 Missing School |
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I miss school. I see Beth's reading lists and I drool. I read Mo's tales of reading and writing poetry and that drool turns into foam. I miss school. I loved school. I mean, I loved it and I hated it, usually at the same time, which I suppose a lot of people do. My first memory of school is winning a purple lollipop in kindergarten when I won the "Who Can Write Down the Alphabet Fastest?" contest. That was a good day. My most recent memories of school, of course, involve college. I miss the challenge and the camaraderie of my graduate program. I miss my literature courses. Oh, how I do miss those. The first time I met Toni, we talked of how we both sometimes feel like our brains have atrophied. In ordinary life, we use our brains, of course. I use my brain at work, and parts of it that I'm using I've always used well, and parts of it I'm using in new ways, and for the most part, I enjoy it. But my brain needs more. It's definitely challenged on the job, and it feels alive, but it doesn't feel ALIVE. If you catch the obvious distinction. I find it very difficult to conceptualize an unmeasured life. Some people measure their lives in seasons, but we don't really have seasons here. Sometimes it rains every day, sometimes we have a summer drought, it's cold for a short while, for a few precious months in the spring and fall, it's perfect. But mostly it's just hot. I need beginnings. I need endings. I need semesters. I need to know that my year is divided into little cycles of projects and learning and evaluations. I suppose I could create these cycles for myself, but I suck at that. I set abstract goals and then I laugh at myself a week later. I need deadlines that are imposed by other people. I need tests. I need due dates. I have deadlines at work, but it's not the same. Somehow, it's just not the same. I'm learning, and I know some people would gyrate in ecstasy if they had my job. It's a really nifty job. It's interesting and exciting, but it's not in my heart. It's in my brain, but barely. I'm considering applying for the M.A. program in English at my university. It won't be for a while, since applications aren't due for the next cycle until January. So I have some time to think about it. I can't really see myself having the time to write a thesis, and there is a non-thesis option. Although writing another thesis might actually be fun in that sick, masochistic way that doing something really difficult can be. I loved my M.Ed. program (secondary English education). I loved the combination of literature and curriculum theory. It was complex and dynamic and hard as hell and amazing. Since I didn't last in teaching, I think it would serve me well to take the students out of the formula and put myself back into it. Just me. Me and the books. Not teaching, but being taught, by professors, and by myself. I need to find out if doing such a thing is even feasible. Are there enough night courses in the concentration of courses I would need to take for me to pull it off in five years? Do I want to commit to being here, in town, on a week to week basis, to sit in a classroom for six hours every week? Do I have the fucking money? How hellish will it be to deal with the infamous red tape that this university subjects you to as you apply for graduate school? (I have hellish memories of sprinting around campus from office to office, screaming at people who would lose my paperwork. Horrifying.) Can the other parts of my life withstand the neglect they will suffer because by school I will be, as I always have been, consumed? Is it reasonable to enter a degree program with no real intention of ever using that program to further my career? To create my career? I don't really have the desire to be an English professor. The thought of teaching again still makes me swoon. And not in a good way. What would I even study? Graduate school is not hodgepodge like undergraduate. I would have to pick a concentration. A kind of writing or a period of literature. At least I think I would. Fuck if I know. What do I love the most? I have no idea. I love Dorothy Parker and Chaucer and Shakespeare. I love American poetry and Victorian poetry, too. I could be locked in a room full of Romantics and die happy. I would love to take literature courses focused on gender studies. There is no concentration that focuses on all of the above. And you know what? English professors don't play. I had some serious ballbreakers in my undergraduate study, and I suspect that their ballbreaking would only increase exponentially for their graduate students. Am I up for that? Am I smart enough? Do I care enough? Do I KNOW enough? I've thought about creative writing but I know I would never do it. I love novels, but I'm not a novelist. I love movies, but I'm not a screenwriter. I love poetry, but I'm no poet. I withdrew from the one short story course I ever took before I finished it. My professor praised my first story and gave me one of the few As in the class, but during the workshop when it was dissected by my classmates before my very eyes and ears, even though their criticisms were mostly quite positive, I thought I would puke. I changed the names, but this was a story about my brother and me and the day of the Great Dane. A story I've never even told here. That's how scarring the experience was for me. It's so much easier to write for faceless readers than to see your readers' faces. But I read about all of the wonderful texts Beth is studying and I crave them. And I read about Mo's classes and readings and workshops and I simultaneously want to faint in glee for her and combust in envy. To be in that kind of environment full-time must be so invigorating. If you read Mo, you know what I mean. That girl sounds more alive in her entries than she ever has, and Mo's entries have always jumped off of the page with their light and life. That tells me something. It tells me that when a person is doing what she truly loves, her whole life lights up. I can see it on a monitor. I can only imagine how it would feel in real life. In my life. So I'm thinking about it. No decisions need to be made right away. I think I need to tackle one goal at a time, and right now, that goal is buying a house. Maybe once that's settled, I can realistically fantasize about that window seat where I can curl up with my textbooks and my pets and my notebooks and my dreams.
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© Copyright 2001 words diminish |
Still nothing but crap. Listening The bachelorette party mix I made. It's stupendous, really. Seeing Survivor starts in 39 minutes and don't even think I'm not counting. Journal Quotes du Jour So it meant a lot to me that I was able to come up with an original conceptualization of this poem. I mean, it is not a huge accomplishment. But it means something to me. --from go go gadget poetry career from Mo's anyone's any I miss moments like this. ::: Really, I have this vision of the written word as one endless progression, everything interconnected and referencing back and forth, and I love that. I feel that if I can just read everything, or at least everything of importance, then I'll finally understand the big picture, I'll be able to assimilate the knowledge of the people that came before me, and then I can go ahead and die. --from On Being Well-Read from Beth's Bad Hair Days I mean, exactly. EXACTLY. |
