what is it like to be done?

I’ve noticed that I’ve been really hate-y of my MFA program lately. My mom mentioned to me the other day when I told her about how I was so sick of my MFA program and its bullshit, that she noticed a pattern with me. She said that every time I start to get ready to leave something, I tend to hate it. Maybe she is right. I have done this from a young age, from pre-school up until now and since my mom knows me, she’s seen it. I get into this mode where I have to look at all the shitty things about something I’m involved in and say what they are. This means I must go through some initial phase of idealization with the thing before I get involved or at the beginning. It’s kind of silly, really.

It must be because I am in the final throws of my thesis. I am revising half of my rough draft and expanding it and turning it in to my director at the end of the weekend. The more I look at what I’ve written, the more I don’t know if it’s done or if it needs more work.

It’s hard when you have to go into the minutae of editing mode, to really keep focus of the big picture, the inspiring part of the first draft that got you writing the story in the first place. Everything feels like lock-step at this point, and I am starting to lose the joy of the prose. However, on the plus side, I can see sloppy parts that I had neglected to fix, thinking they were poetic, and fine-tune them now, where I couldn’t before. Also, I am working on weaving together two very different peices to come up with my page limit.

I feel like I don’t know what it means to write a “finished” piece of fiction anymore. By finished I mean, a publishable peice of fiction, not just one I don’t feel like working on anymore. I don’t know what it feels like to “finish” a story or a novel because I haven’t experienced the feeling before. I had always anticipated that I would end with a confident flourish, like how I’ve seen the authors write their last words in the movies, and then judiciously put their quill pen back in the inkwell, closing a large tome slowly with a sigh of satisfaction. But I’m starting to get the picture that maybe this is not what one feels like at the end of a peice. I saw my friend on the day she finished the first draft of her memoir. She said that she started crying many times during the day for no reason. I sat and ate with her and she looked like she had seen a ghost. She was a psychological mess. I saw her a few weeks after that and she was back to her old self. But, it gets me wondering. What’s it like when you’re done with a peice of writing? Do you know when you are finished? Do you ever really feel done? Maybe I still haven’t experienced enough to really begin to answer this question.

pretty picture

teaching is really hard

One of the main problems I have with teaching young students is that nobody thinks. It’s not just that they don’t think. But it’s that the ones who do think are afraid to say their opinions. Why is this? How much of high school is a waste of time…a time where kids are treated like prisoners or animals and are never asked their opinion. They have to go to schools that have metal detectors, be interrogated and intimidated by the poice at times, imposed to all these very strange and soul-killing activities, and the only ones who “do well” are the ass-lickers. It really gets to me because the ones who kiss up can’t think for themselves often. Sometimes the kids who think for themselves are the ones who get into the most trouble.

I can’t stop thinking about teaching. There must be something wrong with me because I often just can’t seem to decompress. I keep thinking about my students. New ways I can get them to talk, to think, to open up, to get excited by their own thoughts, by each other’s thoughts.

It scares me to see how easily fooled America’s youth are. How they don’t think. Then when I think of all the priveledged assholes I encountered in graduate school, I wonder, why should they bother? I spent my whole young life being told by teachers that I would never make it. That I was a behavior problem. And it was just because I was smart and bored in class. Because my parents worked full time and didn’t have time for me. Because I wasn’t well-dressed. Because I didn’t seem rich enough. Because my father was an immigrant. Now I am not defined by these things. I am an adult in a position of authority. I am an “educated” person. I went to a public school in a city that passed an ordinance that if three or more kids with baggy pants were seen walking togehter that they were in a gang, and could not be together. I went to a junior high school where at lunch time if a group of more than five kids gathered on the playground, the lunchladies would come up to us with a bullhorn and scream “Disperse! Disperse!” until we separated. I went to public school that felt like jail. I hated the preppy kids. So what am I doing back at public school, trying to teach young people who just came out of the same situation? I really have no idea.

The education system in America is a disgrace to the humanity of the children who are in public schools. There is such a disparity between schools based on neighborhoods, and between public and private schools. The disparity is disgusting. Wealthy people who pull their kids out of public schools so they don’t have to mix with commoners are doing the country a disservice. They should pass a law that all people serving in government posts must put their children in public schools. I bet the amount of money going to schools would change dramatically.

