Alas…  One of my M.F.A. colleagues (on staff at Willow Springs) says that if I review a batch of poems that have been submitted and I provide reasons for it not to be accepted (or pursued further by my fellow editors), that must mean that my own verse is better.

Well, I’m not sure that it “must,” but for the time being at least, I am struck with how we rationalize by non sequiturs ad infinitum (and how we lapse into latin).  Nothing follows nothing:  good, better, best…  And the grand prize goes to… Subjectivity!

***

Jorie Graham has loads of fascinating things to offer about the poetics we practice, the poems we write and the poems we judge (ie., compare and contrast with other poems).  In this regard, the Poetess-in-Charge at Harvard U. even has her own rule named after her own controversial evaluation of various works in the University of Georgia’s 1999 contest.   The rule essentially stipulates that a judge must recuse her or himself if the potentially award-winning poems are penned by the aforementioned judge’s students, or her future husband.

With that contentious hullabaloo out of the way, consider what the author of the recently released collection, Place, has to say on the subject of narrative, which happens to be the pre-emptive- strike category by which prose (fiction and non-fiction) seems to hold poetry under lock and key in the literary basement.

Narrative, coupled with the block-form stanza, is the idol to which nearly every student of the craft must pay homage and bow down.  The only problem is–what if the stinking existence, which yawns before us like halitosis, what if the entire kit and caboodle of the space-time continuum, bears little resemblance to the storied-arc by which we’d like to float above it???  And so, Jorie Graham once told an interviewer at Lumina, the magazine affiliated with Sarah Lawrence College:

Consequence in narrative is illuminating, often morally instructive, moving, and surprising. But to privilege linear, temporal constructs over all other ones is to refuse to represent, as I began by saying, way too much of ordinary human experience. Everybody dreams. Leaping and associative progress is natural to the way time passes in everyone’s life. We are just taught to distrust those sensations of time as “irrational.” This is a much larger cultural issue. There is much power in the hands of the creators of the narratives, and the master narratives, by which we “recognize” our lives. So I’d say, yes, be intimidated, if you are, by non-narrative poetry. Experience is intimidating. But don’t be distrustful—choose to trust it, go along for the ride, see if it reminds you of anything.

How bleeping gracious is that!

And don’t you dare be intimidated by the phrase, “Experience is intimidating…”

And don’t you dare feel as if Graham is patronizing you (or matronizing you)!

Far from it.   What she’s doing, in her kind and gentle and intellectually-trying way, is warning you not to enter a contest that’s sponsored by “The Non-Profit Organization Dedicated to Story-Telling in the Digital Age.”   She’s warning you.

You’ve been warned.   Don’t say Jorie Graham didn’t try to get you to leap into the abyss before you caved and wrote a beginning, a middle and an ending.  Loser?

Peace–

It’s time to feel bad about something fun (sorry guys).

I haven’t seen Avengers yet but I hear it’s pretty rockin’. Unfortunately, a lot of that rock was generated by artists and writers who are dead and died poor. It’s a familiar story; artist who die in poverty are, much like their remaining possessions, worth a dime a dozen. It’s even a romantic little dream to imagine that one’s work might shake a culture to its roots when discovered years after one’s death. That may be cold comfort for the deceased, but to us living it’s a story with a happy, if belated, ending.

In the comic book world, it doesn’t exactly work that way, and looking at it from the outside, the industry seems intent not just on driving their contributors into poverty and an early grave, but making as much money as possible off them until that point. There’s Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who sold the most powerful man on earth for $130 dollars, and died broke in the early nineties. But they’re far from the only ones—the legendarily grumpy Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and some of the greatest Batman stories of all time has become so disgruntled with the industry that he refuses to attach his name or take a dime from any of the blockbusters based on his work.

So seeing as virtually every major artist in comics has gotten a raw deal (except perhaps Stan Lee; but his participation in the creative process has been challenged as peripheral at best) why is Avengers such a big deal? Partially it’s just how big the movie is, but the other side of it is that the big super hero team-up means that a legendary number of creators will be screwed over simultaneously in a world threatening explosion of creator’s rights denial. One of the founding forces of early Marvel, Jack Kirby, is arguably the most screwed, but the list goes on: Steve Engelhart, Peter David, Herb Trimpe, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas, and literally dozens more created the groundwork, design, history, and stories that made Avengers possible.

