Lucky, this point in time and space

I Dreamed a Dream

2012-01-19T00:12:00.000-06:00

Next week my aunt is flying down to Florida to babysit her grandbaby (my second cousin) for like ten days while the baby's parents are taking their anniversary trip to Belize. Tonight I sent my aunt a text message asking her if she wants adult company while she's there, and I was not really joking, even though Florida usually depresses me.

Here's the thing: right now, it's like 9 degrees in Chicago. It's snowy and icy. It's still getting dark early. I have no job. I have no MFA applications to work on. I have nothing, really, to do with myself except think about MFA programs and worry about MFA programs and I'm slowly driving myself crazy.
Right now, Florida sounds like paradise. My cousins have a pool! I could lay out in the pool all day and read and hang out with my cool aunt and my adorable little cousin and enjoy their palatial house and maybe...forget about MFA programs?

No. No. Real life doesn't work like that.

Are self-lobotomies a thing?

2012-01-15T00:57:00.000-06:00

So right now it's 12:44 a.m. and my downstairs neighbors decided it was a great time to blast music. They do this periodically, usually late at night when I'm tired. Last time I went down and knocked on their door until they got scared and turned it off, but that was 2 am on a Thursday. Since it's a Saturday night I'll let them have their fun for a bit. I have too much on my mind right now to sleep anyway.

Today I officially, finally, completely finished all of my graduate school applications. Eighteen of them. The first one was submitted on October 21st. I feel liberated, but also very strange.

Really, I've been working towards this for the last three and a half years. For the last year in particular, I've been extremely focused on getting into a fully funded MFA program. It's strange to think that I'm so close to the moment when it may actually become a reality.

I don't know what I'll do if I don't get accepted anywhere. Unfortunately, with MFA acceptance rates, that's a possibility even if I applied to 30 programs. When I think about my writing, I feel (mostly) good. I feel like I sent in strong samples. I feel like my personal and artistic goals were outlined well, better than the last time I tried this. My grades and test scores and recommendation letters are all great.

But then I start thinking about the numbers. Iowa, for instance, got 1,530 applications last year for 47 spots. North Carolina State had 235 applicants for 8 spots. Miami had 90 for 6 spots. It's absurdly competitive, and unfortunately, it's also absurdly subjective. I know that rejection doesn't mean my writing is bad, it just means that the adcoms didn't see whatever they want to see when they look for students. But it's hard not to feel like a failure if you don't get in anywhere. If I get rejected from 18 schools, or if I get some waitlists that don't pan out, it's going to take me awhile to pick myself up off the floor.

About two weeks from now, the first schools will start contacting the students they want to accept, and the decisions will keep rolling in steadily until mid-April. I think I'm going to be kind of a wreck the whole time. Right now, these programs are all I can think about. I feel like Cartman in the episode of South Park where he tries to put himself into a coma until the Nintendo Wii comes out. I just don't want to wait. I want to wake up and find out where I'm going. I'm even having dreams about MFA acceptances.

Luckily, other things are coming up soon that may help distract me. In early February I'm going to Tennessee with my mom to work on wedding planning, and at the end of February I'm attending the annual AWP conference and bookfair here in Chicago, my very first time at this big event. I've got a new project I'm working on, and I've got lots of good books to read.

Still...it's going to be a long wait. Especially if my neighbors keep blasting their damn bass.

How Wedding Blogs Made me Temporarily Crazy

2012-01-06T23:17:00.001-06:00

I've heard the warning repeated again and again: don't look at too many wedding blogs. They will make you hate yourself.

I figured I would be immune to this. I usually hate myself for substantial things, like not writing well, or having verbal diarrhea during a job interview. And I definitely do not spend my time perusing websites like theknot or martha stewart weddings, because they tend to make me vomit. I trusted my judgment.

Never, ever do this.

See, even though I avoided the big-name OMG-YOU'RE-GETTING-MARRIED-SO-YOU-NEED-COLORS-AND-A-TROUSSEAU-AND-A-VIDEOGRAPHER-AND-WE-HAVE-A-LOVELY-USERS-FORUM-WHERE-YOU-CAN-CREATE-AN-AVATAR-WITH-YOUR-FIANCE'S-FACE-AND-BE-"MRS.HISLASTNAME"-AND-CAN-POST-PRETTY-PICTURES-OF-YOUR-PRETTY-DIAMOND websites, I did want to do some online recon of normal, sane, fun, pretty weddings. My error was not understanding what it is about wedding blogs that would make me crazy.

Over the last several months, I've gotten into a pleasant Sunday routine. I sleep in, get coffee and breakfast, and then lay on the couch with Greg. We watch football, and while we watch the games, I peruse blogs like 100 Layer Cake, ruffled, and the mother-fucking clearinghouse of Style Me Pretty. That place is like the Kleinfeld's of wedding blogs: they have more shit than anybody. I like these blogs because they don't tell me what to do, or what I need, or what I absolutely have to spend money on, or what is on-trend (usually, anyway). They just show real weddings, and the details of real weddings, with lots and lots and lots of gorgeous pictures of happy people at fun parties. And most of the weddings pictured aren't formal, fancy ballroom weddings, either. They're in barns, they're secular, they're same-sex, they feature brides that aren't always wearing white dresses.

I have gotten a lot of ideas from these blogs, so I'm not trying to trash them. I'm just saying that last weekend, after my seventh hour of wandering through the SMP archives, I started to go a little crazy. I started to get Michelle Bachman eyes:

I literally googled "Michelle Bachman crazy eyes"

The weddings were so amazing! The brides were so gorgeous! The favors/altar/dessert table/decorations were all so handmade and DIY! The centerpieces were all so unique and special to the couple's history!

And then I despaired. I despaired a little something like this:

God, that dress is gorgeous...my dress is definitely not that gorgeous. It's not designer. I am never going to look that good in my wedding dress. God, I hate my wedding dress. Why didn't I look at more places. What if there's a dress out there somewhere that WOULD make me look that good, but I'll never find it because I bought a dress at David's Bridal? Nobody on this entire fucking blog has a dress from David's Bridal. Oh my God. I'm going to look horrible on my wedding day.

Those photos of the bride and groom getting ready are so cute. But...my photographer doesn't have a second shooter. How is she going to get adorable photos of both me AND Greg getting ready on the morning of? Oh my God, I wish I could afford a team of photographers. I'm going to have horrible pictures of me in a horrible dress.

Look at that! She made her very own carnival-style marquee letters! That would be so awesome. I wish I could do something like that. God, I have no crafting skills. I wish I could make decorations that will be special and unique, but I can't, because I suck at everything. God, I hate myself.

Picture me frantically scouring through websites like BHLDN (anthropologie's drool-worthy wedding line) trying to justify buying an entirely new wedding dress and dropping 30 bucks a pop on a stick with a bottle tied to it so I could have convincing "rustic decor." It was bad. It was really, really bad.

I went to bed that night really depressed because I was going to hate my wedding. By that point it was just a foregone conclusion.

And then I snuggled up to Greg, because that's what I do when I feel depressed. And he kissed me on the forehead and told me he loved me. And really it was kind of like he hit me in the forehead with a brick and screamed, "YOU IDIOT!," but in a good way. Because in that moment I realized what a monumental fool I was to be hating myself for buying a dress from David's Bridal.

I don't need a wedding dress, or paper flowers or handmade centerpieces or a fucking mustache prop to get married. NONE of that matters. What matters is me, and Greg. All we need is someone to marry us.

I knew this from the outset. Of course I did. I wasn't even sure I wanted to have a wedding a year ago, because I knew we didn't need all that extraneous stuff. Sure, that stuff can be fun, and great, and memorable, but ultimately it's just stuff. And I knew that.

I had failed to heed the warning. I had crossed into the land of wedding-mania. Through the back door, maybe, but nonetheless I lost myself. Be bold, but not too bold, Spenser warned Britomart, lest she fall prey to the carnal images all over the fortress of the evil enchanter Busyrane...

Okay. Maybe I'm still crazy.

IBS Update

2011-12-31T20:31:00.001-06:00

So a year ago I wrote a post detailing a few goals for myself in 2011, and the first one was "focus on my health." Specifically, I wanted to try to get my IBS under control.

I actually achieved this goal, but for whatever reason I never really wrote about it while it was happening. I thought it might do some good to explain how I found a solution, because occasionally people show up to this blog after googling "IBS." One of the most frustrating things about suffering from IBS is that so little is known about it, and so many doctors have no idea what to do about it. It's easy to feel hopeless and lost in your own little world of pain and shame.

In January, I was probably at a six out of ten in terms of controlling my IBS symptoms. I'd had a great deal of success with The IBS diet, something that I discovered on my own and that no doctor I've yet met has ever heard of. This just goes to show you how little attention IBS merits in the medical community compared to other chronic conditions. Anyway, I'd been on the diet since 2008, and it made a huge difference in my quality of life - I went from experiencing terrible pain almost every day to having it maybe 3 or 4 times a month. Big improvement. But still not enough. For one thing, the diet is complicated, and I found that I could not stray from it even a little, which made for some problems when I had little control over what I ate - for instance, at Greenwood in summer 2010, even with its vegan options, just about every meal I would have to eat something that didn't jibe with my system. The result was predictable - pain, lots of it, and urgency, and frequency, just about every day, miserable mornings, and terrible anxiety. My first year at Interlochen, eating Stone cafeteria meals all the time, was the same. Although I was fortunately able to move into an apartment with my own kitchen the second year, it wasn't perfect, and I was definitely having huge anxiety problems on top of the monthly flare-ups. At my lowest point, I was afraid to go anywhere for fear that I might have a flare-up. Something needed to change.

I started by talking to my primary care doctor in Michigan, Kari Young. What I love about Dr. Young is that she immediately accepted that I knew more about my personal situation than she did. Instead of telling me to try things I already knew wouldn't work ("Eat more fiber!"), she asked me what I wanted to do. I came in with two requests - I wanted to start taking Paxil for my anxiety (which I took back in high school for a number of years to get my OCD under control), and I wanted a referral to a gastroenterologist. She did both of those things for me in one appointment. Not all doctors do this, unfortunately, so I would say to anyone who has an unhelpful doctor - try someone else. Keep looking.

In February I had my first appointment with Dr. Rex Antinozzi, a gastroenterologist. I have to be honest, the reason I put off seeing a GI doctor for so long was that I was afraid I was going to have to get a colonoscopy, since that's usually a requirement to be officially diagnosed with IBS. God bless Dr. Antinozzi. He listened to me explain my history and said that, given the consistency of my symptoms over many years and the absence of any indicators of an auto-immune disorder like Crohn's, he felt safe going with the diagnosis of IBS without doing further tests unless my symptoms changed.

He did order some bloodwork, but the only test he wanted to do was a hydrogen breath test. This was a test to see if I had an overabundance of bacteria in my small intestine. As I understand it, the theory is that many IBS patients have too much bacteria in their small bowel because of their mobility problems. No one really knows what causes IBS - some think it is an oversensitivity to pain in the colon, others think it is a problem in the wiring of the brain/gut connection, and others think that at its heart IBS is a mobility problem - your digestive system moves too fast or slow, or just irregularly. One result of this irregular motion is bacteria building up where it shouldn't, thus causing the pain and diarrhea.

Anyway, I went in one morning in March after fasting for 12 hours and took this weird test. I had to drink a little cupful of lactose/sucrose and then sit there for four hours with a timer. Every twenty minutes I would breathe into a little bag. I think there were fourteen bags altogether. They just left me alone with the bags and the timer. I watched TV and thought about how hungry I was. A whole lot easier than a colonoscopy, on the whole. Later they would measure the hydrogen levels in the bags to see if I (or rather, my bacteria) was breaking down the lactose/sucrose faster than normal.

Because every single other medical test I've ever had (including said bloodwork) has always been normal, I assumed this would be the same, so I was surprised when the nurse from his office called and told me that my results indicated that I did have an overgrowth of bacteria. Dr. Antinozzi started me on a two week course of two different antibiotics - Keflex and Flagyl. All told I was going to take seven pills a day for two weeks. I have never taken so many high-dose antibiotics at one time, and I was super-nervous because I knew it would probably wipe out all the bacteria, even the good bacteria, and could potentially make me feel a whole lot worse before it got better. Dr. Antinozzi also recommended that I try taking one capsule of Imodium Advanced (the kind with both loperamide and simethicone) every morning and one before I went to bed, since I told him I'd had good results with this particular drug in the past.

I was really lucky - I had almost no side effects from all the antibiotics. I noticed a HUGE difference within a month. I even cut back from two IMO capsules a day to just one in the morning. By summer, I felt like a totally different person. I think I had one bad day the entire summer. I don't know if it was the Paxil, the antibiotics, or the daily dose of imodium - probably all three. But I can honestly say that I've had virtually no problems since then. I still take Paxil and imodium every day, but that's it. I've even discovered in the last few months that I can stray from my diet sometimes without ill effects - I can even drink coffee again! I've been drinking it almost every day for the past three months with no problem. It's amazing.

So I got lucky on several counts, most notably that I got doctors who listened on the first try, and that I had great health insurance (which sadly I no longer have). There are a ton of people suffering out there who have neither. But that doesn't mean there isn't any hope. Ultimately, with IBS I think the most effective solutions are in the patient's hands. So many doctors - especially primary care docs, who have a wide umbrella of things to treat - just don't keep up with IBS research. My primary care doc, great though she was, had never heard of a hydrogen breath test. Not even my gastroenterologist had heard of this diet that has worked so well for me. And had I not done a lot of reading and research about IBS, I would not have known what to ask my doctor in the first place.

If you have health insurance - talk to your doctor. Find a GI doctor. If they don't listen to you, try another. Be the annoying patient who brings in print-outs of things on the web. Come with ideas and questions. Take charge of your health, because in my experience few doctors will do it for you.

If you don't have the means to see a specialist, I would still urge you to educate yourself. Helpforibs.com is a great place to start - even if this diet doesn't help you, there is a TON of information on the site and lots of things you can try. Peppermint oil capsules, for instance, didn't do much for me, but some people swear by them. Same with soluble fiber supplements. There are IBS groups and message boards all over the internet - another good one is ibsgroup.org. Talk to other people, listen to their suggestions and experiences. It's a cliche, but a long time ago when I had just started this journey to fix my wayward bowels, knowing that I wasn't alone in my suffering was a hugely important moment.

Anyway, that was my long ramble about IBS, but it felt important to share. In fact, thinking of my other goals for 2011, this was about the only one that I achieved completely. Figures that it had to do with poop, right?

My Year in Review

2011-12-29T20:35:00.000-06:00

A year ago this time, I was visiting my mother and contemplating whether or not it was the right time to take a big step in my life and get engaged to Greg. So much has happened since then, and so much will happen NEXT year, that I feel the urge to take stock of it for a moment.

This picture about sums up my reaction to joining the ranks of the engaged. I didn't really know how to feel. I knew I was supposed to be excited and happy, and I was, but I was also feeling some trepidation about planning a wedding, some shame that I had no proposal story, and some disgust with the wedding industry in general. Sharing the news with close family and friends was wonderful, but I remember the day that we went "public" (i.e., facebook) as mostly unpleasant. We put it up late one night in January, and I had no way of knowing that the following morning I would be enmeshed in a disciplinary meeting about one of my students; I remember sitting there in the dean's office trying to hide my left hand under the table because I didn't want anybody to remark on it at what seemed a supremely inappropriate time, and then getting a gushing, shrieking phone call from one of my co-workers, which I took because I thought it was work-related, and having to basically kill her excitement. Later I was fussed over in a staff meeting, but I felt guilty about everything, guilty about having no real story to tell people, guilty about feeling guilt in the first place. It was weird.

It's taken some time to get used to the ring on my finger, to referring to Greg as my fiance, to go from fantasizing about a wedding to actually putting one together. But I'm happier now with it, excited about our future together, and more and more certain, every day, that Greg is my match in every way.

This was the year I really came into my own at Interlochen. With fewer students and more responsibilities, I got to know them better and faced challenges I never would have thought I could handle. This was the year that I really started to believe that I was good at my job, that I enjoyed helping people, that I have good judgment, that I can keep a cool head in an emergency. I am proud of the work I did there. I think this year is when I really became an adult.

This time last year I never would have imagined leaving, but after the incredible and unexpected blessing of Greg's new job, I was able to quit, to uproot and take flight to a new and exciting city where we could live together and not have to take phone calls at midnight. Now, four months after moving and still unemployed, I still can't say that I regret my decision. I don't like being unemployed, but I do like the time to write, work on my grad school applications, and explore Chicago. I don't like having to rely almost entirely on Greg for finances, but it's taken our relationship to a new, more "married" level. I hate the emotional tug-of-war that has been my job search thus far, but I think I'm learning a lot about interviewing and searching, which may come in handy at some point. I miss my students, but I don't miss the constant, unrelenting pressures of living amidst them.

My mom's surgery was frightening and unexpected. It made me re-evaluate my relationship with her and how I've treated her in the past. It forced me to accept my parents' mortality on a different level. The two weeks I spent in Boston helping her recover from her surgery were difficult at times, but I'm so glad I could be there for her. I'm so incredibly grateful for my mother, and for the surgery that saved her life. When I think of what could have been, it brings me to my knees. She only discovered she had a problem because she made an offhand comment to her endocrinologist, who then referred her to a cardiologist for a checkup. That cardiologist told her that if she did not have surgery, she would almost certainly have suffered a heart attack in the next five months. Her quadruple bypass was scary and painful and wrenching for both me and her, but it spared us from something much, much worse.

Now it's been two months and she's doing even better than expected. She feels better every day, she's starting cardiac rehab soon, and with luck she'll be around for a very long time, something I will never take for granted again.

2012 is also going to be a big year. By May, I'll know for sure whether I'm going to be attending an M.F.A. program full-time with a teaching assistantship. Six months from today I'll be married. I'm going on a week-long trip to Hawaii in July with Greg to see volcanoes. And in the fall, if I'm lucky, we'll be moving again, this time to one of the sixteen (ugh) towns that houses a university I've applied to. It could be Miami or Minneapolis, Ames or Albuquerque, Carbondale or Corvallis, Richmond or Roanoke. I'm not going to pretend I like not knowing whether I'll be accepted, but I do enjoy the sense of adventure.

I've been more blessed than not in 2011. I hope 2012 will be the same.

The little lights are not twinkling...

2011-12-20T12:29:00.000-06:00

"For two hours each December, my dad didn’t have to be stoic or driven. He could simply laugh. And I’d cozy up beside him, tucked into the big calico couch in the basement and furtively watch him roll and roll at the slapstick. Literally wipe his eyes at Clark sliding down a collapsing ladder or the squirrel launching out of the Christmas tree. I’d watch his face relax and now, it occurs to me that maybe Clark’s well intended buffoonery made him go a little easier on himself."

One of the reviewers at Bright Wall, Dark Room wrote a piece about Christmas Vacation that unexpectedly took me down memory lane. Truthfully, this piece could have been written about my own father.

My family doesn't have a whole lot of Christmas tradition. We did it differently every year. But the one thing that always happened, as far back as I can remember, is that we'd sit down and watch the Griswold's Christmas disintegrate. We'd eagerly wait for the appearance of Snots. We'd chortle aloud "Merry Christmas! Shitter was full!" and mimic Julia Louis-Dreyfus scowling "I don't KNOOOW, Todd" and laugh at the Christmas lights scene until our faces were wet from the tears.

My favorite thing, hands down, was always seeing my dad laugh. My father's laughter is a wonderful thing, and I used to do anything I could think of to earn it, including quoting Christmas Vacation out of season ("I have to EAT! So I can take my back pills," I used to say to make fun of him for getting older, and adored watching him crack up at the reference). I wouldn't necessarily define my dad as a serious guy, because he's easily amused, but he always worked so much, and so often, that it was rare to see him truly relaxed and happy.

It's been eight years since I've spent Christmas with my dad. Because it's on TV so often in December I usually still wind up watching the movie around the holidays, but it's not the same. Without being able to look for his reaction to his favorite parts, a good chunk of the magic is gone, and it becomes just a silly, kind of dumb Christmas movie.

There are other movies that I love for sentimental reasons, but this is the only one that I associate so strongly with my dad. I can still laugh thinking about certain scenes or quotes in the film at the memory of my dad cracking up at them.

I think he still watches it every year. I wonder if it makes him think of me?

Piecemeal?

2011-12-16T14:53:00.000-06:00

Some days, I really want to scream with frustration. Other days I just want to stay in bed and do nothing, because it feels like that's all the universe is telling me I'm capable of doing anyway.

I know how lucky I am in so many ways; I know that leaving my previous job was my choice. Maybe I don't have any right to complain.

It is just demoralizing to go to interview after interview for jobs that I am more than capable of doing well - nail salons and diamond merchants and accountants who need someone to answer the phone, essentially - and be told, "Don't call us, we'll call you," and know that I won't be hearing anything.

It is incredibly frustrating to hear a nannying agency tell me that I don't have the experience that they look for because I haven't been a babysitter before. Never mind that I've spent the last two and a half years essentially living with children, taking care of them, and helping them learn - that's just not good enough.

During the last few years working with kids, I've done so many things I would not have thought I was capable of until I did them. I climbed atop a lamppost in a crowd of millions to keep track of my kids and stole bottles of soda out of a hotel ballroom to carry to them on a bus that was stuck and had no water. I've had students come out of the closet to me. I've been privy to the incredible trust of teenagers, have had them tell me things that were incredibly difficult to hear. I've sat beside students in the hospital. I've advocated for them when they were being sexually harassed. I've been scared and intimidated. I've also felt the flush of success when they tell me "Thank you so much." I've caught vomit and mopped up wounds and burned the crap out of my hand trying to make a wax seal for a kid who really wanted one on her friend's birthday card. I've consoled and laughed and worried and disciplined and talked to kids, and their parents, day in day out, for a very long time now.

So yeah, I get irrationally upset to hear someone tell me that my experience with children is "piecemeal." It sure as hell doesn't feel like that to me.

I Should Have Slept In

2011-12-10T16:35:00.001-06:00

Yesterday morning I had an interview for a receptionist position at a very high-end salon in downtown Chicago. I dragged my ass out of bed very early to get to the train in freezing cold, and when I arrived shortly after eight I was the only one there. It was supposed to be a group interview, but for a long time it was just me, waiting. At one point the manager of the salon quipped to me in passing, "Guess it looks pretty good for you, huh?"

Eventually two other women showed up, both late, and they took us into a room with about 40 chairs. The style director admitted to us that she had sent out 30 invitations to this group interview. For a job that pays 10 bucks an hour.

The three of us proceeded to get a lecture about how important it is for the employees of this place to have a certain look. I felt like chucking the 2 pound novel in my purse at their heads. When I went back for my one on one interview with them, the director said, "I have to ask right away if you are open to cutting and coloring your hair."

It was a weird little interview, not least because I had decided before I went in that I would not get it, nor did I really want it. They were less interested in my skills or experience than any interviewers thus far, and mostly wanted to talk about how they expect their receptionist to dress a certain way and wear lipstick every day. I was not, at that time, wearing any makeup, my hairdryer is currently broken so I was not styled in any way, and there is an unfortunately large coffee stain on the hem of my thrift-store gray wool coat that I can't afford to have dry-cleaned. Although I was wearing nice clothes, next to the salon director I kind of looked like a homeless person. I pointed out to them that I was concerned that I was not "(Name of Salon) material," and the manager said, "Oh, you'd be surprised what a little cut and color can do for a girl,"with a conspiratorial wink.

They had me stay for half an hour to observe the other receptionist at work, though there wouldn't be any clients for at least an hour and most of the stylists weren't even there yet. I guess it was supposed to be edifying to watch someone answer a phone and schedule an appointment. At one point the second girl to be interviewed came out to observe. She was much more elegant than I was, but she said to me, with some irritation, "They asked me if I would be willing to get rid of my hair extensions."

I didn't fully realize how angry I was until I walked back to the train. I don't know that I've ever felt judged so closely on my appearance. Given the work I've been doing for the last few years, that job was clearly beneath my abilities, but I felt like my actual abilities, after a cursory glance at my resume, weren't really what was being discussed. On the ride back, though, I figured something else out about where my anger was coming from.

After all, I reasoned, of course they have to be concerned with the appearance of their employees. They are selling a brand, a style, and a promise of glamor, at very high prices, so of course they need glamorous employees to sell that. I get that. So why did I feel so angry?

I realized that my resentment came from an attempt to convince myself that all this stuff about appearance was frivolous. The whole experience reminded me just how unglamorous I am. I've always had a fascination with drop-dead gorgeous, impeccably stylish women, and sometimes I resent that their world is so far away from mine. I know that I'm pretty, and I would never want to trade my intellect or my humor for beauty, but just once I would like to know what it feels like to walk into a room and have men look at me with lust in their eyes and women with jealousy. I am never going to feel that, and I hate myself for wanting it because it is stupid and shallow and vain. I wasn't so much angry at this salon. I was angry at myself.

That being said - they were still jerks.

2011-12-08T15:18:00.000-06:00

I'm going to get all personal and sort of political in this post, so be warned.

I am a feminist, and I fully support the idea that birth control, in all its forms, should be available to all women. I believe that all forms of birth control should be covered by all forms of health insurance. I believe that abortion should be legal and safe, and that there should be no legislation in place to prevent those in need of it from getting it; no mandatory waiting period or ultrasounds or counseling.

That being said, I have difficulty disagreeing with Health Secretary Sebelius's decision to keep the "morning after pill" from becoming over the counter, for two simple reasons.

Reason one is, Plan B is not exactly like a condom in that it messes with the hormones in your body. I took it once, a couple of years ago, when I had sex while on a course of antibiotics that, unbeknownst to me until afterward, are known to interfere with the effectiveness of the birth control pill. While I'm very glad it was available, it definitely had side effects, and I experienced a few of them. It's not something that should be taken lightly, and not something that should be someone's first line of defense against unwanted pregnancy.

Secondly, I think it's easy to forget that girls who are under seventeen are, in fact, still children. That doesn't mean they don't have the same rights as other women, but it does mean that we, as adults, have different responsibilities towards them. If a fourteen year old girl finds herself in a position where she might be pregnant, someone other than that girl needs to know about it. Her parents, at the very least; if her parents are out of the picture or posing a danger to her, then a counselor of some sort, as there are bigger-picture, long-term problems that she needs help with. A pregnancy scare is one of the most frightening things a young woman can experience, and frankly I don't think we should encourage teenagers to be alone in that by enabling them to walk into a pharmacy, buy a pill, and not have to follow up with anyone. I have trouble imagining a situation in which that would be a best-case scenario. If a girl is raped, someone needs to know about it. If a girl and her boyfriend are not being responsible with their sex lives, someone needs to know about it. If a girl got incredibly drunk at a party and woke up with missing underwear and no memory of what might have happened to her, someone needs to know about it. In other words, absolutely I think that these young girls should have access to the morning-after pill, but it needs to come through an adult who will help her through that experience.

I'd be curious to know anyone else's thoughts on this subject. Is there a critical element or scenario here that I'm not thinking of in my assessment of this?

Tonight I...

2011-12-06T20:59:00.000-06:00

- successfully cooked chicken lo mein

- finished grad school application #6. Just 10 more to go!

- got a job interview...for 8:30 on Friday morning downtown, which means leaving at 7:30 in the freezing cold while wearing tights and heels...but still.

- restrained myself for the 30th time from pre-ordering the the Practical Wedding book (gotta wait until tomorrow for the Great APW Book Buy...)

- watched it snow for the first time this winter in Chicago. I wonder if it will snow more, less, or equally as much as it did in northern Michigan?

- played some horn, which was absolutely dreadful (at one point I actually muttered, "Damn it, I used to be so good at this), but not quite as dreadful as I thought it might be. So begins the long uphill climb back to competence.

- Got a lovely Christmas card from Mari.

All in all, I would call it productive!

2011-12-05T01:19:00.002-06:00

I think I'm beginning to realize I'm not very good at wedding planning. Not that I ever thought I'd be great at it, but, you know, I organize. I figure I can handle it, right?

And now, seven months out, I have some of the big stuff nailed down. Dress, venue, officiant. Save-the-dates are mailed. I (sort of) have a photographer. I (sort of) have some musicians. The rest of it (flowerscakeceremonyringsfoodboozerehearsaldinnerthelistgoesonandon) I figure I'll worry about later.

