You're Cry, the Beloved Country!
by Alan Paton
Life is exceedingly difficult right now, especially when you put more
miles between yourself and your hometown. But with all sorts of personal and profound
convictions, you are able to keep a level head and still try to help folks, no matter
how much they harm you. You walk through a land of natural beauty and daily horror. In
the end, far too much is a matter of black and white.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Quiz Time
OK, in all honesty, the first time I took this quiz, I was The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, but I think it's unfair to have to be a book I haven't read yet. It'll unduly influence me when I actually do get around to reading it. So I went back and took the quiz faster, more reflexively, and ironically I think I got a little closer. Funny though, that in six short little questions, both times came out with me obsessed with war and travel.
The Love Camel Browses the Bookstore
It happened in the bookstore, I think.
The campus bookstore of my new school is entirely different from the one at my undergrad school, which was really more of an underground warehouse, the upper floor having been reserved entirely for flashy alumni merchandise-- the bone handled letter openers and mother of pearl bar sets reserved for those who'd long since "made it" and then grown nostalgic for simpler, budget-noodle-and-beer-bong times. Underground were the books, and an infestation of panicked students decimating the place like wood lice. I always ran smack into the Asians, who burrowed from aisle to aisle with their heads down and their overflowing hand baskets thrust forward like a train's cattle guard. I would dodge, duck, and then dig in the back corners of the shelves for the shittiest copies of the books I needed, the "used" sticker meaning a slightly less astronomical price and occasionally some good research leads scribbled in the margins, or the found poetry of boredom and sleep deprivation. I could never get all of my books at once-- low stock, late orders, a freak rush of English majors, or my own pre-semester, crowd-induced panic attacks ensured that.
But yesterday I went to the bookstore to check out what books I would need for my semester of graduate school. I alloted an hour for this task, and was done in 15 minutes. I walked in, followed the signs upstairs, and found the far wall (not the southeast corner of a massive room) devoted to English, and of that wall, two bookcases devoted to graduate English. The stacks of books were clearly labeled and well stocked, even though school starts next week. I quickly found my two classes and wrote down the titles and authors I needed as well as the bookstore's best price, so that I could later calculate my savings from buying them all used online, and then I straightened up and looked around.
No one was crying. Parents were there. I walked outside, where it was not thirty feet to where I had parked my car for free feeling bemused and optimistic.
Work has gone well. I feel like skills of mine that I like are being put to use-- my eye for graphic design rather than my freakish mastery of alphabetizing-- and my office has a window through which I can check on a mother pigeon who sits cooing softly in her nest of feathers, dried grass, and trash. My morning commute, about an hour each way, allows me to plug in to NPR again and guiltlessly pound coffee as I keep tabs on the all crops (some things in my life have a way of repeating themselves. I had a theory in high school, when I moved a lot and burnt bridges much the way farmers will burn a crop to keep the bugs from spreading, that there were 20 people in my life, they just kept switching bodies and names).
I've been unreasonably excited about work and school recently, and it's not a feeling I'm familiar with. Yesterday, as I was leaving the bookstore, it caught up with me. There's a good possibility that Pants will deploy as soon as late December. If the first semester of grad school goes like any of the semesters I spent in undergrad, I'll put my head down and concentrate and when I next look up, it'll feel like two weeks have passed, but in reality it'll be Thanksgiving, and then in another blink, Christmas.
A very wise friend has continued to harp on me about my concepts of scarcity and abundance in life and love. According to her, I often live like I have savings accounts with finite balances of time, love, and attention, like I think spending love or time on one thing means I necessarily have less to give to another. The idea was so deeply entrenched, and so logical, that it's taken me years and my friend a lot of time and breath, to begin to be suspicious of it.
After all, how does it make sense that if I give a lot of enthusiasm and passion and time to my work and grad school, I won't have less to give to Pants before he deploys? But that's how it works-- even if I was home all day, which we tried with weird and stilted results, the time we'd have together when he came home would still be hemmed in on all sides with whiffs of dissatisfaction and resentment and pressure because that's all I'd be doing: waiting for him.
Looking at it another way, it's also not like I can "save up" on being close to him before he leaves. He'll still be gone either way and it'll hurt either way and neither of us will get any sex for six months either way. You can't be a love camel, in other words, which is such a damned shame I can't even articulate it.
So even as I'm getting all antsy and excited about starting school and going to work, this other cold current is coming under the door, where I feel weird and guilty and sad that another huge thing is coming up, maybe sooner rather than later, and it will not be fun at all. My brother said it best this morning, on the phone from Indiana while his work walkie-talkie crackled in the background: "All you can do is try to be present for all of it, even the suck parts."