I recently met a philosophy professor at my school. I teach at a community college. “He teaches all the right people,” said a colleague of mine. I said, oh yeah, Like Foucalt, Derrida, thinking of the instyle deconstructionist philosophers. The guy smiled at me like he was trying to mask the fact that he didn’t know what I was talking about, and then he said, “Oh, I try to teach philosophy that doesn’t have too much jargon, so the students can understand.” It was as if he was saying that the students are not smart enough to read Foucalt and Derrida. (I wondered if he had read them. Maybe he hadn’t.) That really infuriated me.
Isn’t philosophy all about trying to make sense of the terms that characterize thought? Couldn’t the argument be made that all philosophy is jargon?

I am dealing with people who have never been taught how to think for themselves. When they do have an opinion, they have been let down by the world so much that they don’t feel like they have the authority or the permission to say what they think. I just had a student write a great critical paper which talked about reading and writing and how the people in power have controlled education from the people who don’t have power. Her whole paper implied that knowledge was something that was controlled and distributed by the “people who have” but she didn’t go as far as to actually say this. When we met in my office hours, and she asked me how her paper could have been stronger, I told her. And she told me that she didn’t really feel like she should make a strong opinion, instead she should give a voice to all sides. I told her, but you didn’t give a voice to all sides, all your examples point to this one conclusion, but you don’t go right out and say it or analyze it further. She said, but I didn’t want to make anybody mad. Isn’t the point of good writing not to make anyone disagree with you?

I told her: Where does it say that in writing you are not allowed to piss people off? What do you care if people don’t agree with you. You should say your opinion. At least that’s interesting. Let people disagree with you if they are going to disagree. Let them build their own argument to try and prove you wrong. Say what you want to say and say it well. This was coming from the smartest person in my class. It’s as if she was afraid to be smart–to say what she wanted to say even if it could be disagreeable. When I told her she was doing a marxist analysis of education, she said, Oh, I don’t want to do that. What the hell? If my smartest students are afraid to say what they think, imagine what the ones who are behind are like? Do they think critically at all? Do they just act, react like babies? Oh…I am so frustrated. I know that I, singlehandedly can’t stop ignorance. I know that singlehandedly, I have no power to counteract twelve years of crap schooling, of kid jail, of broken homes, broken promises, poverty, distress, but I feel like if I can’t change at least one person, there is absolutely no point in me going to work in the morning.

So I sit like this, in mental agony, completely obsessed with the fact that my students must learn how to think…if they learn nothing else. (I even think about it in the middle of the night.) At least learning how to think will set them free. But it’s sad when that is such a scary thought to them.

I marvel at how people from my grad program with no teaching experience (except for one piddly English TA-ship that is doled out to the most kiss-assy of the grad. students to babysit the most priveledged babyish coddled of the undergrads) just filters them into community college teaching like it’s somehow easy. I marvel at the professional teaching conference held at my grad. school where people who had never taught before talked about the most basic “pedagocial” bullshit that didn’t really have anything to do with real students and their needs. The conference, though superbly-run and well-organized, was filled with the most boring, trite presentations about grammar, etc, people’s pompous generalizations. I wish they had actually gone into the schools, been made to find a need and fill it. And talk about that. Not just wax poetic with generalities on what they think teaching means and then clap for themselves after they got up and talked behind a podium. There must be some better way to get people ready to teach than this.

Anyway…I don’t really know what to think abou teaching. Sometimes I think I should find a job where I can just try to do well and where I don’t have to worry about the problems of the world. But I want to put my life’s energy to some use. I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t do what I believed.

I guess it comes down to one fundamental thought: The more I teach the more I learn how to teach; the more I learn how to teach, the more I realize how little I knew about teaching before and how much I have to learn.

No matter what I do, I’m never done

This is my mantra, lately. I realize that no matter what, I will always have unfinished business. I have a ton of papers to grade. I found out that my school is piloting a new program of letting 11th graders take college courses. They take small classes in ninth and tenth grade that get them ready for college. The new experimental school let in it’s first batch of 9th graders in 2004. This semester the first crop of students made it to 11th grade and are starting to show up in Freshman Comp. classes around our college. Of course by some fluke, I, the newer teacher got stuck with fifteen out of the twenty kids who are doing this program. They are not necessarily the A students of their schools. In fact, the philosophy is that they are the B and C students. Supposedly, though being in a special high school that’s second two years is on a college campus is supposed to get their test scores up. It’s a band-aid solution to try to shock some life into the public schools in the area that deal with at-risk youth.

