*beautiful thing*

The other day, I was driving from my work to my MFA program. I took sidestreets and crossed a small bridge. Right when I got across the bridge, I crossed the railroad tracks, and went under the freeway. I was trying to maneuver my car with one hand as I talked on my cell phone to my friend, the dancer. We were having a conversation of a somewhat spiritual nature. I forget the exact details of our exchange but it was something along the lines of when how we have to learn how to be happy with what we have and not to strive too hard forgetting to live life. She was approaching the idea from an Eastern mystic philosophy that she is currently learning, and I was talking about my own spiritual practice with Eastern Christianity. So as I drove, we talked. I told her about my MFA program, and how I am distancing myself from it.

There’s something about when I step foot on my MFA program’s campus; I get very, very tired. I went there this weekend. I went there again on Monday. I went there again today. Each time, I came home and took a nap, I fell down in my bed, exhausted by the people there, by the surroundings, by the heaviness of being “done.” It’s a kind of narcoleptic effect. I go to mfa program. I come home and sleep.

This weekend at the MFA program conference, I had a lot of chatter conversations. Hi how are you, geez it’s been so long, blah blah blah. I saw my former close friend, who is consumed by her own envy and has since become an acquaintance, we made polite conversation that didn’t make much sense. I ended up feeling drained. Maybe it is the feeling of obsessive striving that I get from the people there. It’s not that they’re that bad. It’s just that there’s a collective pressure there, and it may be a pressure I have been operating under for a long time–so that is why it affects me. But–the pressure is something like striving and simultaneously seeing oneself as great without the necessary introspection.

My dancer friend, who’s becoming a yoga teacher, said that in yoga, they call that feelling “maya” or “illusion”. Maya is the term that I think, if I understand her right, is when falsehood and self-conceit rule a person. I feel like intertwined with this idea is the idea of people who are always striving for something, in a kind of blindly ambitious way. I think it’s something similar to the concept of “plani” in the Greek Orthodox Christian mystic tradition. It’s the idea that someone is so consumed by their own self-worth, that they believe beyond a doubt in themselves and that they are always right. The Orthodox spiritual fathers and mothers, coming also from an Eastern tradition, see plani as “delusion”, or to quote the book I am reading, Gifts of the Desrt by Kyriacos C. Markides, plani is more specifically, “an error of perception and cognition related to spiritual matters that undermines one’s ascent to God. A product of human imperfection.”

This explanation somehow goes in my mind with the ideas I felt when leaving “professional day” at my MFA program. While the idea of helping students survive outside of grad. school is commendable, it felt like I was trapped in a room with a bunch of people (from my MFA program, and from other MFA programs) that all wanted something so badly, that they couldn’t help but strive and bite and scratch and act in such a manner collectively as a desperate pack of dogs trying to claw their way to success and fame. I was maybe one of these strivers when I first entered the program, and maybe now that’s why I have such an aversion to it. I’ve also been disgusted with the way that a few mutual classmates have treated a dear friend of mine, who has suffered a stroke. It seemed thoughtless and cruel, some of the things people have told her, and they seemed to be coming from a place of envy. What kind of people, don’t respect when somebody has suffered an physical ailment so huge?

When my dad was in the hospital for cancer my first year in the program, I felt a similar lack of empathy from those around me. When my insurance dropped me, when I totalled my car the first year, when my mom was in the hospital, when I had my own cancer scare, when I was staying up all night taking care of my grandmother when she was having night terrors, etc, when I was working, doing an internship and taking three classes a semester, I felt similarly alone the first year. I felt like instead of asking me what was wrong, people assumed I had cooties or something.

I wonder, is it the drive to perform that pushes everyone to be so passive-aggressive? Is it the idea that we all want, beyond anything else in this world, to publish our writing and to be read by others? Is it the fear that there may not be enough slots for all of us to succeed? How many of us want to be writers because we want fame? Because we are chasing after an illusion that doesn’t really exist? Because we want people to validate us?

