No more teachers, no more books…

Well, I’m almost done with my semester of grading. My Freshman comp class had to turn in their final papers today. What a pain in da arse this semester’s class has been for me. I heard all the little excuses today from every possible person on every possible thing. The different stages of I’m getting an F because I blew your class off all semester, and now at the last minute after having clung on like a dingleberry, I want to somehow magically pass. The shock, anger, the denile, the despondency, and then the stoic, begrudging acceptence. Two students emailed me yesterday about not being to get on the library database to access articles for their research papers all semesters. They actually didn’t try until yesterday, and then when they couldn’t access them, emailed me all frantic and accusatory as if it was my fault that they waited until the last minute and didn’t have time to ask the librarian for the password again. This class! I’m so glad this class is over. The challenges I’ve had in this class have really run the gammot. I had three ex-convicts in my class, from (county jail, juvinile hall, and prison, respectivly). I had many men who were my age or older who liked to objectify me by commenting on my color choice in my wardrobe. (I wear a lot of browns, and one guy actually made it a point to comment several times.)

I had a girl who couldn’t speak a word of English try to hang on and who tricked me into signing her ad-slip at the beginning of the semester and then grabbed it away and ran and registered before I could figure out she didn’t understand anything I was saying. She kept turning in things that she directly typed out of the book, and every time I tried to confront her about it, she would take off right after class and act like she didn’t understand English. Eventually, I went to the registrar and dropped her.

I had two Chinese students continuously try to use the N-word to the African American students, and I had to explain to them it’s not okay, and they played stupid like they didn’t know. I had white students subtly and not-so-subtly put down the Chinese students.

I had a guy who just got out of jail, take me aside and tell me that he noticed my wedding ring and was bummed that I was married, and then told me he had schizoaffective disorder and heard voices sometimes. I made the mistake of calling him to see if he had dropped the class early on (before I knew he was nuts) and he laughed maniacally like hanibalector in silence of the lambs.

I had a discharged Army officer whose whole batallian went to iraq but him, who refused to read past chapter one of slaughterhouse five because it wasn’t enough like “Saving Private Ryan,” what war really looked like. I asked him how does he know what war really looked like if he had never been there, himself?

I had a poor girl, a civil war survivor from Nicaraugua get sick and have to go to the county hospital and get fibroids removed and who has no health insurance. I had a white girl who wants to own a thousand dollar bag. I had a 45-year-old Jewish business man who came from an East Coast upper-middle class family and was forced to take my class in order to apply to his second bachelor’s program, who didn’t understand how the rest of the class could be at such a low level. I feel like at our last meeting, he was coming on to me for a moment, but in such an under-the-radar way that it was difficult to pinpoint. He told me today as he turned in his paper, “I’m new in town, and always like friends. If you ever need me to read one of your stories, just let me know.” (I had told them i was a writer) He is engaged, so i thought it couldn’t be. And I always talk about my husband.

But, I just graded his portfolio where he mentioned that he belongs to leather communities and watches porn, and wrote his 8-10 page paper (which I said could be on any topic related to the readings) on “the path to sexual enlightenment.” (And he has found a loose way to relate it to the readings!) EWWW!!!!!!! Oh yeah, did I mention he was writing that in a post about his father, and he found a way to work in a reference about the size of his penis! Double EWWWW. Either he is really open, in an almost confessional way, or he is kind of letting me know he is open to sexual experiementation, and wants my approval? (I think he’s a swinger and is trying to feel me out if I am one, but was not sure if i was imagining this.) All I know is the best thing is to not think about it and move on. But he’s like a conservative looking business man in his forties–what a character!

