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!

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I feel like i should have something interesting to say but I don’t.
Does it really matter, in the long run, though? I teach English and this morning I asked my students to answer the following question in writing for five minutes on lined paper: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s something that I am constantly asking myself. Ted says that he doesn’t ask himself that question, but just thinks, shit, I’m grown up, I better start doing something.

When I was five years old, I had this deep interest in civil rights and the civil rights movement. Though there was not a single black kid in my class, I identified as a five-year-old with the African American struggle for civil rights and my favorite months were February and April and the only thing I really remember from kindergarten was our teacher telling us about Rosa Parks not giving up her seat on the bus, and that Martin Luther King said I have a dream. The teacher took my mother aside and told her that I had this obsession with inequality and prejudice and all these opinions about it, in hurried rushed tones. My parents raised me to be a shit-desturber.

When I was five, I wanted to be presdient of the United States when I grew up. This dream lasted through about second grade when we had to make a city out of rocks and my second grade teacher, Mrs. Crayon, said that our rock city couldn’t have a president and discouraged me from making my rock a president rock. I even wrote a letter to the President in my journal about pollution which I think I remember reading to my mom. Instead of making my rock into President rock, I made it into a psychologist. My childhood logic thought it was fat and smooth and resembled my mom in her rock-like form. So, I made it into her. I made myself a little mold of my mother, a psychologist. I remember feeling uncomfortable about making my rock into my mom’s life. But I also remember feeling scared somehow if I didn’t represent my own dreams in my rock-person, that I would not be able to have them anymore.

What do I want to be when I grow up? I don’t know because every day it changes. I think some days, a writer. Other days, a noted political activist and critic, other times a fiercly independent journalist, other times a mavric publisher of Wild Guppy Press, the beacon of arts and culture on the Left Coast, and at other times, a teacher who shapes young minds to challenge the system. Other times, a Bay Area hippy who sips Yerba matte at three in the afternoon at outdoor coffee shops. A radio-anouncer. The head of a company. A political correspondent. A novelist. A poet. A screen-writer. An independent art-film writer/director. A talk-show host personality. A stand-up comic. A grant-writer. A non-profit organization administrator. A wife. A daughter. A mother. A friend. A good person. A human being. An artist. A painter. A photographer. A devotee. A spiritual child. A crazy old lady on pharmecuticals pretending. An intuitive. A healer. A road-side fortune teller. A naturopath. A political representative. A hotel owner. A small-business owner…

I don’t want to ever grow up in my heart. I want to always dream in this life.

I am on vicadin and feeling no pain

Dear world,

Ever since my upstairs neighbor gave me some of her pain killers for back pain brought on by falling down while dusting a very hard-to reach shelf and pulling a muscle, everything has been a lot easier. No longer do I care whether or not Bank of America online banking stole my 99 dollars for opening a secure credit card five years ago and then stole my deposit three dollars at a time queitly, clandestinely until two months ago. No longer do I care what I have to do the next day, nor do I get stressed. Nothing like that can bother me now. But the way the setting sun looks through the tippy-top eucalyptus branches during a golden twilight walk in the panhandle–now that’s interesting.

I just got back from going to the Bank. I’ve been trying to close this savings account that I didn’t know I had. Bank of America charged me 99 dollars when I was just getting out of college and wanted to open up a new credit card. Over two years ago, without telling me they converted this depost to a savings account and proceeded to slowly voraciously drain it like the vampires that they are. But it didn’t show up with my statements and only recently I noticed it was there. When I noticed it, the account had dwindled to 12 bucks because the bank had been charging me a 3 dollar service fee because it was below the 300 dollar minimum they had for savings account.