They’re a nice group of kids. I’ve got their respect, I think. Though I don’t want to speak to soon. When I was first an intern, I saw students at the very same college act awful in front of young grad. students, throwing paper airplanes, laughing, mocking and ignoring, and throwing projectiles, and talking on their cell phones in class. They listen to me and I don’t use any kind of severe methods like yelling, punishment assignments, etc. I just talk to them like people. They seem to like it. Funny, people like to be talked to like people? What a concept.

But I am not going to let myself feel guilty for having 15 more student papers to grade. I just don’t have the stamina to look at one student paper right now. I just don’t.

Instead…I want to write down great one-liners I’ve scribbled down on scraps of paper haphazardly around my workstation, also going through my little fat black notebook that holds my life together. Once in a while I will scribble something interesting:

Poetry comes in when we least expect it.

A trinity of fathers, two of them dead. (Came up with this one while joking with my fiesty poetry teacher who sometimes likes me and often gets pissed at me.)

“People demand freedom of speech for the freedom of thought which they seldom use” That’s a quote by Soren Kierkeguard, the father of existentialism.

“Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul” Henry Van Dyke

“Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.” D.H. Lawrence.

*take the middle of the road, go up that hill (driving directions to myself with no destination listed)

“Over the whole world goes the cry of the artist to help me do my very best” (It was in quotes in my notebook. I don’t know if I wrote this or if it’s a quote I pulled from somewhere. I think I woke up from a dream saying this.)

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal ideas from many is research.” (I know that’s a quote…but of course I didn’t put where I got it from)

Holy Trinity historical society–sounds official doesn’t it? I have no idea what this is.

Directions to a funeral…sad.

An empty page that says nothing but the words “policy — pre-existing” Probably this had to do with when i was getting dicked around my my grad-program and by insurance companies earlier in the year.

What are the common elements in all Cinderella stories?

*I want to study the connection between class anxiety and female sexuality in Middleton’s Early Modern English play, Women Beware Women. (I wrote a paper on this..this was my structuring thought.)

A note in scrawling red pen to myself that says: “Talk about the fragmentary nature of ” (who knows what was next)

“thinking about thinking”

“Sitting in the cliff house
life is beautiful
inside this square box a candle.” (written on Valentine’s Day after dinner when my husband went to the bathroom)

“My will is secondary to the will of God” (somebody told me this the other day and I wrote it down)

“______never realized it, but this is the day he really died.” Great advice about tightening a story I wrote, which I scribbled down in my notebook, hurriedly while on the phone with a wise friend/editor.

around town on president’s day

All you need is love

I’m feeling loved right now. I found this interesting side-walk graffitti while walking in my neighborhood the other day.
Check it out.

Secret identities

Don’t worry, fellow semi-anonymous bloggers, I am not outing you. Though makes you wonder with a title like “secret identities” doesn’t it?

Instead I was thinking about my plumber. My plumber is a very good-looking young man who is half Armenian and half Greek. His name is even Adonis. The other day he came to fix the pipes, (yes, I know the cliche), but he came to fix the pipes and we got to talking about how we both had been taking muscle relaxers for our back pain. “Yes, I know exactly what they are,” he said enthusiastically, “little round orange ones with a line in the middle, but I forget what they are called.”

“Me too!” I said.

We both twisted our backs while falling about a month ago. I fell while I was doing a manic cleaning of my top pantry shelf. He says he fell while building an art studio in the backyard for his wife who is a painter. But he said, it’s exacerbating an old injury. He started explaining. You see…it seems the plumber who my husband and I have been hiring to fix the pipes is a boxer. Not just your regular old run of the mill street fighter or amateur boxer, but a real life Thai boxer. Not just your regular old Thai boxer but a two-time US Champion in his weight class. What a cool secret identity. We had wondered once, my husband and I how Adonis was able to twist this really difficult bolt that was so hard to turn, and he had done it with ease, an almost super-human strength. But now it all makes sense: he is a world-class athlete. Of course he’s strong.