I had a woman who got stabbed in the back last semester, another woman who told me that she was a crack baby today, another woman who told me she saw her father murdered when she was three in her village, a woman who was molested on the public transit system in Peru, another two women who confided in me that they were severly beaten by ex-boyfriends/ex-husbands. Hmm…what else? Oh, yeah, three people got the horrible flu. I have a couple of film school dropouts. I had a guy that was living in his car and taking my class, who ended up dropping. I had three 18-year-olds who were working their first jobs for 40 hours a week at Ikea and trying to take four college classes, I had a young Korean-Hawaiian kid from high school who was brillant, but whose attendence is sporadic, who has to take my class because he missed too much high school, whose parents had to leave Hawaii because their massage business failed and took him out of school for nine months to drive across the country and live in their car, stay in motels and try to work at massage through the Korean communities from the West to the East Coast, and then came back again. I have a martial arts champion in my class. I have a girl who comes from a very rural shantitown in Peru who has big dreams; I have a single mom with five boys, and three jobs. I have a lady who works 2 jobs back to back, seven days a week, a lot of kids who are very smart and who don’t believe in themselves, but who have, in some miraculous cases, despite all odds, improved. Yet, why do I know so much about their personal lives? I don’t remember having this kind of drama from students in my previous classes. Do I just have a kind face, so people tell me their personal problems? Was the reading triggering for them? Was it their own fear of education that made them feel this way? This kind of accusing, outward pointing finger, that is really a mirror of what they have inside of them, of what they felt growing up? Is it because they are for the most part, poor or in some way traumatized that they feel so bad, so unworthy before the learning? I had students trail me eagerly from class, to the hallway, to the starbucks and wait in line with me, unable to disconnect from the class discussion, and i was too kind to say, okay bye now immediately, and also unsure of how to draw the line when they were so hungry to talk, to share their lives, to express their opinions. (However, this is minus the one sexual guy…I’d rather not have known his opinions.)

Am I missing my true calling as a therapist, or does all this angst come with being 19, or with expanding one’s mind for the first time in college?

I had all the angst in the world at 19, but I was the kind of person who burried it when I stepped foot in the classroom, but I guess I didn’t have the problem of going to jail. High school was a nightmare for me. But in college I remade myself. I went from the slacker who barely graduated, to the popular stoner-poet chick who could pull all-nighters and get good grades, even as she slacked off. The anonymity of a UC school helped me work in my own way and my idiosyncracies didn’t threaten my own teachers’ authority. My professors actually liked it if I talked in class. Nobody cared if i was late.

Oh well…I don’t really care. At least I’m done with this damn class. They were really a bitter pill at times, with the odd sugar cube mixed in.

what are all these little buttons for?

It’s sad that I’ve been writing in this blog for three months now, and I don’t know what all the setting do. I am not very computer savvy. I am just the minimal computer savvy, but not VERY savvy. So, not that finals are over, I have time to focus on more pressing questions…What are all these little buttons for on this blog that say b, i, link, b-quote, del, ins, img, ul, ol, li, code, more, lookup, and Close Tags? Damn it! I want to know.

b ah yes, Bold! I get it, now.

i Hmm, and italic…yes, makes sense

link–okay i know what this one is

b-quote

del

ins

img–humm seems to be some kind of picture link

WTF?
ul

ol

This looks kind of like Korean characters in the editing pane.

li

woah, man.

code I feel like this one must be really intense!

the local coffee shop

There is something special about the coffee shop by my house. Could it be that it has been there since the 1960’s, and that it was a hippy haven? Could it be that the same people who probably used to come hang out there in the 60’s still emerge from the ether once a week to lend their toothless, sort of one-eyed cat, odd-ball voices to the poetry open-mic? Or could it be the homeless people who show up during the music open mic night and command everyone’s presence for a minute while hitting a single drumstick on a table over and over again and sing improvised songs about how money and capitalism is the root of all evil? A cliche, maybe. But a must for San Francisco coffee shops.

Why do I like this place so much? Could it be the drab furniture? The thick rows of students who sit there at all hours hooked into their laptops, working on their endless papers, trying to drown out the strange music that the owner’s wife plays? Lately she’s had a thing for show-tunes like Gershwin, Phantom of the Opera, etc. I can’t stand them, but I put up with it and if it gets really bad, i put on my headphones and tune it out.
I know she really enjoys it, though. She hums along, and even has learned some of the words in English. The owner’s wife is a nice lady in her fifties who comes from China. The owner is a chubby white man with a beer-belly who always wears Hawaiian shirts and has a very laid-back attitude. He met her there while traveling through some remote area and they married a few years ago. Since then, she has been taking turns with him working at the shop. I always wonder if she was a mail-order bride or if they really fell in love. Either way, it’s kind of sweet that they found each other. Their situation seems to work well for both of them.