I don’t know the answer. But all I know is that every time I step foot onto campus, I leave and I’m fine for a while, but then I collapse in the mid-afternoon into my bed, or onto the couch and take a nap. It really exhausts me.

In fact, at the professional survival day, the only real true conversation I had time to have, was with two people. The first one: my friend who had the stroke. The second was with a writer I had thought snubbed me because he didn’t see my email. He said something really human to me. He asked me how my writing was going and I started to tell him, but then I realized that I really didn’t know what to say. I told him, well, I don’t really know what the hell I’m doing, but I think I’m doing this. He looked at me and said in a kind of confiding way, “Guppie Girl, that’s the secret. Nobody really knows what the hell they’re doing.” I found this to be incredibly kind, especially since here I was admiring him for all of his writing awards and accolades and he was able to be human. I found this to be refreshing.

Then, on Monday afternoon, as I crossed the rail-road tracks, under the freeway, I saw this woman. She was rail-thin, of an indeterminate age, a white lady with a thin brown, pony tail who looked like either a speed or heroin addict begging for money on the center devider. I had a dollar in my cupholder, and I was at a stop light, so I told my friend, the dancer to hold on a minute. I put the phone down, rolled down my window and handed her the dollar. She took it and gasped, a silent ‘Thank you’. I looked at her, with such compassion, but with no pity. I just looked her. I looked at her as if she were a person who I’d known my entire life. She looked at me, and she said the usual thing that homeless people tell me, if I give them change, “God bless you.”

Ok…nothing abnormal, there. But something felt very different about this interaction.

Then, the lady burst into tears. They were real tears. And I thought that maybe, she wasn’t sad, but was in a way, happy. That they were the gift of tears, a kind of spiritual joy that she was having. A release of some kind. I don’t know what it was exactly. But I felt such compassion for her, as a sister. I couldn’t explain it in the moment, and I didn’t do it justice. I sat and then I told her, I wish I had another dollar or something else to give you right now. She shook her head and breathed, no it’s not that. She continued to cry.

It was as if, as I watched her, as if her soul was naked, and who she was was layed bare. It was as if for the first time, she was making some kind of change. I felt that in my heart she had begged for the money to get drugs, but that she was aware that she had hit bottom, and maybe was vowing to make a change and get help. I don’t know.

The Greeks call this metanoia, a kind of “fundamental transformation of the mind and heart that takes the form of profound repentance. The beginning of the process, and a necessary stage, of the soul’s reunification with God.” (again this is from Makrides’ book). I have to say, that I felt love for this woman in this moment. And then the moment passed, I realized the light had turned green, and some jerk honked at me, so I said goodbye to her and went on my way.

I left the experience with goosebumps on my arm. I tried explaining what happened to my friend, the dancer who was still on the other end of the phone which I had momentarily forgotten was on the passenger seat waiting for me. But I don’t feel like I can really, truly put this experience into words.

It just taught me the incredible power of compassion. It can move people to tears. It can change horrible situations. It can console the unconsolable, it can give hope to the hopeless. That day I trafficked in compassion, trading thoughtful stares for tears at the center devider near the railroad tracks, stealing a brief moment of humanity. Me — a tiny ant– before the awesome face of kindness, the fleeting ephemeral nature of life.

journalists in prison

I can’t stop thinking about this journalist who is in prison. His name is Josh Wolf and as of today, he became the LONGEST INCARCERATED JOURNALIST IN U.S. HISTORY FOR FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH A SUBPOENA. It’s really scary that a judge could lock up a journalist for not revealing his source to the court. He is being held in contempt of court for refusing to turn over video tapes that revealed the identity of members of an anti-war protest. The Feds say that the reason is because he won’t provide them with information related to an anarchist group. But the reality is…this is a matter of journalistic ethics. A journalist, be they a citizen journalist, a blogger, or an employed staff writer for a major publication, must be free to report on the news without fear of censure. Journalists are third-parties. They are independent, and it is reasonable that they should be able to protect their sources. Who would say anything to a journalist if everything they said was something that would later be used against them?

