jam band

Apparently, I am in a band.

I never thought I would try to be in a band, nor did I go looking for a band, nor did I ever think that I was tres cool enough to be in a band–it just sort of happened. I play keyboard and piano.  I play fills and sometimes I lead the songs.  

It all started one night after sneaking into a theatre downtown that somebody I know had the key to.  We were all going to bring our equipment, and jam. I had no equipment, so I brought a plastic egg filled with beans that makes noise when you shake it around. Ted said he caught it in Las Vegas at The Players Ball.  He was in the audience when George Clinton from the P-Funk threw it at him and he caught it. I was in Greece at the time. It was winter.  My father wanted to send me to Greece one last time in the hopes that I would marry a Greek man at the last minute.  This old, fat really horrible guy who looked like auto from the Simpsons ended up coming on to me over tsipouro and mezethes at a tiny hole in the wall in the snow after I interviewed my uncle about his war memories.  He kept trying to feed me more booze and I kept trying to be polite and declining. He had a son near my age.  Otherwise, the trip had been uneventful.  I got sick most of the time, bought cute shoes, fought with my aunt, bonded with my cousins,  and spent a lot of time by my other aunt’s woodburning stove freezing my ass off while my husband to be was out dancing at the player’s ball grooving to Parliment Funkadelic in Las Vegas, but I got some great interviews, and I saw my family so I guess I can’t complain.

Anyway, back to our band. We jammed all night at the theatre downtown again last night. I slept in until noon today. It took me four cups of coffee to finally wake up.  I found out that the local coffee chain by my house doesn’t notice that my atm card doesn’t work, since my bank went under and was bought by another one, so I have been ordering a lot of fancy cafe lattes lately on the house and paying for it with plastic.  It gives a whole new meaning to “pretend” money.  I keep waiting for somebody to say something, but nobody does.  I devoured a HUUUUGE breakfast burrito with chorizo (so yummy), and sort of sat around like Java the Hut for a few hours, contemplating my fullness and generally navel-gazing.  Now, I face wakefulness, tomorrow like a ton of bricks and the workweek, where I must put on professional looking clothes and try to cover up my party-animal side for another week, where I must grade papers and pretend like I am an upstanding citizen worthy of shaping young minds. Ha! Life is such a farce.

My late night jazz piano fingers, instead of smoking a blunt or banging on the piano at four am drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers between to bleed a bit, can be instead holding a red pen and explaining the difference between participles and modifiers.  Because I am not rich enough to fancy myself an artist all the time, but secretly do, in the spaces in between when I have time to breathe.

Like diamonds peering at you through the cracks in the cement, daring you to pick them up, but disappearing the minute you go for them.

glass of red wine

I am sitting here drinking a glass of red wine in my little writing studio and pondering the nature of the universe, and listening to Erykah Badu if anybody cares to know. 

I went to a reading at Lit Quake and gushed to Steven Elliot about how much I liked his writing and how much I enjoyed taking his workshop at the intersection for the arts. I’m sure he thought I was particularly crazy, but oh well. I went by myself and it was at a bar. I walked in and Ishmael Reed was reading his poem titled after my name. I felt like it was my moment to stroll in.  They had my favorite Beer on tap (Sierra Nevada Pale ale and I ordered a pint for only 3 dollars)

I went and sat in the front, and I noticed there were some empty chairs.  I didn’t know it was at the “author’s” table.  I ended up sitting with really nice people and chatting and then finally I worked up the nerve to tell Steven Elliot how much I liked his writing. He seemed flattered. I wondered if he thought I was a stalker. I honestly wasn’t trying to sit in his chair. This kind of thing always happens to me. I went to see Amy Goodman speak, and I walked in at the same time as her, and she was two feet away from me the entire time, then I saw the whole crew of Democracy Now (who I didn’t recognize at the time because I always listen to them on the radio instead of see them in person.) Then I went to get a falafel and she was in the same restaurant.  I kept saying hi to her.  I wonder if she thought I was nuts. 