And that’s terrible. Not just for them but for their art; who’s going to continue to participate in an industry so hostile to desperate talented young people? Okay, I just answered my own question, but such practice doesn’t seem sustainable. Sure, there’s always a new voice to drain dry after the old ones have been thoroughly mined for intellectual property, but I might hazard that comics could be a much more fulfilling art form if there was any incentive at all to stay in it.

So, while it isn’t very realistic to ask any of us to do so, at least consider possibly thinking about The Hero Initiative, an organization that’s dedicated to fighting for the rights of the writers and artists who create the art we love, not the corporations who exploit it. Because we shouldn’t have to wait until we’re dead to pay off our loans.

1. “In Scenic Pigs, Arizona”

2. “The Pool Boy Sends His Regards”

3. “Here’s to You, ‘Typhoid Mary’”

4. “Forty Pounds of Tallow and Thou”

5. “Nude, Manning a Leaf-Blower”

6. “Indiana, We Hardly Knew Ye”

7. “The Prolapsed Trumpeter”

8. “Beulah’s Boil Gets a Name”

9. “Twenty-Eight Stitches Later”

10. “All You Need is Gin”

11. “A Boy Named ‘Escanaba’”

12. “Skokie Delenda Est”

13. “My Love Affair With Thames Valley Business Solutions”

14. “The Romance of Burning Tires”

15. “There’s No ‘I’ in Blancmange”

16. “Ailurophony”

17. “She Doesn’t Even Like Sturgeon”

18. “Twelve Angry Accountants”

19. “Last Year’s Night-Train Blend”

20. “The Passion of Rupert Gumm”

Can you guess the relationship between this butterfly and my post?

So I haven’t barked in a while because I’ve been obsessing over this thesis thing, but I’m back with an earth-shattering post. Except not really. My brain is still recovering from writing that thesis thing, so I thought I’d offer you a bit of Saturday randomness.

When I go out in public, I like to play a little game called Guess the Relationship. It’s pretty much what it sounds like. I sit unobtrusively somewhere and watch for pairs of people and try to decide what their relation is, how healthy it is, and, if they’re a romantic couple, how they’re going to break up. It’s sweet, I know. Lately, I’ve also added another game called Pick Out the Serial Killer. But that’s another story/post.

I was recently at a fast food restaurant and found myself in the unique situation of having two people at the table behind me who I didn’t notice when I sat down (and therefore I had no idea what they looked like). So here’s my attempt to relive how the game played out:

Voice #1: They’re not real vampires. I mean, they sparkle in the sun and I think that’s just embarrassing. Real vampires should be scary, you know?

Voice #1 is male and anywhere from 18 to an immature 35. I’m guessing early twenties based on the timbre of whininess and a need to prove himself.

Voice #2: Oh I don’t know about all this Twilight stuff, but when I think of a real vampire I think of Brad Pitt. Have you seen Interview with the Vampire? Back in my day, that was the movie to watch.

Voice #2 is a woman, older, at least 50 based on that “back in my day” comment. I’m going with mother and son. (At this point, I get distracted by thinking about Gary Oldman as Dracula and eating the rest of my burger, but I pick up the conversation again when I hear this:)

Boy voice: So you like watching movies. What else do you do for fun?

Uh-oh. That’s a weird thing to ask your mom. Maybe a relative like an aunt that he’s never met before? And he’s trying to connect with because he just moved to Spokane?

Old lady voice: Oh I love to read. Most days it’s just me and my cat and a book. Which is why I decided I should get out more often.

Ok eww gross. Is this a date? Am I eavesdropping on a weird old lady date?

Boy voice: What area of town do you live in?

My Pick Out the Serial Killer light comes on and I’m suddenly concerned for this old lady who just likes to read at home with her cat. She was finally brave enough to try online dating and her first date out is at a mediocre fast food joint with a possible predator.

Old lady voice: I’ve got a little place up on South Hill. It’s not too far away.

Good job, old lady. Be vague. Don’t let him follow you home. And what the heck is wrong with this kid, even if he’s not a predator? He’s not after her for her money or her fortune of cheap paperback novels. He’s probably got unresolved mother issues.

At this point I start thinking about my own unresolved mother issues, but I catch myself and realize I need to focus. I’m done with my meal and I carefully mosey over to the trash bin behind me and turn around so I can get a good view of the pair. And here’s what I see:

The guy is about 28 and is wearing a uniform and nameplate for the fast food restaurant that we’re in. The woman is somewhere between 45 and 55 and is wearing a rather hideous floral blouse. And she has what is most definitely a job application on the table in front of her.