It’s hard to believe we are living in a democracy when San Francisco journalists can be jailed. As a young San Francisco writer and freelance journalist, I really identify with his struggle. What if it were me? How would I fair 160 days at the Federal Detention Center in Dublin for refusing to testify? Would I crack and give up my moral beliefs? Would I allow them to soften my anti-war stance by giving in, just once, just for a moment? It’s amazing to see this brave young person hold to his ideals.

This year the Society of Professional Journalists gave me and my classmates an award for a radio series we created on redevelopment in Oakland. We got to attend the awards dinner with all the big shot journalists. I sat next to a table with some very nice people. It turns out that the table next to us was the mother of Josh Wolf and his best friends. They were there because the Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California presented an award to Josh. It was no small award. He won Journalist of the Year. His friends seemed cool, like normal young people. They seemed like people I would be friends with. Like normal San Franciscans. I imagined he would be the same. I had never heard of this case until I went to the awards dinner. It was not being covered in the main stream TV news, and I missed it on SF Gate. Now is luckily getting some more attention.

But what struck me was that he won Journalist of the Year. This was heartening to me, in the face of how the media is changing and how many journalists are losing their jobs as corperate conglomerates further consolidate. Even Judith Miller, who was jailed last year for failing to reveal her source, shmarmy as she is, even though she helped beat the gong of going to war in her New York Times articles, even she came out in support of Wolf. (Though I have my qualms with Judtih Miller, I agree that she should not be jailed). I hope that journalists will continue to rally behind the fight to report the truth. For the sake of the future of news and truth in this country, and in the new age. But more importantly, aside from being a free-lance journalist, Josh Wolf is a blogger. And this raises all sorts of important questions like: Is a blogger a journalist? Is a free-lance writer a journalist? Peter Laur raises this important question, and follows it up with a third pithy question: “Is someone who sits in a studio and reads news dispatches over the airwaves that are written by others a journalist?”

I think that anybody who writes dispatches from their lives can be a journalist. It’s both exciting and scary that bloggers can be seen as journalists, and that they could wield enough power to be seen as a threat. But the reality remains that this is an attempt by the few to squash the voices of the many. It’s a way for the powers that be to scare bloggers, isolate them from speaking out. It’s yet another way to silence political dissent, as if we didn’t have enough ways of squashing dissent already?

This guerrilla warfare against journalists must be stopped. Keeping Josh Wolf in jail is an act of terrorism against the truth. Free Josh Wolf!

Book QuiZ

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Literate Good Citizen   You read to inform or entertain yourself, but you’re not nerdy about it. You’ve read most major classics (in school) and you have a favorite genre or two.
Dedicated Reader
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

ser·en·dip·i·ty

serendipity — the act of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

I have been in a good mood lately. Almost an insanely good mood. Maybe it’s the two weeks of muscle relaxers the doctor prescribed me earlier in the month for my back pain. Maybe it’s just going to the monastery in Arizona that did it. Maybe it’s getting back on a routine of actually waking up early in the mornings, or taking vitamins…But I have been feeling better lately. Physically better and emotionally better and spiritually better, even.