I love drinking red wine and going online.  I fell in love with my husband over email when he was on a three-month odyssey through Mexico and emailed me updates. I was going through a really rough period in my life, a self-questioning, self-hating, kind of quarter-life crisis where I was wondering what to do with my life, taking too many drugs, and living with total losers, yet feeling too alienated to go back and live wth my parents. I was also living with a really lame boyfriend, that I wanted to break up with but couldn’t think of an easy way to do it, since I lived there.

I used to pour myself a glass of red wine and go hide in the bedroom, while everybody I lived with played videogames and ate nasty 7-11 microwavable food and sat around downstairs in the living room. Then I would turn on the computer, and check my email. I had dial-up, a slow computer, and an old shitty desk that wobbled when I typed. I managed to find a nice glass for my wine and I balanced it next to the keyboard. I would open up my emails, then I would write about my life to my friend who was on this Odyssey traveling through Mexico, and whose van broke down in the middle of nowhere and he had to wait for a new engine to be shipped to his small village.  He would say whatever he wanted, because he was stuck in a van with two guys all day long, and because he was stranded and staying with their mechanic.  I would say anything, because I felt like he really cared to hear, and like I could say whatever I wanted, all the feelings that I felt like I couldn’t say to anybody.  I would sip wine and slip into the midnight void on Friday nights, much like this one.

Something about a glass of red wine after work. I love the velvety way it pours down my throat, and the rosy, comforting way it embraces my aching bones after a long week of working and running around on a Friday night. I think Friday nights are made for red wine.  Red wine and solitude. Loneliness and red wine. Yourself, your music, and red wine. When the tiny box you’re in becomes luminous, and you feel the twinkling stars.

Today Is Life — Tomorrow never comes

 I feel like in the face of the collapsing economy and uncertain futures, the most radical thing is to love the people who are close to you, to engage with fun on all levels, to get out of the house at times, and to live your truth.

 

I just posted this as part of an online introduction of myself for a class I am taking on the web.  It was in an uncensored moment of deep-self reflection. Sometimes I find it easier to say deep truths online than when talking to people in person.  I did all of these things this weekend in varying proportions. I went to an old theatre downtown and jammed with some friends. I went on a date with my husband afterwork to the new gourmet ghetto which is cropping up near my house in SF.   I had red-wine and deep dish pizza, what a combo.  Then on Saturday, I graded papers all day. Bummer, I know, but it had to be done. I had been putting it off. I stayed inside all day and at night we went took the bus downtown because I found an old gift card to borders. We stopped in Knob Hill and had margaritas and tacos at a karaoke bar/ mexican restaurant.  I watched a middle-aged guy do a perfect rendition of Eric Clapton.  I could have sworn that we were sitting next to Bill Gates, or someone who looked a lot like him, sipping cheap margaritas, but my husband assured me that I was crazy, and then claimed the guy looked nothing like ole Billy boy.  (I still think it COULD HAVE BEEN him going very very incognito).

Then, we ended up stuck in the LOVE FEST on the way home and swarms and swarms of people, dressed in very strange outfits, half-naked, or fully clothed.  We ended up in BORDERS and I got sucked into reading a memoir about a guy who was given a lobotomy for $200 in the 1960’s in a doctors office because his step-mother didn’t like him.  I was too scared to buy it, but it was so compelling. Instead I bought two books with my gift card:  Chef MD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine and Beijing Coma, by Ha Jian.

We ran into two of the husband’s former ESL students from Japan, standing on the street corner playing guitar and singing in Japanese near Union Square.  Then we went all the way home.  Then we got our band equipment together and went to this theatre (with our neighbor and his friend) and we have decided to go and jam there until 5 in the morning. The building is sound-proof, and we get to play on a stage and drink beers all night long and rent it for C-H-E-A-P.  At 5 am, we packed up all our stuff and ate breakfast at Lori’s diner. I am on the keyboard, Ted on the guitar, our other friend Mike’s on the bass, and Aaron’s on the drums, except we don’t have drums, we just have a drum synthesizer. But Aaron kicks major ass on that.  We have a good time. Who would have thought, me in a band with four guys?

Then we went home and crashed as the sun came up and woke up late in the afternoon, ate chicken soup and walked all the way to the Academy of Sciences from our house.  It was closed by the time we got there. We never made it to the Bluegrass festival like we had wanted, but oh well. You really can’t do everything, but its well worth trying to do as much as you can.

