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" &amp;quot;Maybe they&amp;#039;re the ones who are wrong,&amp;quot; the kid said. I went back to my alma mater, Bishop&amp;#039;s University, to talk to some students today. It&amp;#039;s near Sherbrooke, Quebec, maybe a six- or seven-hour drive from Port Hope. Last night, I made a pit stop in Ottawa on the way. Drove by the old house. It was looking pretty put together \u2014 new curtains in the windows, splashy patio furniture on the deck out front. We clearly don&amp;#039;t live there anymore. Anyway, the class was filled with English students. They seemed incredibly young. I remember thinking I was pretty old when I was in university, that I knew a lot about how the world works. I was a fucking infant. I was talking mostly about magazines and popular culture, that weird game we play, putting someone on the cover to get readers to pick us up, but then hopefully surprising them with some of our deeper, darker stories inside. I was telling them how we write the celebrity stories grudgingly sometimes, because they&amp;#039;re usually pretty hard to write and not all that satisfying. Most of us would rather be remembered for our stories about war or politics than that story we wrote when Scarlett Johansson revealed that her favorite word is beans.  (That actually happened to me, by the way, in the middle of my reporting for &amp;quot;The Things That Carried Him,&amp;quot; a story about how a soldier&amp;#039;s body gets back from Iraq. I was at the Port Mortuary in Dover and then flew to Los Angeles to eat in a diner and go to a wax museum with Johansson. &amp;quot;Beans,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Beans. Beans. Beans.&amp;quot; I was like, What am I doing here?) Anyway, I was telling the kids that my last celebrity story was a surprisingly good experience: Javier Bardem, in Hawaii. I was really jetlagged after going to the World Cup in South Africa, and we went sailing with a neurologist and a urologist, which was kind of surreal. But the movie tied to the story \u2014 Biutiful \u2014 was really good, and Bardem fit where my head is right now. He seemed like a man who knew the way he wanted his life to go, and he made it happen. He seemed like a man who picked his spots. He seemed like a man. For one of the few times in my career, I decided to include myself in the story. I thought my experience of seeing Bardem \u2014 through my tired eyes \u2014 might make for an interesting device, and that it might lead to a pretty, delicate ending about love. Normally, I don&amp;#039;t like writing in the first person for my features. (I once tried to keep out of a story I wrote about my dad, which, it turns out, is impossible.) But I thought it was worth the risk this time around. I thought it might pay off. When the story was posted here yesterday, I got beaten up pretty well for it. Some blogger called me a Muldoon; in response, I might have dismissed him as a blogger, but I can&amp;#039;t really do that anymore. There were a few other broadsides, shots about my ego and boring-ass life. (If only they knew the thrill that comes with lifting subfloor.) I kind of chalked up the Bardem story as a miss, and I told the class as much. Sometimes we try and still fail. &amp;quot;Maybe they&amp;#039;re the ones who are wrong,&amp;quot; the kid said. He was sitting near the front of the class. French, I think. Big eyes. It struck me dumb for a second. I didn&amp;#039;t know what to say. I can be awfully neurotic about my writing; I&amp;#039;m the kind of person who could receive a thousand nice letters about a story but lie awake at night stewing about the one piece of hate. When I started reading criticisms about my Bardem story, I found myself nodding. I never thought, not even for an instant: Maybe they&amp;#039;re the ones who are wrong. Only kids think that way. They&amp;#039;re so confident and sure of themselves \u2014 the way I used to be, when I was in school, sitting near the front of the class. I thought I knew everything back then; I was always right. There&amp;#039;s something to be said for the wisdom and sense of fallibility that comes with years. But there&amp;#039;s something to be said for the sheer sack of youth, too. There&amp;#039;s a power in believing that you&amp;#039;re on the side of right. There&amp;#039;s a freedom in not caring what other people think of you. Somewhere, there&amp;#039;s a perfect balance between courage and fear, between ego and humility. I&amp;#039;m hoping I find it somewhere in a cavity in the walls or wedged in a pipe or in the peeling paint on a doorframe. I&amp;#039;m hoping I can sleep as well in our new house as I did when I was a kid. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a8545/javier-bardem-esquire-interview-091610/>