What happens, though, is that I go for weeks where I am not thinking about the wedding. At all. I'm focused on writing and grad school and finding a job. These are Big, Important Things. Calla lilies vs. gerber daisies? F*ck that.

Then all of a sudden - usually on a lazy Sunday when Greg and I are watching football - it's like some switch flips on in my head that reminds me OH RIGHT YOU HAVE A WEDDING TO PLAN. And then I get frantic and start looking at blogs and pinterest and making a ton of lists and calling my mom to talk about calla lilies vs. gerber daisies and wind up getting really freaked out about all of the work I still have to do and all of the decisions I still have to make and the money we're going to have to pay and the stuff I might actually have to physically make myself, with my own two inept hands, like every time I set out to make fun door decs for my girls at Interlochen and it ended with me drunk on a Thursday night weeping in a pile of construction paper and plastic googly eyes with smears of glue stick residue all over my hands. Every time I thought it would be different when I did the crafting and IT NEVER WAS. THE CRAFTING NEVER TURNS OUT WELL. WHEN WILL I LEARN TO GIVE UP ON THE CRAFTING?

Do you see where this is going?

And then in my perusal of said blogs I noticed completely sexist and ridiculous bullshit like this:

My pretty little head? Glamorous sparkler? The "I Do" and the tears - OF COURSE? Like I'm supposed to be Scarlett O'Hara lounging in a ballgown, fanning myself and musing "Oh, Rhett, however shall I choose my wedding china? I declare there's just too many thoughts spinnin' round my pretty little head for me to ever make a decision! Thank goodness some smart man made some company that can do it for me!"

Actually, there was no proposal because I'm an independent woman who made a mutual decision with her fiance. The ring was put on my finger by my mother, since it was originally hers, while Greg was several hundred miles away. There were no tears. Mostly I was just thinking, "Crap, I hope I don't lose this thing." And I assure you that I did not ever once think about wedding china until my mom asked me this summer if I wanted it and I laughed because I thought she was joking.

I shouldn't even be bothered by sexist wedding crap, I just see it so much now that I'm actually looking at wedding stuff instead of ignoring it, and all it does is make me determined to make my own wedding different, which then puts more pressure on me to not neglect it, which causes me to make more lists, und so weiter...

Then I wind up right where I am now. It's 1AM and I am wide awake, unable to sleep, totally wired on stress and anxiety.

Okay, the latte I had earlier today probably didn't help either.

The Nemeths are Loaded and Down for the Count

2011-12-03T15:07:00.000-06:00

So I was perusing wedding blogs, as I am wont to do lately, and I stumbled across one that described a three-day "wedding weekend." Including a "bride's family vs. groom's family softball game."

I tried to picture this translated to my family vs. Greg's family, and I had to laugh, the kind of laugh where you sort of want to take a shot of some vodka afterwards. Here's what my family softball team would look like:

1) Me. The last time I did anything remotely athletic was sometime in 2008, I think.
2) My mother, the heart patient, who is clinically depressed and cries whenever she sees my father.
3) My father, whom everybody on my mom's side of the family hates now. Totes awkward.
4) My aunt D, who would be pretty good at the softball stuff and the competitive stuff but somewhat hampered by the fact that she'd probably throw the balls at my dad's head every chance she got, and maybe the bat, too.
5) My congenial uncle A, who would probably only consent to play the game if he had a Scotch in one hand while doing so. Actually, make that my entire family. We'd all need to drink for this.
6) My 85 year old grandfather whose knees last worked correctly sometime when Reagan was president.
7) My dad's brothers and their wives, all well into their 70s, who also need a drink or two to loosen up before doing anything as active as going out to dinner.
8) My 43 year old cousin with Down's Syndrome. He'd probably have fun at the game but wouldn't understand why my Aunt D kept trying to throw the softballs at my dad.
9) My other cousin who got out of prison not too long ago for GTA and has a couple of kids by a couple of different women.

Ladies and gentleman, the Family of the Bride!*

Meanwhile, Greg's family is the most wholesome, midwestern, family-togetherness kind of family you can imagine. Every time he calls home they both pick up the phone and talk to him together. They got excited when they came to visit us and saw corn way up in north Michigan. They sent me a birthday card that said "Welcome to the Family!" His mom consults me on his Christmas and birthday gifts. His youngest brother calls home every day. His parents still send Greg care packages with cookies and granola bars and handwritten letters about family news and reminding him to wear a coat. Greg got a letter from his grandfather last month, and the bulk of it consisted of information about farming weather and tales of how he sweetly visits his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife every single day. Needless to say, no one in his family drinks.

Just try. Just try to picture a softball game.

***Disclaimer: I LOVE MY FAMILY and would not trade them for the world, they are wonderful and they support me and make my life great - but we are definitely not the most normal group of people. I have already shared this scenario with them and we laughed our asses off. So I feel okay about sharing it with the internet.

My first CSO Review

2011-12-02T16:21:00.000-06:00

Last night I got last-minute tickets to hear the Chicago Symphony perform Mahler 1, along with Stucky's Rhapsodies for Orchestra and the Mozart bassoon concerto. It was the first time I've ever seen the CSO live, and it was FANTASTIC. I couldn't stop smiling the entire time.

A few observations:

- Charlie Vernon is LOUD. Like, absurdly, hilariously loud. I love it. The man is a legend, and I love it.

- Trumpet section was incredibly tight. The horns weren't perfect and Clevenger wasn't playing, but they nailed all the really big moments.

- I think that was the best string section I've ever heard. I don't even think the BSO strings made quite that impression on me during the years I "ushed" there, but this is all subjective. The friend who got me the tickets and accompanied me told me that the CSO strings have been criticized when compared to European orchestras, but, I mean, who isn't criticized when compared to the Berlin Phil?

- Although at times the performance was a bit more careful and restrained than I usually like my Mahler, I have to say that the third movement was the best I've ever heard, live or recorded.

- I have got to start playing horn again.

December is Mahler Month at the CSO. They are doing the 6th in a couple of weeks. I'm so there.

Why I Miss Practicing

2011-11-29T23:16:00.000-06:00

I realized recently that one of the things I miss most about my music student days is practicing. I submit this thought with the note that there is a difference between a practice session and practicing, by which I mean the regularity, the constant, everyday routine. I never particularly enjoyed it when I was younger, but eventually I grew to appreciate the fixed quality of it. And I have a very different perspective on practicing now that I am trying to get into the same sort of routine with my writing.

I miss knowing exactly what I needed to work on every day. The list of pieces, excerpts, etudes, scales, tuning. And I miss knowing how to fix problems. There came a point during college when I realized I actually knew how to solve a lot of things without asking for help; even if I didn't, I had a lot of ideas to try. And the most valuable thing I learned from Eric when I was his student was how to practice efficiently. By the last two years or so I almost always came in with a plan, and I knew to chuck something if it wasn't working.

Writing is so much harder because I haven't reached that point yet. So often I think I know what I'm going to do and I get stuck without any idea what to try next. I often sense that there's a problem but I don't know exactly what it is, how to isolate it. Other times I realize I really don't have any idea what I need to do during the course of a given hour, other than put out x amount of words. And efficiency? I honestly have no idea what that even means yet, in the context of trying to write a novel.

I miss, too, the mindlessness of practicing. I don't mean that practicing is really mindless, but so much of the daily routine was exactly that - routine. Warmups, scales, the same tricky passages over and over and over again, broken down into bar by bar or even beat by beat. New material to learn was usually the exciting exception to a given day's work, and with that repetition quickly became old. Horn is physically taxing at times; music is mentally taxing much of the time, but practicing is usually pleasantly predictable.

Nothing in writing feels routine to me yet. Every day I need to create new material out of nothing or rework old material until it feels new again. If I'm struggling with a sentence I can't just write it over and over and over again. I'm wrestling with nothing but myself, not the horn or Strauss or the tuner, and it often makes me feel like banging my head against the table.

I also miss the trust in repetition and time. Eventually, after years playing horn, I learned that given enough time and work, I really would get better, and I came to the point where I really believed it because it was a tried and true notion. It's how I mastered triple tonguing and polyphonics and high horn. Knowing that freed me from the self-loathing I used to engage in if I was struggling with something. If I had a crappy practice session or even a bad performance, it got so much easier to put it aside and trust that the next day would be better. It got so much easier to condense the focus to the moments when the horn was actually out of the case and not spend time beating myself up when it was not.

I am nowhere near that point with my writing yet. In some way I believe that it is possible to get there, but it seems so far away.

Maybe what I really miss about practicing is having a relative confidence that I was good, that I did in fact know what I was doing when I sat down and got to work. I hold out hope that an M.F.A program can provide me with the structure and support to get there by the time I graduate. If I had not learned from Eric and my older, wiser peers how to approach problems how to think about the act of practicing and playing horn, I wouldn't have gotten so much better. That's what I want, more than anything, from an M.F.A. program. I want to write the way I used to practice.

The Dude in Starbucks

2011-11-16T14:10:00.001-06:00

On days when I don't have a job interview, my routine is to get up mid-morning, eat, shower, get dressed, and then take my laptop to the Starbucks down a few blocks from me, where I get a latte and submit job applications or work on my writing or my grad school applications for an hour or two. Sometimes I go back in the afternoon or early evening to do the same thing.

There's this man who is always at the Starbucks. Every day. He's middle aged and is always wearing huge headphones and on his laptop and he always takes the big handicap table even though he never has any materials with him aside from the computer.

I usually show up with a laptop and a computer bag and a purse and a notebook and sometimes a book as well. I want that big handicap table because it's the only one I can spread my stuff out on. This guy is almost always there. On the rare occasions that I do get there before him and claim that table, he'll show up, sit at the table right next to me, and just wait. He won't unpack his laptop. He just sits there, sipping his coffee, staring at me. It's awkward. It makes me want to leave. As soon as I do get up he swoops in. If he sees me close my laptop he actually stands up and hovers.

I have occasionally tried waiting for him to leave. He doesn't. He's literally there for hours. I have no idea what he does there, but evidently he's intense about it.

So this morning I was walking to the bus stop to leave for a job interview and I saw him walk right past me, headed to Starbucks, and I thought, "Hey, there's the dude who's always in Starbucks." Then I paused for a moment and thought about something.

Yesterday when I went into Starbucks the staff commented that they hadn't seen me in awhile (I've been in Boston). They asked me if I wanted the usual. They asked me if I had an opinion on what their next tip jar theme should be.

It was at this point that I realized that I have been misjudging the dude who's always in Starbucks.

Because I am the dude who is always in Starbucks. I'm not a dude, but you get the point.

I really, really need a job.

2011-11-08T20:56:00.000-06:00

These days, I rarely feel the need to comment on current events. But I've been following the sordid Penn State story with an increasing sense of anger and disgust that needs to find an outlet somewhere.

I keep trying to put myself in their shoes - Paterno, Curley, Schwarz. I desperately want to understand why they did essentially nothing, when presented with strong evidence - not just a rumor, but an eyewitness who reported seeing Sandusky having sex with a 10 year old in the shower - of an appalling thing happening that they had the power to stop.

I've tried to imagine what it would be like to be in a high-profile, money-making powerhouse with as much prestige as the Penn State football program. To know that if you report it as you are legally obligated to do, you will bring shame on everything you've worked for. I've tried to imagine what it would be like to learn that a trusted, close, and productive colleague has a horrifying darker side; to know that if you say something, you will be destroying his career, his family, his life. I have tried to imagine the reasoning, the decision process, the rationalizing, that these men must have undertaken. I do not imagine that it was easy; were it easy, they would have done nothing. The lip service they paid to the gravity of the crime - banning Sandusky from bringing children on campus - makes me think that deep down they did not want his monstrous tendencies to come anywhere near them again. When I really think about it, the pressures they were under, the difficulty of realizing a colleague is capable of something like that, I can almost understand why they did what they did. Why Paterno, having passed it along to the higher-ups, left it alone and absolved himself of responsibility, having perhaps done just enough to allow himself to sleep at night. Why the other men involved erred on the side of their own caution.

Almost.

Until I think about the simple fact that they had very strong evidence that this man was molesting children.

In my training for residence life, we always have an annual session about mandatory reporting of abuse. Mandatory. Mandatory.

I think there are very very few cases of black-and-white decision making that a person is ever faced with in their life. But child molestation is definitely black-and-white. And I cannot, no matter how much I push my brain into Paterno's fictional shoes, conceive of a situation in which I, having learned of what was so clearly something horrible, would not have done anything.

I just can't.

It saddens me and enrages me more than any news story I've read of this year. Can you imagine being in a position to stop something like this from happening? Can you imagine not doing anything? How could you live with yourself? How could you fall asleep? How could you go to work with children every day and not think about it? Does winning football games and getting booster money really mean that much?

There is the right thing to do and there is the easy thing to do. How many times do we hear that message reinforced in movies, in media, in Harry frigging Potter? Do we not intuitively feel this, in situations like the Sandusky case?

I just don't understand how and why.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Litterbox...

2011-11-08T19:48:00.000-06:00

While my mom was in the hospital this past weekend I was doing a bunch of random chores around her apartment, including cleaning out her cat's litterbox. In order to get to the litterbox I have to pass the door of her bedroom. My wedding dress, still in the garment bag, is hanging on her door.

As I passed it I thought, "Gee, it's been four months since I've seen this thing. Maybe I should take another look."

So I unzipped the bag and there it was hanging in all its white-taffeta prettiness. I ran my fingers over the bodice and thought, "You know, it probably wouldn't hurt to try it on again. Make sure it still fits."

So I pulled it out of the garment bag and got undressed and stepped into it and zipped it up. Then I thought, "Gee, my shoes are in the closet. It's too long without the shoes."

So I put the glittery heels on and then I thought, "Gee, there's my veil in the box right next to the shoes. Why not put that on, too?"

So I got that out and put it on and noticed my mom's pearl necklace and earrings on the nightstand and thought, "What the hell."

Only then did I realize the full ridiculousness of what I was doing when I looked at myself in the mirror, alone on a Sunday night decked out in full bridal regalia next to a pile of dirty laundry and a stinky cat litterbox.

Eight months until my wedding and I may have already lost it....

All I Can Do

2011-11-03T20:04:00.001-05:00

Staying in my mom's apartment for the last few days has been strange.

When they divorced and our house was put on the market, all of our things were stuffed into boxes with no real rhyme or reason. Much of it was done by my dad's girlfriend, who must have been eager to have us and our "crap" out of her way, and so there was no real order to the packing.

These boxes followed my mother to Massachusetts and sat largely undisturbed in various garages and storage units as she moved over the last seven years. Finally, a couple of months ago, she dedicated herself to the painful task of sorting through the remnants of our old lives, box by box, deciding what to keep and throw away. Much of what she has sorted through already is here in her apartment.

The things of mine that she has kept surprise me; not because she has kept them, but because I either forgot they existed or had assumed they were forever lost in the chaos. Hidden all over the apartment are things I never thought I would see again. I keep unexpectedly stumbling across them and shaking my head in wonderment.

On her bureau is the red plastic toy telephone rattle that I played with when I was an infant. On her nightstand, an old picture of me in a frame with a plastic Barbie shoe glued to one corner - when I was eight or nine I went on an inexplicable spree with my collection of Barbie shoes and a bottle of Elmer's glue, soddering them to random secret places in the house to see if anyone would notice. My mom never said anything to me about the weirdness of this, but she kept that frame with the shoe glued to it.

In the kitchen drawer with the spatulas I found the plastic "magic wand" I used to play with as a little girl. In a box in the living room there is a notebook I kept during my freshman year of high school, one that I had searched and searched for years ago and assumed was gone. On my bed, amidst the pillows, she hid the ragged stuffed rabbit I slept with until I was past kindergarten.

She has my high school diploma, the tassel that hung on my hat, my diploma from Boston University, a framed photo of myself with John Williams taken when I was fifteen at Tanglewood. My whole past is here in pieces. My future is here, too - hanging on her bedroom door is my wedding dress, still in the garment bag we bought it in; in her closet are my shoes and veil.

If it is this emotional for me to see these things and feel the bittersweet ache of memories long forgotten, then what must it be like for her to sort through the remnants of a 38 year marriage? It must be harrowing, an exercise in self-torture, every little thing reminding her of what she's lost.

She is doing well, finally home after a week in the hospital with thankfully minimal complications so far. Every day this week I have ridden the red line from Braintree and followed the hordes through the Downtown Crossing Tunnel to the orange line, to emerge at Tufts Medical Center and sit beside her bed for a few hours with a cup of tea and make feeble conversation and joke with the nurses. It is not much, but it is all I could do.

Now I have unpacked and organized her 12 prescriptions, have cooked her dinner and made her tea and put away her things. Now I will take her temperature and weigh her and make sure she takes what she is supposed to take when she is supposed to take it. Now I will do her laundry and open the too-heavy door to the hallway and walk with her on slow trips down the hallways of the apartment complex to strengthen her heart.

It's still not much. But it's all I can do.

Long Day

2011-10-26T12:56:00.000-05:00

As I am writing this, my mother is in pre-op at Tufts University Medical Center, about to undergo coronary artery bypass surgery.

I thought I was okay with this, until yesterday when I was a nervous wreck.

It is nothing as simple as fear that she's going to die. In fact, I'm not dwelling too much on that possibility, although she does have a higher risk of complications because of her diabetes.

It's the thought of her splayed out on a table, a tube down her throat, her ribcage broken open, on a bypass machine, veins ripped out of her legs, and her heart, still and unbeating, in some surgeon's hands. That's what's bothering me.

She's never been healthy in her entire life, thanks to her brittle diabetes, but she has also been unusually blessed in that she has never had any major medical complications from it, either. In the last few years she's had some frightening episodes of ketoacidosis, including one that resulted in a few days in intensive care, but DKA is a relatively quick fix.

I have lived in fear for the last few years of the inevitable day that one or both of my parents develop a major health problem. A heart attack, cancer, Alzheimer's, the worsening of my father's multiple sclerosis, kidney failure from the constant battle with my mother's diabetes. We've been so fortunate in so many ways. We are still fortunate that her atherosclerosis was caught before it caused a major heart attack.

But I feel it looming.

If I could, I would shield both of my parents from suffering, wrap them in some cocoon that would repel pain and disease and infirmity, that could knit broken limbs and soften stiff arteries and keep the grooves of their brain from wearing down with the weight of their years. But I can't. I can't even assuage my mother's constant grief over her collapsed marriage. Her depression is a fixed, immovable object, impervious to anything, as much a part of her now as her hair and skin. The only one with the key to vanquishing it is a man that is not even worth her time anymore, but until her dying day she will wish that he could be by her side. That is just one more thing I cannot give her.

Maybe that's the worst thing, that she has to go through all of this without him. She will be cut open and rearranged and when she comes through the other side he won't be at her bedside. My aunt and uncle and I will pick up the pieces again. He wouldn't even have called her if I hadn't badgered him.

Saturday I am flying out to help take care of her for as long as I need to. I suppose it's the only small blessing of my joblessness at the moment.

I am not nearly as religious as I used to be a few years ago, but I still believe in God and I still badger that God every day for small, ridiculous things: Please let this wedding photographer cost less than the last one. Please let the bakery not be out of raspberry cupcakes. Please let the grocery store not be crowded. Please let me finish this short story. Please let me get into graduate school. Please let me get a job. Please let me figure out what I want to do with my life.

And now, when I have something real to pray about, I feel like I can't, because I spend so much of my time worrying about things that don't matter. My mother matters. Her health matters. And my powerlessness over all of this makes praying feel less useful than usual.

Weddings are ridiculous, Part 2: Designer Dresses on a Budget

2011-10-22T00:16:00.000-05:00

Here are some couture designer bridal gowns. They probably cost equal to at least a down payment on a two-bedroom ranch house in the suburbs somewhere. Here are some budget-friendly solutions I've devised for those who want couture style without the price tag.

You could recreate this beauty with a satin bedsheet and a dead ostrich.

All you need for this is the frame of a patio umbrella and a shower curtain (try Ikea!)

Buy: a corset, a glue gun, and 6,000 rolls of toilet paper

Go to Sears, buy a duvet, dye it light pink, and crumple the shit out of it.

You need like twelve reams of resume paper and the stamina to crumple them all into little beige balls.

This one is a little harder, but I think I've got it figured out...

For the headpiece, buy a fake tiara and then get your ass down to Trader Joe's to buy out the garlic bin:

And the piece de resistance:

(Just so you know, I found that image by googling "plastic lawn goat.")

Greg

2011-10-18T18:24:00.000-05:00

Greg has never bought me flowers. He does not remember our anniversary. He has never taken me out to dinner at a fancy restaurant or planned a big romantic surprise. Greg has never bought me jewelry. He did not propose to me by hiding a ring in a wine glass or a cake or renting a plane to carry a banner across the sky. He didn't get down on one knee. In fact, Greg didn't even propose at all.

But when we get married, he is taking my last name. I didn't ask him to; it was his idea. And when people give him a hard time about it, it really doesn't bother him. He's probably signing up for a lifetime of people, including his family, assuming he's "whipped" and not masculine or some other sexist crap, and he truly doesn't care.

Greg puts up with my incessant 24/7 need for cuddling. When I'm sad, he talks like Werner Herzog to cheer me up. Greg was willing to move to Chicago with me even though he doesn't like big cities and I didn't have a job lined up.

Greg is paying my student loans during this uncomfortable period of joblessness, and he has never, ever, not once, held it over my head or used it to get out of doing the dishes. He buys my weird non-dairy expensive groceries without complaint.

Who needs flowers? Greg is pretty damned wonderful, and I feel like the luckiest woman in the world.

The Odyssey of my Job Hunt, or Why I Suddenly Have Graying Hair...

2011-10-14T16:35:00.000-05:00

Job #1 was full-time with benefits, free weekly yoga classes on the roof, a salary in the mid-twenties, and a cushy front desk at a high end real estate agency. I made it to the last round of interviews, and it was between me and one other candidate. NOT HIRED.

Job #2 was almost-full-time with benefits, three days off per week, in a beautiful boutique dental office on the thirteenth floor of a skyscraper with a to-die-for view of the Hancock Building and a salary in the twenties. NOT HIRED.

Job #3 was part-time at a nail salon for rich people, which the woman in the interview described as "extremely demanding." No benefits, not enough money to shake a stick at, and I was grotesquely overqualified, but still - NOT HIRED.

Job #4 was part-time at a kennel with big big doggies, but had no benefits and a lower hourly rate than I used to make ushering in Boston. TURNED DOWN.

Job #5 was full-time with benefits and a salary in the mid-twenties, in a seriously gorgeous office on the 84th floor of the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower. I made it through the phone interview and one in-person interview, then never heard from them again, and they did not return my emails. Douches. NOT HIRED.

Job #6 was a barista position at a coffee place downtown that would have required me to get up at 4 am and paid less than the kennel. TURNED DOWN.

Job #7 was a part-time position at a real-estate office in Lakeview that paid 9 dollars an hour with no benefits. I made it through two rounds of interviews and then was offered the job. I just need more money. TURNED DOWN.

Job #8 is an independent contractor-type tutoring position with a company in Bucktown. I set my own rates and get 65%, which is not terrible, but I have to go through a barrage of tests to prove that I actually know how to read, write, and remember what the Treaty of Versailles is. I will not conceivably start making money from this until about a month from now. GOTTA REMEMBER GERMAN AND MATH AND STUFF.

Job #9...oh, #9. How I love thee. Full-time, benefits, salary in the mid-thirties (my jaw dropped and I immediately wanted to die with shame because thirty seconds before she told me that I had said "I'd like to at least be making above ten dollars an hour") for an administrative position with a marketing/branding company. I have a second interview with their director on Monday afternoon. PRAYING.

Number of craigslist scam emails I've gotten: at least 30.

Le Sigh.

A Few Random Observations

2011-10-11T20:40:00.002-05:00

- This morning began at 5:30 a.m. when I woke up to the sound of poor Greg barfing in the bathroom sink. I thought I had gotten over my fear of vomit this summer working in the infirmary, but here's a little lesson no one should have to learn: All vomit is gross, but 8 year old girl vomit is not as gross as grown-man vomit. Also, all vomit is gross, but vomit in a barf bag is a lot less gross than vomit in your bathroom sink and all over your wall and mirror. Luckily, Greg is feeling better now, and after using all of the Lysol and Clorox wipes in the house, so is the bathroom vanity.

- I then had to leave Greg with Gatorade and saltines because I had to go to a job interview, where I got asked the same questions I'm always asked and gave the same answers I always give and tried really hard not to be weird or awkward. They're supposed to get back to me tomorrow. I have mixed feelings about it because it's not one of the better jobs I've interviewed for, but I feel pressed to take it if it's offered.

- I also applied for an after-school tutoring position with inner-city kids, and just got an email informing me I've been scheduled for a two-hour audition next week. No information about what this "audition" might consist of. I hate hate hate hate hate not knowing what I'm going to be asked to do. So far the worst thing has been math without a calculator, but I have a feeling this could be one of those mock-classroom management situations. Gag me with a fork.

- On the upside, planning our honeymoon in Hawaii has been super duper fun. Because we are doing a honeymoon registry, it's kind of like planning a trip with other people's money. That sounds weird, but essentially it's just people giving you the gift of a night in a fancy hotel on the beach instead of a new vacuum. I can't wait to see volcanoes, and pamper myself witless at the Fairmont Orchid's spa, and snorkel for sea turtles, and lay around sipping daiquiris on the beach. Honeymoon is cooler than wedding.

- I was just thinking about the fact that I was in London five years ago (God I feel old) and discovered that remembering my experience playing under Bernard Haitink still makes me giddy. The weird thing about it is that what makes me giddy is how amazingly expressive his hands were. After years and years of working with all kinds of conductors, I understood why he is one of the greats. If I could play under him for the rest of my life I would die happy. Those hands! I'm swooning just thinking about that old guy.

I told you they were random...

2011-10-10T12:37:00.000-05:00

Today I'm feeling down.

I still don't have a job. People I've had interviews with don't return my phone calls or emails.

Wedding planning has been unpleasant because of guest list drama, and everything is costing way more than it should.

I'm worried about my mom.

It's fall, and I miss being in Tennessee.

Writing is exhausting.

Everything is exhausting.

Oh. My. Jesus.

2011-10-02T18:31:00.000-05:00

Oh, my God, you guys.

My family is crazy.

I thought I already knew this. Until I spent this weekend in Fort Lauderdale celebrating my grandfather's 85th birthday. I should have known it was going to be nuts when I realized that the Dasani bottle I assumed was full of urine from a homeless man was actually the scotch my relatives brought. I have no idea why it was in a water bottle - there was no reason. Definitely not to conserve resources. This was in addition to the CARDBOARD BOX OF LIQUOR that MY GRANDFATHER PACKED HIMSELF that I had to lug up to the timeshare.

On Day 1, we had a nice dinner at my cousin's house, nice enough except that my grandfather's girlfriend twisted her knee somehow while walking and had to spend the whole rest of the weekend being rolled around in a wheelchair. Did I mention that my mom's in a wheelchair, too, these days? She needs heart surgery soon. Meanwhile my grandfather has a skin condition called Really Severe Oldness and basically anything he touches makes him bleed. It was like a competition to see whose body is falling apart the fastest. And when you get more than two people in a room who are over 70, all they want to talk about is comparing the ways they are slowly dying. There is nothing like chowing down on a burger listening to people talk about having a part of their intestine upcycled to replace their bladder.

Day 2 my other cousin, her husband, and their two teenage kids showed up. My thirteen year old cousin wants to go into modeling and my grandfather's dirty old man friend was leering at her and making roofie jokes (NO. NO I AM NOT KIDDING.) My aunt announced that we had to move so she could roll grandpa's girlfriend to the bathroom, and someone joked that she should just tell everyone in the whole complex so my aunt went out on the balcony and screamed MARY HAS TO GO TO THE BATHROOM!!! at the top of her lungs. Somebody made a joke about my 17 year old cousin being gay. His mother said she knows he's not because she finds condoms in his room all of the time. Dirty old man chimes in with, "Oh, I can tell you some stories about what we used to do with those in Thailand!" (WHAT? WHAT?)

Once we're all thoroughly liquored up we go to the casino across the street. We were gonna go to a nice restaurant but the old people wanted to eat the free seafood buffet. If free seafood from a casino buffet was the last food left on the earth, I would not eat it, but everybody dug in. My 17 year old cousin had four plates of food, including a steak he slathered in butter and three slices of pie for dessert. His mother was telling me how her husband's gambling paid for her liposuction and shows me pictures of her 5 tier wedding cake on her iphone in case I wanted to do something like that for my wedding. She also asks me, "So, Clarissa, what's your new last name going to be?" I'll just let you imagine the conversation that ensued when I told them that Greg is taking MY last name.