Every little thing is not bothering me like before. Yes, when people are annoying, they bother me. Now when something gets stuck in my craw, I notice it immediately. It doesn’t hide behind other feelings of inadequacy, or self-loathing, or worries about things I can’t control. But now, when something bothers me, I am able to own my own anger, experience it, analyze what may be causing it, and then let it go. Wheww. I feel about a thousand pounds lighter after letting it go. With this attitude, things don’t bother me as much. I believe that in this mood, we are charged with positive energy. And that this positive energy eminates from us, in a non-physical way, but much like a physical charge would radiate from a person, into everyone we talk to. I believe that this is the moment we are ready to meet our destiny. And this is the moment when, as intuitive beings, we humans can run into people who are exactly the person we needed to find. It’s really weird and difficult to explain but I’ve experienced this feeling many times, and then I’ve met people I was supposed to, or had conversations that I was supposed to have. It happened to me the day I met my husband. He walked into the breakroom at this horrible job I used to have as a phone customer service rep. I was resting from the phones, taking my first break and he walked in. I saw this light. I felt like I knew him and I said hi and started talking to him like we were old friends. It took us about fifteen minutes of straight conversation before I realized, perplexed, that this was the first time we had ever introduced ourselves, though we must have seen each other before because we had all the same friends. I had even been to his house many times in the previous few years because I was friends with his roommates, but all the times I was there, he was always out. Except for one time, I did hear him playing guitar on the balcony of his water front apointment while I was inside passing a pipe between friends. I asked them, who’s playing the beautiful music? They said oh, never mind. Pay no attention, that’s just our roommate Ted. This is just one example of the kind of meetings by serendipity I’ve had. Perhaps an extreme case, more intense than the other ones, because it involves meeting a life’s mate.

I added Modern Greek at State College. I sometimes try to affiliate with their Modern Greek Studies Department, because they are interesting, and I love finding people who want to have intellectual discussions on what it means to be Greek in America. Last Spring I took a class for fun, Greek American Literature. It really rocked. So I decided last minute on Wednesday, that I should try to add a Greek language class. For some reason, I felt like Greek was going to be more difficult for me, so I tried adding a low-intermediate course. I showed up, late, of course, and thinking it was the first day (but it was really the second week). The professor was totally cool about it. She had me read along. It was really easy.

I understood everything in the class and serendipitously, I made friends with the professor.

She is a scholar sent by the Greek goverment to teach Greek abroad. She has a doctorate in Modern Greek Literature, and she is also a poet and a fiction writer. We immediately clicked. We had a similar aesthetic when it comes to telling stories and the kinds of situations we like to talk about, write about, think about. It was great. She was so enthusiastic about my taking the class, but said I had to enroll in the advanced class. We ended up talking for two hours after the two hour class in her office.

the downside of mfa programs

I don’t know what it is–but something in the air at my MFA program is annoying. There are some people there who irritate me. I am in a thesis group. My advisor made me be in one. I didn’t have one so I asked this girl who I had never seen before. She also has my advisor as her thesis director, and I met her when we were both in her office. This girl hemmed and hawed and said, Well, you can only join my group if everyone says it’s okay, blah, blah, blah. I asked her who was in her group, and it was all people who I am totally cool with and know very well. I said, sure..ask them and then my thesis director says to me in front of this chick, in her pushy, Arab way (which I love her for) “Well, if they say no, I will take them aside and ask them, and then they’ll have to let you in.” I just was resolved. I figured. I just want to finish my thesis. I don’t care if the group thinks I’m weird, I just need to get in some group and go through the motions. Murphy’s law works this way in MFA programs and life: You don’t give a shit, people want you in their group desperately. So it goes. So it went. All the other people in the group “were thrilled” that I was joining. Whoopee. I thought everything was going to be great, right? Guess again–this is Camp Marzipan we’re talking about, people, not a pony parade at the circus.

The other night I realized, in a kind of crazy, orgiastic writing frenzy which ended at 3am, that I am done with the first draft of my thesis. All that pissing and moaning in my last entry, and while I may not be anywhere near a novel, I do have 100 pages of stuff I’ve turned in to my director. That’s right, I have 100 pages. I just have to rewrite. Thank GOD!

I had a really really long day. I ran from work to the thesis group. Me–who is always late everywhere I go. Never one to be on time, I step into the quad at exactly 2:30 the minute we are supposed to start and nobody is there. I figure I must lead the charmed life…For once, I’m on time. Out of five people, I’m the only one here. At first I thought, I must have gotten the time wrong, or maybe I am in the wrong place. Nope. I walked around the cafe area again and still nobody. Finally I just left and went to the computer lab. I came back 10 minutes later. One person was there. Then the other three showed up and everyone wanted to get food. By the time we all sat down it was three.