The campus bookstore of my new school is entirely different from the one at my undergrad school, which was really more of an underground warehouse, the upper floor having been reserved entirely for flashy alumni merchandise-- the bone handled letter openers and mother of pearl bar sets reserved for those who'd long since "made it" and then grown nostalgic for simpler, budget-noodle-and-beer-bong times. Underground were the books, and an infestation of panicked students decimating the place like wood lice. I always ran smack into the Asians, who burrowed from aisle to aisle with their heads down and their overflowing hand baskets thrust forward like a train's cattle guard. I would dodge, duck, and then dig in the back corners of the shelves for the shittiest copies of the books I needed, the "used" sticker meaning a slightly less astronomical price and occasionally some good research leads scribbled in the margins, or the found poetry of boredom and sleep deprivation. I could never get all of my books at once-- low stock, late orders, a freak rush of English majors, or my own pre-semester, crowd-induced panic attacks ensured that.
But yesterday I went to the bookstore to check out what books I would need for my semester of graduate school. I alloted an hour for this task, and was done in 15 minutes. I walked in, followed the signs upstairs, and found the far wall (not the southeast corner of a massive room) devoted to English, and of that wall, two bookcases devoted to graduate English. The stacks of books were clearly labeled and well stocked, even though school starts next week. I quickly found my two classes and wrote down the titles and authors I needed as well as the bookstore's best price, so that I could later calculate my savings from buying them all used online, and then I straightened up and looked around.
No one was crying. Parents were there. I walked outside, where it was not thirty feet to where I had parked my car for free feeling bemused and optimistic.
Work has gone well. I feel like skills of mine that I like are being put to use-- my eye for graphic design rather than my freakish mastery of alphabetizing-- and my office has a window through which I can check on a mother pigeon who sits cooing softly in her nest of feathers, dried grass, and trash. My morning commute, about an hour each way, allows me to plug in to NPR again and guiltlessly pound coffee as I keep tabs on the all crops (some things in my life have a way of repeating themselves. I had a theory in high school, when I moved a lot and burnt bridges much the way farmers will burn a crop to keep the bugs from spreading, that there were 20 people in my life, they just kept switching bodies and names).
I've been unreasonably excited about work and school recently, and it's not a feeling I'm familiar with. Yesterday, as I was leaving the bookstore, it caught up with me. There's a good possibility that Pants will deploy as soon as late December. If the first semester of grad school goes like any of the semesters I spent in undergrad, I'll put my head down and concentrate and when I next look up, it'll feel like two weeks have passed, but in reality it'll be Thanksgiving, and then in another blink, Christmas.
A very wise friend has continued to harp on me about my concepts of scarcity and abundance in life and love. According to her, I often live like I have savings accounts with finite balances of time, love, and attention, like I think spending love or time on one thing means I necessarily have less to give to another. The idea was so deeply entrenched, and so logical, that it's taken me years and my friend a lot of time and breath, to begin to be suspicious of it.
After all, how does it make sense that if I give a lot of enthusiasm and passion and time to my work and grad school, I won't have less to give to Pants before he deploys? But that's how it works-- even if I was home all day, which we tried with weird and stilted results, the time we'd have together when he came home would still be hemmed in on all sides with whiffs of dissatisfaction and resentment and pressure because that's all I'd be doing: waiting for him.
Looking at it another way, it's also not like I can "save up" on being close to him before he leaves. He'll still be gone either way and it'll hurt either way and neither of us will get any sex for six months either way. You can't be a love camel, in other words, which is such a damned shame I can't even articulate it.
So even as I'm getting all antsy and excited about starting school and going to work, this other cold current is coming under the door, where I feel weird and guilty and sad that another huge thing is coming up, maybe sooner rather than later, and it will not be fun at all. My brother said it best this morning, on the phone from Indiana while his work walkie-talkie crackled in the background: "All you can do is try to be present for all of it, even the suck parts."
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Yay! Back to school! (snort!)
Fate has smiled on me. Dimpled cherubs call down to me with their verdict: "Thou shalt work!" I complete a circuit of ballet leaps on my slick wooden floor and make extravagant promises to Pants about what we'll do with my future scratch. But the cherubs are not finished. They hover ever lower, suppressing giggles while flashing cheeky angel ass from beneath their weightless loin cloths, and just when they reach head height, they whisper the newest news: "Thou shalt enter graduate school, too. For FREE!"
I can't remember if I was excited for first grade or not-- the photo's kind of unclear on that. I'm standing on the porch with my yellow Muppets lunch box, wearing a white jersey dress with a rainbow ribbon belt (apparently I supported the gay rights even then), my hair in a ponytail and my bangs combed neat and straight over my eyebrows. My chin is tucked and I'm smiling, but it looks more like a smile of embarrassment because my mother is bent down next to me in her faded yellow bathrobe, hands on her knees, bed-head curls tumbling everywhere, and a giant, theatrical wocka-wocka smile on her face.
Re-imagining that morning is the closest I can get to an analogous feeling to starting grad school. It's been six years since I finished college, and I never stopped wanting to get an advanced degree, but my reasons have changed kind of like a stream clears the further it gets from a silt deposit, or dead, bloated deer carcass. At first I wanted to go back to avoid the (entirely necessary) shit-eating phase of entry-level work. Then I wanted to go back to do penance for the mistake of getting a liberal arts degree-- make me a butcher, a baker a candlestick maker (read: a lawyer)! Then I wanted to go back and throw caution and earning potential to the wind and become a whacked out studio artist compiling huge murals out of dried beans or something, because why the hell not? I've always loved art! And then I just gave up and admitted that I wanted to go back to English, to writing, to the thing that's hurt the most and been the most disappointing and challenging, to the thing I can't help but do because it's how I make sense of things.
