The Return

Spring semester: day twenty-eight

I ventured out yesterday afternoon to find...the roads were clear. Not only were they clear, but they were dry. Dry as in you-couldn't-tell-there-was-a-snowstorm-dry. Not just the main roads here in Newton, either, but all the streets I drove on, residential neighborhoods or otherwise. It was 37 yesterday with abundant sunshine, and snow was melting everywhere -- water running down the ditches and gulleys like rivers.

Well, Kansas, I thought, we survived another crazy weather phenomenon. Just in time for tornado season to start in a few weeks, too. 

I parked my car in the middle of my driveway, as melting snow from my roof occasionally drips down the front of the house, becoming long icicles that could potentially damage my auto glass were they to fall off with a crash. This morning I found that this was a mistake -- for one, there were no icicles, but there was a thick layer of frost on the car that I had to scrape off, and my windows had frozen shut with said frost. It only takes a little to freeze the windows shut, and normally closed windows in my car are a good thing...until you remember that I have to have the driver's side window at least cracked in order to be able to get out, since my inside door handle doesn't work. This meant I had to take an extra ten minutes de-frosting the car and unfreezing said window.

Tonight, as most of the snow has now melted off my roof, I pulled the car back under the balcony's overhang, having learned my lesson. Screw it, it's falling apart anyway and I have good insurance.

Today was a long, tiring day. As mentioned before, over the extended snow-vacation, I got used to sleeping for nine or ten hours at a time. Last night, I got a little over seven hours, and by the time 2PM rolled around and I was sitting in the Writing Center, bored out of my mind, making up my missed hour from Tuesday, I was certainly feeling it. I'd drank a pot and a half of coffee and had been trying to force myself to stay awake and engaged all afternoon. I wanted to go to bed, actually, by the time I got home -- but I also wanted to talk to Daisy, who had her two job interviews today. Well, one of them. I'll get to that.

My classes weren't incredibly interesting -- as we'd been out for a full week, we had nothing to do today but collect workshop copies and talk about the final formattings of the papers they will soon have coming due. I once more had to lay down the law, so to speak, about in-text citations and properly formatted Works Cited pages. When I did, to make sure everyone was on the same page, some of looked bored, while some of them looked scared and/or nervous.



I feel bad about doing this, but I always assure them, to ease their fears, that I'm not out to get them in any way, shape, or form -- I am trying to help them out. Proper formatting and proper citations in papers is something they need to learn, and use, throughout the rest of their college careers. No, they may not always be writing papers in MLA style, but it's a good base to get them on the "hey, you have to cite your sources and cite them properly" track. If they learn nothing else in this class, they're going to learn how to write a proper research argument paper with proper citations, goddammit.

That being said, after being off for a week, I almost dread looking at their workshop copies. Some are long, some are fairly short, but the best part about their being off is that they've had time to do their best on them, and all brought them in, which is good. I have twelve of them total, and a good chunk of my weekend will be spent poring over them to help them out next week. The rest of my weekend? Thesis revision time and comps reading/studying/note-taking. I read 200 pages yesterday of Sharon Olds' work, and took 20 pages of handwritten notes.

"I'm trying to average reading about 100 pages a day," I told my thesis director in a short meeting with him this afternoon. "Covering poets in sequence, taking notes, making sure I can get a good feel for their works overall."

Reading 100 pages a day sounds like a lot, but it's really not -- not for reading poems, anyhow. It's the analysis and note-taking, getting a feeling for form, for diction, for content -- that's what takes the longest time. Extrapolating meanings from the works are easier for some poets than they are for others. Most of Olds' stuff, for example, is extremely personal and confessional, focusing not on the reader's experience but the poem itself, and getting it out onto the page. Most of her stuff is also fairly straightforward, so it doesn't need to be "translated" to be understood, so to speak.

I got my director to sign off on my comps form which will allow me to take it on the computer instead of in a handwritten fashion, and told him that I will be getting the finalized copy of my thesis to all three of my readers as soon as possible, probably before the March 15 deadline. I'm going to soak up the rest of my meetings with the visiting writer and try my best to apply her suggestions and edits to the works in my thesis before I "lock it down" and call it done. She adores my work, from what I gather from our meetings -- I don't know why, exactly, but she seems to. I've been showing her a lot of my older stuff intermingled with newer poems -- if anything, in the past three years I think I've gotten worse at poetry. I still look upon the stuff I wrote in my first and second semesters here as my best, really. I have a few others I like that I've written in the past year or so, but those are few and far between -- and, as I've mentioned before, it doesn't help that the ones that most of my friends and colleagues like the most are the ones that I absolutely hate and think are awful, really. I'm not sure I can see past my own perspective, my own cynicism, to truly take a compliment anymore, or even recognize one when a genuine one is offered.