Then the girl who I didn’t know started taking control of the meeting and bossing everyone around. First she tried to change the time for a lame reason because she felt like she needed more of a break after her class. She kept trying to make it really inconvenient for others to come (especially me), and suggested that I do a double commute from the city, because I have to be near campus for work in the morning and then in the city in the afternoon. They actually wanted me to come back to campus and then go back across the bridge home (For a total of four times over the bridge in one day). I told them, NO FUCKING WAY. WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM? SUPERWOMAN? Then she endend up pressuring this other girl, trying to make her change her internship day. I didn’t think that was fair to her, but then she was going to go along with it to not stir controversy. I realized at the last minute that I had a conflict. We went back to the drawing board and that girl conceded that she was just going to ask her professor to let them out on time and walk across campus. Boo hoo for her.

Then she started being really type A personality and controlling the time, cutting my time for receiving comments because she wanted to leave at a set time. (Even though she was late!) I don’t mind when people are on task with time, but I do mind when people try to act like the teacher when it’s supposed to be a collective with no leader. Knowing that these people had let me into their group at the last minute, though, I was kind and let her be “in charge” but as the group went on, we “workshopped” another writer’s peice, I didn’t like how she dominated discussion and I didn’t agree with a single one of her comments for the person. I am starting to realize I hate workshop. I didn’t want the thesis group to be a hey, let’s rip apart somebody’s thesis session and not show them how to put it back together. I knew that by the time we got to my short story that I would have a hard time with the person in question. (I haven’t even been able to give them part of my novel yet.) The thing is, I didn’t have a problem with anybody else in the group. I liked everyone else, and still do. But there is something that grates on my nerves about this other girl. She sounded interesting at first, but she is just insecure and hasn’t written anything and at the same time is trying to dominate and control. She gives the kind of crippling comments that are ment to stall others creatively. She tells you to cut the best part of your story. This happened to me. I am working on a story with several significant characters. She told me to cut them. That’s bullshit. I had to start controlling the comments and telling the group that I was on my 8th draft of this particular story and I didn’t really find the kinds of comments where people rip your peice apart and don’t show you how to put it back together useful and that I didn’t really want to hear those kinds of comments, thank you very much. In fact I wanted them to help me find solutions to problems with the story, but I wanted to keep the story as the story I wanted to tell. I wanted them to give suggestions on how I could tell it better.

They listened. Actually, everyone else gave me good comments, but it was very emotionally draining to be in the same room with this other, new shitty person. I think, since I have been taking time off from my MFA program, I have stopped being able to take people when they say bullshit to me. Passive agressive bullshit. I might try to wangle out of this thesis group nicely, or ditch or something. The thing that gets me the most is that the person who annoys me only has 15 pages written of her thesis which not even her thesis director has seen. Our thesis director made us estimate what percentage of a whole we had completed. (We estimated that mine was 65% done (because I still had to do re-writes) and the other girl tried to say hers was 20% done. Our thesis director told her, I’m sorry honey, you have 15 pages that nobody has seen, you’ve got like 3% of your thesis done at this point. I didn’t realize it at the time, but maybe that was her way of putting this biatch in her place.

I’m sure her bossiness must come out of insecurity. But at the same time, I don’t want to deal with people like that. Especially not with people who have emotional problems. I think some people need to talk things out in therapy before they become writers. Often, creative non-fiction writers (NOT ALL–but I feel like this genre is prone to this kind of thing) are substituting writing about their fucked up lives for getting some good, sound therapy.)

I don’t know why I had such a strong negative reaction to this person. I love everyone else in the group. But this chick’s presense is like an annoying beeping sound that won’t turn off when you are dreaming or something, and then you wake up and realize it’s your alarm clock and you have been sleeping through it for the past 20 mintues. She is like a pain that you get in your neck when you lean forward into the computer too long while writing, the artistic thorn in one’s side. The negative, gnarled up Salieri that kills any playful creative thought. Bleah. I just want to puke her out and go to bed.