Sometimes they fight and pretend like they are not fighting. It’s usually over her wanting to work at another job. In China, she used to be a pre-school teacher, she tells me in her semi-fluent English. Now she is going back to the local community college to learn English at get her early childhood education credential. She just got a job working with small kids at a Chinese-American school in San Francisco, and she hired a small-framed nineteen-year-old boy with curly hair and big eyes and big dreams to work part time, a fair-skinned girl who builds violins and shaves head, and is cheery. She also hired this one girl who kind of smacks her gum loud and has dark brown hair, who talks really loud behind when nobody’s at the counter about sex. She’s kind of annoying when you’re trying to study and always claims that the coffee is fresh when it tastes stale. But in general, I like the rest of the people there.

I especially like the owner’s wife. She is very sweet and always gives me a hug when I come in. She makes me a special sandwhich, which you can’t get anywhere else in town and which I am addicted to. She’s so nice to everybody who comes in. She seems to percieve when I am about to get sick, and gives me little tips on how to stay well, home remedies that will make me feel better. She roles her eyes with me when strange customers come in who are really demanding. But then, at the same time, she finds little ways to accomodate and pacify them. It’s a great place to be. Everyone feels welcome there. The cafe is a safe-haven for all who go there. It’s not the cleanest, it’s not the dirtiest, it’s not the newest, it’s not the oldest in town. But somewhere in the intersection of all these elements, it is a nice spot to hang out, and where you’ll find me at an odd, lazy hour of the late-afternoon, sipping tea, passing my way into dusk.

what i want to be when i grow up

Well, it’s almost 3am. And here I am: a night owl. Again and again I come here, to this computer, to stare into the void–again. The void has become familiar. i don’t even know why I am writing. I kind of gave up the idea of being “successful” at writing I think this year. I don’t really give a shit now. (What am I saying–yes I do deep down…but you know, I’m not banking on the fact, anymore. I’m not so naive.

I feel like how my dad must have felt when he came to a poetry reading of mine when i was a teen and went around asking people what they really did for a living in order to prove that poetry wasn’t a real job that people could live on. I think he must have thought that he was teaching me about life while doing this, but I really resented him for it in the moment. Now I can kind of see where he was going with it. He didn’t want me to be dissapointed.

I have always wanted to be things that are impossible: From age five to age nine, I was sure that I would grow up to become president of the United States. I actually believed that if i wanted it enough, that it could happen. It didn’t bother me, that I would have been the first non-WASP president, nor the first woman. People thought it was cute back then. Now I’ve since awoken to political dissadence and realize that this idea can never happen, and that I, like Clinton, could not say I didn’t inhale, nor would I want to say it. Then at some point, I wanted to be an actor, or a film producer. All really unattainable things. Now, as a “grown up” that refuses to do so, I want to be a writer! Of all things? Sometimes it feels as far off as growing up and wanting to become the Pope.

I might write the rest of my life and never sell a peice of fiction, or publish more than a trifle. Kind of like Van Gogh or Killgore Trout in Vonnegut novels. In that case, if after several decades I am still in this situation, I won’t let anonymity sink me without a trace. I’ll just self-publish and pass my ravings out at bus terminals in the middle of the night, or to prisons. And with the US having the largest incarcerated population in the world, something to the tune of 2 million people. In fact, according to one article I read 1 in 32 Americans (7 million in total) were on parole, probation, in jail or prison in the last year! That’s one in 32 Americans! I could potentially have a very large, very captive audience) I could leave my scrawlings in piles at the Welfare office, in books for prisoners programs, or I’ll leave them in the waiting room at County Hospitals. I could post them on the dirty bathrooms of trains traveling north from Thessaloniki through Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest, Prague, and Krakow, with the hopes that someone will read them, as they used them to line the floor of the dirty bathrooms as they pissed in a whole that exposed the track below moving at 45 mph for three days straight. I know that last sentence made no sense…but this is my euphemistic dream of glory, so bear with me.