Dirty old man asks me if I've gotten permission from my grandfather to get married yet and if he approves of my fiance. I stare him straight in the eye and say, "I am an independent young woman, and I don't need anyone's permission." Then I ask my grandfather if he trusts my judgment and he brings up my tattoo. I forgot he didn't know I had a tattoo. Then my 17 year old cousin tells me about all the tattoos he's going to get. My 13 year old cousin leans over to me and whispers, "This place smells like old people." My grandfather's fingers are bleeding from the crab legs. Did I mention that there was free liquor at this casino? There was.

I can't. I can't even think about my wedding. THIS IS JUST ONE SIDE OF MY FAMILY. WE DIDN'T EVEN GET THE OTHER HALF INTO THE MIX. I love my family - I really do - but holy shit. Hoooooly shit.

Everything is All Over the Place

2011-09-29T00:08:00.000-05:00

It's been an interesting week. Some ways good, some ways bad.

Yesterday I found out that my mother has to have open-heart surgery very soon, probably within the next week or two. It's going to be a difficult road for her. I had so hoped that they would be able to fix her problem with stents or angioplasty, but her doctors recommended that she have the surgery. I know that CABG procedures are performed all the time now; my grandfather had one like fifteen years ago, and this weekend I'm going to Florida to celebrate his 85th birthday. But it's one thing to know that abstractly it's a common surgery; entirely different to think of it being performed on my mother. I am so glad that they caught her problem early, before she had a heart attack, but I am worried about her ability to withstand such major surgery and especially worried about the difficult recovery period. I am considering flying to Boston to stay with her for the first few weeks afterward, possibly a whole month.

Of course, I can't do that if I get a job. At the moment I don't have one; I was offered the kennel position I wrote about last week, but turned it down because I have several more on deck at the moment that pay more or have the option of benefits, including a great position that would have me working on the 84th floor of the Willis Tower.

Right now it just feels like so many things are up in the air. I am not ungrateful for all of the good things in my life. At this point last year I actually had more day-to-day stress, a million and a half small things to worry about and an ever-burgeoning to-do list, not to mention student problems that would crop up all the time. Right now I have fewer things to worry about, but the things I do have to worry about are much, much bigger.

Looking for Jobs in All the Wrong Places

2011-09-22T13:01:00.000-05:00

Job-hunting for the last three weeks has been a roller-coaster ride of emotions. Elation. Despair. Anxiety. Confusion. Fury. Depression. I'm ready for it to be over.

I guess I've never really looked for a job before. I've sort of lucked into the jobs I've had in the past, including Interlochen; had I not been an alum, I don't think I would have gotten an interview. Then again, had I not been an alum, I probably wouldn't have known about the job in the first place.

At any rate, it's been...interesting. I interviewed for a receptionist job at a real estate brokerage. They invited six people in for the first round of interviews. Then they invited two people back for a longer interview. One of them was yours truly. The job was full-time, had health insurance, and free yoga classes on the roof once a week. I was gunning for it. I was sure I had it.

I didn't get it.

So I cried and got drunk and watched Game of Thrones on the internet illegally and woke up with a hangover and started looking again.

I've had three interviews in the past couple of days. One was for a receptionist position at a dental office downtown. It's a small office on the thirteenth floor of a skyscraper with gorgeous views of the Hancock building. I thought it went well, but after last time I'm not getting my hopes up. I won't know about that one until next week, probably.

Yesterday I interviewed for a part-time receptionist position at an upscale "nail spa." I guess it's in a very ritzy part of Chicago and the woman whom I interviewed with told me that she had once done the job herself and said it was extremely demanding because of the clientele. I am trying to picture rich people in need of buffed nails being more demanding than a bunch of teenagers trying to argue with you about their bedtimes. I am failing.

I also had an interview for a part-time kennel assistant position at a dog boarding and training facility. Of everything I've done so far, this was by far the most interesting, and truthfully the one I would enjoy the most. The man who runs the place reminds me of Eric Ruske, if Eric Ruske was Cesar Milan. Very no-nonsense and very good at what he does, which is train difficult and sometimes dangerous dogs. He actually trains police dogs, too, and has quite a facility. They also have a doggy daycare and grooming facility, but he told me straight up that most of what they do is training dogs with aggression problems. One of the things that I've always been interested in doing is learning how to train dogs. Obviously I love dogs, the bigger the better, and since I one day plan to have a super large-breed dog like a mastiff or St. Bernard, I want to know how to train it properly. I really like the vibe there, and although it would be dirty and physically demanding work, I would be excited to do it because, unlike the drab routine of office work, I'd really have the opportunity to learn a lot.

The problem with all of these jobs, if I were to be offered one, which is not guaranteed (I might know about the kennel job by tomorrow), is that they are part-time and don't offer benefits. The dental job pays enough that if I got it I could probably afford my own insurance (and it does come with dental, just not health, benefits), but the other two really don't pay much at all. The kennel job would pull in less than a thousand bucks a month.

I'm still applying to other jobs, but I'm feeling conflicted. If I were to be offered, say, the kennel job tomorrow, do I take it and be grateful I have stimulating work at all? Or do I hold out and keep looking for something that pays more or has better benefits?

Meanwhile, my savings account dwindles.

***

I love Chicago, though. I really do. I am so so so so glad I chose to do this, even if it does mean job stress. It's worth it to wake up every morning next to Greg, and walk down the street to the coffee shop, and walk dogs from the canine rescue place, and hop on the L and head downtown, and randomly find a bookstore that lets you browse the stacks with a glass of wine.

I recently started a ridiculous project that, if you are at all entertained by my writing, you might want to check out. I am re-capping Star Trek: Voyager, which has got to be the most absurd show to air on television in the pre-Real Housewives era. Seriously. I am doing this because someone had to. If you don't believe me, go check it out.

Ten Years Ago

2011-09-11T20:41:00.000-05:00

I've sort of been avoiding television all day today. Not because I don't want to remember the events of September 11. I don't think anyone in my generation will ever have a problem with forgetting what happened that day - nor everything that followed. But because for some reason I feel that all of the saccharine ceremonies, commercials, and television specials that pop up this time of year, every year, cheapen my own remembrance. I know that's not necessarily true. But that's how it feels for me.

It's strange to think that it was already a decade ago. Many of my students at Interlochen were only five or six years old when it happened; soon, our high schools will be filled with students who were born in the post-9/11 generation. Will they think of it the way I think of the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor, as historical events that have no visceral connection to their lives? On the other hand, a great many more families were directly affected by the 9/11 attacks than in those two events. They are all seared upon our national consciousness, but thousands and thousands of people who lost family members, friends, colleagues, who watched people leap to their deaths, who survived the terror and chaos of that day in Manhattan and Washington, wake up every day living with the memories in a way that I don't. Thousands more servicemen, women, and their families have been directly affected by the military action we took following the attacks. They, too, live with September 11 in a way that I never will.

That is what I think about now when I think about September 11. What it must have been like for the people who were thrust into the horror of that day. When I think of how I was affected, so far away, without having lost anyone I knew, I try to imagine that magnified by a thousand. I try to think of them.

I was fifteen. I was in chemistry class, and when I came out, a friend of mine told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought she meant a small plane. An accident. I did not understand.

At morning break the mood seemed wrong. Somebody told me the Pentagon was on fire. I thought that was crazy. I did not understand.

On my way to my second period class I ran into one of my favorite teachers. I asked him, "Is it true that the Pentagon's on fire?"

"Yes. We're essentially at war. It's just a matter of finding out who did it." He said it brusquely. He was distracted, not full of his usual good humor. Even then, I still did not understand.

Only when I got to my second period class and saw what was happening on the television did I begin to understand. By the time I started watching, the first tower had already fallen. As we watched in our dingy little basement classroom, the second tower collapsed, and I put my hand to my mouth, and tears came to my eyes, and all of us in that room gasped and cried and wondered what was going to happen next. The reporters were as frightened and stunned as we were. There were conflicting reports coming in about other targets, other planes. No one knew what was going to happen next. Somebody wondered aloud if Oak Ridge could be a target. I remember some people discussing it, but all I could think about were the people on the ground in New York City.

We watched television in my third period class as well. My band teacher made us go out and march. Nobody was happy about that, but I understand now why he did it. He had a son in the Marines. He was a former military man himself. For him, it would have been worse to sit on his hands and watch the scenes playing out on TV, knowing what they meant for his family. We went out and we marched and I remember somebody making a joke. A girl said she was missing her hair tie and another girl said, "Maybe we should get the FBI on it. You know, if they're not too busy." Nobody laughed and after a pause she said, "I'm sorry. That wasn't appropriate, was it?" And we all shrugged. We understood.

I remember my father closing his office for the day. We went over to some friends' house for dinner. We watched television the whole time. I cried when Congress sang "God Bless America." The couple had just had a baby a month before, and I remember looking at him, sleeping in his carrier, wondering what kind of world he was going to grow up in. That little boy is ten now. He doesn't know that I think of him every year on September 11.

When you are fifteen, everything that happens to you seems to be of world-shattering importance. I could fill pages and pages of a journal analyzing a lunchtime conversation with a boy I had a crush on, obsessively cataloguing every possible meaning of every possible gesture. But when real earth-shattering events happened, I didn’t know how to react. Faced with a blank page of my journal on September 11, I hesitated; I did not know how to write about what had happened that day, how to convey the true sense of drama and life-changing experience of it into a book that was filled with my petty teenage ramblings. I didn’t know where the collapse of the World Trade Center fit in with my small reality of high school crushes and classes and pseudodrama. In some way, we all felt the challenge of awkwardly adjusting our tiny lives with the crushing reality of what happened that day.

At fifteen, I was already smart enough to understand that what happened that morning was going to become the defining event of my generation. I knew that my life had undergone a significant change the moment I stepped out of chemistry class and someone asked me “Did you hear?” But I did not know how to write about it then. I’m still not sure I know how to write about it now.

Love/Hate

2011-09-06T18:51:00.000-05:00

It can't all be roses and sunshine and rainbow glitter all the time, can it? These are some things that are currently driving me nuts:

Trying to find a job
I started doing this from before I got here. At this point I've sent out over ten resumes/applications, and have yet to hear back from anyone legit. I know it takes time. I know it was labor day weekend and people are behind. But my bank account is draining every day and it's depressing to think it may be a long time before I can find something that will fill it back up - and also not make me want to tear my hair out.

Craigslist
I've had a pretty good relationship with craigslist since college. I've found sublets, sold stuff, and even found a couple of gigs through it in the past. But lately it seems like it's just a giant headache. When I was trying to sell our couch before we left Michigan, I got embroiled in a scam. Today I woke up to find an email response to one of the jobs I applied to over the weekend. It looked great...until they asked me for my credit score. A little more research revealed that it was another scam. A waste of my time and effort writing a cover letter for a job that doesn't exist. Half the jobs I applied to were from craigslist and now I'm wondering how many of them were scam postings attempting to get personal information or sign me up for a credit protection service.

MFA Applications
Much like women who have been through labor, I think I forgot just exactly how much this sucked. 16 schools that all have slightly different ways of doing things, application fees, GRE score reports, transcripts, personal statements, letters of recommendation (ugh), analytical essays (double ugh - I never took upper level English courses so I have to write a paper for the first time in years without the benefit of any professors to assess it), and writing samples, all for the privilege of likely getting punched in the gut by programs that get hundreds of applications and only take 3 people. Tell me again why I'm doing this?

But, thank goodness, there are a lot of things that make me happy. I follow up the doom and gloom with some things that make me do a happy dance:

- My neighborhood. Everyone in Roscoe Village has a dog. There's a canine rescue place I can volunteer at less than two blocks away. There's a yoga studio. There's a great grocery store. There's a Starbucks. Lots of neat little cafes and shops. And - best of all - a vegan bakery with the. best. vegan. cookies. Ever.

- Greg. He seems to know exactly when I'm stressed to the breaking point even when I don't say anything and always knows how to cheer me up, make me laugh, or talk me off the ledge.

- Our apartment, which actually has some furniture now! I have a workspace that I love. Our dishwasher makes my life complete. We have laundry in the unit. A giant bathtub with jacuzzi jets. A usable kitchen - tonight I'm going to bake banana bread.

So on the whole, I guess it balances out right?

Except for the MFA applications. They can still suck it.

A Few Random Observations About Moving

2011-09-03T21:59:00.001-05:00

Somehow, we got here. I rode here with my body folded at a 30 degree angle because we had so much stuff crammed in the car my seat was pushed as far forward as it could go. We left piles of stuff for donation. We gave away a bunch of wine. We threw away bags and bags and bags. We shipped 23 boxes. But we made it to Chicago.

It was 100 degrees when we arrived. Our apartment is on the third floor and it's a converted attic. When we turned on the tiny little window unit AC it told us the temperature of the room was 95 degrees. It took eight hours of that little buddy blasting away before it got down to 88. Yesterday to avoid the worst part of the heat we decided to go ahead and go to IKEA.

Chicago traffic on labor day weekend was my personal nightmare. I think there should be a name for a large group of cars, like a pride of lions or a gaggle of geese. And I think that word should be apocalypse. Yesterday around 3pm on the Kennedy Expressway there was an apocalypse of cars.

IKEA is a wondrous place. Full of magical words like Blabbars and Foba and Hermsajkojdld, and room after room of ingenious layouts and one two story tall bookshelf. At first we were like children, picking out tons of stuff to buy for our new apartment. But by the third hour of shopping, we were flagging. Our eyes were glazing over. We were staggering like drunks through the maze of rooms. And of course, that was exactly the time that we had to go down into the less-charming Furniture Dungeon to find the 6,373 boxes and parts for all the stuff we wanted to buy. We almost broke up at this point when Greg lugged 797 heavy boxes for our bedframe onto the tiny cart before I realized that they were sold out of the mattress we wanted to buy.

We also almost broke up this morning when we were trying to assemble his desk and we accidentally screwed one of the legs on backwards. We needed a hex wrench to unscrew it. We don't have a hex wrench. Greg basically curls up into a ball on the floor while yelling swear words. I walked a few blocks to an auto repair place to bat my eyes and beg to borrow a hex wrench. When I return with the borrowed wrench, triumphant and feeling like a genius, Greg has found tiny bag among the 67 other bags that came with the desk that contained a hex wrench all along.

But. We're here. It's finally cooled down. We have assembled all the furniture. When we do not have 7,877 IKEA boxes, wrappings, bags, and little cardboard bits piled into the corners I will take pictures and put them up so the 2 people that read this blog can see what we look like when we try to be grownups.

What do you mean I have to plan a wedding?

2011-08-26T18:56:00.000-05:00

So this wedding thing has been overwhelming from the beginning. Far more overwhelming than the marriage part of it. We can blame the Wedding-Industrial-Complex all we want for making it a bigger deal than it has to be, but at the end of the day, even with all my eye-rolling, I do want it to be a special and fun occasion for everyone involved (I'm only planning to do this once, after all). I've heard it said over at A Practical Wedding (to which I owe much of my sanity) that a wedding is your first act of hospitality as a couple, and I like that sentiment. It's not all about me; it's about everyone there.

When I first started thinking seriously about my wedding, right before we got engaged, I could envision only a few things. I knew I wanted it small (as did Greg). I knew I had to have certain people there in addition to my family members. I knew I didn't want dancing. I knew I wanted my uncle to marry us. And I knew I wanted to have it in my hometown. Dress? Invitations? Flowers? Cakes? Who cared?

The thing that has really boggled my mind since I started actually doing the planning is the sheer number of things you need to make a decision about. And I am still at the outer edges of it right now, since the wedding is still ten months away. As I get closer and closer I will have to make more and more decisions about things that I really don't NEED to care about (like escort cards or favors), but that I inevitably will care about because, you know, it's my wedding. And we allll know how I am about decisions.

Here are the number of choices I have made so far:
1) the location
2) the "bridal party" (if you can call it that; it's my mom's two best friends, my "fairy godmothers" who will likely be paired with Greg's brothers)
3) My shoes
4) My dress
5) My headpiece (screw the veil; I have never felt creepier than when the David's Bridal automaton put a floor-length veil on me and then draped it over my face)
6) My officiant

Pretty much the only one of those decisions that wasn't difficult or contested in some way was the shoes. Here's what I still have to decide. Some of it, at least.

1) The Save-the-Date cards. Doesn't seem like a big deal, does it? Unless you are indecisive. I have looked at HUNDREDS of these, even tried my hand at making a few of my own, and still have no idea what I want, really.
2) The invitations. Ditto.
3) The MOTHERF*CKING GUEST LIST, the current bane of my existence
4) The menu
5) The cake (or pie, or cupcakes, or whatever-the-eff it's going to wind up being).
6) The photographer (I have one in mind but I'm not sure if she's going to be available).
7) The music/musicians for the ceremony (ditto)
8) The ceremony itself (vows, readings, etc.)
9) The rings
10) Whatever the hell the rings are going to be put on
11) The flowers (real? what kind, then? Paper? Cloth?)
12) The ceremony decorations
13) The table decor
14) My accessories
15) Whatever Greg wears (if I don't tell him what to wear he will probably just wear shorts and a T-shirt with a panda on it)
16) The favors
17) The guestbook
18) The registry
19) The booze (if you know my family, this is...important)
20) I want to have some display of family pictures and pictures of us, so gotta set that up
21) Hair, makeup, other shit I usually never worry about
22) The rehearsal dinner
23) Which guests we'll be fronting accomodation for
24) Where we're going to stay the night before
25) The seating chart (this, if you know my family, is also crucial, since half my family might bludgeon my dad on sight)

WEDDINGS ARE RIDICULOUS. I don't even care about much of this stuff, but I know I will. I didn't think I would care about save-the-date cards, but right now I do. And I'm not alone in making these decisions. I'm really glad that my mom is going to be a huge part of this, but her involvement does not necessarily make it easier.

So...I'm sorry for this wedding rant. I just needed to get it off my chest. I actually feel better now. Until the next time I start looking at save-the-date cards or talking to my mom about peacock feathers and whether or not I should invite the cousins I haven't seen in over five years.

Summer is Over...What Now?

2011-08-22T20:42:00.000-05:00

If I hadn't quit my job, today would have been my first day back at work. Which means that today is the first day it has really sunk in to me: I quit my job. The one with the really great health insurance. And the (mostly) free apartment and meals. The job I (usually) enjoyed.

Gulp.

Now is the time when the known seems a lot more appealing than the unknown. "Known" being the pleasantly dull routine of reslife training that I would be starting this week, the busyness and excitement of kids arriving next week. "Unknown" being the endless boxes of stuff that Greg and I have to sort through before we move next week (I swear, they are like tribbles; every time I turn around there are MORE BOXES); the fear of not being able to sell my car before we leave for enough to even pay back what's left of the loan; the fear of not being able to find a job in Chicago; the fear of everything, our whole life together from this point forward. (And also the fear that the odd abdominal pains I've been having the last few days means that the IUD perforated my uterus and is floating around in my body waiting for the MOMENT my health insurance lapses to start wreaking havoc).

On the whole I still think I made the right decision. Only now I am inching towards the reality of being unemployed, and picking up my whole life and moving to a much bigger city than I've ever lived in before for no real reason beyond I felt like it.
***

Some good things, though, are also bouncing around in my head. I'm excited about the apartment we found in Chicago - it's in a great neighborhood and has kind of a quirky setup. I'm excited about decorating it. I'm excited about Greg and me actually having a place to call our own for the first time. I'm excited to be living near one of my best friends from college - hanging out with her while we were visiting last week reminded me how much I've missed close female friendship in the last few years, not to mention the novelty of hanging out with someone who doesn't have the exact same job as I do.

Most of all I'm excited to get to know Chicago. I don't think I fully realized how much I missed living in a city until Greg and I were on the train back from a long day of apartment hunting. Across from us was this girl who...well, we all know her. She was That Asshole on Public Transportation.

First off, she was testing every single ringtone on her phone at top volume. Every. Single. Ringtone. Then after about five minutes of that she started calling a friend of hers. Also at top volume.

"HEY! I'M ON MY WAY TO YOUR PLACE. AND I GOT THIS SWEET BITCHIN' NEW PHONE. YOU NEED TO HEAR MY NEW RINGTONE. HEY, AND I GOT THESE PEACH CIGARS? THEY'RE LIKE, CIGARS, BUT THEY TASTE LIKE PEACH? HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF THEM? YEAH, I'VE GOT THIS FRIEND, YOU KNOW, SHE'S IN A NURSING HOME?" (I swear she said this) "AND SHE RECOMMENDED THEM TO ME. YEAH, I'M ON THE BROWN LINE TO KIMBALL. YEAH, I'LL BE AT YOUR HOUSE IN LIKE FIFTEEN MINUTES."

Worse: nobody else on the train was making any noise. Everybody was reading or listening to headphones or sitting quietly. It was painfully awkward and annoying. As this went on and on I became sort of incredulous that this woman couldn't realize how rude she was being. I started looking around and caught eyes with another girl and a guy sitting a little further away and we all sort of shook our heads in disbelief. Then she said:

"YEAH, I'M GONNA BE THERE SOON. HEY, YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME UNTIL I GET TO YOUR HOUSE?"

I looked around the train and immediately caught eyes with the girl and the guy I had looked at earlier and we all three started cracking up. This is the kind of thing I miss from city living. Turning That Asshole into an amusing shared urban experience. These things only happen when you are crammed into a city bursting with all kinds of people.

***
Last night it was cold here for the first time all summer. Look up in the sky and you can see V's of geese flying south. Leaves are already, just barely, starting to turn. Summer is a brief and glorious thing in northwest Michigan. And now it's leaving.

So am I.

The Things I do for (No) Babies

2011-08-18T13:21:00.000-05:00

Fair warning: this post contains a discussion of female anatomy. If you are not comfortable with cervix cervix cervix vagina uterus vagina then you should probably go read something else.

So this morning I got Mirena inserted. I probably shouldn't be blogging about it, but considering that it's pretty much ruined my day and left me bed-bound but also in too much pain to sleep, I have nothing to do but watch Star Trek: Voyager and blog about how much getting my IUD sucked.

I knew it wasn't going to be fun. My doctor pretty much told me it hurts and advised me to take 800mg of ibuprofen before I came in. Since that's twice as much as they advise you to take on the bottle, I assumed it meant Serious Business. I had Greg go with me in case I didn't feel like driving back.

I was holding it together until I got into the exam room and saw the side table piled with all kinds of shiny metal tools. It looked something like this:

Only instead of being neatly organized, it was pretty much just a pile of things that looked way too long and sharp and...hooked...to belong in my ladyparts. Plus the biggest speculum I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure it was a gorilla speculum.

My doctor, bless her, reassured me she wasn't going to use all the tools. But, she said, she might have to use the cervical dilator depending on how...inviting...my cervix was on this particular day. Here's more or less what that looked like:

In case you can't get a sense of the size of that thing, it's approximately the size of an ice cream scoop. Or at least it was to my fear-dripping eyeballs. This, my doctor said, was likely to be the most "uncomfortable" part of the procedure.

Around this time, as she started wrestling with the gorilla speculum and swabbing off the things she'd be poking at, I noticed that even while Greg was holding my hand like a diligent boyfriend, he was rotating his neck so far away from what the doctor was doing that he looked like he was auditioning for The Exorcist. It occurs to me that if, for some reason, someone invented a birth control method that involved shoving a piece of plastic through your penis, absolutely zero people would go for it. Yet here I was, voluntarily stretched out on a table, bare-assed, welcoming "some discomfort" while my doctor clipped a long and frightening instrument called a tenaculum (raise your hand if that sounds like some kind of lethal spider) to my cervix to steady it (though I was not aware it moved around). Modern Womanhood!

The tenaculum's bark was worse than it's bite, and just when I was starting to feel like I could handle this, she started to measure my uterus.

I have never, ever felt pain like this. It took my breath away. Imagine someone kicking you in the stomach during your very worst period cramp ever. Times ten. This was not discomfort. This was PAIN.

"Is this what labor feels like?" I gasped.
"Labor is more intense, but yes," my doctor said. "That's why I had an epidural with my second child."
"Did it work?" I said when she pulled out the probe.
"The epidural?"
"NO. THE MEASUREMENT." I was thinking that if she had to use that giant cervical dilator, I was out. There was just no way.
"Yes, it did," she said brightly. "Now I'm going to put in the Mirena."

I cannot describe this except to ask you to ponder the fact that your uterus is not an organ you can feel. Sometimes you feel it cramping when you're on your period, but you do not have a sense of its dimensions or anything. Well, today, I felt my uterus. Every single square inch of it, violently rejecting the intrusion of a hormone-soaked plastic stick. I'm not kidding - I could actually feel it pressing up against the back of my uterus. "THAT REALLY HURTS!" I yelled. Greg was basically trying to dislocate his neck while I dislocated his hand. I saw my tiny, painless birth control pills flash before my eyes.

Then the worst of it was over, except I felt nauseated and lightheaded and continued to have terrible terrible cramps. As soon as the doctor left to give me time to recompose myself I said to Greg, "Do you think it's possible to have an epidural for your entire pregnancy?"

Then we went to check out. The lady at the desk was very chatty, which normally I wouldn't have minded, except that I started to feel like I was going to throw up, and then my vision started swimming. I made it to a chair before I passed out, and the nurse made me lie down for another twenty minutes in an exam room. Humiliating.

So now I am home and glued to my heating pad because I'm still cramping and probably will be for the next day or two. I am literally counting down the minutes until I can take my next 800 mg of ibuprofen. All I can say is this had better be worth it.

The Proust Questionnaire (ala' Vanity Fair)

2011-08-11T21:41:00.001-05:00

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness? A good sandwich, a good book, and a big glass of iced tea.
2. What is your greatest fear? Burning alive.
3. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Sylvia Plath, at least before she became suicidal. I am reading her journals and I feel a kinship with her struggles and ideas.
4. Which living person do you most admire? J.K. Rowling, who has made an entire world that people love much more than their own.
5. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Laziness.
6. What is the trait you most deplore in others? An inability to accept responsibility.
7. What is your greatest extravagance? My library. I have far too many books.
8. What is your favorite journey? Anytime I fly back home to Tennessee - I love seeing the mountains appear out the window and watching the landscape change.
9. On what occasion do you lie? When I can't bear the thought of someone being disappointed with me.
10. What do you dislike most about your appearance? No matter how careful I am, I always get crumbs all over myself or wrinkle my skirt or do something that makes me look disheveled.
11. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? "Evidently"
12. What is your greatest regret? Not trying harder to get better financial aid when I was applying to college.
13. What or who is the greatest love of your life? My fiance Greg, who enriches my life in every single way.
14. When and where were you happiest? Sewanee, Tennessee, the summer of 2005, when I was playing principal horn on Mahler 1 and the conductor was showering me with compliments just about every rehearsal.
15. What is your current state of mind? Pleasantly tired.
16. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? I would like my mother to be happy with herself and move on from my father.
17. What do you consider your greatest achievement? Not letting the incredible unhappiness and anxieties of my freshman year of college translate into poor grades or a bad experience. It was an uphill battle.
18. What is your most treasured possession? The diaries I have from sixth grade onward - my entire life in my own handwriting.
19. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? A stomach virus.
20. What is your favorite occupation? Playing horn.
21. What is your most marked characteristic? Probably my glasses, which I almost never take off.
22 What do you most value in your friends? The ability to not let time away and distance affect our ability to pick up right where we left off.
23. Who are your favorite writers? Ian McEwan, Keith Maillard, Jhumpa Lahiri, John Irving
24. Who are your heroes in real life? Eric Ruske, my horn teacher in college; David Simon, whose TV show The Wire is a true artistic masterpiece with incalculable real life value; J.K. Rowling, again, for similar reasons; Gustav Mahler, for myriad reasons.
25. What is it that you most dislike? Shameless and ingrained self-promotion.
26. How would you like to die? Under anesthesia on the operating table.
27. If you were to die and could choose what to come back as, what would it be? I really wouldn't want to be anyone but myself.
28. What is your motto? Every little thing will be all right.