When Life Gives you Lemons…make avgolemeno

 

When Life Gives you lemons, make avgolemeno

 

You know that old saying, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade?  Well, lately my life has been giving me lemons. After my last post, I bet you dear readers probably thought I was sitting around moping, or in some kind of blissed out percacet stupor somewhere. Unfortunately, or probably fortunately, I lost my pile of percocets after that fateful night a few weeks ago where I stashed them somewhere random and woke up and they were gone. It’s probably for the best.  If any of you are reading this at all. In that case, if nobody is reading this, then I am talking to myself, and if I am talking to myself then so be it, I’m crazy. But at least I have an outlet.

Life in the US, has been strange lately.  There are all these election coverage things. Every time I turn on the TV and watch Sarah Palin open her mouth, I think I am dreaming. Wall street is like a dying animal.  People are living in their cars. I watched Oprah do a show on pets and puppy mills.  She briefly mentioned how people are abandoning their trusted pets of years because they are being forced out of their homes and into cars to live.  I had a student complain to me today about something random beyond my control…but she blamed it on me, and being the sucker that I am, I felt partially responsible.

My body is aching from working at the Greek Festival all weekend.

I spent the entire day on Thursday, starting at 8am applying to a writing fellowship that has once rejected me.  I made it to the late-night post-office as is my ritual and headed over with Ted to Mel’s diner for a late-night burger and oreo shake around eleven to celebrate. Of course I took breaks in between. I did a coffee break in the mid-afternoon and went to sit on the beach. It was unseasonably warm for San Francisco. I sat with my feet in the sand and hoped that someday my ship would come in with writing my novel and with writing in general. I’m tired of going through this process of applying for fellowships and contests, and awards.  It takes so much out of me. What I really want to do is write and forget about all that stuff existing until one day I emerge with a complete text.  Now that I am carving out time to write, I keep getting offers for part-time teaching work. I know this is a double-edged sword.  I’m grateful for the extra work, but I don’t want to overcommit and get a crazy schedule.  However, I am starting to teach immigrant janitors and cafeteria workers English as a Second Language who work for a large university. The pay is high, the prep time is low. I lucked out. Another co-worker told me that she worked a private school and they were hiring and wanted me to apply.  Of course now, when it rains it pours.

A really shitty colleague told me that I didn’t get the full-time job I applied to because they were looking for a man.  Is this legal?  Probably not. But in his mind, affirmative action comes into play in English departments and that somehow means that they are looking for men, because men are “under-represented” in English departments. Did I mention this little man used to always flirt with me when I was new?  Did I mention, he is creepy and gave me a piece of his fiction and all it talks about is his cock and his affairs (which I could care less about) but it was totally written in a preachy and annoying way about his politics.  Did I mention that his skin tone is WHITER than mine, but he somehow passes the affirmative action test in his mind? Did I mention any of these things?  Boy was I pissed off!  Is it legal for them to tell me that because I’m Greek and a woman that I didn’t get the job? That I couldn’t hope to ever get the job over a MAN? That if I was in math or in the sciences, being a woman would count in my favor?  I reminded him about my a close friend of mine who has her PHD from an IVY league school, who is constantly passed over for full-time and adjunct teaching positions, who is stuck as a perpetual post-doctoral student, working on a cure for cancer? Did I mention that affirmative action doesn’t seem to work in her favor? You bet I did.  Did he listen, no.  What did I expect from a narrow minded imbecile?

At the Greek festival this weekend, I blew off steam.  All the most hard-working volunteers (those of us who worked the food-line for five hours plus a day) went out for pitchers at a beer garden afterwards.  This one Greek guy told me about growing up in Utah as a Greek, about his parents working in the copper mines, about his brother getting racially profiled by the cops for driving in a car with his sister.  His sister was fair and his brother was dark (took after his Cretan side).  I told him about the bullshit, this coworker/ hiring committee chair told me.  What a load of crap! He said. 

On Friday night, after teaching all day, and working the foodline during the dinner rush at the Greek festival at night, I downed a shot of metaxa and went outside to dance. I felt like dancing for no real reason, other than I was kind of tipsy from the one shot and the hours on my feet.  I danced zembekiko because I am crazy, and I bumped into the modern greek studies association chair from SF State, who has always encouraged me as an artist, and a writer.  She introduced me to her friend who writes about “whiteness” and Greeks.  His paper was the one I based an essay I wrote (but never published).