It somehow has come to relax me–writing late at night. I don’t know why or how. I’ve written so much in the past few months, that if I am not awake at this hour with my thick headphones plastered to my ears, hugging the sides of my head, playing strange music from around the world into my ears, then it’s like I don’t know what to do with myself. Sometimes at my MFA program, I feel like I will never make it as a writer. I don’t go to Iowa, one of the top schools, aparently, where the rumor is, and I’m not one to start rumors or spread them, as I can see how dangerous this can be, but where the rumor is, that the agents go cherry picking for writers straight from the workshops. Does anyone know if this is true for sure, I wonder? Apparently, I was a little too naive to think that this happened at all MFA programs. Maybe I should have applied to Iowa? Not saying I would have gotten in or anything. But maybe moving all the way out there would have been the quick fix answer for my writing. All right, I know there’s no quick fix. I feel at my school, while we have shimmers, young shooting stars that through their ebullient brilliance, give us glimpses into what it must be like to be at an Ivy League school, but with just enough of a tease because we are not. (And let’s face it, the Iowa Writing Workshop is the equivalent in the case of creative writing). But will our super successful, young teachers who have just made it…will they turn us on to their agents? Will they spend the time with us just like their mentors helped them, to become better writers? Or do they see us as another paycheck? Something to do, to keep their visas, to get chicks, to eat, to stay connected, something they have to do, something that takes them away from their writing, the only place that the overcrowded English dept. scene would have them after the got their PhD’s from University of the Ivory Tower? Something less than them that they have to put up with? Somehow less good then they were? And is this true? I sometimes feel like a used ford for sale next to a ferrari in their presence. Do they see me, my yearning to be a better writer? Do they see my will, the sparkle in my eye, the gleam in my spirit? Do they think I can do it? That I am good enough? And then I wonder, why do I even fucking care? They’re accolades are great. I should be happy when I see a young writer succeed. I am happy for them. But does this mean that all of the writing mojo is used up and there is not enough left for little old me, or the rest of us for that matter? The thought of this makes me very anxious some times.

What if all my life, i wanted to be a writer, and i was just not as good of one as the “true writers” and now is the time when I will begin to figure this out, start working a job, and fade my dreams into non-existence. I know this is not really true. But I worry. Is the publishing industry just a small cloistered world run, like all other things, by friendsies and the greased palm? Do I have to like reading the New Yorker in order to fit in? Should I keep stacks of it in the john for my guests to observe at parties so I look well-read and literary when I crap? Why this bristling prickly feeling of there’s not enoughness that seems to happen for writers? It really is a shame.

I don’t want to be a writer when i grow up anymore. i want to be one now. i am one. ha. Why is writing one of those things that we never feel like we are one, even if we ARE ONE? It’s not like being a doctor. You kind of KNOW that you are a doctor when you become one. But why is feeling like a writer, such a nebulous concept?)

I am a writer. i am a writer. i am the eggman. i am the walrus. coo-coo-ca-choo!

Here I am

Well, I am back. Where did I go all this time? Nowhere. I was right here. But, I was hiding from bloglife. Because I was not letting myself do anything too procrasinatory because I had to make up an incomplete I got last semester before the deadline. I have been writing a 25 page term paper on Early Modern England and the relationship between commodification and class anxieties in the pre-capitalist England of the 1620’s in my spare time. Sound like a doozie? It was! In fact I have spent the past few weeks, every time I am not at work, either writing this paper, researching for it, or eating comfort food because of it. Because I waited several months after the class was over to write it, I had to re-read all of my sources. It really sucked. I’ve read Women Beware Women about five times now. At the end of it I started running around quoting all the veiled sexual parts like: “She took her pricksong early, my lord.” and “Fondness is but the Idiot to affection that plays hot cockles with the rich merchant’s wife,” My husband asked me what hot cockles were while we were in the car on the way to the grocery store after I maniacally recited the line several times. I told him I didn’t really fucking know after all that writing, but assumed it was sexual. We both laughed maniacally.