How will I deal with this person? At least I know she is a bullshiter. I’ll just write her off and give her writing minimal attention. Maybe I’ll go to the group stoned or something. Or take a valium or something and just wear my sunglasses while she talks. Yeah, right. I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing, try to act like she doesn’t bother me and bear it until it’s over.

I may need some maple walnut ice cream in order to find my happy place.
Until next time, fair readers.

What wild guppies look like

In case you were wondering…

This is me:

*or

*this could be me*

woo-woo!

Thesis thesis the-sis Theseus

Yes, the title of this post it what happens to the mind when we drink too much coffee at 9:30 pm on a Sunday evening. Random associations that don’t make any sense. But I am a kind of Theseus in a way, on a quest to find my thesis.

I hate writing my thesis. I have all these pages. But I am shy of showing them to my thesis director. They are not unified, they are all hodge podge. I have been editing and re-writing a short-story I wrote last spring. It is taking a lot of work. The story has expanded from fifteen pages to about 45. My new thesis group told me I can only send them 25 at a time. But the story in its slimest entirety is 45 pages long! Comments on half a story doesn’t really help me. I risked pissing them off and tweaked the margins, spacing to 1.5 instead of double-space and I was able to whittle the story down to 33 pages. But that’s it. Now I owe my thesis director “new material.” Thinking I had it in the bag, I didn’t look over my nanowrimo pages much until this weekend. Wow, did I write crap!

I’m starting to quesiton on what is possible to write about, and what is better left to someone who experienced it? I want to write about the war in Iraq. But I feel like I would be lying or creating a kind of propaganda if I act like I have the legitimacy to tell a story from there. (Even if it’s only the brother of the main character who goes there). I want to use current war as a theme in the story, but I don’t want to make any kind of political statment I disagree with, or beat people over the head with a political statement. i also don’t want to delegitimize the real experiences of people may have had by forcing it into my story, when I know nothing. I don’t want to be the literary equivalent of an abulance chaser, writing about tragedies of our time because it’s “in style.” At the same time, I feel compelled to not ignore this turbulent time and speak about it in my art. I wonder what other people think about these kinds of things? Is it possible to write about war if you have not experienced it? If it relates to your ethnic group, is it possible? For example, Jews writing about the holocaust even though they were not alive at that time? Do ideas mean more depending on whose mouths they come out of? These are good questions that get me thinking.

Meanwhile, I have a thesis to write. I am so procrastinating today. I even baked an apple pie. From scratch. Something I’ve only done one other time, but we get the farm box and we had all these apples that were starting to turn, so I had to do something with them, and what’s the best kind of procrastinating? Cooking new and intricate foods. For me, that means baking–since I’m not good at it. I am getting ready to taste that pie…the last prong of my procrastination.

I can’t get this line out of my head

I heard a poet read on KPFA from the World Social Forum in Kenya which is going on right now. She is a poet named Susan Kiguli. The line is:

I have watched you with the curious interest of an overwhelmed child.

Such a beautiful line.

Another World is Possible. Un Otro Mundo Es Possible.

I was a high school burn out

I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. I just don’t wanna. I have to go. I will go. I know all of these things. But the idea of standing up in front of a room full of seventeen-year-olds is not my idea. Apparently, without telling the faculty (or me), the college where I teach, let in all these high school students who are juniors and seniors as part of their high school curriculum to take classes in community colleges. One of the teachers I work with told me that this is a growing trend in high school education, to just dump off these sixteen through eighteen-year-olds on some unsuspecting English professor and expect the professor to work with them unknowing that they are emotionally and developmentally two years behind the average college freshman. Mix that with a few nineteen-year-olds and you’ve got yourself a class.

I don’t want to teach sixteen and seventeen-year-olds. I hate this age-group. I hated being this age. I hated everything about high school. I was the most rebellious, authority-hating, stoned misanthropic malcontent, and now I have to be some kind of authority figure for this age group. Argg! Scary.