I leaned in to him when the music was blaring and I told him thank you so much for your essay.  I read it and it really struck me that other people were thinking the same thoughts. He seemed shocked that somebody read his academic paper. 

As I write this, avgolemeno soup is simmering on the stove.  I am cooking it slowly, with a whole chicken making my own broth. I am cooking it in defiance.  After hearing my co-worker tell me I was too “white” and too much of a “woman” to be a competitive job seeker, I mix my egg-lemon sauce, and I drink my tsipouro and I say fuck you to him, with a deep bow and a middle-finger salute, from the very bottom of my very Greek soul.  In the writing world, my skin may not be dark enough to be considered a woman of color, and I may never get allowed into VONA and my last name may not be Anglo enough to get treated with respect or authority, yet I sit here, knowing my true place, as I season my soup and slowly add the lemon-egg mixture, I–a child of immigrants–am at the very least, a woman of flavor.

the happy pill

 

Somebody gave me a happy pill on Friday after work.  About a half-dozen percocets.  

A friend of mine from grad school got diagnosed with a later-stage cancer and she had to have a full hysterectomy, including having both of her ovaries removed and her appendix removed.  It came as a shock. She is rather young.  Not as young as me, but still too young for cancer.  Maybe in her late thirties?  We ran into each other and she gave me some of her pain pills.  I think pain pills are for the “healthy” more than they are for the  ”sick.”

It’s true that I had been avoiding her. I don’t know why, but I am afraid of cancer. Maybe it’s because both my parents are cancer survivors.  Maybe it’s because several of my lady friends have been recently diagnosed with female reproductive system cancers…but something about this friend and her illness made me want to stay away from her, as far away as I could possibly stay.  I didn’t want to remind myself of what she was going through, or of her struggle, just because it scared me and made me too sad. If there is such a thing as  a cancer gene, I probably have it.  Let’s just run through a brief history of my family.  Mother-cervical cancer survivor (since 1985), father–choroidal melanoma survivor (since 2006), my maternal grandmother–(colon cancer survivor, since 1986), my maternal grandfather (died of colon cancer in 1967), my maternal grandmother (died of either uterine or ovarian cancer 1970’s (I believe), my paternal grandfather (died of some kind of cancer 1983), my father’s brother (died of lung cancer in 1999 or so(?)).  

        So I guess, when the big c word comes up, I can’t take it.

        I don’t know why people fear losing those who are dearest to them the most. I don’t know why in the back of my head, I fear losing the people I love to death, but I do.  And it makes it hard for me to be around friends who survived cancer. I finally, just now, am realizing this and trying to get over it so that I can be there for my friend. In fact, after chatting with her, I forgot all about her big c experience and we were laughing and howling like we used to on the BART on the way home from our very first graduate school class. I realized that I was be happy to be alive and I was happy that she was alive, and that we were survivors of this crazy world and this crazy life with all of its ups and downs and all of its downs and ups.

So last night I took half a percocet with a friend of mine, then another half, then I was feeling like everything was a pleasure, even folding blankets for guests, or breathing inward, or making a cup of herbal tea. I got thrown out of a secret theatre jam session with some people who all wanted to play music downtown.

Somebody, I can’t say who, had a key to a theatre, I can’t say where, but we thought it would be a good idea to go and jam there in the middle of the night after all the shows had cleared out.  We did it once before and we figured out that nobody would be in the theatre.  We played in an empty theatre and I pounded on the piano keys and we put strange effects on this keyboard and played with guitar, drum machine, bass and me, and our other friend shaking a pebble-filled egg.  But this time, as soon as we set up, we got thrown out by this woman who I think was trying to live there and sleep there overnight. We left without incident.

It was a drag, but as I was driven home in my narcotic-induced state, I realized that I was happy to be breathing and to be driving in a car, and to have food in my refrigerator and to have good music (Reckoner by Radiohead) on the radio and to be surrounded by young, earnest and hopeful people who are all trying to make their own way in the world, even if some of us have a lot of debt, or a few failed plans, or a yearny-one-in-a-million dream in place of a carreer.  We are alive, we are safe, and we are together, and there are more of us in the world.