So that’s it folks. The answer was job interview. Because that’s not weird at all.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Growing up I never liked to read.  Neither of my parents went to college.  Neither of them took the time to peruse much more than a copy of Popular Mechanics, or maybe, the Readers Digest abridged version of Alex Haley’s Roots, which they would watch on television anyway… But I can’t blame my anxiety about reading and writing well on them.

All I can say is that I love the capacity of words to inject emotional energy into a Tuesday afternoon with the drive-through traffic at Starbucks swirling around me.  I grew to love novels, short stories and poems, but first and foremost, I was impressed with the miracle of a well-chosen word.  And sometimes, even an poorly-chosen word would suffice and set me off.  Just the sheer effort of an individual to articulate his or her experience–that’s enough to make my hair stand on end.  Hence:  my apprehension!

What if I fuck it up?

Today I heard on National Public Radio a segment with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.   It dealt with “Roots Envy,” or the inability of some folks to trace their family ancestry back generation after generation like the legendary figure of the 1970′s best-seller.  Gates, around that time, became enamored with the possibility and discovered some things about his mother and father that were remarkable.  For example, evidently one of Gates’ kin had marshaled in and out of a Revolutionary War militia between the years 1777 and 1784.  For an African-American that’s especially intriguing.  Also, during the broadcast, Neil Conan asked the author of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader to revisit what he had written about his mother’s funeral.   (The audio of this reading, available today at 6 p.m., is worth listening to.)  He actually didn’t appreciate the stale, blue-blood service that they had back in 1997.  And so, with nothing more than a few words, he described the rowdy sermon and the swaying hymn-sings and the falling-down-in-the-aisle catharsis that would have been preferred.  It would have been a funeral like they had had for this uncle or for that aunt.  It would have been hot.  It would have gone on for hours.  It would have included those paper-fans, by which the mourners move the air about in vain…

I tell you, when I heard Gates read about this re-cast episode of his life, I wept like she were my own mother.  While driving through road construction barriers on I-90, I nearly couldn’t see that I’d be losing the left lane.  And I realized, while putting my foot on the brake, that I don’t have to be so nervous, that I’m not so much searching for that perfect word as I am searching for that intuitive trigger or that trap door that allows me to plunge into humanity’s collective subconscious.  Is there such a thing… such an ocean of dreams?

Here’s a excerpt from a chapter of Gates’ book:

Where Daddy shied from debt, Mama was intrepid, at least until the change. She could leverage Daddy’s two salaries like a Wall Street financier. But Miss Pauline wanted a house, and that was tantalizingly out of reach. She started buying house books and magazines. Dozens, for research. She and I would look at them, just as I would study the pages of the three or four mail order catalogues we’d regularly receive: Ward’s, Sears, Roebuck, General Merchandise, Mayer’s. (Almost all of our Christmas gifts came from General Merchandise.)

At one point, Mama’s plan was to build a house, on land near her mother or brothers on Erin Street. The first time I ever saw Mama really angry at my father — much angrier than when she’d accuse him of flirting with Miss Noll or Miss Mary — was on the day when he killed the deal that would have let us build a sort of family complex with two or three of Mama’s brothers. We had the plans, the land was picked out (just below Big Mom’s, near where Miss Lizzy’s dogs barked at night when the Sneakin’ Deacon made his rounds visiting his parishioners), and Mama was all excited. Radiant, in fact. She loved to dream, like all the Colemans, and she loved to make things happen, which was more Gates than Coleman. (When it came to finance and risk, Daddy was more Coleman than Gates.)

Standing next to me was a really attractive elderly woman, with expensive Gucci glasses that I would’ve loved to have stolen for myself and perfectly coiffed white-streaked silver hair. Ever since my own hair tragedy three days ago, I’m envious of anyone who looks even marginally better than I think I do.

She gave me a smile and said, “Still in school?” I said yeah, I’m in grad school, actually. “For what?” Creative writing.

Then it happened, as it did every time. Her smile sort of faded and she said, “Oh, that’s nice,” and the conversation was over.

Yeah, I know, Cat. That was my reaction too.

After each of these occurrences, I have to wonder exactly what it is about creative writing that makes people, you know. Suddenly turn into disappointed a-holes, as if they expected you to say you were pre-law or something and all their hopes and dreams are dashed for your future. I believe that people like this—and some of those people share my blood, let’s be honest—are pretty sure that all I do is sit around all day, bang on a keyboard like a distressed monkey, and have something written in under half an hour…just in time to drink double shots of espresso and speak in polysyllabic literary terms until sleep beckons.