Now he’s retired because his wife doesn’t want him to suffer any major injuries now that they have a baby . We comiserated over how we are all, in a sense slaves to doing what we love. “My one true love is Thai boxing,” he said. “But now I only get to do it once a week.”

“I completly understand you,” I said. “It’s the same way with writing.” We have our secret passion, and then we cover it up for whatever reason, or because of the fates, we are prevented from doing it because of an injury, because we have to be respectable, because secret passions don’t make the world go round in the same way that money does.

When I think of people who have hidden passions for the arts, so many people come to mind. Most of my friends…my husband — a would-be international journalist; then there’s me — a fiction writer/poet; Adonis, the plumber’s wife — a painter with an Masters degree in fine art who does not use it to make money; and finally Adonis — a semi-retired Thai boxer. The thought of it is kind of funny. We all have day jobs. My husband is an ESL teacher and tennis coach. I am English teacher, Our friend, Adonis of course, is a plumber by day and his wife is a stay-home mom, for now.

When do we get to become superman? When can we quit our dayjobs? Maybe never. Recently I emailed an old teacher of mine from my MFA program who is a newly minted young Latino writer congratulating him on the publication of his new book. It was about a week ago, to be honest. I wrote a really heart-felt email because I went in to this gigantic megabookstore, and the first book that caught my eye was his new novel, which was a surprise. I also told him of a student of mine who I had loaned his book of short stories. She was from the same town that he was writing about. But, instead of being a privledged American writer of doctor parents like him, she grew up the life of one of his characters, poor, indio, and rural. She really liked his book and I thought he would like to know. So I told him the story. I also asked him where he was doing a reading so I could tell the girl who wanted to meet him or see him read. (He should be so lucky to meet her…she is very beautiful and intelligent, and a thoughtful reader.)

You know, I still haven’t gotten a response back. Not even a short one-liner like hey, thanks so much, here is my reading schedule cut and pasted. I feel like this young former teacher of mine (who is only three years older than me), has maybe forgotten what it’s like to have a secret identity as an artist. He got to throw away his disguise and be a “writer” all the time. Maybe he sits there and measures if it would be good for his carreer to respond to x or y request. I don’t want to speak too soon, maybe he will respond to my email. But, it got me thinking about secret identities…it also got me thinking about what I will do when I publish my own work. I will respond to such emails (if I know the person who sent me). But maybe people who receive critical acclaim have to construct a new secret identity — what they do with their private life. Maybe being a private person amidst the pull of the public is their struggle.

Then another thought came to my head. “We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for” to quote a Hopi teaching and Alice Walker’s new book title. Maybe we are all already secretly who we want to be.

10 Things I Like

This is a meme that I got from Jade Park’s blog who got it from someone else’s who got it from someone else’s ad finitum. I am thinking of ten things I like that start with the same letter. My assigned letter is “H”

1. Hmmm. That is the first word that comes to my mind, and I was going to say that I couldn’t think of anything except for I would say Hmmm classifies as a word, and I like to say Hmmm a lot. It’s really an American sort of nothing word which is meant to mean hold on, I’m thinking…Sort of like “pues” in Spanish. Hmmm is not to be confused with mmmmm, as in how tastey that meal was, or mmmhmmmm, a sort of lazy yes, or uh-uh, a sort of lazy word for no. Mastering all of these subtle mumbles are pre-requisites for living in California, and some would say for living on the West Coast at all.

2. Haute. I don’t quite know what this word means. But it generally is attached to things, products, furniture, wedding gowns, articles of clothing, houses, hotels, that are very stylish and pretty to look at, but are also very ’spensive. I’m actually not sure how I feel about this word. Maybe I don’t like it. Well—let’s just say I like looking at it but I don’t want to be bound by it. But I must say, it is pretty. I’m on the fence.

3. Helping. I like to help other people who need it when I can. It makes me feel important, as if I have something to give them. Gives me something to do. Keeps me busy. (When I think of it. Sometimes I suck and don’t help as much as I could have..but for the most part I try to be helpful.

