As I have grown older, my memory has gotten better, although I wish it hadn’t. I believe forgetfulness is a quality few really appreciate as much as they should. I wish I could forget ex-girlfriends, former friends that I have let slip away, and really bad golf scores and shots, but they all stand ready to be recalled and re-run on my eyelids. I wish I could have memories archived somewhere, after five years, so that I could go back and look at them if I wished, but they wouldn’t follow me around. I don’t need to see all of my shanks.

Recently, I have been thinking of my office and classroom at St. Mark’s of Texas. My office was nothing to speak of, other than a few chairs, a bookcase, a desk, and a phone. I never threw myself into decorating it and, as a result, it always looked like a closet. I had a classroom, but I shared it with three other teachers and didn’t really consider it mine. The room could have easily fit inside 213 with plenty of room to spare, and it held one chalkboard, twenty desks with small writing arms, and a heavily shaded window that looked out onto an elm tree and the gym.

When I taught Moby Dick to the juniors down there, I did my one bit of decorating; I put up a nautical chart of Nantucket. Juniors and seniors, both with astronomical SAT scores, would look at the chart and ask what all the green was. One of my best students saw the dotted lines for the jetties and assumed that that was where the tunnel to the mainland was. I was horribly homesick, naturally, and looked out my Texas window remembering the harbor and the ocean outside my Nantucket window. I knew that I just wasn’t fated to teach in Texas, so I came back.

But Fate is a tricky thing. Looking back from six years in the future, I can see that there was nothing supernatural or beyond my control in returning to Nantucket. I made my decision in thousands of smaller decisions. I decided not to decorate my office, I decided not to buy a new car, I decided to get a subscription to the I&M. Most telling, when I decided to leave Nantucket, I fought for a leave of absence so that I could return. Like Cortez, I should have burned my ships in the harbor. Instead, I made the first of thousands of small decisions that culminated in my return. I can’t fool myself into thinking that it was chance or predestined; I made it happen.

So, I don’t really think that there is a "secret police officer of the fates dogging me"(Loomings) as Ishmael does. Ishmael sees himself as a shabby actor in a play written by the Fates. His part has already been set down for him, his life has been marked out, his death selected and the weight of his life measured to the hundredth of the ounce. As he looks back, he sees the hand of the fates shaping him, while he thought he was making decisions out of free will. If, however, he is a slave to fate, we never find out what were "the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises" which "induced" him to the Pequod. Were we to look at those, I think that we would find that they were created by Ishmael. After all, he doesn’t leave New York for Kansas, but for New Bedford.

At the same time, I also don’t feel that Fate and Chance are synonyms for each other. Chance has a role in our lives, but it is a minor role. As Emerson wrote "Shallow men believe in luck."(Worship). Luck did not bring Ishmael to New Bedford, nor did it bring the Pequod to the Japanese whaling grounds, nor did it bring Moby Dick to the Pequod. Man’s will caused all of those things to happen. Chance may have caused Ishmael to survive the sinking of the ship, but far too many of Ishmael’s own choices had put him in that position already.

The minor roll chance plays comes after everything else has been decided. At the time, Chance seems to control everything, but with more perspective Chance returns to a minor roll. It may seem that Chance gets you the lucky winning lottery ticket, chance did not get you the money, nor the annoying habit of dropping fifty dollars a week on scratch tickets. You put yourself in the position for luck to hit you, and it did. At the same time, you could also smoke at least a pack of Marlboros a day since you were fourteen. Chance may give you lung cancer. Chance is a minor randomness that comes at the end of a lot of deliberate decisions. You buy the car, Chance picks the color.

I won’t even say that Fate is an inducement or a tendency. When Ishmael writes about the ocean, he declares that all men are draw to it, as if "there’s magic in it"(Loomings). The Fate that draws him to see, then, is the magnetic power of the ocean. He seems to be defining this fate as a gentle, almost gravitational pull that will draw you to a pre-ordained place. For Ishmael, he initially suggests that this pull will bring us, like Narcissus or "the Metaphysical professor", to water. Fate has a slow inexorable way of pulling us down to earth and, like water, along the easiest path to the sea. The water can make some subtle choices, but it must come to the ocean eventually, as does Ishmael.

We all have inducements and tendencies, however, and they are not always caused by something much greater or older than ourselves. Modern psychology suggests that most of the little and big decisions we make in our lives were made years and years ago in our early childhood. Everything from sleep positions to my love of strawberry frosted donuts was influenced by long ago and long forgotten incidents from my childhood. Modern science is also finding hints and tendencies in our genetics. My love of fatty foods could come from the overabundance of a certain enzyme, found on the allele of one of the more boring chromosomes. Either my parents or my genes could create the same magnetic field that Ishmael speaks of. Interestingly, we are given almost no history to our narrator. Unlike so many modern narrators, he does not flashback to a sadistic, drunken father or an over-protective mother. Ishmael does not let us play Freudian games. His compulsions and his aversions come only from God. What a simple and pleasant life he must have! No responsibility, no guilt, and no expectations.

Fate is a lie from a bartender. Fate is what you think your wife said before you left her. Fate happens after the fourth Goldschlager shot. Fate walks past the homeless man with a McDonald’s bag. Fate comes in Mastercard bills, pregnancy tests, and police cars. Fate alleviates pain, removes guilt, and soothes worry. Fate does all those things and more, but it does not control your life. You do.

