My brain has already settled into vacation mode. I booked a flight home in a hurry. I want to taste simple home cooked meals, peruse a farmer's market with my mom, reacquaint myself with friends, and explore big cities without a care in the world.
I want, I want, I want.
I just pulled a shoulder muscle... by sitting. My body has atrophied.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
bad fruit
I don't know why it took me this long to realize that I don't like tomatoes.
I've always eaten them dutifully because they're full of lycopene and vitamins. Now I say, WHO CARES! I am going to live on the edge and never eat them again!
I've always eaten them dutifully because they're full of lycopene and vitamins. Now I say, WHO CARES! I am going to live on the edge and never eat them again!
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
sad
Today I found out that another high school classmate passed away. Steph sent us the Youtube video and it was shocking to see the moving montage of photos from his childhood, from his middle school graduation, from his wedding. It was unbearably sad.
Next to this news, my maudlin little aches seem misplaced and shallow.
Next to this news, my maudlin little aches seem misplaced and shallow.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
What have I been doing?
If you asked me what I have been up to lately, I really wouldn't be able to say. My days are bleeding together again.
I've stared at a lot study room racing stripes. A few months ago, the good people at the university spruced up the study rooms and stairwells by painting racing stripes on the walls, presumably to break up the monotony.
I could tell you which bathroom stalls are the cleanest and when the afternoon glare sets in. I know the best time to get a parking spot and I remember all of the library hours. Beyond that, I'm not sure if I'm even retaining the information. Every element, rule, and exception feels like a wilted refrigerator magnet. Everything threatens to peel off and slip onto the floor at any time. I'm running out of space. If I shake my head too fast, information will go flying out of my ears! I'm only kind of kidding.
Sometimes I feel annoyed when people tell me how certain they are that I will pass the second time around. I know they mean well and I appreciate the good intentions. There is no rational explanation for why I am annoyed by their kind words of encouragement, except that it's a mix of fear and hurt pride and generally being sick of the bar hanging over my head. I guess I just want things to be normal, to discuss recipes and news and happy things with my family and friends and acquaintances, rather than rehash things that I don't feel like I can control.
In the end, I keep reminding myself that I am thankful to have made it this far. I am lucky to have the opportunity to even take this test. It's easy to forget how much I used to enjoy learning when everything hinges on three days.
---
On a random note, I've always assumed that "dirigible" is synonymous with "morsel" or "nugget." As in, I picked up some delicious little dirigibles at the market. I pictured something quaint and rustic. Today, I learned that it actually refers to some sort of blimp or zeppelin or aircraft. It was a relief to find out because if I ever used it in in conversation, I would look like a fool.
Still, I rather liked pretending that the word referred to food rather than aircraft.
I've stared at a lot study room racing stripes. A few months ago, the good people at the university spruced up the study rooms and stairwells by painting racing stripes on the walls, presumably to break up the monotony.
I could tell you which bathroom stalls are the cleanest and when the afternoon glare sets in. I know the best time to get a parking spot and I remember all of the library hours. Beyond that, I'm not sure if I'm even retaining the information. Every element, rule, and exception feels like a wilted refrigerator magnet. Everything threatens to peel off and slip onto the floor at any time. I'm running out of space. If I shake my head too fast, information will go flying out of my ears! I'm only kind of kidding.
Sometimes I feel annoyed when people tell me how certain they are that I will pass the second time around. I know they mean well and I appreciate the good intentions. There is no rational explanation for why I am annoyed by their kind words of encouragement, except that it's a mix of fear and hurt pride and generally being sick of the bar hanging over my head. I guess I just want things to be normal, to discuss recipes and news and happy things with my family and friends and acquaintances, rather than rehash things that I don't feel like I can control.
In the end, I keep reminding myself that I am thankful to have made it this far. I am lucky to have the opportunity to even take this test. It's easy to forget how much I used to enjoy learning when everything hinges on three days.
---
On a random note, I've always assumed that "dirigible" is synonymous with "morsel" or "nugget." As in, I picked up some delicious little dirigibles at the market. I pictured something quaint and rustic. Today, I learned that it actually refers to some sort of blimp or zeppelin or aircraft. It was a relief to find out because if I ever used it in in conversation, I would look like a fool.