4. Humility. The most beautiful quality in a person. The quality that I greatly admire. The thing I struggle with trying to understand and incorportate in my life the most.

5. Humus. Did you know that Humility comes from the greek word homos, which is means humus, or dirt, or earth. So a humble person is lowly like the earth. I haven’t checked my facts on this one. Could not be true. But I like the idea of earth, it’s pure and in it things can grow and regenerate.

6. Hospitality. I’m a Greek. Philoxenia is my middle name. Hospitality runs in my blood. The thing that turns me off the most about a person is when they don’t act hospitible to me when I am in their home. I know that some people don’t know any better, but seriously, this is a big deal. This is a requirement and the way I was raised. If someone comes to my house, I always offer them food or drink. You always offer to help people feel more comfortable in your home. You never ask somebody to leave if you are about to eat dinner and there is not enough…you share what you have and you order more or make more, if you have to.

7. Hellenes. While we are on the subject of Greeks, why not the classical term for the Greek people? For the most part I like
being Greek. It’s so much a part of who I am, even though I grew up in the US. It gives me flavor. That’s what I am. Since I’ve been told my some I can’t call myself a woman of color, even though I so identify with the woman of color writers I know, but since I am not accepted fully into the club, I deem myself now and forever a…woman of flavor. A true Hellenida. Must come from a country with flavorful food to join, please, and must be a woman at the time of joining. Please check the appropriate box. Sorry…I’m getting off on a strangely political topic. But, that’s me. I’m horrible, aren’t I? Hmmm. How do I get back? oh yeah….hmmm.. I’ll let that be my focus word.

then there’s…

8. Hemp. Does this really need explaining, folks? If so, click here.

9. Holiday. Oh, I can’t wait until president’s weekend. What am I going to do, you ask?…well I have no idea. But I love to do nothing and travel to far off places and bask in the sun. And wade in the water. I wish it was summer already.

10. Halva. I was having a hard time thinking about this last one. And then I realized that it was on the tip of my tongue. Literally on the tip of my tongue. It’s Halva, a kind of candy/pastry delicacy that my husband bought. Usually sold in Middle Eastern stores, the Greek store, etc. My favorite is Macedonian Halva. From Macedonia, where my father is from. (By Macedonia I mean the original Macedonia…The Greek Macedonia…not the Former Yugoslav. Republic of Macedonia or FYROM named by Tito in the 1940’s as a plot to try to lay false claims to the port of Thessaloniki.)

end of fun weekend

Last night it finally stopped raining.

We mixed a bunch of friends together and we all hung out. I invited my Greek teacher over to the house. She is living in the US from abroad and seemed to be a bit lonely. I would be lonely too without a posse, in a strange country. I was supposed to go to this Greek dinner dance with her but I was worried that we’d feel left out since we didn’t know anybody there, even though we are both Greek. I worried because the Greek-Americans are sometimes cliquish, and I didn’t want to pay 40 dollars to eat chicken dinner and sit by ourselves. Plus, I haven’t the heart to dance with the wild abandon I was used to, because since I broke my toe, really cute shoes are out of the question. I don’t have any sensible dancing shoes, and it was raining…and my husband didn’t want to go, and a bunch of people called us and asked us if they could hang out.

So after vascillating back and forth in my head I said, well, if you want…you can come over here. It was a half-hearted invitaion, more out of philoxenia than anything but she must have been so bored and all alone that she took the bus to our house.

My husband’s friends all came over too and brought their musical intruments. People jammed on guitar, saxaphone, bongo drums, strange metal flutes from Ireland, my friend Fabio on the keyboard, and the rest of us on these little wooden African instruments that look like a block of wood and have flat metal strips that when hit with your fingertips give off a whimsical, dreamy sound. One of my husband’s work friends just quit his job as a teacher and was about to follow his girlfriend to Korea to live. He showed up at our house a little drunk and started wailing on the saxaphone at midnight in my apartment. Then he started scatting, and all the while as people played guitar and bouzouki, and before long and a few more beers, he started singing his heart out, shaking his head back and forth, closing his eyes like a person posessed with the spirit of symphonic sound.

I realized that to someone who did not know me very well, I might have seemed like somebody who consorts with crazy artists. Maybe I seemed like a crazy artist, myself.