We control our lives, poorly, through a combination of vanity and laziness. By combining those two ideas, we set up all of the good decisions and bad decisions of our lives. When I decide to have shrimp for dinner tonight, I made that decision based on other decisions I made or failed to make over the course of the day. My vanity, or self-image, makes me think that I am a skilled and talented cook. Further, I also think I deserve an expensive delicacy such as shrimp as opposed to something far more practical. Finally, I don’t think of myself as that overweight, so I can make a newburg sauce with a cup and a half of heavy cream. My laziness prevented me from taking chicken breasts out of the freezer earlier in the day or from making a healthy, low-fat meal without a cup and a half of heavy cream. These, and a thousand other evasions and decisions, fated me to having Shrimp Newburg for dinner this evening. Vanity and laziness created my menu, not God.

Most of the decisions we make in a day are not made because of who we are, but because of who we would like to imagine ourselves being. Our imaginary self lives inside our real body, animating the flesh around it. Our true soul has not been crafted by God, but by our parents, our peers, and the media. The act of creation has been going on for our entire lives and will only end when the flesh cools and the backs turn. This mosaic of influences guides each of our decisions.

For example, I chose to make Shrimp Newburgh this evening. My decision was influenced by my mother’s love of shrimp. I did not grow up around a great deal of money, so a shrimp dinner was a treat. Sydney and other friends of mine have often remarked that I am a good cook. As a result, I will try to challenge myself with a new dish, as opposed to making a more practical, healthy, and economical choice. Finally, American TV, movies, and education have pushed me to the idea that dinner is to be the largest and most complicated of three meals in a day. Most of the media that I have known has established dinner, and not lunch or tea time, as the largest meal. Therefore, I felt pressure to create something other than a bowl of Lucky Charms for dinner.

While we don’t have any knowledge of Ishmael’s influences, he lists off some of the affects as "mysterious things" that affect him. Famously, he needs to go to sea in the first paragraphs as opposed to committing suicide or homicide. Then, he needs to go to see as a sailor and not as a passenger or an officer. Finally, Ishmael is "tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote" and called for the most extreme animal in God’s green sea. However, Ishmael is not terribly unlike the bored and pampered Middlebury undergraduate, who travels to Belize for "environmental research." Like Ishmael, they are bored enough to knock hats off of heads, feel that they have to justify their travel with work, and feel that they can handle whatever surprise kidnappers or whales may lie out there.

In addition to the vanity of our imaginary selves, our decisions are also made by laziness. Laziness may be a simple physical laziness, but is more likely to be an intellectual laziness. By intellectual laziness, I mean both our willingness to avoid conflict with others and our dislike of unpleasant truths about ourselves. In a perfect state, we would all sit on a sofa with our mothers serving us pizza while Blue’s Clues entertained us on the TV. Physically, we would not cause ourselves the discomfort of stirring our butts. Intellectually, our mothers would serve us without question or conflict, indeed without even a word spoken over the empty paper plate. Further, Steve (or Joe) would ask for our limited response in helping to solve fairly inconsequential puzzles. At the end of each half hour, the clues would complete a picture and we could put Handy Dandy Notebooks away as Steve re-assures us that "we sure are smart and can do anything…that we want to do."

For my sake, Shrimp Newburgh arose from a strange convocation of the winds of indolence. First, I did not take anything out of the freezer that morning. As a result, I had to buy something fresh that afternoon. Further, I wanted to avoid conflict with Sydney so I didn’t challenge her to make dinner. That imagined and impending argument seemed a good thing to avoid, so I let it hang over us for another day. Finally, I did not want to admit that I didn’t need dinner, and in particular, not one as fattening as this one. I would rather pretend to be "hungry."

Ishmael may also choose to go to sea out of a similar network of laziness. While choosing to be a seaman is a physically demanding choice, it’s personal demands are slight. Ishmael does not take control of his life. Rather, he blithely gives that control to Ahab on the ship. Where he asks us "Who ain’t a slave", we know that the answer isn’t Ishmael. Ahab may not be a slave, nor Peleg or Bildad. In choosing to travel as a seaman, he chooses to travel free from responsibility. Finally, I suspect that Ishmael wants to avoid the unpleasant truth that he is a loser. He has not made commitments to a wife, kids, jobs, religion, or even to a name. Instead, he walks away from any control he might have over his own life and trusts it to a one legged freak.

If you choose to see destiny as the synthesis of vanity and laziness, then many of the problems of Nantucket High School are laid bare. Figawi High becomes a traffic jam of self-image and lethargy that form one frozen mosaic of the "way things are." For example, one of the nasty administrative problems at Nantucket has been the staffing of the cafeteria. Not one of the teachers want to give up their lunch time to sit in the caféteria waiting for butter pats, peas, or flying rolls. Our self-image says that we are above such things, and don't need to "baby-sit." Further, though we know that the job is important, we wanted to avoid more conflict with students. So, lunch duty always becomes a chore.

From a student's perspective, homework neatly wraps up the Figawi High destiny. Students do not want to be seen, either by other students or the teacher, as someone who actually does homework. Instead, homework falls into an invisibly hole where the good students hand it in and get it back invisibly and the mediocre ones let it slide without penalty. Teachers want to appear to be a person who assigns massive amounts of homework, but the do not want to upset or antagonize most of the students by actually grading it. Therefore, they assign busywork and grade it, if at all, marginally. From a student's perspective, homework takes up too much time and too much energy. If the work is busy work that is unlikely to be meaningful, then it