The stream's not entirely clear now, but at least I know what I want to study. Other factors: I want to finish an advanced degree before we have children (cringe at the June Cleaver traditionalism) so I can give my full focus to school, and so that if I take some time off from working, the credential will shore up my resume (cringe at the Working Girl smarminess). (Wow, did you catch that? I've managed to cringe at both ends of the spectrum of womanhood in one sentence! My parenthetical self-consciousness knows no bounds!) I've also got to admit that it'll be a delicious role reversal to tell Pants, "Sorry, I can't do [insert fun thing]-- I've got to study." Ha-ha! But now I'm important too! Look at all my books! Look at the scholarly way I pinch the bridge of my nose in concentration-- this is all so fascinating, and yet, the burden of my knowledge...
Clearly, I've been preparing for this role.
Things converge even further-- I'm entering an MFA program, which, prior to this opportunity falling into my lap, seemed ridiculously self serving. I'd been content to pursue an MA in Composition Theory, which would take less time and still allow me to teach community college and do my creepy story-vulture thing where I take secret notes on the personal dramas and mannerisms of my students. But then I got the job working for this MFA program and like the Communist Domino Theory, one thing just led inexorably to another and before I knew it, they were wiping out deadlines, waiving fees, skipping committees, parting seas and inviting me to tiptoe across the exposed briny floor into GRAD SCHOOL. Be still, my nerdy heart.
Classes start the week after next and Pants has already been teasing me and threatening to buy me a Batman lunch box and a trapper keeper. I've been trying to drop delicate hints that what I could really use is a laptop bag and a coffee thermos. And Lasik surgery, because I've discovered from one week of graphic design software that I have the piercing visual acuity of a fruit bat...
I can't remember if I was excited for first grade or not-- the photo's kind of unclear on that. I'm standing on the porch with my yellow Muppets lunch box, wearing a white jersey dress with a rainbow ribbon belt (apparently I supported the gay rights even then), my hair in a ponytail and my bangs combed neat and straight over my eyebrows. My chin is tucked and I'm smiling, but it looks more like a smile of embarrassment because my mother is bent down next to me in her faded yellow bathrobe, hands on her knees, bed-head curls tumbling everywhere, and a giant, theatrical wocka-wocka smile on her face.
Re-imagining that morning is the closest I can get to an analogous feeling to starting grad school. It's been six years since I finished college, and I never stopped wanting to get an advanced degree, but my reasons have changed kind of like a stream clears the further it gets from a silt deposit, or dead, bloated deer carcass. At first I wanted to go back to avoid the (entirely necessary) shit-eating phase of entry-level work. Then I wanted to go back to do penance for the mistake of getting a liberal arts degree-- make me a butcher, a baker a candlestick maker (read: a lawyer)! Then I wanted to go back and throw caution and earning potential to the wind and become a whacked out studio artist compiling huge murals out of dried beans or something, because why the hell not? I've always loved art! And then I just gave up and admitted that I wanted to go back to English, to writing, to the thing that's hurt the most and been the most disappointing and challenging, to the thing I can't help but do because it's how I make sense of things.
The stream's not entirely clear now, but at least I know what I want to study. Other factors: I want to finish an advanced degree before we have children (cringe at the June Cleaver traditionalism) so I can give my full focus to school, and so that if I take some time off from working, the credential will shore up my resume (cringe at the Working Girl smarminess). (Wow, did you catch that? I've managed to cringe at both ends of the spectrum of womanhood in one sentence! My parenthetical self-consciousness knows no bounds!) I've also got to admit that it'll be a delicious role reversal to tell Pants, "Sorry, I can't do [insert fun thing]-- I've got to study." Ha-ha! But now I'm important too! Look at all my books! Look at the scholarly way I pinch the bridge of my nose in concentration-- this is all so fascinating, and yet, the burden of my knowledge...
Clearly, I've been preparing for this role.
Things converge even further-- I'm entering an MFA program, which, prior to this opportunity falling into my lap, seemed ridiculously self serving. I'd been content to pursue an MA in Composition Theory, which would take less time and still allow me to teach community college and do my creepy story-vulture thing where I take secret notes on the personal dramas and mannerisms of my students. But then I got the job working for this MFA program and like the Communist Domino Theory, one thing just led inexorably to another and before I knew it, they were wiping out deadlines, waiving fees, skipping committees, parting seas and inviting me to tiptoe across the exposed briny floor into GRAD SCHOOL. Be still, my nerdy heart.
Classes start the week after next and Pants has already been teasing me and threatening to buy me a Batman lunch box and a trapper keeper. I've been trying to drop delicate hints that what I could really use is a laptop bag and a coffee thermos. And Lasik surgery, because I've discovered from one week of graphic design software that I have the piercing visual acuity of a fruit bat...
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