Maybe it was the drugs that made me feel happy, but I think it was the fellowship and the realization that there were kindred souls out there in the world, or that other people besides me believed in trying something new–

By the way, I promise not to become a pill-popping drug addict, because really, I’ve seen people go down that road, and it’s not pretty.  But once in a while, a chill pill, I guess doesn’t really hurt.

Turning over a new leaf

 

I keep telling myself that I am turning over a new leaf. That’s what I’m really trying to do.  I have always been prone to depression.  I think it’s been around in my life since I hit the teen years.  I am now 28.  When I can feel it coming back to me, now I know what’s coming.  I don’t let myself get fully hit with depression.  I try to detect it and destroy it.  Sort of like a video game. Well, not exactly like a video game. I guess I mean that now when I can feel depression coming on, or anxiety or something along those lines, I can at least define what it is that’s happening, in in some way naming the feeling, if even in my own head, causes it to arrest in its development before it can insipidly spread throughout my entire being.

Yesterday I was feeling quite shitty.  I think it was the Sunday afternoon blues.  I am getting dicked around at my job by these cruel people who work in HR and the benefits office.  I feel like they are trying to be difficult on purpose, as if to imply, you’re too young to be making the wage that your making, you’re too young to be asking me to file your paperwork, etc.  But you know what, fuck them. I worked hard for my education.  I am not rude to anyone, but I need to get paid on time and I need to get my benefits covered under the 50/50 plan that I am entitled to through my teaching assignment load.  

This afternoon after teaching, I called the union.  I couldn’t figure out who my campus rep was, so I just dialed the main headquarters office and hoped for the best.  (Our union is a local division of the American Federation of Teachers). A bubbly woman answered with a sugary voice.  She had the voice of Drew Barrimore.  Isn’t that strange that somebody could have the same voice as a famous actor and you could recognize it?  Anyway, she told me that these people were totally crazy and that I was entitled to benefits because the district made a mistake in its own paperwork and that shouldn’t be my fault.  Finally somebody with a shred of sanity mixed with a dollop of humanity.  Amazing.  Then she told me to email them and cc her and the president of the union and told me how to assert that it was my right under the ED code (that’s the law relating to education in this state–the highest authority in all disputes (beaurocratic or otherwise).  Fuck yeah.  I have rights.  Then she told me that if they screw up my pay I can get an “emergency advance” on the same day as my paycheck is supposed to come and told me how to work the right channels to get paid in case these idiots “lose” my paper again.  I felt like all was right with the world again.

Then, my boss asked me out to lunch.  (I’m at a new campus) I was in shock.  Of course I said yes.  And my boss is not  a pervy dude whose hitting a mid-life crisis, she’s a pretty normal woman with two grown kids my age. Another woman who is an adjunct in another department who I ended up talking to once for an hour about crystals, the sacred feminine, the movie The Matrix, female circular logical and plot patterns and other very strange but interesting fringe subjects, also spontaneously struck up a conversation with us as we were in the elevator on our way out and my boss asked her if she would like to join us.  She did and we had an interesting lunch.  Then afterwards, my boss said, any time you want to go out to lunch at this time, I’m always up for lunch.  I wonder is it because I called the union?  Ha.  But she was the one who encouraged me to call.

Anyway, I don’t want to get to obsessed with what they think of me at my job. I don’t really care.  I just want to work my hours, maybe get some interesting discussions going, hopefully teach some people something worthwhile to them or useful, and then get the fuck out and get some writing done.

I am no longer blinded by the unyielding ambition to get ahead that burns at the back of my throat like bile. I’m just being myself and if people don’t like it, they can stuff it.  Oddly, this approach, is making people like me more at my work.  I guess being who you are is the only thing we can hope for.

Anyway, my feelings of depression were real yesterday.  But sometimes you have to just pull into yourself and let yourself become depressed.  My grandmother’s condition is slowly deteriorating.  It is difficult to watch her suffer in the few lucid moments she realizes she has dementia.  She was always such a bright and with-it person, I think it kills her inside emotionally to know that her mind is gone.  I love my grandmother.