Every time I tried to call the customer service number in the last few months, I’ve been transfered and had to talk to people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Finally I would hang up. One time I called the customer service rep a fucking asshole when I completely lost it. Today I went–after taking a vicadin–into the bank and asked that they close the account. You know they wouldn’t refund me more than 3 months of the fees? The manager, this pert Latina in a three-peice suit showed me that her computer would not allow her to. I know for a fact that they can refund more of the fees (I’ve had friends who’ve had lower status at BofA who had special codes to override the system, unless they were making that up to make their jobs sound dramatic), but at this point , I figured it was wise to just close the account before they start charging me negative numbers for ever and ever until the end of time. I had already gotten pissed at the customer service hotline before the holidays over this issue and they were very recockulous to me in general. So, I decided it was best to just cut my losses, take the 9 dollar credit they offered me. Then the manager took other clients and told me to go have the teller close my account. The teller couldn’t close it and I had to call the customer service number. I refused. I begged him in my vicadin induced state to just take care of it in person. I said, “Don’t make me call the robotic customer service agents. They are going to put me on hold and they are going to be so rude. You know how they are? Don’t do this to me, man. It’s a friggin-nightmare.” The teller was this young Chinese-American kid with spikey hair seemed like a college student who partied on the weekends. He and the other teller, a young hip red-streaked hair Indian girl, smirked back and forth between themselves while I re-enacted what it would be like if I called the hotline. Eventually we compromised on them letting me use their phone to call the customer service number for me. A little personal-touch, nameless, faceless 1800 corporate style.

I felt like some kind of idiot at first, for having them dial the number, but really, bank of america acts like everyone should have a cell phone. I do have one, but it’s the principle of the thing. If they require me to call a number to close my account, they should call the number with you there. They shouldn’t just hand you a number and tell you to leave. So, the minute the teller left to assist another customer, the person on the phone was rude and said that I had called the wrong number. Then they gave me the right number but wouldn’t transfer me.

I had to go back to the manager who ignored me, so I just opened the door to her little glass box and interrupted her when she was on the phone. (politely, of course). I don’t feel bad for interrupting these people. I will never see them again, and they won’t help you unless you are pushy.

Then I went back to the teller and told him to help me because you had to punch a code to dial out on their phones at Bank of America and I didn’t know what it was and it wasn’t listed on the phone. Then I went to the teller and I told him that he had to call the number for me and that I wasn’t going to go through it all over again. He called and then the other rep. needed all these codes. I realized that if I would have called myself, I probably would’ve had to go back to the bank and do another transaction. But the banks don’t care about you when they tell you to call the customer service numbers. They just want to get rid of you as fast as they can. This guy totally knew that I would have gone through 15 minutes on hold with the customer service office. They acted like i was strange for wanting them to do this for me. But why does the bank act like face-to-face service is such a wrong thing to ask for? I told him, listen if I wasn’t going to be a huge pain in the ass for my direct deposit I would just switch everything over to Washington Mutual anyway, where the people actually help you and don’t expect you to call a customer service number for everything. He laughed and then when i left the store all the tellers smiled at me and waived bye. Either they were snickering to themselves about what a baby I was because I made jokes about how awful it was to call a 1-800 number, and got melo-dramatic about it. Or they maybe a little bit saw the humanity in not being wanting to get lost in the void. I really don’t know.

If I ever get a lot of money in this life, I have to say, I am only going to work with bankers who deal with me face-to-face, at a desk, in an old-style, old country, high context culture way. That’s the kind of person who deserves business, not a nameless faceless global conglomerate. Not a monolithic monster network where nobody has the power to do anything and people tell you, “My computer won’t let me do such and such.” Imagine if when you died you went to heaven and at the gates of heaven St. Peter said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not showing your name in our data-base. Can I have the last four digits of your social security number? Well you’re going to have to go over to our records department and verify your identity with a live-scan. Thank you. Is there anything else I can help you with? Oh, sorry, you don’t have a social? You’re an undocumented immigrant, I mean illegal alien? Well, sorry, you are going to hell then. Thank you. Come Again. Have a nice day. Was there anything else i could help you with?”

Thank goodness for vicadin. It at least makes me laugh through the absurdities of life.

Funny trash my husband found

….a letter we found that was sent to him when he was a property manager after his stupid (much younger) punk ass roomate got caught making fake id’s by the police. Amazing what some parents will do to clean up after their kids. For some reason, reading this, I laughed. Won’t you have a looksie.

Wolfe and Associates
173 Chapel Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93111

Dear Mr. Wolfe:

Re: D_____–tenant in apartment 3, 6645 Del Playa, Isle Vista

We have just been informed that D___ has been asked to leave the apartment by your
company after a recent letter from the Sheriff’s Department.

We are parents of D_____, who recently was arrested while in the apartment. The
police had a search warrant for somebody in the apartment who was selling stolen
merchandize over the Internet. D_____ was not in any way involved with the stolen
goods. In the process of the search, the police uncovered evidence of some activities
that D_____ had discontinued a while back. He was questioned about this and has been
asked to appear at an arraignment on November 7th. No charge has been made at this
time.