Thank you, IPR

2011-08-06T18:36:00.001-05:00

So I'm going to go right out and say this: I haven't played my horn in ten months. Aside from taking it out of the case and oiling it up to keep it from becoming useless, I haven't touched it. It's not that I don't have the desire to play it; I just haven't had the opportunities this year, and as more time passes, it's harder to get back on the horse without a reason to. The more time you take off from horn, the more painful it is to start it up again, so I've sort of just been avoiding it.

Part of avoiding horn has also been avoiding classical music. I don't even think I was consciously aware that I was doing it until this summer. I frequently listen to string quartets or piano music, but not the big orchestra pieces so dear to my heart. It's easy to avoid it, sadly.

At least until my summer job. We usually leave the radio on IPR most of the day, Interlochen's classical station piped in from right across the road. Until I was spending eight hours a day listening to my favorite kind of music again, I don't think I fully understood why I was avoiding it.

Every piece that I've ever played has so many memories attached to it, some of them visceral - I can feel a catch in my breathe, a pull in my chest, a twinge in my gut. I hear Brahms and remember Eric screaming at us in horn class. I hear Copland and remember how terrifying it was to play high horn on Fanfare for the Common Man at Symphony Hall. American in Paris takes me back to the spring of my senior year at Interlochen. I hear Dvorak and remember long Monday nights at the Knoxville Youth Symphony. And Sewanee, always Sewanee - with Bizet, Ravel, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, just about anyone else. Sometimes I hear a piece and don't remember what it is or even how it goes, but I have some memory of playing it at Sewanee. Today alone I heard Beethoven 7, Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphosis, and the Candide Overture, all pieces I played at Sewanee.

It's bittersweet. One morning I came in and they started playing a Mozart Horn Concerto as soon as I sat down - not only that, but the performance was by one of the teachers I studied with in London. I actually said, "Really? REALLY?" to the radio. It all just reminds me of everything I've done, and everything I'm not doing. With something like Beethoven 8 playing on the radio (a piece I've played twice, in two very different settings with two very different orchestras), I'm forced to think about how radically different my life is compared to how it was three years ago.

I have a complicated relationship with classical music now. It's partly nostalgia, because after all those years thinking I sucked, I actually came to realize that I was pretty damn good at horn. Maybe not good enough to get a job right away - but a strong player. It's kind of strange that just as I realized that I more or less decided to quit pursuing it as intensely as I had been for years.

Playing horn, practicing, performing, rehearsing, listening to pieces, studying scores - this was a huge, huge part of my life that just sort of evaporated this year. Even last year, I got opportunities to play with the Traverse Symphony and spent the summer at Greenwood. But this year - nothing. Literally nothing.

I miss playing horn. So much. I miss playing wonderful pieces of music. I miss the magical moments I treasure so much. I need them back in my life. I want to play again. I want to play as much as I can. And I think if I hadn't spent so much time locked in a room this summer with IPR, I would have been able to continue pretending that the absence of horn in my life doesn't bother me so much.

On Birth Control

2011-08-02T18:59:00.001-05:00

This might be a little TMI, so I guess I'll warn that the following involves a discussion of birth control. Yes? Yes.

Pretty much the only big downside to quitting my job is that starting September I will be losing my really great health insurance. I'm in good health and have taken advantage of the insurance while I had it - seeing a gastroenterologist and working out a plan for my IBS, seeing a therapist for my OCD, getting physicals and checkups regularly. So I'm not too concerned to be going without it for a little while. But one thing I was worrying about the other day was how I was going to manage to pay for my prescriptions once I no longer had insurance. I only have two prescriptions that I take regularly, and one of them is birth control pills.

As I was thinking about it, I realized that I didn't have to stay on the pill. There are so many options for birth control out there that can match with all sorts of lifestyles. After doing a little research, I realized that an IUD might be the best option, since once it's in, it stays in and you don't have to do anything for up to five years. I did a little more research, called my insurance company to check that it would be covered, and set up an appointment to talk to my doctor about it.

As I was doing all of this, I couldn't help marveling over how easy it was. It might sound a tad grandiose, but I was thinking about the generations and generations of women who came before me for whom it wasn't so easy. Go back one generation and there were far fewer options, many of which were more difficult to get. Go back a few more and there were no options. Women had to either forego the pleasures of sex, or accept that their lives were likely to be determined by the children they had. The pill really did change the lives of women for the better, no matter what the naysayers say. I definitely want to have children one day, but I want to choose when I have them. A large part of the freedom I have in making decisions about my life (or, ahem, not making them, as seems to be the case with me) is due to the freedom I have from worrying about unplanned pregnancy.

Although I didn't realize it, the day I was doing all of this birth control research was the same day the Obama Administration passed a law requiring insurance companies to pay for 100% of birth control, no matter what the method - from pills to shots to an IUD. This is a HUGE step forward in allowing women to continue to make their own reproductive choices, and I was very happy to hear about it. But it's still not enough.

A couple of days ago I was looking at the horrifying and heartbreaking reportage of the famine in the Horn of Africa on The Atlantic's website. Far more appalling, in some ways, was the comment thread, chock full of observations like this:

i feel terrible for these people. i really do. Im a young father and i would die if this happened to my kids. what i dont understand is why these people are having 5-8 children!! they cant feed themselves let alone 7 kids. why would they put them through that??

Yes. I feel so bad for the children...if the adults know that their children have a slim chance of survival, why do they have so many?

Feed them so they are healthy enough to have more babies they cannot feed or care for?

That is so sad. But reality is these people really need to step back and look at the picture so to speak. These people need to Stop having kids. If I were in a position as they are, I would not have any kids. I would precautions or don't have intercourse.

It really makes me angry that there are so many people in the world who fail to understand that all around the world are impoverished women who have no choice about how many children they have or when they have them. Women who are raped. Women who have no say in how their bodies are used, or how often. Women who do the best they can with what they have, and what they have is so little. What really, really enrages me is that many of these people whose reaction to these photographs was "Why are these people being so irresponsible and having so many kids?" are probably the same people who want to give women even fewer choices when it comes to reproductive rights.

I am so lucky to be a modern woman, living in an affluent country, raised to believe that I am the only one who can choose what to do with my body, and able to have the resources to make those kinds of choices. I can't help but think of the millions and millions of women who aren't so fortunate.

Wedding Trends that Drive Me Nuts

2011-07-24T21:52:00.001-05:00

I'm in the middle of planning nuptials that don't make me want to gag on all the syrup and sugar. This is harder than it sounds.

Because I have no money, most of my "planning" means "scouring the internet for ideas that are cheap and nice." You can waste a LOT of time scouring the internet for wedding ideas, and I have really seen some beautiful, inspiring weddings. But I've also noticed some recent wedding trends that I just don't understand. To wit:

Staging a Photoshoot with Vintage Furniture in a Place that Vintage Furniture Would Not Normally Be

YOU DID NOT FIND THAT COUCH IN A FIELD, BRIDE. YOU PUT IT THERE. And the options here are either that 1) you wasted precious time on your wedding day dragging a couch into a field to position it artfully or 2) you wasted precious MONEY paying some wedding coordinator or photographer to do the same. As someone on APW pointed out, the only acceptable use of an outdoor couch is if you were doing a wedding shoot with a theme of HBO's "The Wire."

(Picture the bride and groom trying to play chess and sell drugs).

Wire Hangers That Say "Mrs. HisLastName

Seriously? I know not all women agonize over giving up their name, but this is like a celebration of everything that gives me the wedding heebie-jeebies. "I am no longer an individual - I am the wife of this guy in a pretty white dress." I'm going to have one of these made for Greg that says "Mr. Nemeth."

"Discussion Starters"

I get the idea - you have a bunch of guests who might not know each other, give them something to talk about at the dinner table. But the problem I have with this is the same one I have with g.d. "team-building" exercises in the professional world - it assumes that intelligent people who have been raised to understand social niceties cannot manage to find anything to talk about. Have you ever been to a wedding where the meal was awkwardly silent? If you're worried that people need a conversation starter, have an open bar. And for God's sakes, if you are going to have cutesy questions for the guests to talk about, at least don't make them all about you."Oh, honey, let's spend money on these cute question journals so that people who were nice enough to come celebrate our union can spend the whole meal talking about how cute we'd look in ski suits."

Custom Wedding Candy

Okay, so there's an awful famine in Somalia right now, but I can order custom M&Ms for my wedding. Seriously, if I wanted my guests to eat M&Ms, I'd have my wedding at Wal-Mart.

"Themed" Weddings
It's one thing if you are actually going all out with, say, a Halloween wedding, or a winter wedding, or a RenFair wedding. I get that. Whatever floats your boat. What drives me crazy is people having a wedding theme that isn't really a theme. Like "rustic preppy chic." Or "Texas hill country glamor." Or "vintage nautical with a touch of hipster." Okay, I made that last one up, but here's a real example I found when I googled "shabby preppy chic wedding":

"The bride who requested this board is working with a navy and shades of blue palette for her September beach wedding in New England. Her theme is elegant, preppy beach with a touch of a rustic feel."

That's right. "Elegant, preppy beach with a touch of a rustic feel." What the hell does that even mean? You know what the theme of my wedding is going to be? "Greg and Clarissa get married. Have some cake and a mimosa."

"Trash the Dress" Sessions

This is one of those things I thought was cool the first time I saw it - until I really thought about it. Usually it involves brides artfully diving into a river or the ocean or mucking it up on the beach with their new husbands. Maybe I'm lacking a sense of romance or whimsy, but do you realize how much wedding dresses cost nowadays? I know you are only going to wear it once, but you can still sell that shit on Ebay! Here's an idea: I will have my wedding photographer photograph me after the ceremony, wearing my wedding dress, flushing between 500 and 1,000 dollars down the toilet. Artfully.

Thoughts on Medicine

2011-07-19T20:32:00.000-05:00

I always wanted to be a doctor until I didn't.

But maybe that's not entirely accurate. I always wanted to be a doctor until I heard the first few bars of Mahler's Second Symphony, which is the moment I decided I wanted to pursue music professionally. So I spent the rest of high school and college focused exclusively on that, never looking back until my senior year of college, when I came to terms with the fact that the professional music world, and the lifestyle it would require, was not for me.

I have never quite managed to lose my fascination with medicine. In an odd way, I enjoy hospitals more than anywhere except maybe bookstores. I'm fascinated by equipment, medications, diagnostics, procedures, and the very energy of a hospital. As a writer, I'm always interested in stories, and a hospital is full of stories, packed to the brim with people experiencing significant moments in their lives.

One of the things I did in my early adolescence, once I decided I wanted to be a doctor, was read a ton of books about medicine. Almost all of them were accounts written by doctors, either of their residencies or of the day-to-day life as a surgeon, pediatrician, etc. I loved ER, but I devoured these books because I wanted to know what I was getting into. I was never under the illusion that medical training would be easy, but when I was fifteen I imagined I could handle it.

I still have many, if not most, of these books - The Intern Blues by Robert Marion, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure by Perri Klass, Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives by Pamela Grim. I've found it hard to part with them. I read a lot of them over and over, and the dog-eared copies make me smile, remembering the fierce certainty I felt when I was thirteen, fourteen, that one day I would also be one of these people. And I still buy books written by doctors about medicine and medical training - anything by Atul Gawande, more of Perri Klass, Megan Weir's account of her residency training in pediatrics, a recent book by Sandeep Jauhar about his residency in internal medicine. There is something about the world of doctors that still draws me in.

My job this summer in a camp infirmary can only be described as "medical" in the loosest sense. Mostly we treat sore throats, scrapes, upset stomachs, and mosquito bites. Having no medical training, most of what I do is hand out band aids, tylenol, and cough drops. Sometimes I can't even do that until a nurse checks the kid over first. But I do consider it some exposure, and I have to say I'm enjoying it. I enjoy watching and listening to the nurses, jumping in to help when I can; I like the sound of "ceterizine" and "methylphenidate" rolling off my tongue, I like mopping up bloody knees and figuring out the correct dose of cough medicine for a ten-year old, and I even like talking to a scared kid to distract her from the chunk of meat she just took out of her foot while the nurses debate whether she needs stitches. The thing about medicine that has always been most attractive to me is the sleuthing, figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it, and even in this most basic of settings, with so little real knowledge, I find myself trying to think one step ahead, predict what the nurses will do, what tests the doctor might order, what the lab results might mean.

Sometimes I fantasize about going back to school, enrolling in a post-bac program, then going to medical school. In a perfect world, there would be time and money for everything. But the reality is that medical training is expensive; more than that, it is grueling. It would be an absolutely enormous expense of time, effort, and money. Maybe it would be worth it, but maybe not; maybe I wouldn't be able to master chemistry and physics well enough for the MCAT; maybe I would be so terrified of patients and procedures, so worn down by lack of sleep and high-pressure situations, that I would drop out. There is no way to know unless you do it, and doing it requires that same kind of certainty I felt when I was fifteen. I haven't felt that certainty about anything in a very, very long time.

I think the story of my twenties will be one of indecision, of trying on careers and lifestyles in my head in a game to figure out what my best fit would be. I've changed my mind so many times in the last few years I hardly trust myself anymore to make any decision. A month ago I convinced myself that I really wanted to go to law school; now I have rolled back around to MFA programs and writing; occasionally I still even debate getting my master's in music. Medical training doesn't allow for this kind of waffling.

But for now, I'll enjoy it while I can, even on the fringes. Bring on the splinters and the scrapes and the tummyaches; I'm more than happy to do what I can.

Back From Another Hiatus

2011-07-15T16:47:00.000-05:00

Towards the end of the school year one of my students found my blog and recognized that in one of the entries I had written about her (not by name, of course). She wasn't upset - not at all - but it sent me into a terrified shame-spiral so I shut my blog down until the end of the school year, mostly because I didn't want other students to read it.

Now that I'm halfway through my summer, I'm feeling the urge to write again. A lot of things are going on in my life that are actually worth writing about.

For one thing, I'm leaving my job at Interlochen and Greg and I will be moving to Chicago at the end of the summer. The story of how this has happened is almost unbelievable. Greg and I have been in tight financial straits for the last year; he's barely making ends meet at the winery and I certainly don't make a whole lot wrangling teenagers. I immensely enjoy working with students and I love Interlochen, but by the end of the year, a number of things were making me feel burned out. I was beginning to feel the same way I felt at the end of Greenwood last year - a stinging certainty that I was "done" with the place, no matter how wonderful it is. I firmly believe that no one should be burned out while working with young people, because students need you to be positive and invested in what you are doing for them. I was very worried that I could find little to look forward to about the coming school year; yet I couldn't fathom leaving with no assurance that I could find another job, let alone one with benefits, and afford rent in a new place. Plus, I had already signed my contract back in March, and the last thing I wanted to do was sour my relationship with a place that has given me so much.

Then, at the end of June, Greg got an incredible job offer. He wasn't even looking for a job, but it came to him in the best possible way - someone noticing his talent and skill (in this particular instance, via the internet). The position is everything he wants in a career - flexibility, creativity, autonomy, and all with a company whose values and goals he shares. Plus - it comes with money. Enough of it that even if I didn't find a job, we could still get by. Even in a city like Chicago or Seattle, the two places we were considering moving to.

Leaving Interlochen was still a difficult decision. Earlier in the summer, trying to figure out a "cure" for my feelings of stagnation, I had applied for a promotion within the residence life department, and was invited to interview for it the same week Greg learned about his opportunity. I was weighing predictability, a higher salary, excellent benefits, and security against - what? The desire to live like "a real adult," as I put it in my conversations with friends? My family all thought it would be smarter to accept the promotion and stay. My younger friends, perhaps indicative of the difference between generations, all thought I should go for it.

In the end, it came down to my sense that this may be one of the last chances I have to take a risk and enjoy living somewhere stimulating. I don't have many responsibilities right now, but next fall I'm determined to be in grad school, and by the time I finish that I will be almost 30. Greg and I will probably be thinking about kids by then. I want to live with my fiancee, in our own apartment, in a world-class city. I want to be somewhere with opportunities for me to play the instrument I love. I want to be back in a sea of people, with a job that I can leave behind me at the end of the day.

If nothing else, my job this summer has confirmed for me that this is the right decision. I'm working as a nurse's assistant at one of the camp infirmaries at Interlochen, and I'm really enjoying it because it's so very different from what I've been doing for the last two years. I love interacting with kids, and I love not having to be the one directly responsible for any of them. I love solving simple problems like a scraped knee, and I love not having to deal with the messy ones like "My roommate makes fun of me behind my back." I love having a stimulating workday with truly interesting professionals that are not my own age, and I really really love being able to leave at the end of my eight hour shift and relax with Greg. No one will knock at my door, no parent will call with a concern, no co-worker will text me with questions. I can drink a glass of wine and sit out on a deck and enjoy quiet.

In a best-case scenario, I would really like to find a job in Chicago that involves working with kids, whether it be in a tutoring situation or in an after-school intervention program like Head Start. I think my issues with my job this year had very little to do with my students and everything to do with living where I work. I would be happy to work in an office job, or maybe even retail if I was selling books or something, but I really do love young adults, even when they make me want to tear my hair out, and ideally I want to continue helping them help themselves.

Running in Place

2011-04-25T15:48:00.002-05:00

This year, many of my great colleagues will be moving on from our (crazy) job here to bigger and better things. One of them got a full ride to grad school for higher education. One of them will be earning his master's and working as a residence hall director at a university. One of them will be teaching in South Carolina with Teach for America. One of my closest friends decided, rather late in the game, to apply for creative writing MFA programs and got accepted to Alabama, one of the best (and best-funded) fiction programs in the country.

I am truly happy for all of them, but I'm also envious. I am staying here for a third year. I think I'll be the only third-year person working here. I recognize all of the benefits of staying, but I can't help but worry that I will feel stagnant; that I am stagnant.

In a couple of weeks I'll be celebrating my 25th birthday. Part of me feels like everything is happening too fast. There's still so much I want to do, and I can't believe 25 years are already gone. But when I think about how much I've changed, how much has happened, and all of the things I've done in only the last five years, I get a better sense of the span of time. I am very different than I was when I was twenty. I have very different expectations for myself - and of other people. It makes me wonder where I will be when I'm 30, what I will be doing.

At least I know who I'll be doing it with. In terms of day-to-day life nothing's really going to change, but next year Greg and I will be super-busy planning for the next few years of our lives together. In addition to planning our wedding for June of 2012 (tentatively), we're going to be applying to grad school together. I'll be applying to MFA programs and M.A. programs in creative writing. He'll be applying for a master's in higher education/student affairs.

The strange game of MFA programs means you need to apply to as many as possible. I will only apply to programs that have a 75% chance or better of offering full funding with an acceptance, and of course I can only apply to schools that also have higher ed programs (preferably with funding, too). Right now that list looks like:

Iowa
Iowa State
Minnesota
Kansas
Alabama
Mississippi
Miami
West Virginia
Southern Illinois
Oregon State
UMass Amherst
DePaul (M.A.)
Tennessee (M.A.)
Western Washington (M.A.)

Initially I was going to also apply to one higher ed program, just in case I don't get in anywhere, but I'm sort of not seeing the point. I know what I want to do, and it's not higher education.

So a lot will be happening...it probably just won't feel like it. That's what I have mixed feelings about.

***************************************************************

Some of my students put together a film titled Nipplediebstahl ("Nipple Thief"). It's...pretty special.
I asked one of them, "Is this what you do instead of your homework?"

He said, "Pretty much."

A Whole Lot of Rambling about Engagement

2011-03-05T16:49:00.000-06:00

So a lot of things have been going on in my life recently. I suppose the biggest thing is that I am officially (whatever that means) engaged to Mr. Greg Brown.


What passes for an engagement photo when you have literally no money

This is a big life event that most people treat as hugely important, but for us it didn't really feel like that big of a deal. We've known for awhile that we wanted to get married; it was just a question of figuring out when. It's funny, I never used to believe stories about how someone "just knew" after one date that they had met the person they were going to marry, but honestly, about two weeks after Greg and I started dating I had the feeling that this guy was my future husband. It's so much more than just loving someone. It's knowing that this is a person you can work with, that he is the one I would want by my side if we were traveling around the world or dealing with a tragedy. He said he felt the same. We started talking about it this past summer after we'd been dating for about eight months, and then having more serious discussions this fall.

In fact, we had more or less settled on summer of 2012 as the earliest probable date of a wedding and decided we would probably get engaged sometime this spring. I wanted to use one of my mom's rings as my engagement ring, so when I was visiting her for Christmas break we discussed it. My mother said, "If you know you want to get married and you've got a ring, it sounds to me like you're engaged. Why wait to announce it?" Meanwhile, at the same time, Greg was visiting his family and mentioned to them that I was picking out a ring. His family took this to mean OUR SON IS ENGAGED and told everyone in his immediate family. When we got back from our respective vacations, we decided we should just go ahead and "go public" while we still had control over the information. So I told my family and close friends and then we made it facebook-official.

So there's no romantic proposal story, there's no unveiling of the bling (although I do like my ring and might post a picture of it later), but it feels right. I would have felt uncomfortable if Greg had just decided for both of us that we were ready to get married. I like that it was our decision, the first one we made together about our future. It feels like a good stepping stone to our marriage.

What has been difficult to come to terms with, at least on my part, is reconciling my desire to be an independent, self-sufficient woman with the knowledge that I'm now engaged at 24 and will probably be married at 26. Up until very, very recently, marriage was not something I ever thought about or imagined for myself. I was not one of those little girls who dreamed about her wedding. I used to judge people who got married in their early twenties. I honestly figured I wouldn't even want to think about getting married until I was past thirty, if ever. A tiny part of me feels like this engagement means I'm a failure as an independent woman, even though this was my choice; it's what I want.

I can't fully explain what's changed, but so much of it has to do with the kind of relationship that Greg and I have. I am the most indecisive and neurotic person I know - I agonize over everything. Just last night I worked myself into a frenzy over whether or not I should host a showing of a movie for my students in our lobby or in another building. But I have no doubts or indecision about being with Greg for the rest of my life, if we are both lucky enough to live a long time. I can't think of a situation I wouldn't want him to be there for, good or bad. I am absolutely certain that I want to raise a child with him (eventually....waaaaay down the road). There is a peacefulness attached with this decision that I have not felt about anything in a very long time, if ever.

So here I am, engaged at 24. There are a lot of things we still have to figure out - next year is going to be a frenzy of grad school applications, and the thought of planning a wedding is super-intimidating to me, but the bottom line is that I am happy, and Greg is happy, and our families are happy, that we are moving to this next chapter of our lives together.

Some of my students are happy, too. Many have offered to be flower girls, while one of Greg's favorites wanted to be the best man. I told him it might be better if he did a reading, since Greg has two brothers. His response?

"Awesome. I'll do something from the Vagina Monologues."

2011-01-19T19:06:00.002-06:00

Things I Need to Do:
- Research summer jobs
- Update resume
- Write cover letters
- Research writing conferences to see if I can find one that doesn't cost 10,000 dollars, housing non-inclusive
- Write for said writing conferences

Approximate Hours of Desk for the Last Three Days:
- 11 1/2

Things I Have Done While At Desk:
- Browsed facebook to try to determine, once and for all, how many people I went to high school with who already have or are currently growing children
- Drooled over pretty weddings at websites like 100layercake.com
- Read back essays of Bill Simmons on ESPN
- Solved 3 crossword puzzles
- Made a to-do list that I have crossed nothing off of, except the things I did before I wrote the to-do list just so I'd have something to cross off to make me feel better.

Yeah. 2011 has not gotten off to the best start. Part of it is because the campus decided to self-destruct and I've been dealing with a rash of bad decisions on the part of my students. Part of it is because all my days off this week got sucked up by the aforementioned stuff or the weekend's semester party. Part of it is because I have a bum finger. But today I told my boss that I'm officially not going back to Greenwood, which means I need to actually find another summer job. This is proving to be much more work than I anticipated.

THIS WEEK.

2011-01-15T12:27:00.002-06:00

SUNDAY: Notice pretty significant pain in finger, but decide to just take Advil and see if it gets better. Hang out with colleagues at staff house. Decide it would be a good idea to drink a bottle of wine all to yourself. Watch a colleague have almost three bottles of wine to himself, then several shots of rum. Laugh as he discovers Eggo waffles in the freezer and uses them as "chips" to scoop out his "dip" from a can of vanilla frosting with an undetermined expiration date. Friend then discovers a bag of taco cheese and a bottle of hot sauce. "Waffle Quesadillas" are born.

MONDAY, EARLY AM: "Waffle Quesadillas" decide to make another appearance. All over the bathroom sink. And the bathroom floor. And the living room floor.

MONDAY: Hangover. Finger pain much worse. Devour a handful of Advil and Imodium. Must roll out of bed to work and tutor a student for his history exam. Since most of what the student needs to do is read and he has major focus problems, come up with the brilliant idea to lock him in the office for two hours. It fully fills the outline in, or else it gets the hose again.

MONDAY PM: Student approaches you at the desk casually and hands you a piece of paper on which is written "What do I do if I'm suspicious of a drug deal happening?"

MONDAY PM, CONT'D: Interrogate student. Student decides against giving more information. Bang head against wall.

TUESDAY: Big Ugly Meeting to discuss how to handle Monday's incident. Discover you will have to get up at 7:30 A.M. for a whole day of Big Ugly Meetings on your only day off this week. Meanwhile, middle finger now immobilized with pain. Go to nurse's office for finger splint, then go to library to tutor student. Student fails to show up. Bang head against wall.

TUESDAY PM: Finger pain worsens. Discover that temperature is 99.7. Nurse suggests "you should try to get out of whatever you have to do tomorrow and go to the doctor." Bang head against wall.

WEDNESDAY AM ("Day off"): Rise at 7:00. Finger on fire. Pull student from class. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Big Ugly Meeting #1. Room search. "Those cigarettes aren't mine." Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Big Ugly Meeting #2.

WEDNESDAY PM: Drive to doctor. Wait. Wait. Wait. X-Ray. "You probably just bumped it, but it might be the start of rheumatoid arthritis." Fingers taped. Prescription NSAID. Walgreens. Wait. Wait. Wait. Return to campus just in time for roving shift traded a week ago. Afterwards, Big Ugly Meeting.

THURSDAY: Meeting, meeting, meeting, DISCOVER THE ENTIRE STAFF HAS BEEN FARMED OUT FOR TWO HOURS OF DATA ENTRY. TWO HOURS OF DATA ENTRY. Meeting.

THURSDAY PM: Just before the desk shuts down, student runs out into the hallways, throws himself on the floor screaming and flailing. Think he is having a seizure, but it's just a fit. Like the kind a toddler throws. Talk to student on floor for half an hour. Call student's parent. Walk student to health office to spend the night there. Go to bed around 1 am.

FRIDAY AM: Get a phone call and discover a very sick, intoxicated student. Watch student vomit EVERYWHERE. Go to ER with student. Get put in a room that looks like a garage and smells like vomit. Spend five hours in ER. Return to campus. Two of your students are going home for awhile. Cry. Cry some more. Bang head against wall.

SATURDAY: Get up at 7:30. Meeting. Meeting. Work. Lunch, where your boss points out to you that you have been wearing your sweater inside out all day. Work. Throw party you have been planning for your students all week. Just as you set out food and prepare to have a good time, student comes out of room. "I just threw up." Student throws up again. In the hallway. Then on the floor of her room. Several times. Go to health department to get items with which to clean and learn that another student is being drug-tested there.

Bang. Head. Against. Wall.

New Year's Resolutions

2011-01-01T15:52:00.001-06:00

In keeping with tradition, I've been thinking about what I want to accomplish this year. While 2010 wasn't a bad year, I didn't accomplish very much, and I would like to change that. Here's a few of the things I've come up with:

1) Focus on my health more. For the last couple of years, I've kind of let my IBS dictate a lot of my decisions. I'm on a ridiculously strict diet, which has helped a lot, but I still have frequent pain and I let my anxiety over that pain overwhelm me. This year I would like to get a referral to a gastroenterologist and really get to the bottom of the problem; I'd also like to go back into therapy for my OCD, as this often paralyzing anxiety stems from the same place. Working with a psychologist in high school was extremely helpful for me, and for a long time I really didn't need it anymore. But I think it would be helpful again. I'd also like to keep making yoga a bigger part of my life; it's made a huge difference in the way I feel.

2) Start saving money. I've been doing well in the last year or two in that I've been able to make ends meet, make payments on my credit card and car and student loans, and not have to ask my parents for money. Now I'd like to start putting some of it away to save for grad school, or a vacation, or maybe even (gulp) a wedding somewhere in the next couple of years.