Even though she is out to lunch and kind of psychotic, she is definitely far from being a vegetable. Lately her hands are starting to bother her. She claims that there are bugs on them. My mom and I have started to think that it’s because she is reaching a later stage of dementia, where a person’s hands and limbs start to atrophy and kind of become claw-like.  She always had beautiful hands, but now her fingers and hands are gnarled and woven inward like crooked, greek koulourakia, or like crab claws.  It scares her to look at them and to lose sensation and to forget how to lose them.  I try my best to alleviate her pain by massaging them, and wiping them down with a hot wash cloth and “throwing away the pretend bugs,” then a towel try her hands, and then a rub lotion on her hands and in between her fingers just so that she will get some kind of stimulation.

My mom says, eventually, old people like this forget how to breathe, and then their heart forgets how to beat and then they die.  I have been living with my grandmother with dementia for four whole years now in San Francisco.  My husband moved up here with me too.  (We were just dating when we moved up here).

I don’t want to think about my grandmother dying, because she’s a living human being who has become part of my life, but at the same time, it would be a big release for my mom and I, and most of all, it would be better for her, if her quality of life gets worse to die before really approaching great physical and emotional suffering.

In some small way that I cannot explain but that my mom and I can both feel, I believe my grandmother is starting the dying process.  How long it will take is anybody’s guess.  All we can do is make her as comfortable as possible until the time comes.

Oh yeah, and two other ways I am turning over a new leaf today, is I discovered the 99 cent store in Berkeley.  It’s amazing how many small things that we use every day that the 99 cent store has.  

And I worked out.  A year ago, I tried to take a class in West African dance and I nearly blacked out because I was so out of shape.  But this time, I was able to hold my own and rock out/ shake my booty to the music. It was a small personal triumph that probably sounds stupid to athletic people, but it works for me.

So, overall, life is life–going on, crazy, incomplete, full of surprises, rolling into a new experience, like the waves beat out the dusk, then starting all over again.

mid-day malaise

I don’t know why but I am feeling a little bit depressed. I feel like it may be something physical, more than mental. I don’t have any reason to be sad or upset.  But, something inside my brain, and my emotions are telling me that I feel sad.  I wonder if it’s hormonal?  I am surrounded by people who love me and whom I love dearly.  So why this strange feeling?

I think it’s just the idea that I might have to do work on a Sunday afternoon and I don’t really want to do it. I’m not really feeling pro-active right now. I just want to laze around.  I feel like I should be out enjoying the day, or actually enjoying my work, or something like that, but I just want to do nothing. Yet, doing nothing isn’t really entertaining. This strange malaise or state of ennui is getting to me. I feel like maybe I should do something active and physical to combat this feeling. Maybe it would wake me up a bit.  But then I feel guilty because I’ll be neglecting my work which I should be doing right now (which I don’t feel like doing).  In fact, I don’t feel like doing anything at the moment. Just venting into this blog is enough.  Maybe I miss writing.  I have fit writing into my schedule now, but it has been since Thursday since I have really started writing.  Maybe I miss writing.  This is really a strange and funny feeling. I could be coming down with a cold. I think just resting from the crazy summer is in order.  I don’t really have to do anything if I don’t want to and that’s kind of a comforting feeling at least.  Maybe just curling up with a good book is enough at this point.  Sometimes the world is too much, and that’s all we can do.

A bird doesn’t sing because it as an answer…

--it sings because it has a song!

I think this quote, which I filched off my friend Jenabird’s facebook page, is really appropriate to writing. Today is the first day I am officially breaking ground on my “serious” writing after a LONG LONG hiatus.  I have been waiting and priming for this day.  I am currently writing a “treatise on writing” to get myself going.  The treatise on writing my novel is going to have FOUR parts:  Part 1: Why I am writing this treatise  Part 2: What I see my novel is about at this point  Part 3:Who I see myself as a writer:  Part 4: What unique things I can bring to the table.  Part 4 is mostly going to be a self-pep talk so that I don’t quit and think I am not interesting enough to write about myself/life, my perspective as fiction. I will change the parts as I write if they don’t seem to fit.  I wrote part 1 and a portion of part 2 today:  Here is an excerpt from my part 1:

I think creative people like artists and writers spend periods of time where we collect things into ourselves, where we absorb like a sponge.  I was accumulating things in my life. I was accumulating knowledge by training, taking classes, buying books, learning new things… 

The dictionary calls a treatise “a written work dealing formally and systematically with a subject.”  I think for me, this kind of formal introspection is necessary because it signifies a time when I can just start.  From here on out my best writing to date will be born.  This is the moment in time where things are starting to coalesce and come together, where my ass meets the padded comfort of a big soft cushion and I roll up my sleeves and get to work, where my surroundings are finally beautiful, where I have transformed my tiny shacky hovel in the basement of my yiayia’s house into a Shangri-La for my private thoughts and a safe space for my collection and synthesis of things from the deep well of self.

 

The other quote I found online, posted by an old high school classmate who I recently added to my facebook page:

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life, but define yourself.”
-Harvey Fierstien

I think I have let myself be bullied into silence too much in this life, and I think I have let other people define me, instead of defining myself.  I am throwing down the gantlet at this point and redefining myself again into the writer I want to be, into the writer I really am.  Into the writer I was all along.

End of Summer

 

summer

 

Well, Labor Day Weekend and with it my name day came and went. In Greek culture, we all have namedays.  But as a Greek American, I always remember my nameday before or after it actually happens.  In Greece, the nameday is a bigger deal than the birthday. I was surrounded by family on my nameday, yet we all forgot.  Oh well.  I only remembered because my friend from Athens wished me a happy name day on my facebook page.  

I can’t believe I went to Greece and came back and that the summer is already over.  As I write this, I am listening to Greek songs online in my headphones at 2 in the morning.  I got into a strange fight with an HR person at my work.  It was lame. I needed them to do something for me;  they didn’t want to do it;  they were really busy;  they felt like they could yell at me;  I got frustrated.  That’s pretty much how it went down.

It was rather demoralizing.  I hate getting treated like shit at work.  I think a lot of it has to do with my age. Basically, I work in the public system as an adjunct community college teacher.  Basically, if I don’t get certain paperwork in on time in a certain way, I don’t get paid and I miss the open enrollment period for my health insurance. But nobody from each department seems to talk to me.  They see me as some kind of insolent white girl I’m sure who dares to ask them to find my paperwork in the pile.  This woman actually told me that she was too busy to locate my paperwork and would be for the next two weeks. (Conveniently in time for them to miss the deadline).  But little do they know I’m a sassy Greek who won’t take no for an answer. Haha.   This was all because I felt like being nice and teaching a class outside of my normal discipline and have to get cleared. Even though I have been teaching the class for two weeks, they haven’t gotten my paperwork in yet. I’ve tracked it snaking it’s way through about 5 people’s offices. It’s now on it’s final hurdle.  It must get past this one battleaxe before it can move on.  What a nightmare.

All the adjuncts I talk with are always talking about walking out.  It’s my fantasy, says one ESL teacher, that one day ALL part-time college professors go on strike for 5 days across the state and then what would happen to the education system.  We all snickered.

I, the youngest and least jaded, as a fellow reject from the cult of full-time elite professors, have been a new inductee in to this group of over-forty whip-smart adjunct female teachers and on Mondays and Wednesdays we gnash our teeth and snarl at the general injustice of it all.  I love them.  Then one day, this really pithy Australian woman who is hilarious, came up to me and asked me how my writing was going.

She kept trying to talk me into applying for the Stegner fellowship again. Hello, I apply for the thing every year.  

“You have potential. You have to keep trying,” she said. “At your age, you still have a chance to make something of yourself. Believe me, the people at Ivy League schools aren’t that great,” she said. “Believe me, I know, I went to one.”

She knows I am setting aside all this time this semester and next semester to write.  She loaned me two really obscure books about the Greek Civil War that I would have never found otherwise.  I thanked her for the books and the motivation.  She said it motivated her to finish her dissertation to give me a pep-talk.  We both decided that procedures are for cutting through bullshit or setting up bullshit systems.