Even though D______ foolishly became involved in these activities, he is not a “bad apple”,
but a kind and caring individual who’s been a respectful tenant since August.

He is attending SBCC currently and intends to transfer to UCSB in the fall of 2004. He has
worked at Petco in Studio City, California for two years and saved the money to
move up to Santa Barbara and rent accommodation. He has never been arrested for
anything before.

Since we are concerned that having to move during the school year would be quite
disruptive, we ask that you reconsider and allow him to stay in the apartment.

We hope you can show some understanding in this matter. If you need any more
information, please call us at (###) ###-####.

Sincerely,

__________________
(D’s parents)

reading like a writer and the daily blather of life

Well, usually when I spend an entire day doing lame stuff, I usually feel guilty at the end. Then there’s the feeling of nervousness that sets in, like an impending tidal wave. And then I get kind of manic, self-punishing thoughts, was there more I should have done? How can I be more “on the ball?” Then I beat myself up about it. Usually when I think about writing, this feeling gets bigger. But, I’m turning over a new leaf in how I treat myself after what I do in a day. So, here is what I did today in no particular order.

Woke up late. Allowed myself to sleep in because of getting over a cold.

Then, I showered.

Then ate breakfast from leftovers that were in fridge. Eggs, Hashbrowns and fried zuchinnis. Did dishes. Then I went out to Golden Gate Park and walked around. It was cold. Then I went to Haight Street. Bought a book, and a magazine. Reading Like a Writer, and the latest issue of Mother Jones for Ted. I had heard Reading Like a Writer was good from somebody. (I think it was Leonessa.) Picked it up off the shelf and thought it was 20 bucks, but it got my interest because the writer said that as a writing teacher, her act of trying to teach students how to write via the creative writing workshop was a 20-year act of complete fraud. I got a kick out of this, considering some of my puffed up literary critiques, and especially after the idea that my most loved peice in workshop was a peice I wrote before I knew what an MFA was, when I was at the ripe age of 19. Since then, my prose has gone downhill from there. But hopefully it’s about to be on the upswing again soon. I think I suffer from a lack of confidence of seeing characters and stories through to the end.

So far, the book is good. I see it as much better than what I gleaned while at the library recently and looking at Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at A Novel. (By the way, Leonessa, if you are reading this, and if you liked the book,I respect your opinion, but I couldn’t get into it for my own strange reasons.)

I opened up the book to the criticism about the book I had most recently read and this was Dostoyevski’s The Idiot, which I read over the summer and frankly, i found it to be dissapointing. I found Smiley’s little blurb on Dostoyevski’s novel to be dissapointing, not Dostoyevski’s novel. Maybe I’m old school, but I feel sad when contemporary writers try to talk bad about the greats like Dostoyevski. It just seems silly to me. It’s like if Dick Cheney got on the History Channel and started criticizing the battle plans of Alexander the Great. That’s absurd. Hey it could be the latest Republican spin propaganda. That would be a gas, wouldn’t it? If Dick Cheney actually got on the History Channel and started simultaneously critiquing and comparing himself to Alexander the Great? I wouldn’t put it past the current regime to do some random nonsequitor shit like that just to confuse people.

I think I remembered she said that his book was boring or something. I felt like, who the hell is Jane Smiley to say that The Idiot was boring? I don’t think so. This is Dostoyevski we’re talking about not some student in an MFA workshop who writes about something that we “don’t buy.” Then I remembered how lame my 12th grade English teacher was, and how she LOVED Jane Smiley’s A thousand Acres and made us read it. I remembered how much I hated reading about neat little white people on the farm and their sublimated rage and hate for each other, and I remember being pissed that we couldn’t read Truman Capote instead like the other class. I am making a really sloppy criticism here, I realize, because I don’t have her book in front of me, but based on my weird, probably unfounded personal dislike for Jane Smiley’s work, I must blather on.