3) Write every day. I went through a loooong dry spell this fall after I got back to Interlochen, and only recently have I started writing again. It's hard to do it when no one is checking up on you, but I have to keep doing it.

All of those things are relatively uncomplicated. A less straightforward, but no less important goal, is to be more like the person I want to be. That means being less aloof and self-absorbed; that means muscling through the days I feel sick or irritable with more stoicism; that means talking to other people more and really listening to what they have to say; above all, that means being a better surrogate parent to the students that are under my care. Sometimes I can tell that something's wrong, or that there's a question I should ask, but I don't do it because I'm tired and don't want to deal with the consequences, or because I'm afraid the student will take offense, or because I think that they might not like me if I'm asking a hard question or calling them out on a behavior. That's the thing about parenting: it's confrontational. You have to ask the hard questions, because you're the only one who can.

I know that I'm not really a parent to these students, but I am a caretaker, an educator, a potential mentor. I think I do a good job of being their friend, and of giving them advice when they ask for it, but what I need to get better at is being that person who addresses a problem when they don't bring it up; who can give them what they need even when they don't necessarily want it.

Those are my thoughts on the cold, brutally windy day before they all start trickling back into the dorms and a new year and semester start.

On Christmas

2010-12-24T23:09:00.000-06:00

I always associate this holiday so strongly with my childhood. My Christmases as a child, even through high school, were always magical and wonderful and fun and filled with warmth. I have so many wonderful memories of decorating the tree, listening to Christmas music, going to holiday parties, wrapping presents, opening them. But my fondest memories are always spending time with my family. Thanksgiving was our big, extended family holiday, so often on Christmas Eve and occasionally on Christmas Day it was just the three of us. My parents and I were such a close family, and we really enjoyed spending time with each other.

Since my father left, the holiday has been different. I always feel like I'm doing it wrong, but of course it has nothing to do with that - our lives have changed, mine and my mother's, and now there's only two of us, and she is terribly, terribly depressed. Why should we put up a tree and pile it with presents or cook a big meal if there's just two of us? Since 2004 we've sort of ignored Christmas. We get Chinese. We go to a movie. By and large, we spend it by ourselves, staving off memories.

But I still love Christmas. It's not fun anymore, but I want it to be. We drive down the street and I look at the lights, the trees and the piles of presents I can glimpse in people's houses, and I do feel an ache. I have such fond associations with this holiday. I console myself with the thought that one day I'll have a family of my own to have Christmases with, and Mom can be a part of them, and we'll both be happier for that.

But for now, it's hard. My mother is just so sad. When I am here I think she tries to hide it, but it's just window dressing, a fragile covering over crumbling remnants; her depression colors everything in her life. She doesn't eat, barely cleans, hardly takes care of herself. I thought that after my dad crushed her hopes a second time, she would finally be ready to move on, but I think her heartbreak is worse now than it has ever been at any point in the last six years.

I can't believe that one year ago, my father was coming to visit us; that she was entertaining the hopes that they would reconcile. I was not so optimistic, but I had let myself be swayed that he was finally at least going to get out of the unhealthy relationship he was in. I can't believe I had dinner with the two of them, spent time with them almost as if it were old times; but there was still so much that was wrong, you can't just sweep the past under the rug, and meanwhile there was the horrible specter of Judy's crazed anger over everything in the background. It was not a happy time, but there were worse times to come shortly after. My mother had her heart crushed twice. Now I'll never be able to think of Christmas without thinking of that memory, too.

I have much to be grateful for in my life, but when I'm with my mother all I can feel sometimes is anger, at Dad and at life, at God even, for dealing her this deck at such a point in her life and for making her so constitutionally incapable of meeting it. I fear that over the next few years she'll founder, slowly decline, and then get cancer or some other illness that will be absolute hell, and on her deathbed she'll be calling for my father.

I know this is how life works, you get older and you deal with the fact that your parents are getting older and will eventually die; but you hope they have each other, or someone, to lean on, or the desire to take care of themselves, or at the very least the dignity of widowhood. Sometimes I think the worst part for Mom is the indignity of her situation. If Dad had died, instead of leaving her for Judy (not once, but twice), I think she'd be, mentally, in a better state. It's terrible but I think it's true.

I spent so much time mourning for myself in the last few years, but I think I'm finally at a point where I'm mostly done with that. Things still hurt if I dwell on them, but I try not to. Truthfully, the first 18 years of my life don't even feel like mine anymore. They are so different from my present I barely recognize them. But I cannot stop mourning for my mother. She lost so much more than I did.

I know this is not a happy Christmas essay. Christmas, as I've said, is not such a happy holiday for me these days. I have hope that it will be again in the future.

If anyone out there has taken the time to read this, whether you are a believer in God or not, I would appreciate a prayer for my mother. For her spirit. She's a wonderful, wonderful person, and unfortunately the only person who doesn't realize it is her.

Last Day of Fall

2010-10-27T15:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we had a hell of a windstorm up here, and I guessed that it would rip off what leaves remained on the trees. So I braved the wind and went out down by the lake with my camera to try to capture the foliage. Greg and I took a few cute pictures of ourselves along the way.

The lake was really whitecapping. The wind was just unbelievable.

A Really Long Post about Life Stuff

2010-10-25T13:47:00.000-05:00

I write less and less often these days, and I guess I find that worrisome. So much of my life the past few years has been a desperate struggle with myself to figure out what I want to do with myself. And it feels so desperate even though it doesn't need to be. It feels like I'm running out of time, even though I'm only 24. I have a good job that I like. I'm probably going to do it for one more year. I have time. This is what I keep repeating to myself.

***

One of my students, aware that I was once a student here myself, was in the middle of a college-related breakdown and worried about her own future, when she paused and asked me, "I hope you don't get offended by this, but - when you graduated from here, did you really want to come back?" In other words, was this always part of my plan, or did I just take this job because I had no other options, because art school had failed to launch me into a career in the art world right off the bat. It was obvious that she was afraid that she would end up like me, back in high school after the four years of college that were supposed to take her as far away as she could get.

I had to think about my answer, and what I came back with was "Yes and no." Because what brought me back to Interlochen was nothing very simple. When I graduated, coming back here to work at some point in the future did seem like an attractive option, mostly because my year here was so whirlwind that I felt like I didn't get enough time here. But what I really imagined was that after four years of college I would go on immediately to grad school and probably go abroad and do all kinds of Important, Prestigious Things, probably related to music, but maybe not. When I started college, I never really spent any time imagining that I would join the young professional workforce after I graduated, especially for more than one year. I was certain I was destined either for grad school and then either an orchestra job or academia. I would never have imagined that I would be in my 3rd year out of college, still working an entry-level job in a field I never had much interest in, living at my old high school, and contemplating doing it for yet another year because I'm too damn confused about what I want to do next and in the meantime I need to pay down my student loans.

But this is what I had trouble explaining to my student: a lot of stuff can happen that you would never have imagined. I never would have anticipated my parents' terrible divorce and the financial implosion whose aftershocks I'm still feeling six years after the fact. I wouldn't have imagined being $40,000 in debt for a music degree. I wouldn't have conceived of dropping out of a graduate program I loved for purely financial reasons. My 18 year old self made her decisions based on the world she knew, and that world began to change dramatically during those first few weeks of college. By the time I was out of school and facing life as an adult, I was thrilled at the prospect of my current job. Health insurance! Benefits! Meals and rent covered in salary! I don't consider this "settling" for anything, though I guess young adults with big dreams for their artistic careers might see it that way. But if I hadn't taken this time after college to work, I wouldn't have this time to think about what I wanted. I wouldn't have had this time to grow, to observe, to learn without deadlines and midterms and research papers and recitals. I wouldn't have had this time to be more outer-directed and worry about the welfare of other people for a change. I wouldn't have had the time to learn to really manage my money. And I wouldn't have met the man who, in all likelihood, is probably going to be my husband someday. How could I possibly regret any of that?

***

For the last six weeks I've been taking a beginners' yoga class at a modest little place up the road from the school. It's perfect for me, because it's very low-stress, and the rest of the class is all made up of men and women over 50, which eliminates all the feelings of self-consciousness I usually get when I step into a gym full of young, fit people whom I assume must all be laughing at how slow I am on the treadmill. I'm kind of in love with it, in large part because the instructor is so wonderful. She's very patient and very good at explaining, demonstrating, and push-pulling us into the proper positions.

The session wrapped up last week and one of the other class members, an elderly man with serious back problems, suddenly became very effusive in his praise of her - "I can't tell you how much I appreciate you. This has just been so wonderful, and you are an excellent teacher." The rest of us joined in immediately (because she is), and she smiled and said, "Thank you. I love what I do, every day." He replied, "It shows."

It was a little moment that stayed with me on the drive home and throughout the rest of the day because he was right - she so obviously does love her job, and it makes her so happy, and her enjoyment of us helps both her and us have the best experience possible. One of the things I've really been struggling with in my career anxiety of the last few years is the sense that in order to really be successful I must do something prestigious, either artistically or something that's going to make me a lot of money. I'm slowly readjusting my expectations and trying to start viewing my possible career as something that doesn't have to make me famous or rich. Being a yoga instructor is not a particularly admirable or lucrative career by the standards of US News & World Report. But if I could find something that I enjoyed doing as much as she enjoys gently fixing my atrocious downward dog every week - how lucky I would be. I just need to find it. Or have it find me. Because really, we hear it all the time but I don't think most of us really take it seriously - isn't happiness really what it's all about?

A Primer

2010-09-27T18:20:00.000-05:00

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word "truth,"
can sincerely use the word "sincere."
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we're not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you're from Michigan.
It's like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy,
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there's a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
"Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball"
is how we might sounds were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn't ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. "What did we do?"
is the state motto. There's a day in May
when we're all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he's from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.
- Bob Hicock, May 19, 2008, printed in The New Yorker

I just love how perfectly it captures Michigan - so much of what I think of when I think of Michigan, my adopted home at the moment. It's not a perfect poem, but the heart of it is so true I can't help but smile every time I read it.

For most of September, Michigan has been cool, borderline cold, damp, drizzly, and blustery. The leaves are already changing. Everywhere there are puddles filled with acorns and pine needles and red-orange leaves, early departures. A few days ago I braved the wind and walked down to the lakeshore to look at the whitecaps.

Usually at this time of year, my favorite season, I feel waves of intense homesickness for Tennessee. But I've found myself really coming around to the beauty of where I am. Though I've always felt a great affection for Interlochen, Michigan has long been just another state. But Northwest Michigan is beautiful. I wonder why I never really appreciated it before?

Bedbugs

2010-09-21T14:45:00.000-05:00

Bedbug Summit Opens in Chicago

My freshman year at BU - this would have been about six years ago - my dorm room had bed bugs. They were in the wall between my bed and a bed in the room next door. Every morning I’d wake up to huge (half-dollar sized), painfully itchy welts all over my body - once I had so many on my neck that BU Health Services thought I was having an allergic reaction to something and sent me to the emergency room.

Getting rid of them was an eight month saga, not only because they are so difficult to kill, but because the university refused to recognize it was a problem. For a long time, no one really took me seriously. Their first response to my complaint was to spritz my mattress with something like bleach. I had to enlist the help of my horn teacher to get the university to even change the mattress. One maintenance man, even after seeing the bloodstains on my sheets, told me that my poor hygiene was to blame and I had probably brought fleas with me. The university kept insisting that with each halfhearted step it made, the problem should be remedied. They wouldn’t provide me with anywhere else to sleep.

Finally it got so bad that I was able to catch one scurrying over my sheets and I put it into a plastic bag, which I then left (along with a “bedbug facts sheet” with a large color photo that I printed off the web) on my building manager’s desk. This, combined with an angry letter from Daddy the Lawyer to the Dean of Students, finally got them to pay attention. My roommate and I, along with the two other girls from next door, were moved into a temporary apartment for two weeks while they fumigated our room. Then the university refused to believe that we still had bed bugs and we had to prove, again, that we were still getting bitten. We were once accused of lying about old bites being new ones.

Then their solution was to have us move in and out of our rooms every two weeks for several months while they fumigated the room again and required us to dry clean all of our clothes and sheets. Again, we had to get lawyers involved before they finally moved us into the temporary apartment for two months while they took out the wall between the rooms and did serious extermination. By the time we got into a bed-bug free room, it was April.

It was a nightmare, not only because I was afraid to sleep in my bed at night and was exhausted and itchy all the time (for a while I took to sleeping on the floor, but I still got bites), but because it felt like no one was willing to acknowledge that bed bugs could possibly be infesting a dorm room in such an expensive university. Even the doctors at the health center, for awhile at least, kept insisting that I must be having an allergic reaction to something, no matter how many times I told them I wasn’t using a new lotion/conditioner/body wash. Only the emergency room doctor got it right - he recognized bedbug bites right away. When I got back to campus after that hospital visit I told the building manager for the first time that my room apparently had bedbugs, and his response was something along the lines of, “That’s silly. Bedbugs are really uncommon and we’ve never had them on this campus.”

Now every time I see an article like this one, about the explosion of bedbugs everywhere in American cities, I kind of want to find that guy and punch him in the face.

MFA woes

2010-06-16T19:08:00.000-05:00

I have been in vacation mode since Interlochen ended - maybe even a little bit before Interlochen ended. I was doing a bunch of grad school research this spring but I sort of stopped around the beginning of May and haven't done much since. Yesterday I met with my old teacher at BU and, although it was lovely to talk to him, he made me realize that I still have so much work to do if I'm planning to apply to 10 schools in the fall.

I haven't even begun applying - I haven't even finalized my list of schools yet. But already the MFA stomachaches are outnumbering the M.S./M.Ed. stomachaches 3 to 1. For instance...just choosing the schools. I have it narrowed down to 8 now, from which I would like to pick 5: Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Iowa State, LSU, Kansas, Minnesota, and Mississippi. They all have pretty good funding and various pros and cons. They also all pretty much have slim chances of acceptance. Like, lower than Harvard Med School acceptance rates. It makes me nauseated thinking about Minnesota accepting 11 people out of over 400 applications. Iowa takes about 50 people, which sounds great until you read that they get, on average, 1700 applications per year. And the odds are worst when you want to write fiction. Gulp.

And then there's the writing sample. I have been going back and forth on whether I want to revise old projects or write new stuff or some combination of both. Right now I want to write new stuff, but I'm not sure if something I start now will really be in great shape by this winter. And then there's the question of stories vs. novels. I want to write novels, and 90% of the ideas I get or have tried to develop over the years are ideas for novels. Half the time, when I get short story ideas, I start to work on them and find that they are better suited for a fleshed-out novel. I don't think I write good stories. But I have never come close to actually finishing a novel (that's one of the reasons I want an MFA: I need help with learning how to build a novel). I have several finished short stories that I think would be okay after revision. So what the hell am I going to send these people?

Also, who am I going to get to write my rec letters? This is really bothering me and I don't know what to do. When I applied the first time around, I used an English professor from BU and my creative writing teacher (who was, at that time, an MFA student at BU) from my senior year, along with my mentor from high school. I don't really feel comfortable asking the English professor and CW teacher again because I didn't know them that well and the process was kind of difficult for them. My high school mentor would do it again, but I need at least three people, and the schools want people who are familiar with your writing. I am pretty sure I can ask the woman who taught my editing course at Lesley. But it still feels a little weird to ask for a recommendation from someone who teaches at a program that I'm leaving. In the same vein, I could ask my mentor from Lesley, but I didn't have a very good relationship with her and I honestly was not proud of most of the work I did for her; I'd be afraid that she would write me a lackluster recommendation. The only other faculty member at Lesley with whom I've had contact is the director of the program, who is amazing, but he's not actually familiar with my writing. So assuming I went with a teacher from high school, and my editing teacher, who would be my third person? The professors I was closest with at BU are all music professors who can't speak to my writing ability. Similarly, my current employers can't speak to my writing ability or my academic abilities. I have no idea what I'm going to do. I'm actually considering enrolling in one of Gotham's online writing courses solely for the purpose of having a third recommender.

I hate you, MFA programs. But I need you. This is such a twisted relationship.

It's Not Me, It's You

2010-06-04T23:18:00.000-05:00

This article really got me thinking about books I’ve tried to read and simply couldn’t finish. I am a speed reader (I just finished The Given Day, at 702 pages, in six days) and over the years I have developed a very useful ability to skim text and pick out essential information quickly. If a book is not very well-written, I usually resort to skimming, as in the end I am loathe to put down most books, even the bad ones. I guess I don’t like unfinished business. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I read last fall, has got to be one of the worst books I have ever spent time with, and I almost threw it across the room several times, but I still finished it. So what were the books that seemed to me so uncompelling and unrewarding that I eventually had to toss them aside? A few in particular are generally held in high regard:

1). 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I tried with this one. I really did. I’ve never heard or read anything about it that wasn’t a gushing, stellar endorsement, so when I got two-thirds of the way through it I found myself wondering if I was reading the same book everyone else did. I have read other books by Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera andChronicle of a Death Foretold - that I loved. But I guess I just didn’t get this one. It felt like far more work than reward. All that “magical realism” felt forced, the characters seemed wooden and all had the same damn names, and I just didn’t care about them. I got tired of trying to keep track of them. I realize this is one of the most highly-regarded books of the twentieth century, but I think for me it's going to be the most highly-regarded book that I just couldn't finish.

2.) Peyton Place by Grace Metalious. I tried reading this one last month. Considering that millions of people couldn’t put this down and it "captivated the nation" in the 1950s (according to the introduction, which I found much more interesting than the book itself), I found it very dull. After two weeks of trying, I didn't get past chapter three. I think reality TV must have ruined my sense of intrigue. Why wait for the slow reveal of sordid secrets when I can just watch Bravo?

3.) The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I should have known better because I hated Gatsby (though I did finish Gatsby). This was just too damn depressing for me, and I’ve read We The Living by Ayn freakin’ Rand.

4.) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. I would like to try this one again, maybe, because I was pretty young when I made the attempt, but I'd heard people raving about it. I didn’t find Holden inspiring or even relatable - just whiny and annoying. And that is a hard book to stick with if you happen to dislike the main character. Still, I guess I was pretty whiny and annoying when I was fifteen (which is the age I was when I picked it up), so I probably owe him another chance.

5.) Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. I cheated on this book - skipped a large chunk of the middle and just skimmed the end to see if the main characters lived or died, mostly because I was curious from a writerly standpoint. I think the problem with this one for me was with the pacing. It felt like it was moving too slow, and it wasn’t well written enough to really hold my attention. And again - I’m not lazy. It took three months and a lot of moments where I thought it was a lost cause, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t finish Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, upholding my personal promise to read every page at least three times. So really, I read Suttree three times. Mr. Frazier has no excuse.

6.) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling. Okay, no, I’m kidding, I read this in its entirety on the night it came out, from midnight to 6:30 a.m, and cried a lot. It's responsible for the only book hangover I've ever had.

BONUS ROUND, the book I loved that was pretty much universally panned: Until I Find You by John Irving. I have never read an Irving book I didn’t like, even his juvenilia, and although I still think his best novels are A Widow for One Year and The World According to Garp, I liked this one better than Cider House Rules or A Prayer for Owen Meany. Yes, it’s weird and too long and there's too much of an "I" on the page (It's painfully obvious that John Irving was writing about himself), but those are all things that I hold the editor partially responsible for; good editing, I think, could have remedied that. The important thing to me is that despite all its faults, I still couldn’t put it down. I cared about the characters. That’s all I ask for in a good book. I even read it again a couple years later and enjoyed it just as much as the first time. Which is more than I can say for a lot of books.

Blue Whale

2010-05-23T19:11:00.000-05:00

Today while I was packing I found a poem I wrote a couple months ago. I had completely forgotten about writing it, and after some heavy editing, I like it.

On my television screen,
men carve up the corpse of a blue whale.
It floated in with the tide,
brought miles from the depths it smoothly haunted
to rest, a monolith on milky sand.

Such is its girth,
the men are dwarfed by the hole they have cut.
They stand before their tunnel of flesh,
and I cannot even see the edges of the wound.
Just folds of red, slick, dripping,
slippery walls of a dark cave.
The muscles look like red velvet,
like the lining of a box my mother used to keep her jewels in,
smooth delicious pearls, icy diamonds.

They are searching for the whale's larynx.
The cavern holds the voice that thrummed in the deep.

We do not know much about blue whales,
my television tells me.
We may never know why they sing,
but this one might tell us how.

When they finally pull the precious item free,
it is dripping, gray,
an old Volkswagon, bathed in blood.

The men pose with their treasure.
I think about the whale, alive,
floating like a massive cloud above the seafloor,
and singing lonely melodies to its brethren miles away.

I will never know the secrets of a blue whale,
probe its life and death with my gloved fingertips,
as these men do.
I will never even see one.

Still, this whale makes me want to sing,
though I am alone,
and small,
and unable to glide through the world.

Summer Stuff

2010-05-06T17:53:00.000-05:00

May is always a whirlwind time of year for me. Or maybe it's just a whirlwind time of year for people who are in school; since I still work at a school, I'm on that schedule, and it seems like all of a sudden there's too much happening. It's also the month of my birthday. While that doesn't mean the same week of "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!! HEY! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" and parties that it meant in childhood, it's still a big deal in my head, because it makes me think more about getting older, and how quickly time passes, and how we have to enjoy every little minute, and where do I want to be in ten years, and OH MY GOD DID MY GRANDFATHER REALLY WRITE ME A $1,000 CHECK?

That's right. I'm rich. Not real rich, but rich enough that I can breathe a big sigh of relief about vacationing in Boston next month. Between that, my tax return, my salary, and a little bit of extra money I've got from playing with the local orchestra up here, I am going to be able to actually have a month off. I am renting a sweet apartment in Boston for the month of June, right across the street from a movie theater and Fenway Park. I am going to sleep in every day and walk around the city and spend hours at Starbucks reading the de la Grange Mahler biography vols. 1 -4 (I mean that; this is the summer I am going to do it. I have got to Vol. 3 in London and halfway through Vol. 1 last summer, but I was too busy to keep going. Now I'll have nothing better to do). I plan to relax and write a lot and enjoy my favorite city and the central air conditioning I was too poor to afford when I was in college.

Then I'm off to Greenwood for five weeks. I am less excited about that then I was in past years; it's going to be a little more work this summer, I'm going to be significantly older than most of the other staff, and I think right now, after an 8+ month gig living and supervising teenagers, it's hard to work up the enthusiasm about doing it with a whole new group of them in two months' time. But I know that after my lazy month in Boston I'll be looking forward to it, and I know I'll also be looking forward to playing more horn.

2010-04-08T14:00:00.000-05:00

After years of internal debate, I have finally decided what tattoo I am going to get, if and when I have the money and opportunity to get one from a high-end tattoo artist:

The Athenian Owl, used on ancient coinage, a symbol of the wisdom of Athena. Here it is in another version:

Do I have other things going on in my life right now? Absolutely. But clearly this was the most pressing issue that I needed to share with the internet.

My MFA Manifesto

2010-03-22T20:22:00.000-05:00

I love the MFA program I am currently enrolled in. Really, I do. I loved the residency experience. I can't imagine any program anywhere having a director that is kinder, more personable, and dedicated than Steven Cramer, the director at Lesley. The faculty are outstanding. I learned so much from just one semester. My colleagues are warm, open, and friendly. It's a 100% supportive and talented community.

So I'm withdrawing.

A year ago, I was anxiously following The MFA Weblog, waiting to hear from the programs I applied to, kind of wanting to kill myself because of the anxiety and the incredibly long odds and the expense of applications, and feeling just one overwhelming desire: to never go through this process again.

So I'm doing it again.

If you want to know why, keep reading.

A year ago, I was also living in a trailer in Tennessee with a broken-down car, mounds and mounds of debt, no social life to speak of, and a seriously broken heart. My job didn't pay very much, nor did it make me feel particularly useful (most of the time I felt like I was more of a hindrance to my father's practice than a help). The thought of being in an MFA program was literally my only lifeline. When I got into four programs, none of which could offer me any concrete funding, I convinced myself that funding didn't really matter. It had to be worth $10,000 a semester to have the experience of being a writer, of learning to navigate this world, to get feedback and improve and be part of a community and blahblahblah. It was not by any means an easy decision, but at the same time, I didn't have any other options, and I could not bear the thought of spending another year like the one I'd just spent, particularly with the agony of another round of MFA applications. And, like I said - I loved Lesley and knew it would be a good fit for me. It wasn't like I decided to go to an unattractive program.

Then, unexpectedly - after I had already accepted at Lesley and was just a week away from the first residency - one of my longshot backup plans kicked in when Interlochen told me they wanted to schedule an in-person interview. I had such a fantastic time doing the residency at Lesley that I was thrilled at the prospect of continuing to study there while still being able to work full-time at Interlochen. I thought it was a really fortunate coincidence that I would up attending the only low-residency program that I'd applied to.

Now, nearly ten months after I told Steven Cramer I'd be attending his program, a few things have changed. I don't know how I would be feeling if I was still living in Boston, eeking out a hand-to-mouth-two-part-time-job existence. But since August I have been living with a steady and stable paycheck. I have been living with a new car. I have been living with health insurance. I have been waking up in the morning to a job - and a life - that I love. I am in a happy, healthy, wonderful relationship. And I have realized that financial stability is important to me. After spending five miserable years worrying about money every single day, losing sleep at night over my debts, and feeling guilty for every latte on a sunny day or impulse buy at a bookstore, I absolutely refuse to go into one more penny of debt for a graduate education that does not have a high likelihood of job placement at the end of it. Which unfortunately means I have to say goodbye to a program that I really do love and would recommend to anyone without hesitation.

I've been debating for several months now about what to do next. I plan to continue to work at Interlochen next year, and I knew I wanted to use that time to apply to grad school again. I tried to decide if I really wanted to go through the MFA process again. If I missed music enough to get a degree in that again (and I do miss playing horn every day - particularly playing in an orchestra). I pretty handily ruled out musicology because I am much less enamored of academia than I was a couple of years go. I considered law school - have been considering it for a few years - but ruled it out because even though you do have the opportunity to make a lot of money as a lawyer, law school is ridiculously expensive, and deep down, I have no burning desire to be a lawyer. I like the prestige of it, I think I would like the challenge of law school, and the thought of (eventually) making tons of money is appealing, but all of that combined doesn't equal a good reason to go to law school.

The next thing that came to mind was the field I am already in - student affairs. The more I work with teenagers, the more I realize I really love it. In my current position, I get to experience and witness a few different kinds of jobs in education - administration, student activities, teaching, and counseling. The aspect of this job that I enjoy the most by far is counseling. I love helping students solve problems, I love listening to them talk about how they're discovering the world, watching them make decisions and learn and mature, and helping them through that process. I think I could work as a school counselor and not view my job as something to be endured five days a week.

But at the end of the day, if I ask myself what I really want, what I really feel possessed by, and what I can never stop doing even if I wanted to (there have been so many times where I've wanted to), it always comes back to writing. Ever since I was a child. I love so many things and am interested in so many things but the only thing that has ever felt completely necessary to me is writing. Writing, reading, editing, teaching about writing...my dream life would include all of those things.

So I decided to try again. This time I am going to really do my homework and only apply to programs (I'm thinking five or six, seven at the most) that offer either full funding or a 75%+ chance of full funding to their students. Which means that my odds will be long and dismal and I am basically asking to get punched in the face by everywhere I apply. I don't care. If I am not funded, I will not get an MFA.

Because my odds really are absurdly low (most of the fully funded programs have admissions percentages lower than Harvard, Harvard Med, Harvard Law, and Harvard Business), I am not applying solely to MFA programs next year, either. I am also going to apply to a few master's programs in school counseling with funding opportunities. I would enthusiastically attend a counseling program if I don't get into any MFA programs, and the great thing about an MFA is that there's no optimal time to get one. Plenty of people attend these programs when they are in their 40s. I can keep applying for my whole life. I'll certainly keep writing my whole life, even if I'm never published.

So there.