Parker told me this morning that he wants to read some of my work. I don't normally show my work to people outside of a workshop setting -- it took me great courage to show any of it to Daisy, even, and that's saying something. I'm always afraid people are going to be like "This? That's it? This is what you've been doing for the past three years in grad school?" This is a big reason my parents haven't even seen my serious writing work, to be honest with you. It's not that it's overly personal or incriminating, but it's that...well...while I'm proud of what I'm attempting to do with my life (to a certain extent, anyway) I'm not necessarily proud of my output while I'm making that attempt. If that makes sense. It's difficult to explain. I know my parents support me in the path I've chosen (at least somewhat, anyway) and are looking forward to me graduating and moving on in the world, but even though that's a fairly big accomplishment, I look back on my time in grad school with not a lot to show for it.

Daisy says that I have deep-rooted self-esteem and self-worth issues that I need to work on, and maybe to a small extent she's right, but I really don't think that's the problem. I've mentioned before that Daisy is, for lack of a better term, a militant optimist -- she sees the bright side of everything, failure is not an option, and she's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about everything, while I am a militant realist. I try to view things from all possible angles, good and bad, without becoming too optimistic or pessimistic (limiting one's hopes and dreams to realistic goals keeps one on an even keel, I find). Failure is not an option, but it is certainly a possibility, and one has to take that into account whether one wants to or not. I apply this viewpoint to all things in life.

That being said, I told Parker I'd let him read some of my stuff -- of all of my collagues, he's one of the most academic and intelligent, yet open enough to recognize and understand a work's good and bad qualities. He's also one of the most honest and thorough people I know -- believe me, if he doesn't like my work, he'll flat-out tell me it's crap and give me a proverbial bulleted list as to why. As you know, I appreciate full-blown absolute honesty in all things. Parker's just that kind of guy.

Daisy also thinks I have a man-crush on Parker that I am just not able to process or deal with at present time. I replied to this accusation that everyone has a crush on Parker to some extent, both males and females alike -- again, he's just that kind of personable, honest, intelligent guy. I've had few colleagues over the years I've respected more; he's like a big-brother sort of figure to me more than anything else. So, yes, I trust him with my poetry. I'll have to dig out some choice selections over the course of the weekend.

After taking care of all of my campus stuff today, I exhaustedly came home. Maybe I was on campus only one day this week, but after so much time off, it felt like all five rolled into one. By the time I got home I was burnt-out, I hadn't eaten anything but two donuts and my coffee all day (Parker made good on his donut bet this morning) and all I wanted to do was tell Daisy I was okay, see how her interviews went, and go to bed. As I am typing this at 1:51 AM, that obviously didn't happen.

Daisy had two interviews scheduled for this morning and afternoon, respectively. Daisy has also been really sick all week -- this afternoon was the first time she's looked/acted completely normal for the past four or five days -- and she can't really help it, really. Sick or not, these companies scheduled interviews with her, so she decided to do everything she could to make them happy. However, this morning she was feeling so sick that she had to reschedule her first interview (for sometime next week, I think) and focus on feeling better so that she could go to the other one (for the company that rhymes with RayRal). That interview went really well, apparently, which is very good. They're running background checks and credit checks and all that on her, and if they decide to hire her she'll know within a scant few days. This is fantastic news, and I'm very happy for her -- all I want is for her to be happy, to be able to become financially stable again and have one less thing to worry about (not that she's the type to openly worry, anyhow). Her work schedule for said company would be less than ideal, however -- I believe she said they're shifts of Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday -- but it's a good, stable job in an incredibly stable company. RayRal, ahem, is not going away anytime soon, if ever. And I can't tell you how quickly I would jump at the chance to work for a company like them, especially after she told me what their facilities are like.

After talking to Daisy for a bit, I ordered my next set of comps books from Amazon tonight (it wasn't cheap, but I need them, and, well, it's either I get them now, when I get paid tomorrow, or get them later and maybe not have time to read them). I now have maybe four or five books left to purchase, at most, between now and April 5, and about fifteen or so to read. Again, with an average of 100 pages a day, I should be able to do that just fine. I'm also guessing I'll get my C.K. Williams book tomorrow or Saturday at the latest, as it's in Kansas City right now (according to my package tracker). I also received my humidifier that I ordered last week , which had been held up in shipping because of the weather. I wanted to set it up tonight, but I'm too tired to mess with it and fill it with water before bed -- I'll see how well it works in the morning. I got a model that has a little slot on the top of it for essential oils or other scents, too, so I can put a few drops of scent into it and refresh the house. I think the dry air in the house from the electric furnace coupled with the dry, windy cold air outside in the winter is what's really aggravating my allergies on a daily basis (not to mention keeping my skin really, really dried out over the winter), so maybe my $15 humidifier will help -- if nothing else, I should sleep a little more comfortably at night with it next to my bed.

On that note, I'm going to sleep -- I have a long weekend full of somewhat-busywork ahead of me, and I'd like to get it done as soon as possible. Besides, if I stay up any later, Daisy is going to wonder if I've died in my sleep or something, since who knows what time I'll wake up tomorrow.