Then, also, I remember being a college student when Smiley came to speak at the College of Creative Studies after she one the Pulitzer Prize. I remember being twenty and my writing mentor was going to introduce me to Smiley. I remember saying I would go. But I remember that it was my birthday and my friends and I had to get beer for a party later that day or something, and I missed it. (What a brat I was). Kind of like when my friend Mikey and I went to see N. Scott Momaday read and he bored us to tears and we got caught behind this curtain looting the catered h’ors derves cart in front of the whole lecture hall, stuffing our faces with mini-enchiladas, and putting cans of soda in the front pocket of our hoodies. And the caterers thought that the event was over and opened the curtains while he was speaking, and the whole room saw us stuffing ourselves mercilessly with free campus food. Our writing mentor, B was cool about it though. We thought he was false somehow, and that it was okay to go get food early. We had bullshit detectors a mile long, back then. (But they only worked on other people, not on ourselves Funny how that is.) Then I remember my writing mentor being kind of pissed at me for not going. But, I didn’t want to explain to B about how I didn’t like Smiley’s writing, and it had nothing to do with her as a person, but with my 12th grade English school girl perceptions of her. I always felt guilty about not going, just because it must have made B mad.

When I came back today after walking around the streets of San Francisco, I began working on this short story that I have written about four drafts of. I’m now on draft number 5. Draft number 5! I don’t think I have ever made it to this many drafts because I usually feel stupid and give up after like 2 drafts, maybe three.

When I worked at City Lights Press, I once was given the monumental task of making xerox copies of a book which they were going to reprint around the fiftieth anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. (I jokingly say monumental, because really the only cool thing I got to do when I was working there was read manuscripts, and that lasted about a week. The rest of everything was your run of the mill menial secretarial stuff, and it was pretty much understood while I was there, among the rest of the publicity/publishing staff, that I as a pee-on intern was not to contribute to the perm. employees inside jokes, and if i was to speak when not spoken to, it was to be done sparingly. This was rather disheartening, when you combined it with reading the desperate people’s manuscripts who wanted to be chosen by City Lights, all promising how they could possibly be the beat poets. Little did they know, the orignial beats were all probably at this point, drinking prune juice, or trying to find ways to keep themselves alive, while abused grad. students like yours truly were really reading their work as their cars got ticketed and towed for blocking access to a strip club a minute after four pm on Thursday afternoons. But the grass is always greener. I used to be those people idealizing City Lights.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make before this paragaraph-long digression was: Howl took something like 20 drafts before it was finished. And Ginsberg worked with an editor on it through all of those drafts! THAT IS JUST ONE LITTLE POEM. (Well, it’s an incredibly great poem, and I’d be an idiot if I sat here and criticized it much like Smiley’s blase classification of “The Idiot”)
When I did NPR’s next generation, my radio script took on about seven different manifestations until it was deemed done by the producer. Why did I think writing fiction was any different?

So, I worked on this damn story the rest of the day, taking lots of breaks to procrastinate, and make an experimental form of salmon bisque soup with T, which didn’t work out, but lucky we had left over pizza and salad and sausage to even out the mistake.

Looking at Jade Park’s blog about What Lit Agent X said about writing resolutions, I realize that there are a lot of ways to feed yourself as a writer which I was doing before I started punishing myself with manic thoughts of not being good enough, or not getting enough done. Sometimes it’s good just to dream, to peoplewatch, to sit quiet, to explore, to get involved in coming up with new material.

Having been properly satisfied that I at least worked a little bit today, when I couldn’t think anymore, I fixed the margins in my document and watched Napolean Dynamite on tv, and just vegged out. I love the part when he does the dance at the end. That was my day. Pretty uneventful. At least I wrote a little bit. I’m still not done with the fifth draft. But I think once I figure out how to get from A to B to C in it, I’ll be done. I’ve got my end, I’ve got my beginning, I’ve got my middle. It’s just a few things in between and how toget from one part to the other quickly in words is difficult. Mostly, I have to grow my character up in a few paragraphs so I can connect the beginning of the story to the rest of it. But, I can’t cut the part of her when she’s younger. (I’ve tried). I have to build a bridge between her five-year-old self and her teenage self, and I have to do it in fleshed out scenes that are less than a page It’s going to be difficult but maybe if I sleep on it. I’ve been agonizing over this for more than a few weeks, so if I wake up tomorrow with an idea, it will be a miracle.

Part of writing, I’ve learned is going through the excruciating pain at re-reading what you’ve just written. It’s so incredibly hard to stay within your own story long enough to fix the parts that don’t flow. Does it ever get any easier to look at one’s own work, I wonder?

Will the butterfly ever emerge out of the crysalis? Or will she remain, dewy-winged, in a state of half-way emergence for ever? Now there’s one to ponder for the ages.