Dusting off the Cobwebs Again

2010-03-13T18:56:00.001-06:00

Occasionally I take long breaks from this blog. I get distracted, or I feel like I'm too self-obsessed and long-winded and who the hell really cares about my grad school angst, right? Since I started working, working at a for real job with for real responsibilities, I've also been less inclined to write. But I do miss it, and the truth is...I'm starting to have grad school anxieties again. BUT! I'm not going to write about them yet. If there is anyone out there who is still interested in reading my musings, I'm going to try to write more regularly again. With that, here's the roundup of things on my mind:

- I know I just said I have a for real job with for real responsibilities, but it does not in any way resemble a normal 9-5 existence. For instance, as I am writing this, I am "at work." Right now that consists of listening to two kids sing gospel music in the lobby while observing another couple of kids try to figure out how to work our desk telephone (asking themselves, "Ohmigod, how many Asians does it take to work a phone?"). A little while ago a kid brought up a napkinful of cookies baked in our downstairs kitchen and said, "If you want you can have a cookie. They're not that good." (Off my look) "I mean, they're not bad, but there was kind of an accident." (Pause) "Anyway, you can have one. Just don't expect it to be great." Poorest bit of cookie salesmanship I've ever seen. I love this job.

- This really freaks me out. Two bodies were found in the woods across the street from a hardware store in Gatlinburg that I've been to about a thousand times. The bodies were there for eight years. I can't really grasp the fact that for seven years or so there were two murder victims just a short stroll from the place where my family and I went to buy windshield wiper fluid. Every year the city of Gatlinburg puts up a big, cheery Christmas light decoration just yards from that embankment where the bodies were found. It's just eerie. Especially because Gatlinburg doesn't have a lot of murders. Hillbilly kitsch, inappropriate t-shirts, and beer guts, yes; bodies, no. There are three times as many Ripley's establishments in that city as there have been murders in the last thirty years.

- Now I just had to tell two opera singers to stop belting out high notes to test the acoustics of the hallway outside my dorm. Again, love this job. Happy to be doing it for another year starting in September.

- Oh, how I agree. I've felt like this for years.

Soon I will write again about my grad school/life stuff/writerly angst. But it's best to warm up with something light. Like unsolved double murders.

2009-11-26T13:07:00.002-06:00

This is the first Thanksgiving I've ever spent away from my family, excepting Thanksgiving 2006, when I was in London. When we finally got the students packed and out and the campus shut down on Monday afternoon, I felt oddly melancholy. I had been waiting all month, really, for the beginning of Thanksgiving break, and as the week progressed it began to feel unattainable - how could we possibly pack up 400-something children, how many more exasperated sighs and whines and "don'tworryI'lldoittomorrows" and "whatdoyoumeanmybathroomisn'tcleans" could I possibly hear? But then they were FINALLY gone, it was FINALLY break, and instead of feeling happy about it I felt kind of depressed. I eventually figured out it was because I wasn't going to be with my family.

Thanksgiving, not Christmas, was our big holiday. When my parents were still married, we used to alternate hosting it with my aunt and uncle, and since the divorce my aunt and uncle have been hosting it every year. It's a big enough deal that when I came back from London, my aunt made Thanksgiving dinner all over again so that I could eat it with my family. Some of my favorite childhood memories of my family are from the various Thanksgiving celebrations in either Boston or Gatlinburg.

Nevertheless, I perked up the moment the train rolled into Chicago. What a city! Skyscrapers shrouded in fog and endless lanes of glittering lights. I am spending the holiday with one of my dearest friends, I'm in love with her neighborhood, and I'm still getting to help cook Thanksgiving dinner.

As I sit and reflect on what a year I have had, and what lies ahead for me, words only do so much to express how thankful I am for the opportunities that have come my way and the people in my life. I am grateful that I live in a place that is incredibly beautiful; I am grateful that I have a job I love; I am grateful that every day I get to laugh with some of the brightest and most talented students I've ever seen; I'm grateful that I have charming, entertaining, and supportive colleagues; I'm grateful for my health, my parents' health, my friends' health, and I pray that the coming year will continue to bless me and those I hold dear.

I raise a glass to everyone today: Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-10-05T23:02:00.004-05:00

I have really been struggling with my writing lately. Both in terms of what I want to write about, and in terms of actually summoning the focus to sit down and do it. Not a good thing for someone in a master's program.

I also haven't really been reading lately. This, for me, is quite literally unprecedented. I can't remember the last time I wasn't in the middle of a book. Usually I'm in the middle of several at once. In a normal month I plow through six or seven. Since I've gotten here in late August, I haven't read any new books. A few short stories; I wandered through the early part of an Anne Sexton biography (quite good, actually; it wasn't the book's fault I stopped reading); I jumped around a T.S. Eliot anthology; but other than that, nothing. And I have no real desire to read. It's the absolute weirdest thing I've ever experienced. I was starting to feel afraid that it will never come back to me, although of course it will, but still - it's a little bit like losing my sex drive. Perplexing to say the least. And how can I write when I have no desire to read?

What's funny is I have a friend here now with whom I discuss books and literature and writing almost nonstop. I have talked more about books in the last two weeks than I've spent reading them in the last two months. We talk about all these wonderful things related to wordsmithing and I feel a bit like a fraud. He just loaned me David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and tonight while killing time at desk I read a few pages.

That was all I needed to know that no matter what I'm feeling now, it's still there. It's never going to leave. Not just my love of reading, but my love of words, my love of language, of beautiful prose, and of that moment - a perfectly rendered detail - when you think, yes, oh yes, this is how it is. I don't feel like much of one at the moment, but I'm still a writer.

I'm still a musician, too. All the neuroses I had related to horn has just been transferred to the pen and paper now. Horn does not stress me out anymore. I love playing it more than I ever have before. Practicing used to be the bane of my existence, and now I look forward to it every day. Perhaps it's because I know what I'm doing now - I know how to solve problems, I know how to fix things, and I have the wisdom to know that nothing is going to get better rightthisinstant.

Of course, it helps if what you're practicing is Harry Potter. And Star Wars. And E.T. Hard horn parts, make no mistake, but the biggest challenge is going to be keeping myself from smiling while I'm playing it.

Conversational Highlight

2009-09-29T22:04:00.003-05:00

"So, my roommate and I have a problem."
"Okay."
"Like, today, I came in to my room to take a nap...my roommate was gone, and my suitemates were gone, too. Well, when I woke up, someone had like, gone to the bathroom. Like, you know. And then they didn't flush."
"Okaaay."
"So it wasn't me. And it wasn't my suitemates or my roommate because they weren't there. So someone must have like...come into my room."
"Was your door locked?"
"No." (Blank look). "Like, can you do something about this?"

Institutional Parenting

2009-09-19T18:11:00.002-05:00

I love my job.

How many people can say that?

But it's not really a job. I think that's why I love it. All of the things that feel like a job - filling out forms, answering the phone, sending lots of emails - are not things I love. What I love is watching kids jam on ukeleles in the lobby. The conversations I have. Helping them solve problems. Feeling USEFUL is the best thing in the world, and so rarely have I ever felt truly useful in any other job I've had so far in my life. I mean, ushering is a utilitarian position - it's "useful" to take people to their seats - but you're not imparting any lasting life skills further than teaching someone the layout of a concert hall. Being a librarian is useful in the institutional sense, but again, you're not doing anything more than finding music for people. Working for my dad last year, I had a sense of how useful he was - but I didn't feel particularly useful as his secretary. One of the things that attracted me to a potential career in law was the knowledge that attorneys - at least some of them - can really solve problems for people. This is why I have enjoyed working with kids in the past, and why I'm loving it now. These kids are fantastic. They are smart, talented, motivated, quirky, and exceptional in every sense of the word.

Of course, they also make me want to tear my hair out a little. They challenge everything (which is healthy); they ask "why does it have to be this way?" and the onus is on me to come up with a worthwhile answer. I feel like I have to come up to their level; I also have to hold them to my expectations. So every day is a different challenge. Sometimes I'm a judge, a mediator, a tutor, a shrewd bargainer, a big sister; sometimes I'm a mom.

Ever since the kids arrived, I've been having trouble falling asleep at night. The end of every day I take stock of my girls and can't stop worrying about the choices they've made, the problems they're having, the ways I can (or can't) help them. Last night, it dawned on me that this must be part of what parenting is: you lay awake at night worrying about them.

2009-09-10T14:04:00.004-05:00

Today at our school's meeting, a professor played us a video of a performance by Laurie Anderson. The piece is called "O Superman." It was, at one point, #2 on the British pop charts, but that's not the point. It was written in 1981.

It was also performed in the week following September 11, 2001. You would think, listening to the lyrics, that that is what it was written about.

I'm not much for interactive blogging, but I suggest you do something today, or perhaps tomorrow. Play this video, but don't watch it; just listen to it. In another window, at the same time, watch this video with the sound off.

After eight years, it is hard sometimes to remember what it felt like on that day. What we lost. How everything changed, even for those of us who had never been to New York or didn't know a single person who lost his life. Today, for about ten minutes, listening to Laurie Anderson's piece, I remembered. And I realized how important it is to remember, painful though it is.

Another New Beginning...Again

2009-08-31T12:49:00.003-05:00

That about sums it up. I've moved around so much in the past five or six years that I always feel like I'm starting something new every few months or so.

This really is a new beginning, of course. My first "real" job. Thankfully it's not in an entirely unfamiliar place, but one of the things that has been brought home to me during my training this past week is that I am going to change the way I think about things. I'm fairly professional in my day-to-day life, but I have to be careful what I write about on here with regards to my employer and the kids that I'm working with. I am a writer, of course, and when I think stuff is interesting I want to write about it, so I may just not be writing as much. I may have to change the tone of my blog. I don't know yet; I'm still thinking about it. I guess it's all part of that growing up thing.

I am really excited for the students to get here, starting tomorrow evening - though I'm also a little bit terrified. I keep worrying what if they don't like me, what if I do something stupid, what if I catch somebody snorting cocaine on the first night (not that that's likely to happen, but...discipline is scary for a pushover like me), etc. Then I remember the absolute insanity of trying to shepherd seventeen twelve-year olds through the inauguration disaster and I feel better because nothing that happens here could possibly be as challenging as that experience.

The one thing that has been a downside to all the excitement of the move and the new job is that it's really easy to forget that I'm supposed to also be doing quite a bit of writing. This is the challenge of a low-res MFA: you have to make the time for it. Right now I'm not managing that time so well. At all. I've been suffering from writer's block, or perhaps just plain laziness; I'm not sure. I'm just finding it very hard to sit down and concentrate on any writing at all. My mind wanders off and I feel restless. Perhaps things will settle down once I get into a routine here, but I have a big submission due next Monday and I'm only about a third of the way done. And I have no time off this week because it's opening week. Starting to get a little nervous...

It Would Figure...

2009-08-24T20:05:00.002-05:00

...that right after writing a lovely paen to the city of Boston, Michigan would welcome me with a spectacular sunset and moonrise.

Though I was sad last night when the staff went out to a bar and nobody in the bar cared that the Sox lost to the Yankees, I may just find reasons to smile in Michigan yet.

Playing Poulence with Pretty Good Kids...

2009-08-20T22:06:00.001-05:00

2009-08-17T23:42:00.002-05:00

I'm thinking a lot lately about being useful in a "counseling" role. For instance, this scenario: a girl is upset because she finds out that other girls have been ridiculing her because she's overweight. What do you say?

We always say the same thing in this situation. God knows I got ridiculed enough in school, for all kinds of reasons, and I always heard same variation on the same thing: the people who are making fun of you do it because they are insecure. Think how bad they must feel about themselves to tear another person down like that. They make fun of your weight/acne/bad breath/personality because deep down they are afraid that something is wrong with them.

But the thing is - and we all know this - that advice is pretty much a lie. It's not categorically a lie. We make fun of people for a variety of reasons, we're mean for a variety of reasons, and one of those reasons is definitely because we want to detract attention from ourselves. When people manufacture vicious, untrue rumors, insecurity and self-loathing do play a role. But nine times out of ten, that's not the whole story. The reason that meanness is funny is because there's always a grain of truth to it. There are a million things about a person that you can select to mock, and the ones you inevitably select are the most noticeable - the tendency to spit while talking, the muffin top over the jeans, the hyena laugh, the dandruff. How many times do you titter over some truly awful jab and say, "Oh, God, that's so mean, but it's so true!"

We all go through life pretending to ourselves - that the acne isn't that bad, that no one will notice those discolored teeth. Even self-deprecation is a form of denial. If I can make fun of it, it can't be that bad. The reason that teasing hurts so much is (usually) not because other people are mean. It's because it brings home those unpleasant truths about ourselves in a way that we can't deny.

And we all know this. I knew this when I was eight years old. When people made fun of me and I sought consolation, only a few people ever had the guts to be candid and say, "Well, it's true that so-and-so is really mean, and it's awful that she said that, but have you ever thought of wearing makeup?" or "I'm sorry that she said that, it was terrible of her, but you have to admit that you talk about your infatuation with this guy all the time and everybody's tired of it." I hated those people then. I thought they were completely unsympathetic. But the funny thing is that, nowadays, those people are the only ones whose opinions I take seriously.

My only philosophy in "counseling" teenagers (or friends, or anyone) is be honest. I don't want it to have an asterisk by it. But I realize there must be mitigating factors. I'm curious if anyone has any opinions on this - how would you handle this kind of situation?

My First Love, My True Love

2009-08-16T19:24:00.012-05:00

It would be hard to love this city more than I do. Walking around the harbor a couple of days ago only reminded me how much I love Boston, and how sad I am to be leaving it once again. That skyline is the only thing I have ever fallen in love with at first sight, and somehow my affection endures to this day. Though that initial infatuation may have been superficial - it was the first time I'd ever been to a city bigger than Knoxville - whatever it was that captured my imagination was only the beginning. The accents, the food, the sports, the buildings, the people, the history, the neighborhoods - the more I discovered, the more I loved it, and the more I was convinced that I had to move here. My only real goal in high school was to go to college in Boston. Even though living in Boston is entirely different from vacationing there, as I discovered during my tenure at B.U. When I visited Boston during my childhood, I only ever saw the landmarks, downtown, Quincy Market, the Pru, the Public Gardens. I'll never forget how dismayed I was when I landed in my new neighborhood.

Allston-Brighton is definitely not tourist-friendly, and at first I hated it. But Allston is where I started knowing Boston as "home." Now I love Allston nearly as much as I love Brookline or the Back Bay or Cambridge. Now, after over four years of bitching about the weather and surreptitiously flipping off T drivers, after two World Serious championships and the NBA finals, after countless nights at Symphony Hall, after trips to just about every famous landmark and many not-so-famous ones (like the Boston Stone), I have to say that my relationship with the city of Boston is the most consistent, stable, rewarding, and least-complicated relationship in my life. No other city that I've ever been to - not even New York, not even London - tops it in my book. Boston is mine, and I belong to it. It's killing me to leave it again.

Really...what's not to love about a city with a building that tells you the weather forecast?

Oh, Hail to the Greenwood

2009-08-13T19:47:00.003-05:00

So another year at Greenwood has ended, which means I can return to non-furtive use of the internet. It was nice to take a break from technology and play lots of horn. I got to play, among other things, a movement of the Poulenc Sextet, the Mozart Horn Quintet, the Carter Wind Quintet, and Schubert's Unfinished Symphony this summer, not to mention the premier of Nico Muhly's piece Motor Music. The kids, as always, were fantastic - they blow my mind away not only with how well they perform, but with how much they support each other and form such an enthusiastic community for five weeks. So what if they occasionally get rowdy at mealtimes or forget to clean up after themselves - they more than make up for it when it counts.

Of course, the summer was somewhat hampered by the fact that it was winter. At least, winter enough that it rained more than it didn't, I had to ask my mom to send me extra sweatshirts, I ruined two pairs of shoes in the mud, and I only went in the pool three times the entire summer. This is apparently the ideal breeding condition for mosquitos. And that's an understatement. I have never been bitten so much in my life. I lost count of the bites. I was popping Benadryl in order to sleep. I'm pretty sure I developed anemia. I'm sure I'll be developing malaria or possibly West Nile sometime in the next few weeks, but as long as it waits until my new health insurance kicks in, we're good. Also, fun fact: several days of heavy, soaking rain brings certain things to the surface of the earth in search of new homes. Certain things that need breeding space. Certain things that decided my bedroom was the perfect place to get it on:

In case you can't appreciate it from the picture, that winged beast is the approximate size and weigh of a schnauzer. At least it was when I found it in my bed, along with several playmates.

But aside from adventures with insects (and, by the way, this summer I also rekindled the charming old pastime of drinking a beer and watching a bug zapper - better than the Fourth of July, particularly when the bugs are Greenwood-sized), Greenwood was an achingly good time, and I'm sad to leave it.

I am slowly recovering from blood loss in Boston for the next two weeks before I move to Michigan at the end of the month to begin in my official capacity as a residence-life professional. I am excited and also a little bit terrified. During a particularly stressful day at camp last month I remember reminding myself that G-wood was only five weeks long, and then realizing that I was going right back into the same job for nine months. But the good thing, I guess, about working with teenagers is that even when it's annoying or stressful or frustrating or exhausting, it never feels like a job to me. If I can get paid to do what I enjoy, I should count myself lucky. And I do. At least until they start throwing food at each other in the cafeteria.

Happy Campers

2009-07-14T18:34:00.003-05:00

I love Greenwood. It's gorgeous and there are great people, and great kids, and general wonderfulness. But I would like to have one meal...just one...without having to watch something like a teenager attempting to wrap a burrito around a second burrito.

Paradigm Shift

2009-06-23T19:52:00.003-05:00

I came home this evening and realized I did not even know what day of the week it was. I had to ask my roommate.

Four days. It's really only been four days of this residency, and what an experience. They say people hit the "Tuesday wall" and I guess this is something like it: all I seem to want to do is sit, slack-jawed, exhausted, and in some mix of disbelief and awe. Last night I went to bed at 9:30. That's the earliest I have gone to bed in years. I was that tired. And I still have four days to go.

Really, I am writing this for myself, to try and articulate some of the things I've done and what I'm thinking about during this whirlwind adventure, so unless you want to get deep into my head and the inner workings of Lesley University's M.F.A. program, go ahead and do something better with your time.

Saturday seems like eons ago. Saturday was when I learned that I am not as conversant as I should be in literary terms, nor am I used to examining a given piece of writing at the close level it really deserves. Saturday was an introductory workshop, which was helpful, and then a class on character development with Rachel Kadish. Rachel talked about how her stories and novels are all character driven, that she knows the characters so well that they create the stories for her; she said that an author must know her characters to such a level that they will know the answer to every conceivable question about them; that this leads to a veracity in fiction that keeps people reading. During that class I realized I couldn't really answer too many questions about the characters in the story I submitted for the workshop, that I had created them more to serve a purpose I had in mind; this would have major consequences for me on Tuesday. She also had us go around the room and write down a statement we found offensive: "I enjoy rape," one boy wrote. I wrote "Only idiots still believe in God." Then we had to write monologues from the point of view of a person who would say that, and make them sympathetic. Interesting exercise.

And Saturday afternoon Brian Bouldrey taught me that I have to read much more seriously, slow down, notice every word and the acres of meaning that lie beneath it. The seminar was "Reading as a Writer." I thought I knew how to do that. I was wrong. My ignorance confounded me. Saturday night I heard Leah Hager Cohen read an excerpt from her book, some of the most lyrical, beautiful writing I've ever heard. It made me slink down into my seat with awe, awash in her control of the language, and think, I want to write like that. Will I ever be able to write like that?

Sunday I still felt like myself. A slightly stupider version of myself, but myself nonetheless. Until I got to Anita Riggio's seminar. It was called "Finding True North" but it should have been titled "Giant Mind-Fuck." That's what it felt like. "You'll probably start crying," the older students warned us. "Or you'll want to just get up and leave the room." Right. Anita brought tissues and warned us the same thing; she said we'd be doing meditation and free-writing exercises. Right. Well, she was right. For three and a half hours, without a break, we did some of the most intense writing I've ever done. She read a list of words and we had to write down all of the ones that had significance to us; words like "pine" and "crawlspace" and "bacon." Then we had to choose seven that had resonance; then three; then one. She had us close our eyes, relax, and imagine a scene that took place behind that word. All these words and images were deeply personal to us. Then we wrote, for twenty minutes, without lifting a hand, without stopping the pen, without reading or correcting, as fast as we could; handwriting became a scrawl, deteriorated as the words flew too fast to even think about them. It was truly stream-of-consciousness writing, writing whatever was in my head, and it became so emotionally staggering that people really did start crying while they were doing it. When it was over, we talked about it a little, and then did another one; we visualized ourselves (in great detail) meeting a younger version of ourself; we were told to begin writing with our younger self saying, "This is what I want you to know." Another twenty frenzied, hypnotic minutes of writing. It was frightening, exhilarating, weird, and painful. We briefly discussed that experience, then did another one: we were to visualize ourselves in the body of someone significant in our lives, down to the last detail of their bodies ("what have these hands held? what have these lips kissed? what have these legs run away from?") then start writing as they tell us: "I always meant to tell you this." Twenty minutes in that person's head, their soul; I did start crying over this one, but kept writing. We finished, we discussed; we did a final one to wind down, but after it was over I just felt...well, mind-fucked. I wouldn't call it therapeutic, though some people did. It was emotionally exhausting. All of the first-semester students went to lunch with a very shell-shocked expression, and the older students were sympathetic. Everyone takes this seminar; it is, in a sense, the seminal seminar of the program.

That would have been enough, on its own, but that afternoon was the workshop. My piece was workshopped. Oh, my hubris, my ease with what I thought was a mostly finished story. My silly expectations of rave reviews from my intro to creative writing class at BU. I was reminded of my first lesson with Eric, when I slowly realized, holy shit. I know nothing about this at all. What an experience, to sit silently for over an hour while a published writer and six other serious writers express their confusion and frustration with my creation. To realize that what I had in my brain was not what got put on the page. That every word has consequences. That I have been lazy, that I have not given the characters or the sentences the attention they deserve, that this is much, much harder than I realized. I did hear encouraging things; no one was mean; and I did not want to run out of the room crying at the end. But I did feel, as things progressed, amused and humiliated and frustrated and then ended, shaking my head: holy shit. I know nothing about this at all. But, as I said, I've felt this before, just not with writing. And at the end, my mentor said, "You should know that if your piece is generating this much discussion and argument amongst us, it's because you've really got something. It's an issue of execution." I hope she wasn't just being nice, but it doesn't strike me that "just being nice" is a reason that anybody at Lesley does anything.

Despite that - and despite the encouragement and great discussion afterwards from my workshop group - I couldn't bring myself to go to the optional evening activity. That day was too intense; I did come home and drink some wine and cry, but I guess it's important that even as I cried from feeling overwhelmed, I still didn't want to stop. I wanted to come back the next day and do it again.

So I did. If Sunday was Mind-Fuck Day, then Monday, yesterday, was Guru Day. I walked into my morning seminar, "Making a Scene" and the clouds parted, the angels descended and sang: I have found my Eric Ruske of writing. She is sassy, black, and I'm pretty sure she's a lesbian, but she is the Eric Ruske of writing. I realized this about ten minutes into the class when she had already offended a couple of people with her blunt, categorical statements about the truths of professional writing, and then said, "No matter if you go on to write for a living or work in a hospital, I treat every one of my students like they will be professional writers. If you are my student, when you leave here, you will have the tools to be a competent writer."

Some of the other students did not like her; she is, like Eric, a polarizing figure. She does not bullshit; she is not interested in excuses; she says things that make people uncomfortable; she has a healthy dose of egotism. But everything she says is right. She really pissed off some people when she said, "Listen, everything in writing comes down to action. Dialogue does not make a scene. Nobody remembers dialogue." Wait, some students said; dialogue can make scenes. I've read lots of scenes where dialogue made a really strong impression. "Quote it," she challenged. "Quote me some dialogue passages." And of course, nobody could. I thought back through all my favorite novels, some of which I read every year; I couldn't remember more than a single line of dialogue. All I could remember is what happens. There were many incidents like this as she dragged us (some of us kicking and screaming) through the basics of scene. By the end, I was a little bit in love with her and also terrified of her.

But! I got to spend another three hours with her that afternoon, because she is the other coach of my large group workshop! It was awesome. Everything was teachable; we had long, serious discussions about elements of fiction. I really don't know how to describe her except in terms of Eric Ruske. She's certainly not like other members of the faculty; she's much more opinionated, she's much, much tougher on her personal students and requires that they do twice as much work as the program officially dictates; she is one of the few fiction mentors who is willing to take on a student with a plan for a novel (most of the others think it's beneficial, at least in the first two semesters, to focus on short stories to generate a strong body of work). She treats everybody, no matter what their skill level, like they are going to make their living from it, so she pulls no punches. After the entire day with her, I am bound and determined to work with her, if not next semester than my third semester and my thesis. My new life plan is to follow her around and see if any of her particular genius rubs off on me.

It was intimidating, and uplifting; but still, I skipped the evening reading, went home, and went to bed at 9:30.

Today was "Wall Day." They make the schedule lighter on the fourth full day because apparently that's when everybody starts to lose it a little. So we had a great seminar this morning that was like a survey course on writing for young people. Some of the people didn't like it, but for me it was interesting because the line between YA fiction and adult writing is pretty slim, and I learned a lot about picture books and kids' books that I didn't know. Best of all, it was a little like revisiting old friends. Thought I certainly read now with a greater appreciation of literature and a greater love of language and skill than I did when I was in elementary and middle school, I don't feel the same way about books as I did for that period when I was like 9-14. I loved certain books with such fierceness that it really felt like they belonged to me, were written for me specifically; maybe it's because that was the loneliest time in my social life and I often felt like books were the only places I ever wanted to go. I read at the dinner table and in the bathtub and at recess and in the car. I remember books like Maniac MaGee and A Wrinkle in Time and The Giver and Chasing Redbird as more than just books; if anyone insulted them, I'd probably take it personally. And one of the YA authors confirmed that today; she said "This age group, when you write for it, is probably the only age group in which you can really affect a life profoundly."

Then I met with my mentor. Whom I do like, despite my rhapsodizing about Sassy Black Eric Ruske. She seems interested (as everyone does) that I came to this from a background in classical music, but she also considers that a strength. I was frank with her about my newly-realized shortcomings, and she seemed pleased that I was thinking about things. We talked briefly about the idea for a novel that I have been working on, and though she still wants me to stick to generating new short stories while I'm working with her, she also has some interesting ideas about it. She also said she wants to mull over my semester reading list a bit more because she wants to figure out who my better influences might be, which I thought was nice. Overall, I'm looking forward to it; I think I can work with her and learn a lot, and she seems very dedicated to teaching well.

The I.D. fair was this afternoon, and since I'm already doing an editing course I didn't go to much, but I did go see one of the faculty do a performance piece wherein she read excerpts on Japanese culture and played shamisen. It was fascinating, and I marked myself as a freak when I started asking questions about tonality and notation; the writer kind of didn't know what I was talking about. So I didn't learn a whole lot about shamisen, but it was a cool thing to hear.

I went out with a drink for some of the M.F.A. ers, who I am getting to know better and most of whom I like immensely. Tomorrow is another full-length day, a seminar and then in the afternoon another workshop with (the chorus swells) Black Sassy Eric Ruske and my own mentor, then an evening reading. And three more days after that left to go! The fun doesn't stop.

Final observation...all this has taken place under oppressive clouds and rain. I don't know if Boston is ever going to see the sun again. I don't know if I'm ever going to break out my summer clothes. I hope it doesn't do this during Greenwood, or it's going to get intolerable out there very, very quickly.

Lovely Lesley

2009-06-20T21:00:00.002-05:00

I can't believe it's June 20th already. In a week I go to Interlochen for my marathon please-please-please-GOD-hire-me interview, and a few days after that I go to Greenwood. The blog will likely darken then, since Greenwood is in this shapely hills of Cummington, which boasts among its many attractions a distinct lack of internet access.

My tenure at Pops ended last Thursday, which puts an end to my accounts of craziness there. My last two shifts were pretty quiet, except for the night that I'm calling "Walker-Fest" 2009. The general populace of Symphony Hall is old, but most of these people were seriously old. Like, too old to really be alive. Too old to reach the bathroom of the appropriate gender if it's too far away level old. I felt really awful for this one decrepit man who came out near the end of the second half to go to the bathroom. It took him five full minutes just to make it out the door to the ladies' room with his helper. Then he was in the bathroom for about fifteen minutes. When he came out, it was right in the middle of a piece that involved a cast stalking the aisles, so we couldn't let the poor old guy back in. He had to stand there on legs that probably stopped working correctly sometime when Reagan was president until these young, spry actors came bounding out of the hall. Double cruel.

