track-lit streets of Papeete, and served with a distinctly American “service with a smile” attitude characteristic of newly globalized post-Cold War American foreign policy.

In fact, that particular essence is what’s felt all across this exhibit. In Traveling the Pacific, it’s not the Pacific, it’s “The Pacific”—a curated fantasy of a globalized world, a victory lap for hard-won capitalism where even its ills (often given in the “compliment sandwich” style) don’t weigh down the fantasy, but tether it and support its glamorous assertions.”