We ended up all jumping in a cab and following these guys to a party thrown by some international students living in the Tenderloin. The students were Turkish and Japanese with one Korean thrown in for flavor. We managed to all fit into this tiny one-bedroom apartment, taking off our shoes of course as we entered, a much nicer custom than many parties. If there had been just one more person, it would have been uncomfortably crowded. The two Turkish guys had made delicious food for everyone and as they urged me to pile up my plate with delicious kefte, and sausages and something which looked a lot like tabooleh salad, they kept yelling, “your pleasure is our pleasure.”

Then the Korean guy who was there, whose name I have forgotten, started telling me about how when he drinks in Korea with friends, he follows a certain drinking protocol. According to him, first and formost that friends drink all together, and if one person stops drinking, they get mad, and urge him on. Then, after they are all really drunk they go, at 3 in the morning all together to a public spa and sit together in a steam room, or sauna and sweat out all the toxins and talk to each other in their drunken state. At the spa, they drink a special traditional Korean juice-like thing with lots of vitamins and minerals. I feel like I have drunk this before, but I am not sure. (I wonder if it is sweet and made from rice?) After they feel replenished, they go all together to a room, and sleep for a few hours. They wake up around noon and all go out to eat soup for lunch. They talk a little bit more. Then they say their goodbyes and go on their way. I thought this was so funny. I wish I could do this spa thing, after a night of going out in America. I feel like this guy has the right idea.

As for this Greek teacher, I wonder what she thought of us — such a debaucherous group of international teachers and students, mucisians, writers, and artists, filmakers, surfers, with a sociologist and a lawyer thrown in for flavor.

Two of our friends ended up spending the night on our couch, and one in our spare room, and we ended our party after brunch in exactly the same way minus the healthy soup, or the refreshing spa. But we did sip cups of water with emergency packets of vitamins soaking in them.

We must have seemed like crazies. But you know, I’ve come to the realization that I like being a crazy who can howl at the moon. I think the way to live life is to allow yourself to be a dreamer, to appreciate life when you can.

transformations

I think I’m going through some kind of new transformation or something. Maybe as a writer, or as a person. Whatever it is, I must say that I am tired of being a graduate student, and I am tired of trying to hussle through the MFA writing world. I had a long talk with my thesis director the other day. We got into some good conversation about my novel, my thesis, etc. It seems that she doesn’t want me to work on my novel and just wants me to get through the thesis and have something finished. She is a good thesis director. But we do have our differences. I want to write a novel. She doesn’t want to read a novel of mine during the semester, because what I have is so far from being done. She just wants me to turn in stories and work that add up to a larger work. This kind of bothers me, because I wanted to work on my novel. But the work I am turning in is really rough, because I am still getting the edges of my story nailed down. This might take two more years to finish. And I just realized, that this is writing that I have to do on my own. She doesn’t want me to wait around in my MFA program and create. She says, get your thesis done and get out so you can continue to teach, and write at your own pace. She’s right, and I had a really intense and deep conversation about her where we batted around various ideas like permission to write something, authority in telling a story, etc. She told me that I have to start writing with my body and get a bit out of my head. This is true. But the thought occurred to me: I have to write alone. If I want to write this novel, I have to write it alone, and look for books as I admire in order to have a dialogue with the dead writers who wrote them.

Writing is still a lonely, uphill process. I finally realized now, what my thesis director has been telling me for two and a half years. I am finally able to look at my own work objectively. I met with her for an hour and a half. She said afterwards, you know you’re lucky because you are taking up an hour and a half of my time and that is unheard of. I know that, but I have been in an MFA program. I’ve had professors that gave me a 15 minute chunk of their time and told me I had to go at the end of 15 minutes I had signed up for, even though there was nobody waiting outside their office. I take what I can get, I told her. She knew what I meant. There’s something about MFA writing teachers, they act resentful if they actually have to teach you how to do something sometimes. This is especially true with the super famous rising star ones, in my experience.