It was only comical because we had a literal nest of walkers and wheelchairs piled three deep outside of both sides of the hall. Half of them didn't have names on them, and of course we didn't have the foresight to keep them separate or organized, mostly because there was no time to do so - there were that many people in DIRE need of assistance pouring into the hall. Blind people, people missing limbs, and sooooo many people inching along on walkers. (Interesting, though: no seeing-eye dogs. Is it bad that I kind of wanted to do an experiment involving a seeing-eye dog and one of the tennis balls that stoppered the bottom of the walkers, a la' Up?)

After the show ended we were there for a full half an hour because it took that long to figure out which mobile assistance device belonged to whom, and then get the severely old people out at approximately 1/8mph. But they were all nice, at least to us, so really I just felt sorry for them. People always say that getting old is better than the alternative, but there are some levels of age that I don't want to reach.

Yesterday I moved on to less comical, but much more interesting things - my first residency as an M.F.A. candidate at Lesley. The last two days have been a mixture of terrifying, inspiring, and exhausting. One thing I like about the residency is that its briefness requires a level of intensity that I've never experienced before. Usually, when a semester starts, I lay back a bit, get a feel for the class and the professor before I start offering my opinions. But I realized today that I can't do that; these are one-shot seminars, and if I have something I want to say, I have to say it. I have to focus and make observations, no matter how tired or intimidated I feel, because there will be no time to do it later.

I've also realized that although I'm a voracious reader, I've never really been a "close" reader. I zip through things quickly and rarely study them closely. Today we looked at stories like Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" and a work of Grace Paley's - brief stories I read in less than a minute or two. But there were so many things I never picked up on, they had a level of depth that I couldn't fathom and that blows my mind. In lengthier, more involved works, like Alice Munro's "A Wilderness Station," the task becomes even more difficult because the prose is so rich. I wouldn't say that I am a skimmer, but I think I'm lazy sometimes in that I can innately pick out what's "important" - salient points that move the narrative forward - and not pay nearly as much attention to the rest. Great for textbooks - not so great for fiction. Great fiction operates on a couple of levels, and realizing how it works and why it works the way it does is something that I desperately need to improve upon. I feel even more bumbling because so many of my classmates have backgrounds in English or creative writing, and are much more accustomed to the vocabulary and the deconstruction of pieces. I always thought of myself as very literate, but this is at a different level. Luckily, I expected this. Plus, I'm used to taking apart pieces of music now, but that used to be a fairly daunting task, too, so I know I will improve. A big part of the distance-learning semester is writing craft annotations, so that will be immensely challenging and helpful.

Everybody seems like wonderful, friendly people, very non-competitive, and very interested in each other's lives and work. It's a real melting-pot scenario, all kinds of backgrounds and ages. I'm in love with the faculty so far, the most important part. I had three seminars today, all very different, all very fascinating. Tomorrow I have another, and my first workshop - in which one of my pieces is (eeek!) being taken apart. I've been through it before, at least, and I do look forward to hearing all the different reactions and suggestions people have.

Final bonus so far of Lesley...tiny campus. TINY. It is the anti-BU. Some of the other new students were saying how afraid they were of getting lost, and I had to laugh because it's literally four buildings, in one quadrangle. Not seven long blocks with four lanes of traffic, a river, and a dangerous streetcar running down the middle. Love it!

2009-06-17T15:57:00.002-05:00

I try to be nonjudgmental. With mixed success. People do things that enrage me, or have opinions beyond my rational comprehension, but I try to shake my head and laugh about it, because it's not my job to go around converting people to my way of view. I kept the same patient smile for my scientologist co-worker who tried to convince me that the drugs and therapy that helped me with my OCD for four years are a self-perpetuating scam and the friend of mine who likes to make fun of my own religion. Put yourself in other people's shoes, yada yada yada. I generally reserve my scorn for T drivers and people who wear Che Guevara T-shirts.

BUT. I am passing judgment now, because the two young people who sit out by Harvard Ave with two skinny dogs and panhandle for hours every afternoon PISS. ME. OFF. I don't care what's going on in your life, kids. I don't care if you're sad because nobody will subsidize your pot and hair dye habit.

"Can you spare some change for the dogs?"

Newsflash, Einstein: DOGS DON'T NEED MONEY. DOGS NEED YOU. If you can afford to spend three or four hours a day in front of Tedeschi's smoking packs of cigarettes, drinking bottles of Arizona iced tea, and somehow find the time and money to pierce your entire face and dye your hair electric blue, you've got time to WALK your dog, you've got money to FEED your dog, and you have time to GO AND GET A GODDAMN JOB. There are way too many homeless people in this city, people in legitimate need of help, people with terrible problems, who need my spare change. Somehow the way you smirked at me over that bottle of tea and pointed to that poor sleeping animal enraged me.

I swear, if I wasn't crashing in someone else's apartment right now, I would have just offered to buy the dogs and take them home with me.

2009-06-13T22:33:00.004-05:00

All I want to say about tonight is that the woman who runs events for the National Lipid Association (that's right; I guess "National Globules of Fat Association" was too long to fit on the brochures) needs to get the lipids out of her ass. I have never seen someone from a VIP group be such a complete bitch to just about everyone who helped her put this together. The woman who does event management for the BSO told me she had been calling her for four months to ask random questions like: are the chocolates on the dessert platter more chalky or do they have a gooey and moist quality? Also, would it be possible to order platters of food from Whole Foods and just have your staff serve them to us? What about the tables? How much food can go on the tables at one time? (Our tables, by the way, are about the size of your average nightstand). She flipped out at about seven important people tonight, including my boss.

On the other hand: Navy Night means lots of young, buff, handsome men in cute uniforms. So things could have been much worse.

Bizarre what with who?

2009-06-12T22:23:00.002-05:00

As I came to the stage door tonight, I did a double take, because I could have sworn Andrew Zimmern was hanging out by security a couple feet away (if you aren't familiar with him, he has a show on the Travel Channel; basically his shtick is that he eats lots of weird stuff that most people wouldn't consider, like cockroach popsicles). But after debating this I couldn't come up with any conceivable reason why Andrew Zimmern would be backstage at the Pops.

But low and behold, before Stars and Stripes Keith introduced him and they let him conduct. I guess he was filming a segment for a new web series he's producing. Pretty cool. I just watched him eat goat testicles the other day and now he's hanging out at my place of employment.

But before Keith introduced him all we saw was his name on the timesheet, so we had no idea why he was there. Another usher and I were tossing around ideas. Maybe, she thought, he was going to come out onstage and eat something weird. Then we tried to come up with weird Symphony Hall-related foods. I suggested that he should have to come out onstage and swallow the fact that we routinely throw away FULL BOTTLES OF SEVENTY DOLLAR WINE.

Thank you. I'll be here all week.

There Really WAS a Glowstick Memo

2009-06-11T23:26:00.005-05:00

Every time I think my job cannot get more absurd, it exceeds my expectations. I swear, I am not making any of this stuff up.

Tonight the Pops celebrated the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and MIT's role in that event. Even though the anniversary is actually next month, we look for any excuse to have a crazy party. The theme tonight was....SPAAAAAAACE.

Buzz Aldrin made an appearance to read something profound between movements of The Planets. I guess it was profound; I couldn't hear any of it because I was busy...wait for it...scouring the hall for his wife and stepdaughter. That's right: We lost Buzz Aldrin's family.

How did this happen? I have no effing clue. I guess they were supposed to get an escort to their table, but there was a missed connection somewhere down the line. The show started and they weren't where they were supposed to be. Someone from MIT was freaking out. My boss was freaking out. At one point ushers were going down the aisles looking for a lady "wearing a jacket with a patch on it." Which might have been a feasible plan of action except that since SPAAAACE is very dark the hall was pretty much pitch-black.

The wife eventually managed to find one of us to help her find the stepdaughter. I guess the stepdaughter got lost on the way back to the bathroom? Even after intermission, we had no idea where she was. I think the freakout was pretty high on the totem pole before somebody finally found her; not knowing where she was supposed to sit, she just found an empty seat in the hall. USHER FAIL.

Not that I minded looking for Miss Aldrin that much; it spared me from dealing with The Woman Who Wanted to Get Buzz Aldrin A Diet Coke. This woman, whom I guess was from MIT, made me want to tear my hair out and I didn't even have to say a word to her. She was furious because the waitstaff could not immediatelyrightthissecond get Buzz Aldrin a Diet Coke. "The man landed on the moon and you can't even get him a Diet Coke!" she berated everyone within twelve feet of the kitchen. The whole time the staff was scrambling around for it she just bitched, at top volume, to no one in particular; it was like she was giving some kind of public service announcement. "This is unbelievable. Do you understand that the man who was just onstage, the man who walked on the moon, wants a diet coke right now, and you can't get it for him in under twenty minutes? I just can't believe this." She was incensed when somebody asked her what table he was at. I guess she just wanted the damn drink magically teleported into his hand. The funniest thing was that later she came out and apologized to me for making a scene. I was probably the only person on the staff who wasn't a direct victim of her supreme wrath, but I guess since I was wearing the vest I was just representative of all the incompetent staff at Symphony Hall. You'd think she would have been more pissed about that fact that at the exact moment that he wanted his Coke, we had no freaking idea where his wife and daughter were.

But the best part of the night, by far, were the glowsticks. I never would have believed it, but for one of the encores at the end of the show - "Imagine" - somebody came up with the bright idea of giving the audience glowsticks to wave around. That was funny enough. But, given the general way the night was going, it should come as no surprise that we managed to completely fuck up the glowstick procedure as well. As my supervisor Richard put it: "Someone didn't read the glowstick memo."

The waitstaff was supposed to pass them out on the floor near the end of the show, and the audience was supposed to crack them. But the waitstaff cracked them all before intermission and passed them out during intermission, so the audience had the glowsticks all during the second half. I thought my boss was going to lose it. I was told on good authority that Keith Lockhart was livid about the screwup. I thought it was great: kids were pretending they were lightsabers during Star Wars, adults were holding them up like they didn't quite know what to do with them, the waitstaff had the extras in their pouches so their crotches were neon blue. We put them in our hair and our bowties. It was like the lamest rave ever. I defy you to watch 2,500 people - mostly elderly -waving around glowsticks to the "Howlin' at the Moon Sing-Along"* and not piss your pants laughing.

And frankly, I'm surprised nobody thought of using the glowsticks in the search for the Aldrin Family.

(*This would have been funny anyway because the audience didn't really know the lyrics to any of them. "Moondance?" Come on. Nobody knows the lyrics to Van Morrison songs. Not even Van Morrison.)

All the Ingredients for Awesomeness

2009-06-06T09:32:00.002-05:00

Swollen, infected cheek that allows me to move only half of my face (smile like a stroke victim!) and causes incredible pain whenever I speak: CHECK.

Pounding headache well into its second day (possibly from locking my jaw to avoid pain from the above item): CHECK.

Youth orchestra concert in two hours: CHECK.

Gospel Night at Pops: CHECK.

I. Need. Drugs.

What just happened?

2009-06-03T13:51:00.004-05:00

I don't know if it was a full moon or what last night. But things were batshit crazy at Symphony Hall last night. I didn't think this week would be as bad as last week. I even managed to snag first balcony, which usually means low-stress evening.

It was a Harvard Reunion Night for the classes of 1949, 1954, and 1960-something, first off. Usually this is bad news. I know Harvard is the best university in the world or whatever, but they can never manage their events correctly. They held a huge banquet in the Cohen Wing before the show, and when my supervisor went down ten minutes before the show started, he found out that the caterer was so behind they hadn't even been served dessert yet.

Meanwhile, two groups from nursing homes in the greater Boston area were also coming in. I guess their buses were delayed or something getting here. Anyway, it was five minutes before the show was supposed to start and the balcony was still 75% empty. That was when I started to get a bad feeling. My usher sense was tingling.

What happened was that the banquet got out and the buses arrived at the same time. They were all supposed to be on first balcony. So this army of old people started shuffling up the stairs and off the elevator just as the lights started flashing. It was like the night of the living dead (we had a walker at every single door). And no one knew where they were going. Which didn't matter anyway, because rule number one of seating old people is that old people are just going to sit where they want to sit. If you try to argue with them, they will say something about how they don't care what's on the ticket, they requested an aisle seat, and if the box office failed to give them one that's not their problem. They will tell you that they need to sit in the front row because they have poor circulation/need to move their feet around/can't go up or down stairs properly/fart uncontrollably/have spastic kidneys, and you, you pathetic little person in the pathetic little vest, you've never had to eat rocks in the middle of the great depression and they'll be damned if you're going to tell them they have to sit where their ticket says.

It also did not help at all that Harvard just gave out random tickets in no particular order, so that couples who have been married 60 years had tickets for opposite sides of the balcony.

It was chaos. Seriously. Our matron - the lady who hands out paper towels in the bathroom - had to come out and help us seat people.

Some of the highlights:

One woman could not accept that her seat was not an aisle seat. I would have just said "screw it" and given her an aisle seat, since there were 300 other people filing in at that moment, but

there was literally no aisle seat to give her, anywhere. I'm trying to explain to her that I can't just move somebody else so she can have the aisle seat, and she's yelling at me, the orchestra's tuning, and I'm starting to wish we were allowed to carry cattle prods, when some saintly couple sitting nearby took pity on me and the husband offered to move so that this damn woman could have the aisle seat. Thank you, saintly couple, because you freed me to deal with Insane Wheelchair Lady.

Insane Wheelchair Lady was asked if she could handle getting down a couple of stairs to her seat. She said sure. When we wheeled her up, she said, "Oh, I can't get down those stairs. That's out of the question." We're scrambling around trying to find a seat for her - it's a full house - and she comes up with her own solution to the problem. She's just going to sit in the hallway in her wheelchair and listen with both of the doors wide open. She couldn't comprehend why this might not work for us.

Then there was the woman who decided the women's bathroom was too far away. She just went into the men's room. The other usher was yelling at her, "That's the men's room! You can't go in there!" and the woman said, "At Brookfield we use unisex bathrooms all the time! You can't make me walk over to the other side! That bathroom is so far away it's discrimination!"

The whole night was like this. Even after the concert got out, there was this huge line for the elevators (walkers, far as the eye could see) and there was a big holdup because this one woman just refused to accept that the elevator was full. She kept pressing the button to keep it open. "There's room for one more!" she snapped, and all the other old people screamed at her "STOP PRESSING THE BUTTON!" I thought for a minute we were going to have a nursing-home smackdown. Finally the other usher bodily stopped her from pressing the button and the old lady wanted to know who our manager was so she could get her fired. Which might have almost been welcome at that point.

But my favorite anecdote of the night comes from the supervisor who went down to clear out the aforementioned Harvard banquet. Apparently there was one guy who was offended at the notion of being hurried. Richard (the supervisor), the guy's wife, and a young Harvard volunteer all told him the concert was going to start in literally minutes and that he needed to hurry.

"I'll get up when I damn well please," the man said. Then he reached over to the plate next to him, picked up a half-eaten piece of chocolate cake, and stuffed it into his mouth with his hands. Ladies and gentlemen, your Harvard class of 1949!

God only knows what's in store for the rest of the week.

I just think it's interesting...

2009-06-01T21:05:00.002-05:00

...that this story is not attracting the same moral outrage I've seen as the death of Dr. Tiller.

Both murders were "politically and religiously motivated."

It is never acceptable to take another human life. But I think it's interesting how we choose which deaths we become outraged over.

Not the Toast I Thought I'd Make

2009-05-31T20:34:00.003-05:00

One of the things I often write about, both here and in my private journal, is how much my life has changed in the last five years. There has been a line demarcated, September of 2004; everything in my life is either Before or After. It is just that so much I never could have anticipated has happened. My father left my mother after 40 years of marriage. We sold our house. His new girlfriend introduced herself to me via that letter I posted earlier. There were fights. My father kicked me out. And the biggest change is our virtual bankruptcy. Sometimes it does feel like I will wake up and find myself in my dorm room, freshman year at BU, and the entire last five years will have been a really warped nightmare.

Today my dad told me he is finally making plans to leave Judy. There is a strong possibility that he and my mother might get back together, though no one is really making predictions.

Not long after he told me he was leaving my mom for her, I used to dream of such a day. I used to pray for it, fervently, and offer up hypothetical sacrifices I would make in order to see it.

"I guess that's good news," he told me on the phone.

But the truth is that it is not good news. Of course it's not. Five years ago he made a choice, a choice that he decided was worth losing our family for. It has been five years of misery for me, for my mother, and for him as well. In the end it came to nothing but misery for everybody. And I don't care for the bromide that people throw at me, that in the end this was all for the better because I learned so much about overcoming adversity and how to appreciate the value of money. Bullshit. Bullshit. Whatever I have gained is not worth an ounce of what I lost. Whatever I gained in the hours I spent crying, watching my mother cry, fearing that my father would stop loving me, hyperventilating because I could not, despite my best efforts, get along with Judy, lying to my dad so that my aunt and uncle would cosign my lease - that is not worth even the value of one single minute with my family; it is not worth the value of one night where we could, all three of us, sleep without worrying about how to get the money to keep going for another day.

And how can one look back on the emotional roller-coaster ride of the last five years and realize that it all came to nothing? I'm sure Judy imagines that my mother and I are dancing in delight, but we weren't. I won't, ever. I am not happy. I am relieved - because clearly that relationship wasn't working and wasn't healthy. But I'm not happy that my father is miserable. I'm not happy that we went through all of this pain so that in the end he could say to us, "I want my family back."

But here's the thing: I love my father more than any other person in the world. And my mother does, too, no matter what we went through because of the choices he felt he had to make. We will always love him. We always want him to be happy. None of us can feel good unless we know the other two are happy, because we are still a family. The bonds are still there, because that's what family is about. Not pettiness, not jealousy, not grudges - but unconditional love, forgiveness, dedication to each other, and perseverance. These are the things my parents have taught me. These are the reasons that I suffered so much when they got divorced, and these are the reasons I somehow made it out the other side.

Whether or not my parents reunite, I just want them to be happy. More than anything, I want them to be happy. And I hope that Judy eventually finds happiness, too. We have all been through enough, and I hope I can move forward from this without looking back anymore.

Here's to the future.

The Crazy.

2009-05-27T22:42:00.002-05:00

I'm lucky. I have a decent job, a summer plan, friends (some of whom house me), family, and my health.

BUT. The crazy.

I had been planning to attend Lesley for my M.F.A. Right now I am still proceeding as if that will happen. Though my submission "deadline" for the June residency was technically yesterday. And I decided my second short story was awful about noon on Sunday. So now I'm trying to write something else that is not total crap a time frame that can realistically give me nothing but total crap.

Then Interlochen, who interviewed me for this position I desperately want, got in contact with me via email last week all "WE WANT TO DO A SECOND INTERVIEW COME TO CAMPUS ASAP BUT NOT DURING GRADUATION BUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!!" I emailed the lady who was supposed to be assisting me with this. Twice. Over a week passes in silence. Today I called her and she had no idea I'd emailed her. Then I discovered that "ASAP" actually means "End of June. Julyish." They had dates on June 22-24th, which is when I'm at Lesley's residency. Then dates on July 5th-7th, which is the first week of Greenwood. So two days after my residency finishes, I will have to fly to Michigan, interview, and then come back the day before I leave for Greenwood. I can deal with all of that because I really really want this job, but did I mention that flights to Traverse City are all over 500 dollars?

Then NYU decided to go ahead and accept me to their awesome master's degree program without a fellowship or assistantship, which I pretty much expected, but it still sucks a little because it would have been AMAZING to do this program and live in New York City for two years.

Also. Symphony Hall took it to a whole new level this week. Last night we had not one, not two, but three major medical events. This has, to my knowledge, never happened before. And they happened in immediate succession. Literally minutes after the first ambulance left, we had to call 911 again. Then while we were dealing with that situation, we had to call them back and be like, "Hey can you send another ambulance?" (I say "we" in the general sense, of course; they do not let me anywhere near somebody who needs competent attention, and thank God for that).

The first lady stopped breathing. In the middle of the world premier of John Williams' viola concerto. At a table in the front row, right in front of the soloist. So for virtually the last half of the piece it was chaos down front trying to get this lady out and get her oxygen. The ambulance took her, and then about five minutes later another women fell backward down the marble staircase and landed on her neck. While they were assessing her, another lady on the first balcony wasn't feeling so hot, didn't make it to the bathroom on time, and threw up all over first balcony left. Then she didn't stop throwing up. Apparently. Once they said "throwing up" I decided to leave early for the night. They took both of these women to the hospital in ambulances as well. I wish I could say they were all okay, and I assume they are, but I really don't know anything after that.

Meanwhile, John Williams, whom I love, has decided that since he's John Williams, rules don't apply for him. He has no problem ending concerts at 10:25, even though I'm pretty sure the union requires the concerts end at 10. Whatever! I'm John Williams, bitch!

And I leave you with this image: A very heavyset woman in a flowered dress, shuffling painfully and slowly towards the door, hunched over with the weight of her severe oldness. The background music: The Superman march.

I know I am going to hell. But. THE CRAZY.

A House Divided or a House Invaded?

2009-05-25T20:03:00.007-05:00

This is not a good time to be a Republican. I don't just say that because the Democrats have control of the executive and legislative and popularity for conservatives is at an all-time low. I say that because the party has no leaders and no direction. We are the party of no right now, because the only thing the party can agree upon is a general opposition to most of the current economic policies of the new administration. We hear over and over again that we must present viable alternatives in order to be taken seriously. We will not have viable alternatives until this debate about who is a "real" conservative finally ends.

Others have written about this internecine squabbling with far more eloquence than I; Rick Moran is one of them. This party problem is extremely troubling to me, as I am one of those moderate Republicans that would, if Limbaugh had his way, be cast out of the party completely as one who is not conservative enough.

This article, about a flap over Colin Powell's comments that the Republican party is having serious problems appealing to moderate, voices the conservative argument that the reason Republicans lost in the 2008 election was because we were too moderate and thus failed to present any real alternative to the American people. I have to almost laugh out loud when people make this argument. It's as if, in Rush Limbaugh's fantasy world, the only thing preventing people from voting for Republicans is that we're not offering them candidates who are Republican enough; as if he really, truly believes that most of America would have voted for a Republican in 2008 if only we had given them Ronald Reagan II.

Of course, the truth is, we could have dug up Ronald Reagan and run him as president with Thomas Jefferson himself as VP, and we still would have lost to Obama. Just like we could have bribed Hillary Clinton to switch parties and be our candidate, and still lost. And to me it's quite obvious that McCain's relative merits or demerits were essentially meaningless; this election was all about Bush, Cheney, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act, and the economy that unfortunately collapsed under the last few months of Republican reign. Obama's charisma and historic appeal were just the icing on the cake for the Democratic party. Now, I myself freely admit to admiring Bush the man, if not Bush the politician. Buteven I knew that so much of this election was about getting rid of Bush. Realistically, there was never a whole lot of hope for the Republicans in this election, and McCain probably was the best shot. As the absolute crucifixion of Sarah Palin should have illustrated to anyone paying attention, a truly right-wing, born-again social conservative "you betcha" folksy candidate was the absolute last thing that would win over most of the undecided voters.

Before the election, I tended to identify as an independent. Watching the way that the Democratic party is heading, I would like to go very far in the opposite direction, and would like to call myself a Republican. But I support gay marriage; I think abortion is a necessary evil; I do not think global warming is a completely fabricated myth; I'm pro-intellectual. To many other Republicans, this means I am a "RINO" and the party would be better off without me, no matter how I feel about taxes, economic policies, affirmative action, a national health service, or presidents who can fire CEOs of private corporations.

But a party in which there is no room for moderates and reasoned discussion is a party that will not survive. We may be on the verge of the death of Republicanism, or at least, its insignificance, for there will come a time when moderates like Colin Powell and Rick Moran will grow tired of being ridiculed and labeled pretenders; they will leave the xenophobes to themselves and forge a new alternative of their own. Libertarianism is the most convenient alternative, as it is closely allied with the right on many issues. But an entirely new party may spring forth, as the Republican party did in the era of Lincoln.

I'm starting to think that would be the best-case scenario.

It was a long night up on second balcony...

2009-05-21T22:09:00.002-05:00

Me: "Okay ma'am, your seat is right here, F10."

600-year old woman: "WHAT? THAT'S NOT RIGHT. YOU'RE WRONG."

Me: "No ma'am, this is your seat. I promise." (I promise? Jesus Christ).

600-year old woman: "NO, NO, THE TICKET SAYS 28 C."

What I want to say: "Oh, I'm so glad you caught that. Did you go to usher school? 'Or: "Well, if you're going to tell me where the seats are, you're the one that has to wear this stupid vest, not me."

Me: "Actually that means second balcony center. You're in row F, seat 10."

600-year old woman: "WHAT? WELL, WHERE'S MADELINE SITTING?"

Me: "I don't know (i.e., have the slightest fucking clue) who Madeline is, ma'am (because there are 40 elderly women streaming into the hall at this very second).

600 year old woman: "SHE'S OVER THERE. I HAVE TO GO SIT NEXT TO MADELINE."

Me: "Ma'am, the show tonight is sold out, so you really need to stay in your ticketed seat, please."

600 year old woman: "I'M SUPPOSED TO BE SITTING NEXT TO MADELINE!"

Me: "Well, if you'd like to take it up with the box office, that's fine, but I have to put you in your ticketed seat."

600-year old woman: "I DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE BOX OFFICE." (Turns her back to me.) "MADELINE! I'M COMING OVER THERE!"

Me: FACEPALM.

Pops Peculiarities.

2009-05-20T15:07:00.004-05:00

Having worked as an usher at Symphony Hall for over three years now, I used to think that sometimes that the job feels weirder than it actually is. Because we do nothing challenging for 2/3 of a shift, there's a lot of time to just sit around and reflect on the minutiae of coworkers and the routine there. But coming back to it after a year off, I'm pretty sure I was right all along: there's a lot of weirdness at Symphony Hall.

My boss, for instance. He is amazing at his job - I've seen patrons so angry they're screaming at us and the exchange between them will end with a handshake and an exchange of business cards. He's also excellent to his staff and takes care of people who do the job well. But he has a tendency to micromanage to the point of absurdity. Last night, a party of Fidelity executives were coming in to see the show. These are the people who donate huge $$$ to the Pops and make the shows possible, so obviously they are as VIP as it gets. My boss came up to me and explained that they would be entering the hall through my door, and on no account was I to leave my post, that I needed to be on my best behavior, stand up straight, et cetera. Ten minutes later he came back and said never mind - they would have an escort. But I should still remind them to watch their step on the way in and smile and say hello to all of them. Then five minutes later he came back and said he would just take care of it himself. As if I would be standing there scratching my crotch and wiping my nose when they arrived and say, "Yo. Table's...uhh, somewhere over there, I think. Hey, can I borrow twenty bucks? That's like toilet paper to you folks, isn't it?"

I know he just likes to stay on top of things, but he does this kind of thing a lot. Last week we had two people come in with seeing eye dogs. They were seated in the same row of tables. One of the other ushers made a joke about the dogs getting into a fight, and my boss overheard and immediately decided that this scenario was a real possibility. He got on the radio to the box office and demanded that they move the dogs further apart. The box office misunderstood and moved the people closer together. It became this huge deal, when it was never an issue in the first place. Apparently my boss doesn't know that you don't just go to the pound, pick a dog, and decide that from now on it's a seeing eye dog.

Then there are my coworkers. Oh, the weirdness of them. One of them, last night, recounted a dream in which he, I, and another coworker all went to a Latin Mass together. He had another dream earlier in which yet another coworker got a job in the tomato packaging industry. Who dreams about this stuff? Then there are the endless discussions about Klingon sex, horoscopes, macrobiotic diets, reiki, women's bowling...

And the things we get excited about. Like the balloon drop. Sometimes at the end of Stars and Stripes Forever, we drop a whole bunch of balloons on the crowd.* The usher staff has to pull the string that drops them. Apparently, a couple of years ago, some person was goofing off during the drop and pulled them early, and Keith Lockhart absolutely lost his shit over it. So now, the balloon drops are this huge, supervised event. The people doing it have to get up there like twenty minutes early and someone stands inside and makes absolutely sure that they pull the string at exactly the right time. The other night the orchestra was running late and cut one of their last pieces and just launched right into Stars and Stripes. The ushers were running around upstairs - literally running - and yelling, "It's started! It's started!" and scrambling to get inside even though they don't pull the string until the end of the piece. DEFCON 5! DEFCON 5! I guess when you have a completely mindless job, the smallest amount of responsibility assumes nuclear-code responsibility.