What do i tell them? That I spent most of my junior and senior year of high school ditching at a coffee shop around the corner and not in class, then walked in and aced the AP test? Anyway, so far I have a bright class. And they are not like the other students I had last semester, who were in so many ways—-hopeless.

But at the same time, I can’t help feeling like I have to watch what I say. Maybe it’s a treat for these students to be able to take college courses, and they might actually want to be there. But a sinking part of me thinks that they are really forced to be there, like so much of high school. Forced to be obedient, to follow the rules, to think like they are told, to shut up and listen. To tell you the truth, I really don’t want to be a part of this dynamic. If I wanted to teach high school, I would have gotten my single-subject teaching credential and a MA in education, not an MFA in creative writing.

What do I do? Maybe I can switch to ESL down the line if the regular English students are lame. I wonder, do I treat these younger students differently, maybe approach them from a younger place? One of them started talking about how people can hate you for what you wear and you have to be yourself no matter what people try to say about your style. This is a very good thought coming from a high school student, but it’s just lame in college. Who the hell cares about what you fucking wear? I haven’t thought about these kinds of insecurities that high school students have, since I was having them myself. In college, at UCSB, I just somehow found all the fellow intellegent, creative, stoney-baloney rule breakers like myself. In fact, I saw some of them over the weekend at a party.

Then there is the whole thing about being a young teacher and having to deal with the secretaries who I suspect are really harpies with masks that make them appear in human form. I have gotten yelled at by many a secretary at work lately. I got “in trouble” with them for asking them twice to open my classroom with their key. They told me that if the dean finds out that I didn’t have a key, that I would be “in trouble” and that they could call the secretaries union on me for asking them to open the door, even though I was never issued a key. (I actually didn’t get a key last semester because the woman who issued the keys got off work at two in the afternoon (officially, but she often left at one) and I didn’t get to campus until 3. This summer, I was not given a key to my classroom either because the secretary of the VP of Instruction who gives out the key said that they didn’t have any more. Then she told me that if the door is ever locked to go next door to the division office and ask the very same secretaries who threatened to call the secretaries union (is there such a thing?) on me and ask them to open the door! Frustrating.

I told her what they had told me and the Vice President of Instruction’s secretary said that what they had told me was complete bullshit and that I should talk to the Dean about the behavior of his staff. I said, well, I just don’t want to do the wrong thing and get in trouble with anyone. Then she suggested if I have a problem I bring it up the VP of instruction. But then she added if they won’t open the door, I could always call her on my cell phone at the start of my class, and wait for her to run across campus and open the door for me. This seems rediculous to me since my office is right next to the harpy secretaries. I just listened and said, “So you are not going to give me a key, is that what you’re telling me that I’m not going to walk out of here with a key to my classroom?” She said yes.

Then on Friday afternoon, I get a call from the same woman who wouldn’t give me a key who said that suddenly a key for my classroom had “turned up” and to call her immediately. I didn’t get the message until late Friday night. I wonder what changed. I hate when these people fuck with me. I would just say something rude, but that’s just going to cause more problems. They don’t know any better. They’re just doing things in the way that things are always done at my college: In a cock-eyed, cacamamie, half-assed disorderly underfunded fashion. How could I expect them to be anything different?

The new you.

Have you ever wanted to be someone in a fashion magazine? Have you ever wanted to stare at fashion magazines all day long and fantasize about having the magaical things inside? (Even if you are not materialistic normally?) Have you ever wanted to not care about politics or what’s going on in the world and just cater to whatever lures lie behind shopping, pampering yourself, and feeling sleek and the smell of nail polish and hair conditioner?

We all say to ourselves: If I can only get x done, then I will have more time for myself. In the case of us writers, we are of a particularly disturbed bunch; we say, if only I could have time to write my novel, then life would be really great. We persecute ourselves and we cannot let ourselves just vegitate; There is always something we have to create on the back of our minds, nagging us to be written, even when we can’t write, when we don’t feel like writing, or when we are not writing for some reason. Somtimes I’ve wished that I could be someone who doesn’t care about real things. You know, the average Joe Shmuckatello or Jane Doe, who goes to work from morning until evening, comes home, has friends, a social life, and that’s it. No particular dreams of changing the world.