We decided the hiring procedure at our college was also part of the bullshit, a legitimization of a broken system through hiding behind policies and procedure, a kind of fighting over table scraps.  This woman has finished all but the d towards her PhD from an Ivy League school.  She is really qualified for a full-time position, in fact, she is more qualified then the rest of the people who work at our school. Why is it that there are many people like her, people who teach at UC Berkeley, who cannot seem to get hired as a full-timer in our community college district?  It seems absurd.   We have to all walk out. I always tell them.  Any time, man, any time. I’ll walk out at the drop of a hat.  If I get the call that morning, I’ll walk out that afternoon.

So here’s the state of things:  We’ve got a complete idiot/ ex-beauty queen dummy being primed to be the next vice-president of the US trying to feed us a bunch of pro-life, family values, line of baloney, there’s a bitch in the HR office lording over my paperwork, it’s two in the morning, I’ve got insomnia and I’m talking revolution from my tiny computer terminal randomly listening to Greek-Arabic dance music remix on youtube while the cat snoozes next to me.   Summer is definitely over, folks.  But, true to form, in San Francisco, the first hot days have just begun, just in time for the first week of school.

I did have a wonderful trip in Greece and a wonderful mind-vacation this summer. I have tomorrow off to do nothing but write.  Tomorrow is actually my first full-fledged writing day after my summer-long writing hiatus.  I’m a little scared but really excited.  I have no more excuses or things to clean or rooms to rearrange. I have nothing to do but write, write, write.

Closure

So yesterday, I returned the keys and filed my final paperwork at the “ghetto” school where I quit.  The only thing I will miss about that place is the students.  The few coworkers, classified employees who made my day better, the lady who does the copies, etc, a very few teachers. (I mean very few).  But otherwise, I really psychologically moved on from that place.

I was told that if I had stuck with the application process, I probably would have gotten the full-time job.   This was after the fact, after I had withdrawn my application from consideration in the process. The reason why I withrdrew my application is complex.  Part of it had to do that they were the last of all the school districts to put together interviews and when I kept asking the people when they were planned, I didn’t get an answer. But one enemy of mine, decided to curtly schedule them when I was on vacation. 

But it had to do with the English department being a fighty place.  Nobody wanted to be the department chair. Many of my fellow coworkes were scared interns who talked with a barely audible voice, in fact, they squeaked.  *But at least they tried their best to teach something.   I didn’t mind them so much. I had startd out as an intern myself, though I was never a squeaker.  Another of my coworkers who I liked, in fact two really cool ladies who were fellow writers, were constantly seeking another job.  One friend of mine who was a classified employee (this means she was a secretary of sorts, and not a teacher), was actually thinking about suing the school district for the shitty way her boss treated her.

 

Then there were the annoying, the offensive coworkers.  There was my former mentor teacher, who offered to let me share her office, but then harped on me with passive aggressive post-it notes reprimanding my behavior. One note would say in fierce script, that slanted angrily across the page and looked like she pressed down hard as she was writing it:  ”Wildguppy, please remember to shut down the computer AND turn off the power-strip cord as you leave the office.”   So, I would do this.  Then the next week there would be a note that read:  ”Wildguppy, DO NOT shut off the computer if I have been using it previously and have left it on.”  ”Wildguppy, please do not leave the water heater on.  This could cause a fire.”  ”Please do not leave your printing jobs on the printer.”  At one point she accused me of breaking the printer.  I think I used her printer twice the entire time I was there. I was only in the office for one hour each day. And most of the things she accused me of I never did or did once by accident.

Then she started making a big deal of my returning the key to the office as if I was not to be trusted.

Finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I played her passive agressive game back. Once I quit, I took forever to return the key. This of course, drove her nuts. But I figured, at the end of the summer, I should eventually return it, before the wheels of the bureaucracy start turning and I get fined for the key. 

 

So I walked onto campus I returned the key to the lady who collects keys who is only on campus between 10am and 2pm, the most inconvenient time for anybody.  She thanked me because she told me that this particular prof was really annoying her with requests and started to file paperwork demanding the key be returned.  ”Professor X really wants to keep her office secure,” she said to me.  

I guffawed. “Well she doesn’t have to worry because I’m not going to steal anything from her precious office.”  They secretary who handles keys laughed under her breath.  Now I’m at a different community college most of the time. Let’s see if I fare better over there or will I face the same bureaucracy nightmares?