And don't even get me started on the weirdest people of all...the patrons. Those are stories for another time.

*(As an aside, one of my coworkers the other night mentioned that she had thought of a really cool opening for one of those CSI-type crime shows. Symphony Hall, a Pops concert, everybody clapping along to Stars and Stripes, the balloon nets open...and out falls a body, crash-landing on a bunch of tables below and upsetting several hundred dollars' worth of overpriced food and drink. Screams ensue, lost in the melee of applause and balloon-popping. Aaand...scene).

Better

2009-05-11T19:43:00.003-05:00

That about sums it up.

I've always been a person very attached to "place." I've travelled a lot, and have loved and been affected by many of the places I've been: London, Alaska, New Orleans, northern Michigan. But I've always felt like Boston and I belong together; I've been in love with the place since I first laid eyes on it when I was 10 years old. When I stepped off the T last week I expected to immediately feel better; I even teared up a little.

But I didn't feel better. I've felt a little bit like a zombie the last week. The best way I can describe it is that I felt mired in all the anxiety and unhappiness of the last few months. All the usual things that can lift me out of a funk failed to work; when I failed to feel that automatic lifting of spirits that comes with the sight of the Boston skyline or Symphony Hall, I felt even worse. I was afraid I would never be able to stop wallowing and start feeling good again.

Then, a few days ago, I did feel better. And it wasn't because of Boston, or my job, or my nice meeting with the director at Lesley. It was because I went to a party with the horn studio at BU. I was in a room surrounded by people I feel completely comfortable with, people I love, people who were happy to see me, and people whom I've been through a lot with. I was sitting on the floor watching people talk and laugh and play beer pong and I realized my face hurt from smiling. I felt like everything was going to be okay.

I'm so thankful for my friends.

Me, My Drama, and I

2009-04-30T11:46:00.003-05:00

Last night was not good. That's putting it mildly. Another way of putting it would be that I dropped my basket.

I was packing, it was like 10:30 at night, and I was feeling upset and emotional and I started crying. And it was like I couldn't stop. I kept feeling more and more upset and anxious and like I couldn't control what I was feeling - I didn't want to feel it anymore, I wanted to stop. I was trying the breathing exercises I learned for OCD, trying to distract myself with whatever was on Bravo, and it kept getting worse and worse. Then it became a full blown panic attack. I felt like I couldn't breathe, like the walls were closing in on me, I was crying so hard I threw up.

I didn't know what to do. I thought about going to my landlord but he's so old and hard of hearing and I was so hysterical I was afraid he would take one look at me and call 911. I called my mom, who is staying with a friend in Kodak. I couldn't even speak coherently. She tried to call my dad, because he was closer, and Judy answered. She refused to let her talk to him. My mom hung up and she and Martha started racing over, even though they were almost an hour away.

Then Judy called me. I was trying to talk to her, asked her to let me talk to my dad, and she wouldn't let me. "This isn't going to work, Clarissa."

That made it even worse, I started screaming at her through the phone, I felt like - I can't even describe what I was feeling. I've never felt like that before. I've never felt so out of control. She hung up on me, and turned his phone off. I tried calling again and left a message.

Eventually Judy called me back, told me she had told my father I was hysterical and that my mom was coming to get me. She told me he had said "Okay," and went back to bed and she would not put him on the phone. That was just that. This morning, my dad admitted to me that she believes this whole thing was a ploy on my part - and my mother's part - to get her and my dad back together.

He did eventually call me - I don't know if he listened to my message or decided he wanted to call me after all - and he came over. When he got there, I was just beyond - beyond anything. I could not stop crying. Heaving sobs and trouble breathing and just this overwhelming feeling of - despair, I guess. I don't know. I was scared. It was like I couldn't find that central part of myself that I tap into when I need to calm down. At this point it was midnight.

Mom got there at about the same time and Dad wanted us to go to the office and talk (Judy came with him). We got to the office and I was trying to talk, trying to articulate what I was feeling, trying to get myself under some kind of control, and it turned into this horrible, horrible fight - me lashing out at Judy, Judy lashing out at my mother and me, and my mother (who was furious anyway that Judy had not let her speak to my father during what she deemed an emergent situation) letting Judy have it. I had to go to the bathroom and throw up again. It was terrible. It was like all of my anger and anxiety and fear and guilt and self-loathing became everything I was. It overwhelmed my personality.

When it became clear that the situation, whatever it was, was untenable, my mom took me back with her and Martha. I finally was able to calm down, I think maybe because my body was exhausted. And I was finally able to articulate some of the things I was feeling.

I know that I am not okay. And I also know that it is not just my problem with Judy. It's problems with both of my parents. It's problems with myself, with who I have become and who I want to be. I am not the person I wanted to be. I am so angry all the time. People tell me happy news and I can't share in it. I feel stuck in this cycle between guilt and rage, guilt and rage, and I don't know how to just feel better, how to just get over it. I have learned to manage anxiety because of years of deliberate work with my OCD, but this feels different. With OCD, I always felt like there was this other thing, like a parasite, that latched onto my personality and interfered with the way I was trying to live. But now I feel like I've lost myself completely. All the rules and things I thought about life feel false now. I feel like I did what I was supposed to do, I held up my part of the bargain, and things continue to get worse - for me and for the people I love.

I look back at my naive self before I started college and I hate her. But I was so generous and warm back then. I did nice things for people, just because I wanted to make people happy. I felt like the world was a basically good place, and I wanted to make other people's lives better. I don't feel like that anymore. I want to feel that way again.

Maybe I haven't really dealt with all of the things that have happened to my family. Maybe in the high pressure environment of school, I was able to focus on other things. Now I have no other things to focus on. On paper, everything looks good, but just because I got good grades or did well at BU does not mean that I was okay.

I just know that I thought I could handle all these things I'm feeling, and now I know that I can't. I have to talk to someone, even if it's just for the luxury of being able to talk. I may even want to go back on medication.

I just wish I wasn't leaving Tennessee on this note. I wish I didn't make things so hard for my dad. I wish I could just be okay. But for whatever reason, I'm not. At least I know that finally admitting already makes me feel a little better.

And Just Because I'm Royally Pissed Off

2009-04-29T19:58:00.002-05:00

THIS letter was the first correspondence I ever had with her, back in 2005, a few months after the divorce, before I even met her. It was a response to a "melodramatic" letter I wrote to my dad about how upset I was.

Clarissa:

This is in response to your recent “hate” letter to the father you say you “love.” You also mentioned in your letter that your mother had taught you “class.”

It is obvious, despite your high gpa, that you have no idea of the meaning of class or love. Class and love are about behaving in ways that make people feel good. They are about showing kindness in both big and little acts.

Never, in any of your letters to your father have you indicated you were happy that he was putting an end to an unhappy situation in which he received no cooperation or respect and was seeking to spend the remainder of his life with someone who was willing to love and work with him instead of keeping him near bankruptcy.

Instead your concerns are with the effect you think these changes are going to have on you. You have said repeatedly that you no longer have a home. Well, Clarissa, that is your choice, not your father’s.

You are 18 years old and many “children” your age have already found jobs and are making their own homes. Instead of thinking your father should stay in an unhappy marriage so you can spend a couple of weeks a year in that dirt hole of a room you had in this house, you should be thankful that you are so privileged as to have a father that works his tail off to send you to college and continue to support you despite your continued lack of respect.

Perhaps if you spent some time thinking of others and what you could do to make their lives happier, especially your parents who have given you everything you’ve ever wanted, instead of doing everything in your power to make them both miserable, you could come through this a better person.

You have mentioned several times that if your father had to choose between you and me, that you would probably be the loser. How idiotic to think that he is only capable of loving one person! YOU are the one making the choice not to be in his life except to make sure the checks keep coming. That is what your mother has taught you.

Obviously, neither you nor your mother are willing to face the facts of this situation. Let me reiterate for the last time what your father has been trying to impress upon the two of you for the last two years:

When your father first called me two years ago, I told him he should be discussing the problems with your mother, not me, which he did.

It was your mother who insisted she and your father come to Florida to see me. I asked them NOT TO COME, but instead they pulled up in my driveway the next day.

Never in the past two years did I suggest your father leave your mother.

I did suggest that he encourage her to get into some kind of charity or volunteer work to learn the happiness that comes from giving of yourself.

5.For two years your father tried everything he could to make his marriage work, including having NO CONTACT with me for the entire year before he finally decided to end the marriage.

When he did contact me again a few months ago I did not respond to his first few messages. Only when he wrote that he was going to leave your mother whether I was with him or not, did I return his calls and agree to see him.

When we finally did get together and I came to Tennessee, this was not only the most beautiful home I have ever moved into, it was also the filthiest. Your mother did not fulfill her role as the homemaker and partner your father deserved, even though all she would have had to do was call a cleaning service to shovel out the crap from time to time and have a meal ready when he came home from working all day. Instead of trying to be a partner, she tried to fill the emptiness inside herself by spending, spending, spending.

She says he never told her what the problems were, but we both know that isn’t the case. She just chose to ignore the facts and wound up losing the man she says she “loved.” I hope you will learn from her mistakes instead of blaming someone else for the end result.

Clarissa, unfortunately you have no idea of what a woman’s role in a relationship should be. I hope you learn this before you find the person you love and want to spend the rest of your life with.

Your father loves you very much, as he once did your mother, but he is only human. Eventually, when that love is not returned and instead you are seeing only evidence of the opposite, that love fades. Love is not a word, it is actions.

We all eventually reap what we sow. Your father has always been a loving, kind, generous man and it is his turn to have the life he deserves and you should be a part of it.

Personally, if I never met you, that is fine with me, so don’t think you will be doing me any favors if you decide you want to have a loving relationship with your father for the rest of your life. I will be happy to make myself disappear anytime you want to visit him.

This divorce does not have to have a negative effect on you. Again, that is your choice. More children are from broken homes than not, and most have managed to survive the breakup. You are an adult, and it is not the responsibility of your parents to continue in an unhappy relationship in order to meet your needs. Your future is in your hands.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

2009-04-29T13:12:00.002-05:00

I have avoided writing about my dad's girlfriend lately, out of an acknowledgment that it's not nice to be written about on the internet without your consent, and because I have been trying to make that particular relationship work. But recent events have led me to change my point of view. I no longer believe that whatever relationship Judy and I had is worth salvaging, mostly because she apparently feels the same way.

My mom is coming to Tennessee for the first time in years this week, and she had hoped to see my dad, maybe even have lunch with both my dad and me. Judy basically wrote her a "stay away from my man" email, like something a high-schooler would write. It made my mom upset, and it made me very upset. I wrote something back to Judy, and since it was written in anger I decided not to send it. But I did send it to both of my parents, because I wanted them to know how I felt, and my dad misunderstood my intentions and showed it to her.

I tried to apologize the next day. She told me, "You're not sorry. You're just sorry you got caught. Besides, I'm getting used to your melodrama. And you should know you're hurting both of your parents." Another attempt at an apology was also not accepted. Now, I guess I'm dead to her. Last weekend when I came by the office to drop off my father's car keys, she hid in the bathroom until I left. Then, Monday night, there was a fire on the mountain next to where I live. For awhile, our security people were discussing the possibility of evacuating the resort. Judy told my dad that she would not allow me to stay in the same house with her; that if I was evacuated, Dad would either have to get me a hotel room or she herself would leave.

But I am the one who is melodramatic.

This is it. This is the end of me trying. This is the end of me suppressing my anger in the hope of being a good daughter, in being a responsible adult, in trying to be mature about things. For the last five years it has been a constant struggle with this woman, and I thought the fact that I couldn't get along with her was my failure. The last nine months in particular, since I've moved down here, have been both revealing and heartbreaking. She constantly berates my father for paying more attention to me than to her. She says that he and I have an exclusionary and abnormal relationship. Her own daughter is a terminal alcoholic, and she berates my father for failing to raise me with the correct respect for my elders. She tells him he cannot afford to take a single day off from work to try to fix my car, but she makes him miss days of work when she has a doctor's appointment, needs to go to Knoxville for virtually anything, or is upset about (I kid you not) the prospect of him buying me a plane ticket to Boston instead of spending that money on a vacation for her. She calls him every half an hour, on average, interrupting his work, and if he doesn't immediately answer she calls me (that is, until I became a nonperson). She once spent an hour on the phone telling me how my father treats her terribly and how her relationship suffers because of his relationship with me.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I cannot even begin to explain what it is like to deal with this woman. I finally realized that she must suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She has no empathy for anyone. ANYONE. She told me that the divorce didn't have to affect me negatively; that was my choice. She became angry with me when, after she took me to get my driver's license, I did not make a point of telling my mother that she was the one who took me. When my mother was living in her sister's basement, Judy spent half a summer taking me on tours of what was to be her new dream house, showing me fabrics and her new jacuzzi and where the window seat was going to be - and couldn't understand why that upset me. This is the house she now claims she never wanted and that my father forced her to build, by the way. She complains to me that her life is so hard now and it used to be filled with trips and vacations and fun things and now I am the only one who gets those things from my father. As if I have lost nothing in this farce.

She constantly craves attention and praise. She is always telling me and my father that we do not appreciate everything she does for us. One of the things that she really likes to rub in my father's face is that he is not "loving" to her, only to me.

She has an extreme overreaction to criticism or perceived criticism; she creates slights and insults even where there was none, and then she nurses a grudge that literally will never be extinguished. Once when I had taken a trip into town and was almost back at the office, she called me. The conversation went like this:

Judy: "Are you going into Gatlinburg?"
Me: "Well, I actually am on the way back now. I'm almost to Cobbly Nob."
Judy: "Oh." Pause. "Well, okay."
Me: "Sorry. Did you need something?"
Judy: "Well, I was going to ask you to go to the bank, but I guess..."
Me: "Yeah, I'm almost back to the office."

Because I did not immediately offer to turn around and go to the bank, she was livid. Not irritated, not annoyed, but furious. She came in the office later that afternoon and when I said hello, she ignored me and then slammed a door in my face. This is another example of me failing to properly acknowledge everything that she has done for me and my wasted family. Here's another example: Because one afternoon she was sick and my dad left her to help me work on my car, she refuses to use him as her health-care surrogate. Doesn't matter how much he apologizes, she believes this is an example of his inability to make appropriate decisions about her wellbeing.

She is incapable of self-criticism. She honestly believes that in this whole horrible mess that used to be my family, she is completely innocent of anything. My dad is the one who has abused her. I am the one who has abused her. She came up here, completely aware that my father was breaking up a 40 year marriage to be with her, and was shocked when my parents' former friends, clients, and I myself did not immediately welcome her with open arms. She has virtually no friends, and it's always because they fail to appreciate her; it never occurs to her that the reason she is friendless is because she cuts people off from her the moment they do something that offends her.

Has she done nice things for me? Yes, she has. But you know what, I have done nice things for her, too. The difference is that I do not hold them over her head and berate her for failing to appreciate them whenever she does something that upsets me.

Maybe this makes me sound petty. But I don't even care anymore. I went out of my way for the last three years to be on my best behavior, keeping things on an even keel, for my father's sake, but I'm done. I'm done being nice, I'm done holding in the anger. For the last year especially, I have been so incredibly angry ALL OF THE TIME - it eats away at me, my anxiety level is higher than it's been since high school, and I have been holding it all in because I do not want to make things worse for my dad.

But in the end, it's not me making things worse for my dad. It's her. She is the one who decides that I am no longer an acceptable person - this is, by the way, the SECOND time I have been "cut dead" by her. The only time I've stepped out of line this whole year to make a point with her about something was when she decided to give my mother a lecture - and even then, to be a "good girl", I decided it would be better not to confront her. It was only by my dad's misunderstanding that she even read what I wrote.

I cannot bear to watch the way she treats him. I cannot bear to listen to the way she verbally abuses him. And I am done being quiet about it.

Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb

2009-04-27T18:17:00.002-05:00

You are telling me that at all the levels that it took for people to approve this publicity stunt, it occurred to no one that this might backfire horribly? Talk about short memory.

Flu Hullaballoo

2009-04-26T15:24:00.004-05:00

I will preface this with these things: I have OCD. I once read a gruesome history text about the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. And I just finished The Stand about a month ago.

Trying not to get too freaked out about the swine flu. But the truth is that on Thursday when I saw a tiny headline somewhere on CNN.com that said "CDC confirms swine flu in 7", I had a bad feeling about it. I've been following events this weekend with increasing unease.

And somehow Janet Napolitano is not comforting. For once it would be kinda nice to have some of the old Bush moxie back. We will find where these viruses are hiding, we will root them out, and then we will do whatever it takes to destroy them.

Not we don't think it's important enough to start screening people returning from Mexico City. We're not really certain what's going to happen next. But we got some extra Tamiflu out of the warehouse.

Oh, well. That's the only thing that's marred an otherwise gorgeous weekend. I leave for Boston on May 1, and I still do not know 100 percent whether I will ultimately be attending Lesley after all, working at Interlochen, or attending NYU. Only time will tell.

The Lie of Virginity?

2009-04-23T08:26:00.002-05:00

Author Jessica Valenti, of feministing.com, has just written a book called The Purity Myth. Valenti argues that our country's obsession with the poles of female sexuality - "Girls Gone Wild" versus "Purity Balls" - have warped the fragile psyches of young girls and convinced them that their bodies dictate their morality:

The lie of virginity — the idea that such a thing even exists — is ensuring that young women’s perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality...Whether it’s delivered through a virginity pledge or by a barely dressed tween pop singer writhing across the television screen, the message is the same: A woman’s worth lies in her ability — or her refusal — to be sexual. And we’re teaching American girls that, one way or another, their bodies and their sexuality are what make them valuable.

What I find most interesting about Valenti's claims, at least in this abstract of her book, is the absence of the role that family plays in determining a young girl's views on both sexuality and character. It's as if we were all raised by the media. In truth, though there's no denying the role that movies and Miley Cyrus play in shaping a girl's outlook of what's "cool," the biggest influence on a girl's moral and sexual compass is the family that she is raised in. Someone might be raised in an extremely Christian family and decide that saving sex before marriage is a moral issue. Another girl might be raised in the same family and feel so constricted that she has sex with as many people as possible. Any number of possibilities lie in between. But to give the impression that everything, for teenage girls, comes down to sex and our bodies, discounts the effort that various families make to teach girls about self-worth that is entirely separate from sex. Oftentimes the family is the anchor of sanity in this world of mixed messages.

But even putting that aside, I'm puzzled by what Valenti has to say about girls and virginity. I'm not a proponent of abstinence-only education, but I do take issue with the modern notion that because we now have birth control, sex is "no big deal." Sex is not inconsequential. It is an act for pleasure, yes, but it's also an act fraught with physical and emotional purpose. It's half of the human obsession (the other half being death). We say it's no big deal, but we talk about it, sing about it, write about it, make movies about it, and think about it all the time.

And in my experience working with high school and middle-school girls - even exceptionally intelligent and motivated girls - they are not ready to deal with the consequences of sex. Valenti is arguing that we teach girls that sex is too important, but from what I've seen, a lot of today's girls are under the impression that they should have sex as soon as possible to get the first time out of the way. At a camp I worked at, one night the girls ages 13-16 had a late-night talk with the counselors about sex. They wanted to know what our first times were like. The other two counselors told how they just found a "random guy" to "get it out of the way" and it was "awful and messy" and that's just the way that first times are. It meant nothing. The other two counselors advised that the girls do the same thing, but just be smart about it and use protection.

I was dismayed. I waited to have sex, not until I was married, but until I was in a stable, healthy relationship with someone I loved and trusted. And it had nothing to do with purity or morality. It had everything to do with emotional health. And I told the girls that, and I told them that my first time having sex was amazing. To my disappointment, they said that was really sweet - but they seemed skeptical. I guess to them, waiting until they were nineteen or twenty seemed like an eternity.

I agree with Valenti that girls should not associate sexual activity with their moral or personal worth. But I think we need to teach girls that sex is a part of their life that they should respect. And I think girls who really do value themselves will think twice about with whom they are having sex.

My final issue with Valenti's explanation of her book is this:

If we’re to truly understand the purity myth, we have to recognize that this modernized virgin/whore dichotomy is not only leading young women to damage themselves by internalizing the double standard, but also contributing to a social and political climate that is increasingly antagonistic to women and our rights.

Where on earth is she feeling our social and political climate becoming more antagonistic to women? Certainly not reproductively - our president is using federal funds to pay for abortions in other countries and would like to overturn the ban on abortions for babies that are half-in, half-out of the womb. I saw a report on the news last night that said men are losing more jobs than women in the recession. The national trend is slowly moving towards allowing women to marry other women. Women are going to college with the actual goal of earning degrees and having careers, not just meeting husbands. A woman was a serious candidate for the presidency and vice-presidency last fall. Women have held the highest cabinet position for the last three presidencies. A woman is Speaker of the House. Yes, there are still problems - "Girls Gone Wild" being one of them - but I think things are getting better for women, not becoming more antagonistic.

Too many women still want to be victims - because that is the easy thing to do. It is easy to decide to become a victim, it is easy to decide that society has completely warped your self-esteem and your self-respect, because that takes your character out of the equation. Then we can rail against the outward world without ever turning inward. The right thing to do - and to teach our girls to do - is apply a reasoned and intelligent eye to both spheres. Not to tell them that we live in a repressive, patriarchal society that uses the construct of virginity to keep us in chains.

The Good Kind of Bad?

2009-04-21T14:53:00.002-05:00

The way it was supposed to go was this: I apply to graduate programs. Graduate programs respond in a timely manner with their financial aid offers before the April 15 deadline. I weigh options. I accept the best fit. I go to graduate school.

This is the way it actually happened: I apply to graduate programs. Graduate programs respond as they see fit. Some have waitlists that remain open until early May. Some do not respond until April 13. Some accept and demand enrollment money by April 1. Some accept and do not offer financial aid information until after April 15. I weigh options without all the necessary information. I accept the one that I think will be the best fit.

Then that random job I applied for when I started getting a bunch of rejection letters, the job that pays close to 20 k for nine months of work and includes free housing and food, calls me for an interview. Lucrative, much-desired job has no timeline for when they will contact people for the second round of interviews.

Then a really amazing school that rejected me for creative writing sends me an email telling me that the dean's office believes, based on my application, that I am an excellent candidate for their very prestigious interdisciplinary master's program, and if I'd like to apply for it, all I have to do is send in a second personal statement.

Odds are probably good that I will not get the job at Interlochen or the acceptance at NYU's Draper program, because both are competitive. But I'd sure as hell like to have either of them, maybe even more than I'd want to go to Lesley. The truth is, as much as I really was attracted to Lesley, I'd be much, MUCH more comfortable going into debt for the Draper program, not to mention that I'd be able to combine my interests in musicology and history and literature and take whatever classes I want; plus, it seems like graduates from this program are able to secure admission into great and well-funded Ph.D. programs in any number of different fields.

And I simply could not turn down that job. I've wanted to work there since I graduated, applied last year but wasn't even invited to interview. And I could use almost all of my salary to pay down my current loans, which would leave me in a much more comfortable position to enroll in some sort of grad school the following year.

But now I feel a little confused and also disingenuous, given that I've already enrolled at Lesley and have been matched with a faculty advisor and have long, wonderful conversations with the director. And the program starts in June. And I have no realistic idea whether I will get the job or be accepted to NYU, or when I might know about either of those things.

Shit.

The First Breath of Spring...

2009-04-06T18:36:00.008-05:00

...which will not exist tomorrow, because as I write this the last gasp of winter is throwing down snow to cover it all.

Drumroll please...

2009-04-02T18:46:00.003-05:00

A little while ago I gave my verbal commitment to Steven Cramer, director of the M.F.A. program at Lesley. Although this is not a binding commitment, it assumes that I'll be sending in the enrollment deposit next week, and I certainly plan to. The only thing at this point that could change it is if I receive a Hail Mary-type funding offer from Emerson or UNO (or UNCW, who have still managed not to get in touch with me...and their deadline was December 30!).

This was a really difficult decision...I guess on some level maybe I really didn't believe I would get into a program. Once I did get acceptances I was a little bit paralyzed by fear...fear of failure, fear of being irresponsible (by getting yet another creative, rather than professional, degree), fear of going further into debt.

It was also difficult because of the nature of full-res vs. low-res. Because Lesley starts their residency in June, they have an acceptance deadline of April 2. The other two schools are way, way behind - so much so that when I called UNO's financial aid office, they told me they still don't have me on record as accepted to the grad school yet, only the writing workshop. And Emerson has still not finished making their funding decisions. There is still a chance that I could get a TAship with a tuition waiver and stipend from UNO. That would be difficult to turn down.

But after speaking for over an hour with the director, receiving emails from faculty regarding my work, looking at the work of their teachers and current students, and feeling really excited about the way their curriculum works...Lesley just feels right. I get such a great vibe from everyone, I love the way that the program is structured, I think it will be extremely helpful to be able to hold a full-time job, and I love Boston. I debated for a long time about whether it was worth another bundle of Stafford Loans, but after consulting with my family, I think I am going to do it. As one of my mentors put it, "Which scenario do you think would be more probable: 'Oh, I really wish I had gone for the M.F.A.' or 'God, I'm so glad I saved that 20k'?"

I know that I will continue to have internal debates with myself about whether I have made the right choice. At different points in my life I've felt like I was certain I wanted to be a doctor, a musician, a veterinarian, a lawyer, a pop musicologist, and Dr. Mahler...but the very first thing I ever wanted to be was a writer. And it's true that you don't have to have an M.F.A. to be one, but I know that I need guidance, feedback, and time to write. I'm excited to have a plan, and a place for it all.

Words of the Week

2009-03-30T17:34:00.000-05:00

"Regardless of the decision you ultimately make: you have promise. And you have a path."

That. Was very nice to hear.

I think that if I can swing it, I'll be getting an M.F.A. from Lesley University in 2011.

March Madness of Another Sort

2009-03-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

I realize that all my entries now revolve around grad school, but frankly that is all I think about. I dream about grad school and drive myself crazy when I'm awake. I think it mostly stems out of my general dislike for not knowing where I'll be living or what I'll be doing.

So, now that I have turned down Chatham, I have three acceptances to consider. I still have not heard anything from NYU or North Carolina, but based on what I can tell from internet snooping, I would have heard from NYU by now had I been accepted or waitlisted, and the same is likely true of UNC-W. And I have no information on funding yet from anybody, yet everybody wants a decision by early April. Ha! But that leaves me constantly debating between:

Emerson College - has the advantage of Boston and full-time classes alongside students majoring in editing and publishing. Also very well-respected. And it's 3 years. The downsides are that is is wickedly expensive and one of the largest programs out there.

University of New Orleans - has the advantages of possible TAships, only 8-12 students per genre, very close and friendly community. I could also live on-campus. It's 2 years. It's much cheaper than my other two schools. The downside involves moving to a city where I don't know anybody. And I love New Orleans, but it also has a terrifying crime rate.

Lesley University - major advantage of being in Boston. It is low-residency, so I could work full-time. They will (probably) let me work in both fiction and nonfiction. It's 2 years, and a very distinguished program. One on one work with a faculty mentor for a whole semester. They require interdisciplinary work. They help you secure internships with literary journals or teaching positions. The downsides are that is a little on the pricey side, I would miss out on the more traditional experiences of attending regular seminars and workshops every week, and I'm worried that without the traditional school environment my tendency to procrastinate might become a real problem.

It will really come down to what is the most affordable, which means Emerson is probably the least likely choice. I just have to keep reminding myself that even though this feels stressful, I am so lucky to have options, because it means that people at more than one place saw potential in my writing.

2009-03-24T17:09:00.001-05:00

I am glad to see that since my last post, Obama seems to have taken a more intelligent and reasonable approach to the bonus tax legislation - although at the same time he is considering increasing federal oversight on executive pay. I may have the mentality of a grumpy old man, but it does make me downright nervous to hear such things.

On the grad school front, I turned down a spot at Chatham. I was unhappy to do so - everybody at the school seems so nice, and since my acceptance I've gotten personal letters from the head of the program and the dean of the Graduate School, but basically I'm just not comfortable taking out another 30 grand in loans for a degree that doesn't have a good possibility of a job at the end of it.

I am still hoping that Emerson can at least offer me something, and I am waiting still to hear from four more schools, so I'm still in a bit of a limbo regarding that.

I am also trying to think of ways to make this blog more interesting...possibilities are on the horizon.