Bad lyrics good life
I’ve been listening to a lot of music with very bad lyrics lately. Interpol and The Rentals. I love, love, love this music; you just have to plug your ears and go “la la la” when you start thinking about the words (“Would you like to be my missus and in future with child?”) you’re singing.

Things both are and are not as stressful as I’ve made them out to be here. I have a number of ideas for the thesis, and I’m plugging away on quite a few. It’s just that something someone said yesterday in a class, is true: Researching and writing are polar opposite activities. So while I’m all into the research end of things, I see no daily output in the writing, and that… Well, it’s just a big ol’ bummer when everyone around me is coming to workshops with pages and pages and with gleaming faces, “Oh, the writing was just so great, this weekend.” This weekend, for me? Well, the writing About Things Completely Unrelated to the Thesis was pretty good. But even that didn’t amount to much, quantitatively. And the poets. The poets-! With their, “Oh, I wrote two poems this week.” A poem. I am jealous of that unit of measurement. Gah-. Fucking poets with their beautiful, perfect, gifted fucking writing.

This year is weird, altogether. I’m a lot more solitary than I’ve ever been, and I don’t care. It’s that knowledge of people in the next rooms. People who are kindred. I need not talk with them, however, to get along with them. It reminds me of those odd sexual relationships where you don’t have anything to say to the other person. Except I’m not sleeping with my roommates. And we have plenty to say when we come up for air. So I guess that’s a bad analogy. Boy, it’s a good thing I’m a writer. I’m so obviously a writer.

Okay, to bed.

My head just might explode the very next time I am forced to hear the phrase "deceptively simple." Especially as applied to writing. You, sir or madam, are the one who is deceptively simple.

Everybody panics. That’s what she tells me, a gal who graduated from the program last year: “You’ll totally find a job after graduation. Don’t worry.”
A job?
No, I was freaking out about my thesis: that two-hundred page monster that I’m supposed to be writing, starting…last year? The reason I assuredly tell my thesis advisor I’m here? Sew, sew driven. Tres, tres professional. That’s me.

“Don’t worry, you can do it over next summer,” the poets tell me.
“Don’t worry, just get your ideas together and write, write, write. Don’t worry about whether it sounds good, yet,” the memoir-writers tell me.

No. You don’t understand. I don’t have any freaking material. Research-based project, here. Trips to be planned. Myriad interviews, books to read. And um, I’m not really sure I’m all that into my chosen subject. Gah-!

So, I haven’t written here in a while. So, that’s why.

What am I writing? Why, gems such as these, on student papers: “What’s the larger significance of writing about this acid trip? It seems like it could possibly be one layer in a larger story, but as it stands now, I’m left wanting more.”

“Your grandfather’s death is a great concept for this essay. What would make it even better: Some scenes. An exercise to try: Sit down and consider just one scene during this five year span you cover here.”

Truth: I’m not left wanting to read anything more about anybody’s drug trip, dead grandfathers or the puddles of tears “I could of swum in” tears and more tears dripping, dripping to the floor at their “pint sized feet.” Truth? I just want to be left alone. I think this is Phase Two of grad school. Phase One is a head-snapping adjustment period. Phase two is Leave me Alone with my Thesis. I think Phase Three might involve the acquiring of an eating disorder, or perhaps psychosis. Worth the thousands in loans a year by itself. Because those experiences sell books like mad.

There's terror in paradise.
There’s this awful movie called Snake Island that came before Snakes on a Plane, about this island, see, and these cruiseship people who get trapped there, and, well, there are these snakes.
Tricky plot.
Well, it was while watching this movie that my friends and I were able to define the classic answer to the horror movie question of Who gets killed next? The answer is always the people who deserve it, because they’re either:
A – Having sex. Sex that’s enhanced visually onscreen with saline or silicone, and, more to the point, sex that’s frivolous and naughty, because we Puritans love to see the frivolous sex-havers getting their due.
B – Complaining. Tacky mustachioed whiners are always the second to get killed by the snakes. Followed by all other brands of whiners.

So, to warn one another that we were about to start bitching and therefore probably deserved to get bitten by all manner of serpents, our shorthand became, “Okay, this is totally Snake Island territory, but…”

So, it’s Snake Island time. I've warned you.

Whatever I devote my attention to, I feel guilty; I should be doing something else. Whatever I’m doing becomes diminished in its importance as the responsibilities I’m not turning my attention to loom up and, just outside the corner of my vision, become these huge, amorphous shapes, impossible to gauge and harder still, to overcome; there will always be more.
I should be grading papers, I should most definitely not be grading papers; I should be writing, but writing what? Is it for my thesis? No? Well, then I should be doing research on my thesis, but that feels like nothing but noodling around on the internet most of the time. (And just what has this or that particular goofy little article to do with my focus, anyway? If the answer's not immediately clear, I'm wracked with anxiety.) So, soon I’m back to working on the paper due Wednesday instead. It’s cut and dry; six pages. Thesis, paragraphs, conclusion, all assigned, all straightforward, all utterly forgettable.

When I was in nursery school, I got this evaluation from a teacher: “Alice gets utterly absorbed in whatever it is she’s working on, but has a hard time moving on to a different task.” This was my problem as a reporter, too. I like working on one thing, not twelve. Grad school is like being a reporter, only on acid. No, I don’t know what I mean by that. I need to get back to work, now.

In Which the Fish goes Inland for a Swim
There are periods in your life that feel more stagnated than others, and then there are periods in which so much is changing so rapidly that you don’t even have time to think about how to classify what’s going on.

I met a woman at dinner tonight who reminded me of this. I introduced myself and she said,
“Oh, we’ve met.”
When?
Five years ago, it turns out, back when I was a student at this same conference I’m mentoring at this week. This woman was a mentor at the time, and she remembered me. Flabbergasted I was, at this. I swear, I don’t even remember me, back then. So much has changed.