If any of these people knew just how hard I worked, I’m pretty sure I would stop getting, “Oh, that’s nice” when I tell them what I’m doing with my life. And sure, there are some days where all I do is stare at a Word document on my computer for four hours, then search for videos of hedgehogs getting baths on YouTube, but writing is no different than crunching numbers. It requires skill, hard work, and lots of practice to be really good. You can be a terrible accountant just as you can be a terrible writer. If you’re lazy and you don’t work hard, you’ll never aspire to much. You will never get better. But if you put the effort into it, like the hours it takes to read and re-read everything we do, or analyze individual lines or words or characters and break them down into their atomic bits to better understand them, or write an entire story in one sitting only to trash half of it because it doesn’t work in the first half for what you did in the second half, then you aren’t wasting your time, or space. You’re developing your art and your craft in the same way as someone with an affinity for numbers does: Practice. You cannot get better without it, and if you want any hope of becoming the kind of writer that people will actually respect, then you need a whole lot of it.

Another thing that I simply love hearing is, “So what do you plan on doing with a degree in creative writing?” Well, that’s easy, fella: My degree is in oral and written communication. I am communicating with humanity and learning how to do so better. How many jobs can you think of that require good communication? Oh, how about every single one of them? I don’t care what you end up doing with your life—I guarantee you, something will require you to speak and speak well, and if you have a creative writing degree, you know how to do that quite skillfully.

You’re also a boss at navigating YouTube for all the best snake vs. giant centipede videos.

I also like Twitter because 140 characters is some sort of mathematically magical number for the creation of terrible and surreal thoughts, such as below, courtesy of the @thecatamites:

YOUR BLOOD IS EVIDENCE IN A CRIME. PLEASE MAIL ALL YR BLOOD TO TRANSYLVANA POLICE STATION C/O DRACULA. THANKS. SIGNED THE POLICE. URGENT.

@thecatamites is the maker of games called “Space Funeral” and “Murder Dog IV: The Trial of Murder Dog.” You probably wouldn’t have guessed that, but you’re probably not surprised either.

Cramming everything you want to say about life and the universe in 140 characters or less is harder than it sounds. It takes a lot of good old fashioned creative writing work to tell a story of a vampire scamming innocent people over the Internet, in a medium that’s stereotyped mostly as method to communicate to millions of people about what one had for breakfast. If it can be argued that Twitter encourages inanity, it must be conceded that it also forces brevity. Adjectives and adverbs are a luxury tweets cannot afford, and throat-clearing is pure decadence. Rachel Toor is fond of a Blaise Pascal quote that goes something like “I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.” It takes a very long time to say everything you want to say in 140 characters, but once you say it, it’s such a weird funny little jewel.

Twitter didn’t invent brevity: the 1948 horror story “Knock” by Fredric Brown opens with a complete horror story in 76 characters: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” Much like the haiku, Twitter forces a certain kind of creativity by forcing so much meaning into a tiny space with a lot of rules. Many of these people are no one special, but like them.

Sometimes the results are jokes:

if a girl invites u in “for a night cap” be aware this means something totally different and she may not even have any hats you can put on—Jerry Beans

Sometimes they are double reverse jokes:

joke: a man walks into a bar and asks for punch “u’ll have to wait” says the bartender “theres a line” the man looks around but no punchline—Charmandork

Sometimes they are sadness:

we’ve deciphered cave paintings. they were just lonely. we’ve deciphered everything. everyone is just lonely—arealiveghost

Sometimes they are disturbingly relevant to the personal longings of MFA students:

SEXT: I AM SHORT FICTION, YOU ARE A LITERARY JOURNAL. YOU REJECT EVERYTHING BUT ME FOR YOUR UPCOMING ISSUE. EVERY WORD IN ME IS “YES”.—regisl
and sometimes they are disturbingly relevant to the job description of MFA students:

I tweet too much. My therapist says I have a problem. My problem is I don’t have a therapist, I made it up. I make stuff up. It’s my job :/—Bryan Lee O’Malley:
So, for all of the rest of us with jobs in the making-stuff-up market, see what you can do in 140 characters.