I have made some wonderful winter comfort food, partly because it is fun to do while procrastinating, including a whole roast leg of lamb and potatoes, seasoned with fresh herbs and garlic. For snacks, I’ve been eating those little peices of this little frosted tea-loaf from Trader Joes, and homemade (well, from a mix, anyway) bisquits toasted with gobs of butter and fresh rasberry jam, and coconut chocolate macaroons, and molasses cookies (which I have yet to dip into), and what else? Oh yeah, really good Irish oatmeal from Trader joes, the kind that’s flavored with maple syrup and brown sugar. (Though my Irish friends have assured me that anything pre-flavored is certainly not the real Irish way, just as I have tried to convince them not to by sun-dried tomato-flavored crumbled athenos feta which they are accustomed to because it’s so not authentic and smells like barf. But to each his own, I guess.) I’ve been warming up that little oatmeal and putting really sour Greek style yogurt in it! So yummy. And I have been drinking an alternation of coffee, ice-water, lemonatta, and pomegranate white tea, and earl grey tea. All so yummy. And somehow, I ate my way through this damn paper, and now I’m done. I went to Trader Joes with my husband again before it closed, right after I had finished the paper, and I got nervous. I mean, I had been inside, in one long inside day since the weekend began (Friday–with the exception of a late-night foray to Hayward in the rain to see a friend of a freind’s band play) and a two-am chat with my upstairs neighbor because we were both coming home at the same time and tend to gab to long in the hallway and it was cold. So, I was completely useless at the grocery store. First of all, I rarely go to Trader Joes or Whole Foods. I love both of these stores, but really they are both a pain in the ass to go to. Both of them are located in a really inconvenient place in the city and require strange driving maneuvers to pull into their parking lots and you must have really good parking karma if you want to get to either of them. And people push you in both stores. People push! I mean it. It makes me feel frantic and I end up grabbing too many groceries and putting them into the cart and leaving. But this time, an hour before they closed, the place was virtually empty. I followed Ted around like a zombie while he loaded the cart, and I drank the free sample coffee and I couldn’t handle pushing the shopping cart or the flourescent lights. I felt like I was coming off one really long drug trip except that trip would be writer’s high. It must be something like runner’s high, but instead of feeling exhilierated, you feel euphorically loopy and drained after it all.

And now I owe my thesis director two pieces, and I have to grade a stack of essays. And what else? So, I will open my nanowrimo pages and mine for things from there. Phew. What a weekend.

News bullein on the status of Wild Guppy

This just in…News bulletin from the front lines of writingdom. That’s right folks, we over here at Wild Guppy Inc, are very, very extremely, profusely excited to announce that WILD GUPPY HAS FINISHED NANOWRIMO, writing more on ONE PEICE than she has every written before in her life in such a short span. Our sources have told us that at the last minute, while writing about how her grandfather talked his way out of a firing squad and lived over sixty years ago this very night (might have been, you never know). And tonight, in the nick of time, two minutes before NANO WRIMO ended, Ms. Gup, got in her very first peice. The peiece was uploaded furiously at 11:58 pm on November 30th with one minute and some seconds to spare. After downloading, she received the honorary trophy and will be standing on the Olympic block singing the national writing anthem, the podcast from six-degrees traveler as she is awarded the gold medal in the virtual form. You can view it here.

It’s amazing over here at the Guppy House, folks. Things are going crazy over here in San Francisco. People are cheering. All the little creatures that live in Wild Guppy’s head are cracking champagne and the toasts are flying. People are tearing off their clothes and jumping head-first into tubs and tubs of vanilla bean icecream that the city of Guppy Ville has brought out especially for the occasion. People are skying up mountains of icecream in the middle of the street. It’s a madhouse! Under-city fountains of chocolate syrup are coming up from springs underneath the earth. It’s just a madhouse here. This is what some of wild guppys inner selves have been telling us. And according to them, the celebrating and ice-cream gorging is not going to be over for a long time, folks. It will be going WELL into the night and we’ll bring you continuig coverage through out to week. Back to you Bob, in the studio. . .

Thanks, Guppilla. Have a nice time with all the Wild Guppy revelers.

Gupilla: I will Bob.

Bob: Well onto other news. In the Bay area…