The conference is taking place in the town where I went to college. The funny thing is that I spent the days preceding this week just dreading it.
“I don’t work in media any more!” I thought. “How can I possibly mentor some young kid on how to do it??” So many of these completely illogical thoughts. (It’s been what, nine months since I was last “in media”?)

Once I arrived, I realized that these fears came as a result of a dip in courage that I’ve experienced only lately. During my months in Beachtown, I have felt, in large part, rather stagnated in many areas of life in which I want to grow. It’s true that I’ve been faced with the potentially self-esteem-annihilating challenge of being in a new geographic location, doing a completely new thing every day, surrounded by completely new people. But then you also have to take into account that (at the risk of offending those of you who are one of these, err, people), there’s the fact that most of these new people are younger, and lack the same brand of maturity/drive and self-confidence that characterized folks whom I surrounded myself with back in ‘Lanta. I’m not counting my very best friends in Beachtown. So chill, ya’ll.
However, the general climate in any creative writing program is gonna be more laissez-faire than that in an urban journalistic environment. Put that program on the freaking beach and boom: You have the possibility for extreme stagnation for goofuses like me, who rely an awful lot on my immediate environment to supply get-up-and-go. So the energy is lacking and you’ve neglected to find a way to refuel it and you start to lag, to be less than the Kicker-of-Ass you know you are. Then you start to blame yourself for your own lagging, and the next thing you know, you’re thinking all sorts of illogical things. Things like, “What if I don’t remember how to use that piece of equipment I used every day for four years?”

Cut to tonight. A night out, after a great day of mentoring and, well, general kicking of ass. To a healthily beer-enhanced dinner out with a few of the coordinators of this program, and a fiery discussion about the future of communication and news and media, what it should be and what our respective roles should be. Tra. And la. We got there around 6:30 and started right in on this talk and at some point shortly thereafter, I looked up from the table for a gulp of air and glanced at the clock. It was past nine. And I wondered: Where the hell had I been hiding myself all these months?

I haven’t jumped to the conclusion that I’ve made the wrong decision in leaving Small Publication for grad school. I just need to find a way to remind myself of the wider world that I love while I’m immersed in academia and the strange social milieu of Beachtown. To remind myself, that while I love the time I have available now, and the things I am learning; the wider world I prefer is still there and it’s still mine. I don’t have to completely unplug from one, to benefit from the other.

By the time I got back to my hotel, I was in this weird, rare state of complete ecstasy with every conceivable aspect of my surroundings. There were these lovely, intelligent, snappy people I’d just eaten with. And then there was the fact that I was driving through my college town, which is also my favorite place forever and ever amen in the land.

How I love it here. I drove back to the hotel from dinner with the windows open, turning down each street by instinct, amazed how well I still knew the way. Here’s the tree-lined street I used to bike to campus on a-million-and-a-half years ago, I thought, and look, there’s a pack of old hippies on bikes, now. Here’s that street right through the center of campus and look how nothing’s changed! I drive right by some girl crossing that street carrying a backpack and the thought floors me: she’s having her college experience right now. The thought is both heartening and lonely-making: I don’t own this place. It never was mine. Still I drive through it; I catch the air in my hand as I surf it out the window. I let it go again.

Tiny Darts of Rebellion
‘Morning, sunshine.
Today, there is an alacrity about things.
Today, there is coffee, for the first time in weeks. And glorious sunny beautifulness out there.
Therefore, it is not a day that I feel like hanging out in the ol’ Artsy Garret Apt ™, doing fricking internet research.

Ah, but isn’t this sort of sacrifice – not to mention maintenance of the pallid complexion -- that the artistic life is all about, after all?

See, I decided to devote this weekend to sitting down and researching the haps on various literary journals. Coming as I do, from the World o’ Journalism, Henshaw, I know my newspapers. I know my public radio stations. Coming from the world of, well, people who eat and sleep and go into bookshops, I know my magazines. But. I do not come from the world o’ academia, my dear Mr. H., so I have no fucking clue about lit mags.

But I’m supposed to. See, here’s the deal: When you enroll in an MFA writing program, you’re supposed to be constantly sending your work out to small publications with arresting titles like Stony Creek Review and Autumnal Corners Quarterly – publications read far and wide… by other academic people who are also feverishly sending out their own work to the same journals.

And in order to send your work out to these places, you need to familiarize yourself with them, so, on any given day, you might end up sending 17 bucks to, say, Punxsutawney, PA so that you can learn whether Marmota Monax considers itself more of a traditional or cutting-edge type o’ publication.

So you end up with: a bunch of poor-ish grad student and profesorly types shelling out all their money on publications that other poor-ish grad student and professorly types read in order to find out if said-publication would ever go for their kind of work.

Okay, so that’s kind of asshole-y.
The writing in the good journals is pretty damn compelling, after all. I mean, the emphasis on quality over mass appeal is so front and center that you really find yourself blown away by the short stories, essays and poems in best ones. As any of the 75-or-so subscribers to any of them will tell you. And there’s something refreshing about that. Just jumping on into this fray and sending your eight pages, your cover letter and SASE to The luNAR mOTH Review is one way of kinda sticking it to the man, of shouting, “Screw recognition by large or medium-sized audiences! It’s all about my art!”

You know: like sticking it to him…with a teeny, tiny needle that he’ll never, ever feel.

But I’m going to do it. I’ll learn myself some literary goodness this weekend if it kills me. It kind of feels like active training to be a record store geek: This weekend, I will crack this insular world-! And I both hate insular worlds, and - like all of us to some extent - am irresistibly, helplessly, drawn to them. And then I just want to make fun of them.

Oh, dear, dear lord.

Wish me luck.