Still, I rather liked pretending that the word referred to food rather than aircraft.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
"Becoming a Writer" by Junot Diaz
It wasn’t that I couldn’t write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn’t budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn’t been pretty damn cool. But they were cool, showed a lot of promise. Would also have been fine if I could have just jumped to something else. But I couldn’t. All the other novels I tried sucked worse than the stalled one, and even more disturbing, I seemed to have lost the ability to write short stories. It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn’t find an exit. Like I’d been chained to the sinking ship of those 75 pages and there was no key and no patching the hole in the hull. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, but nothing I produced was worth a damn.
Want to talk about stubborn? I kept at it for five straight years. Five damn years. Every day failing for five years? I’m a pretty stubborn, pretty hard-hearted character, but those five years of fail did a number on my psyche. On me. Five years, 60 months? It just about wiped me out. By the end of that fifth year, perhaps in an attempt to save myself, to escape my despair, I started becoming convinced that I had written all I had to write, that I was a minor league Ralph Ellison, a Pop Warner Edward Rivera, that maybe it was time, for the sake of my mental health, for me to move on to another profession, and if the inspiration struck again some time in the future…well, great. But I knew I couldn’t go on much more the way I was going. I just couldn’t. I was living with my fiancée at the time (over now, another terrible story) and was so depressed and self-loathing I could barely function. I finally broached the topic with her of, maybe, you know, doing something else. My fiancée was so desperate to see me happy (and perhaps more than a little convinced by my fear that maybe the thread had run out on my talent) that she told me to make a list of what else I could do besides writing. I’m not a list person like she was, but I wrote one. It took a month to pencil down three things. (I really don’t have many other skills.) I stared at that list for about another month. Waiting, hoping, praying for the book, for my writing, for my talent to catch fire. A last-second reprieve. But nada. So I put the manuscript away. All the hundreds of failed pages, boxed and hidden in a closet. I think I cried as I did it. Five years of my life and the dream that I had of myself, all down the tubes because I couldn’t pull off something other people seemed to pull off with relative ease: a novel. By then I wasn’t even interested in a Great American Novel. I would have been elated with the eminently forgettable NJ novel.
So I became a normal. A square. I didn’t go to bookstores or read the Sunday book section of the Times. I stopped hanging out with my writer friends. The bouts of rage and despair, the fights with my fiancée ended. I slipped into my new morose half-life. Started preparing for my next stage, back to school in September. (I won’t even tell you what I was thinking of doing, too embarrassing.) While I waited for September to come around, I spent long hours in my writing room, sprawled on the floor, with the list on my chest, waiting for the promise of those words to leak through the paper into me.
Maybe I would have gone through with it. Hard to know. But if the world is what it is so are our hearts. One night in August, unable to sleep, sickened that I was giving up, but even more frightened by the thought of having to return to the writing, I dug out the manuscript. I figured if I could find one good thing in the pages I would go back to it. Just one good thing. Like flipping a coin, I’d let the pages decide. Spent the whole night reading everything I had written, and guess what? It was still terrible. In fact with the new distance the lameness was even worse than I’d thought. That’s when I should have put everything in the box. When I should have turned my back and trudged into my new life. I didn’t have the heart to go on. But I guess I did. While my fiancée slept, I separated the 75 pages that were worthy from the mountain of loss, sat at my desk, and despite every part of me shrieking no no no no, I jumped back down the rabbit hole again. There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I’d wanted to say for more than a decade: done.
That’s my tale in a nutshell. Not the tale of how I came to write my novel but rather of how I became a writer. Because, in truth, I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.
Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
http://www.altruisticbs.com/becoming
Want to talk about stubborn? I kept at it for five straight years. Five damn years. Every day failing for five years? I’m a pretty stubborn, pretty hard-hearted character, but those five years of fail did a number on my psyche. On me. Five years, 60 months? It just about wiped me out. By the end of that fifth year, perhaps in an attempt to save myself, to escape my despair, I started becoming convinced that I had written all I had to write, that I was a minor league Ralph Ellison, a Pop Warner Edward Rivera, that maybe it was time, for the sake of my mental health, for me to move on to another profession, and if the inspiration struck again some time in the future…well, great. But I knew I couldn’t go on much more the way I was going. I just couldn’t. I was living with my fiancée at the time (over now, another terrible story) and was so depressed and self-loathing I could barely function. I finally broached the topic with her of, maybe, you know, doing something else. My fiancée was so desperate to see me happy (and perhaps more than a little convinced by my fear that maybe the thread had run out on my talent) that she told me to make a list of what else I could do besides writing. I’m not a list person like she was, but I wrote one. It took a month to pencil down three things. (I really don’t have many other skills.) I stared at that list for about another month. Waiting, hoping, praying for the book, for my writing, for my talent to catch fire. A last-second reprieve. But nada. So I put the manuscript away. All the hundreds of failed pages, boxed and hidden in a closet. I think I cried as I did it. Five years of my life and the dream that I had of myself, all down the tubes because I couldn’t pull off something other people seemed to pull off with relative ease: a novel. By then I wasn’t even interested in a Great American Novel. I would have been elated with the eminently forgettable NJ novel.
So I became a normal. A square. I didn’t go to bookstores or read the Sunday book section of the Times. I stopped hanging out with my writer friends. The bouts of rage and despair, the fights with my fiancée ended. I slipped into my new morose half-life. Started preparing for my next stage, back to school in September. (I won’t even tell you what I was thinking of doing, too embarrassing.) While I waited for September to come around, I spent long hours in my writing room, sprawled on the floor, with the list on my chest, waiting for the promise of those words to leak through the paper into me.
Maybe I would have gone through with it. Hard to know. But if the world is what it is so are our hearts. One night in August, unable to sleep, sickened that I was giving up, but even more frightened by the thought of having to return to the writing, I dug out the manuscript. I figured if I could find one good thing in the pages I would go back to it. Just one good thing. Like flipping a coin, I’d let the pages decide. Spent the whole night reading everything I had written, and guess what? It was still terrible. In fact with the new distance the lameness was even worse than I’d thought. That’s when I should have put everything in the box. When I should have turned my back and trudged into my new life. I didn’t have the heart to go on. But I guess I did. While my fiancée slept, I separated the 75 pages that were worthy from the mountain of loss, sat at my desk, and despite every part of me shrieking no no no no, I jumped back down the rabbit hole again. There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I’d wanted to say for more than a decade: done.
That’s my tale in a nutshell. Not the tale of how I came to write my novel but rather of how I became a writer. Because, in truth, I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.
Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
http://www.altruisticbs.com/becoming
empty head
I can't wait to let my brain lie fallow.
I've been browsing through celebrity gossip, rhubarb recipes, and international news. I suppose this means I better get back to the books!
I've been browsing through celebrity gossip, rhubarb recipes, and international news. I suppose this means I better get back to the books!
Saturday, January 30, 2010
the onion dream
I ate some sauteed slivers of onion before I went to bed last night. It probably wreaked havoc on my stomach and my head.
I dreamt that my dad, my sister, and I decided to play in a lake of sludge. We walked through a barren field to get there. While we walked, I contemplated explaining adverse possession to my dad, but decided that it was not a good time.
We paddled a rowboat together with makeshift oars. Periodically, the three of us lost our balance and tipped into the water. As soon as my back touched the water, the boat shifted its weight and sent us bouncing back up, like Russian nesting dolls.
Later, I found myself in New York, eating dinner with classmates and old friends. At some point, harsh words were exchanged, long-standing feuds bubbled to the surface, and I beat someone up. The crowd huddled around us while I knocked the crap out of the poor guy. I felt like I could not punch him enough. He suffered permanent physical injury. I saw him later and he looked like a mess. I felt really bad and sorry. I woke up and I still feel really bad.
I dreamt that my dad, my sister, and I decided to play in a lake of sludge. We walked through a barren field to get there. While we walked, I contemplated explaining adverse possession to my dad, but decided that it was not a good time.
We paddled a rowboat together with makeshift oars. Periodically, the three of us lost our balance and tipped into the water. As soon as my back touched the water, the boat shifted its weight and sent us bouncing back up, like Russian nesting dolls.
Later, I found myself in New York, eating dinner with classmates and old friends. At some point, harsh words were exchanged, long-standing feuds bubbled to the surface, and I beat someone up. The crowd huddled around us while I knocked the crap out of the poor guy. I felt like I could not punch him enough. He suffered permanent physical injury. I saw him later and he looked like a mess. I felt really bad and sorry. I woke up and I still feel really bad.