So I was perusing my usual blogs earlier this week, and came upon an article in Wired, plugging a new documentary by filmmaker Stephen Maing, titled High Tech, Low Life. The name of the film comes from a quote attributed to author William Gibson, who famously used the term to describe cyberpunk fiction as a sort of lire noir of the Information Age. Given the film’s focus on citizen bloggers in the People’s Republic of China, the title seems quite appropriate.

I haven’t seen the film yet, as it’s only just now screening in select cities. However, I was very interested in the article itself, which details the efforts of Chinese citizens to undermine the country’s infamous “Great Firewall.” Granted, by now we’ve all read volumes about China’s record of Internet censorship, mostly in a  pro-America, be-grateful-for-the-freedoms-you-have context. That sort of talk has never really interested me, as it’s frankly dishonest and is usually employed to stifle legitimate criticism of America’s own human-rights record. What DID interest me about this preview, however, was the very different kind of censorship that Maing’s film appears to portray.

We’ve all heard about what China does to its political dissidents — witness the issues over artist Ai Weiwei’s arrest and incarceration, or the recent battle to secure the life of blind activist Chen Guangcheng. The message is always the same: Party officials in China don’t cotton to criticism, so think of how lucky you are to be able to criticize your government here at home (we’re really not, by the way — witness Bradley Manning or the roughly 6,000 American citizens who’ve been arrested and had their belonging seized while coming in and out of the country since 2009). In Maing’s film, however, this isn’t only the kind of censorship with which Chinese have to contend. Instead, the censorship we see takes a much more pernicious form: the systematic scrubbing of unpleasant news or events from the public dialogue.

A young blogger from China’s rural provinces, alias”Zola”, sums it up thusly: “I live in an environment where all of the news is good news. I think this news is crap. Not all news is good news.” I think this statement is very telling, as Zola is no political  dissident — he’s a kid with a camera and an Internet connection who finds himself troubled by the highly-sanitized nature of most Chinese state media. Author Beth Carter details for us how Zola struggled against authorities to raise awareness of a young woman raped, murdered, and thrown into a canal not far from his home. The killer was believed to have been the son of an affluent party official, and as a result a substantial effort was made to try cover up the  incident. Zola’s efforts to raise awareness — to blog what he saw and what he heard from mourning locals — ended with his posts on the subject being taken down, though not before they’d received over 200,000 views. Think about that. Another blogger in the film, alias Tiger Temple, tells us of witnessing a murder in the streets of his hometown, only to be reprimanded by the police upon their arrival. Temple’s crime? Taking pictures of the incident as it happened.

What is so chilling about Zola’s and Temple’s accounts are that their descriptions of censorship aren’t couched in any black-and-white, Heritage-Foundation soundbite context. This isn’t about freedom vs. security, but rather about the refusal of Chinese media and culture to acknowledge that anything is ever wrong. Poverty, crime, homelessness, malfeasance in local government — all are scrubbed out by Party officials, by government snoops, by uniformed police and even by college students, paid by the word to post pro-regime comments on various sites and blogs critical of the system. It’s not about making the government look bad, understand — it’s about anything that disrupts the perceived harmony of the Chinese public discourse. Things like homeless people in the streets of Beijing, or teenage girls murdered out in the provinces, cast doubt on that harmony. They are deemed unpleasant, upsetting of the status quo, and thus not newsworthy. And the worst of it is this: given how conservative and patrician Chinese society really is, there are still a great many members of the public who feel this response is totally appropriate. There is a term for this kind of censorship — Disneyfication — and it is much more insidious than any mere crackdown on partisan dissent. For another angle, check out William Gibson again, in his very good 1996 article about Singapore’s own issues with media management, “Disneyland with The Death Penalty.” As with modern China, the picture painted is much less 1984 and much more Fahrenheit 451.

And if it does not chill your bones, it should. Because it is also happening here, and has been for some time.

Witness most cable-news. Witness CNN. Witness Fox. Witness the brain-dead panel discussions that occur every Sunday morning on shows like Meet the Press — or, as I like to call such shows, Very Serious White People Agreeing with Each Other. Witness the uniformly negative coverage of movements like Anonymous, or Occupy, or the way that for almost two decades, journalists were banned from photographing coffins of dead soldiers. Witness the way we slaughtered the character of one who unveiled massive evidence of war-crimes committed by U.S. soldiers. Witness the way that, according to the UN, we have a fifth of China’s population, but also still manage to incarcerate more of our own people. Witness all of the coverage of the Iraq War from 2002-2004. Witness the near-complete lack of coverage of Afghanistan today. Did you get any of this at all in your morning news-feed? No? Didn’t think so. Why? Because bad news is increasingly viewed as not profitable.