I have been taking this poetry workshop from this famous poet who is old now. We have been having a strange fight over email. It was because I didn’t show up to one of the classes because I was busy. She got all mad at the way I notified her. She seems to have all these rules of engagement, even though she does not teach a course for credit and I am taking it for personal enrichment. The thing that makes it hard for me to succeed with her, is that I often come late and this particular time, I had to miss class. After this back and forth trading of confronting each other on things that the other one did that pissed each of us off, she ended her letter with a very kind phrase. She said

I hope you will understand that I admire and respect you as an artist, and
hope to help you grow into your possibilities–this is the reason I have
taken the liberty to write so frankly and at such length.

With all good wishes,

I had been upset with her because she kept cancelling on our one-on-one meetings (that I had pre-paid for). She said this was unlike her, but I had felt that she was doing it to kind of punish me for being late, or not following the rules (which were unspoken). Then she told me that she didn’t want to read my poetry book and that she would tell me more about why it wasn’t worth reading as much as my new work when we met. (Then she cancelled the meeting). I took this to mean, she thought it sucked. I can’t believe these last nice lines she wrote to me. Are they true? Does she just want my money? Who knows. If they are true it’s hard for me to believe. But I will enjoy these lines for what they are–a nice complement.

The funny thing is I don’t even care if I am a good poet or not anymore. I would have been so flattered, and honored if someone had said that about my previous book. Now on the rare times I do write poetry, I don’t feel the same raw emotion flowing threw me. I’m not writing from an open wound. It’s more like an old, festering infected sore that I’ve learned to live with over time. It’s ironic that I don’t care as much as I once did.

When I first started the MFA program, I wanted them to make me a writer. Now I don’t give a shit. I know that I AM a writer. I know that I will always write. I will always revise, and nobody needs to tell me what I am for me to be that or to define myself as that.

Today on the way home from teaching, I crossed the Bay Bridge and wondered as I stared at the Ocean, why didn’t I get into a more practical job where I could have more measured success? Why did I care so much that I would pay all this money for people to tell me whether or not I was any good. I am good. I am not good. What’s the point of such musings?

I couldn’t help, as I crossed the bridge, wondering why I didn’t become an entrepenuer, or a lawyer, or a doctor, or something tangible, something practical. Why did I live for little pay, put all my talents and life force into being a writer, and a teacher, two things that our society doesn’t really appreciate if you look at in terms of straight paycheck. Surely, I could put this kind of obsessive drive into a more lucrative carreer?

I realize for the first time in my life, that I am a writer. And I don’t need anybody to tell me.

The only problem I have now, in my semi-apathetic state is to somehow find a group of readers to work on my thesis with. I have asked so many people in my program to work with me. They have mostly given some polite excuse. (All except one dear friend, Jade, who has been nothing but generous). One group let me in because I asked one of the girls right in front of my thesis director and she couldn’t say no. To be honest, the difficult person in this group bothered me so much that I’m glad that a time conflict made it impossible to meet with these people. But I’ve approached many people I had considered friends in the program, and they have all cheekily denied me. One friend said, I’ll have time to read your work next fall. Even some people who I have helped directly, by pubslishing their work, or either through moral support, or through editing their work, or through helping them with finding somebody to interview from the country they are writing their novel about, all of these people have said: Oh sorry, I’m not at the point where I am exchanging work right now. I know this is bullshit coming from some of them because they have another group that they are working with that they are not telling me about, or not considering to invite me into, etc.

But I don’t care anymore.

Or some people even say, Oh I would never trust my MFA peers with reading my work. I am not sharing my work with anybody. Which is okay, I guess, for them. But I think sharing your work with people who are like-minded is cool. It’s not good to completely hide for you, or your peers. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it still fall? If a writer writes clandestinely in the corners of her room and nobody reads it, does she still write?

I am always on the look-out for some writers that would have my back. For some people that would be willing to give as much as they take. But if assholes are going to exclude me, there is nothing much I can do. If helping out another writer, is that threatening to them, or if they are that selfish that they only have time to get help on their own work, then they can piss off. (Of course, I could be misreading people. These could also have something to do with the proverbial cliquey assholes that I create in my own mind to exclude myself.)

No matter what, I am a writer.

I will always be a writer, whether or not mediocre people let me into their clique. I raise my hypothetical glass in the air like an old whino and jeer into the computer screen like the Bukowski misfit I am, as I contemplate a new life in mortgage brokering. Har de har.