I feel strange for having a desire to write. Why can’t I just be mellow when I have nothing to do, and watch t.v. or something? Why can’t I be a part of the ignorant unwashed masses? Sometimes I don’t want to have to care about what’s going on in the world enough to pay attention and feel horrible about the damage the Bush administration is doing to the people of Iraq, and to the people of this country, to the military, to the constitution, to the legislative branch, to our civil liberties. Caring about these things feels like it does nothing. Though, on the bright side, Senator Lehy really ripped Attourney Genral Gonzales a new one the other day in congress. He called him out on the carpet. If you watched C-Span, and you could see Gonzales’ response to most of these comments, you would be able to tell that he is an incompetent shmuck by the way he smirks when the congress takes him to task. He is definitely the fall guy for the Bush administration’s war on the American Constitution. When I see him talk, I imagine that Attourney General Gonzales has a hand up his ass that makes his lips move and that he likes the gentle tickle, hence the smirk on his face.

This gets me by for a moment. But will there be change? Am I the only person watching C-SPAN seeing this? Or all we all so paralyzed we don’t know what to say when faced with this kind of incompetent beaurocratic double speak coming from the mouth of a public official? Much like the beaurocratic talk that comes out of the empolyees at Bank of America customer service or any company with a call center.

My grandmother doesn’t even know who the current president is. That’s how out of touch with reality she is. I can’t blame her, she’s 96 and has advanced dementia. She’s in deep retirement. She no longer cares about such trifles. She’s getting all saintly as she begins her to detach from worldly cares, slowly, gingerly one toe at a time, not quite ready to give up the daily pleasure of being alive, listening to the birds chirp, playing with the cats, or just being. She is the only person I know who most of the time, can just “be.”

Have you ever noticed that people are always waiting and hoping for a time when they don’t have to work so hard, where they can just “be”? Usually, we call that retirement. But then people who get the situation of being “retired” (I’m thinking of my dad and his brother in this case), and the just hate it, and can’t stand being still and they feel worthless in a way, like all their great work is over. This must feel particularly bad for men who have provided for their families for a number of years.

I wonder what I would be like if I won the lottery and never had to work again, or if flashing forward sixty to seventy years to my deep retirement. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Sometimes I think it would be kind of nice–to not have to do anything–to be free. Then I think, are these just strange dreams that the industry of wanting has injected into the soul of every industrialized worker? Have we lost the ability to relax? Have I lost my sense of me when everything is quiet and I am not doing anything? Or, is this just an intrinsic part of human nature, to want to work and make use of one’s time, much like Adam and Eve had their “daily work” in Genesis in the Bible.

While this may be true about human nature and our desire to keep busy, I can’t help but take a Marxist view of work when i look at how hard we all work. What are we working for? To survive? To be able to acquire new things. Is this what’s driving us? Are rich people and poor people and middle class people simultaneously driven and opressed by the desire to be new? To have new things? To feel powerful, important and sleek? Or the lack thereof.

The wanting to be new comes on a conveyor belt out of our minds like freshly minted plastic tiny parts that come manufactured all together on one tray, ready to be punched out and put in a cargo container, shipped by Han Jin lines or Mueler Mersk to the port of Oakland, unloaded by muscular longshoremen, attached to trains and ferretted out every mini-mall in America.

Well, in honor of this desperation for newness, I give you this new background to my blog. Previously a dreamy green with neat organic swirls, we’ve now upgraded to an eclectic, yet urban creative arts feel. Hope you like. Reach out and grab it. It’s the new you. It’s waiting. Don’t hesitate, buy today. Operators are standing by.
It is our pleasure to serve you. New and Improved! Now with nano-technology. Free sample! Free sample!