I speak, of course, as if all this were somehow something new. It’s not. But what haunts me about it this morning, is an email that came into my inbox at work. At my 9-5 job, I do customer service for a bank, and in my Outlook a few days ago was some generic inspirational chain-mail tripe making its rounds across the floor. The message, titled “The Power of Positive Thinking!”, detailed a purported exchange between the author and some “real American” gas-station attendant, who opined that all we ever get from the news is bad news, and how wouldn’t it be nice if you turned on the TV for once just to find stories of real, hardworking real Americans working hard and overcoming adversity?”

First off,I want to say that we had that show a couple years ago. It was called Sarah Palin’s Real American Stories, and it survived one episode back in 2010. Secondly, how is it that we can be so inured to the idea that, hey, maybe things in the world are not all right?  I get that people have enough to deal with, but these are big issues — war, poverty, a rapidly-dwindling middle class, just to name a few. And it’s not that those issues aren’t getting any coverage — they are — but rather that where they do, the American people simply don’t want to hear it. I read these posts, and I hear people say these things in real life, and all I can think to myself is that these people would LOVE the kind of squeaky-clean, inoffensive brand of news peddled in places like China or Singapore. The same kind of news being battled against by guys like Zola, or like Tiger Temple.

The hell with censorship, what about willful ignorance?

The Graceful Dance of the Zamboni as Seen in It's Native Habitat

It’s the thought I have in the blue hours of the morning, sitting in front of a word document realizing I can’t create a good story by bashing stones together. It’s my Spanish speaking skills slowly atrophying in the dull, liquored parts of my brain. The thought is there when I watch episodes of Mad Men at marathon length, or go out on a Friday night. I could be so much better. I could be doing more.

I could write the great American novel, I could get in running shape, I could learn Chinese and sign up for the Peace Corps. There are exotic women in exotic places with exotic animals perched besides them waiting for me. I could help out around the community, take up gardening, have a rough and tumble life on the road like Jack Kerouac while I write feverishly about my experiences sneaking onto boxcars. There’s never a time when self improvement isn’t an option, you can always work harder, can always go to sleep a little more haggard, but lately, when  I think these things, I feel so damn tired.

I think everyone toward the end of Grad School is filled with anxiety about the future. We wonder if we could have been just a little more productive in our writing, if we could have networked more, if we could have planned better for the future. These thoughts give way to brief fantasies about the future. For a while I entertained ideas about:

-Owning and operating a hostel in Costa Rica.

-Working in Yellowstone, maybe something bear related?

-Owning an occult themed bar where each drink purchase comes with a tarot reading.

-Drifting. Just Drifting. Driving my go-cart-sized car across this majestic land, the scenery blurring in my peripheries.

-Moving to Beaver Island and doing something? Maybe reestablishing the Mormon Kingdom.

-Opening the male equivalent of the bikini coffee huts in Spokane.

-Going into Med/Law/Dental/VCR repair school just to avoid people asking me what are you going to do? How will you get paid? So you learn this unmarketable skill so with luck you can teach other people this unmarketable skill? Have you read The Hunger Games? Maybe you should write The Hunger Games. The author of that is doing well.

-Working as creative executive in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, and spending years combating alcoholism and demons from war and an abusive childhood, while gender roles and the socioeconomic environment changes around me.

In the end, I’ve decided to procrastinate looking into life decisions till I graduate; to pop a xanax midway through typing this and have waves of chemical reassurance tell me now that everything is going to be alright.You’re doing just fine, Buddy.

What I do know is that more school isn’t an option right now. I went directly from an undergrad program into grad school, and while it’s been good for my craft it’s also left me maladjusted and predisposed. Being in the womb of academia far too long has made me feel like a less rounded human being. Yes, it’s nice talking about Calvino or Johnson, it’s great hearing someone quote Hemingway after their third round, but I don’t know how many of those people I could talk about with what it’s like to work in a fish hatchery, to drive a Zamboni for a living or how it feels to uproot and live in a new city because you’ve never been there.

The point is, that voice telling you to be better, to worry and plan is useful to a point. When it becomes debilitating, when it’s screaming in your frontal lobe while you are putting together a resume or editing thesis, it’s best to shut your laptop and go for a walk outside, realizing that after months being locked away, it’s finally Spring.