Hopes and Dreams

Spring semester: day six

Longtime readers of this blog know that I always suffer from insomnia, sometimes worse than others, on Monday nights during the semester. This is because, as you know, I have Mondays off -- it's like another little "weekend day" for me. I've never taught on a Monday, and haven't had a Monday class since my very first semester as a graduate student eighteen months ago. Therefore, it's very hard for me to sleep on Monday nights because, really, I'm required to get up on Tuesday morning at 5AM regardless of when I go to bed. If I've slept until noon on a Monday (as I did today), it's rather difficult for me to go to sleep ten or eleven hours later most of the time. My body tends to function on a "sleep ten hours, stay awake for 24 or more" sort of pattern if left to its own devices, something that graduate school throws a huge wrench into. Graduate school and my responsibilities within it makes my sleep schedule really erratic -- sometimes it's more along the lines of "stay awake for 36 hours, sleep for five or six, repeat" sort of erratic.

I can't really complain, though; I am on campus only three days a week, which is really two-and-a-half days most of the time, as on most Thursdays I can leave and come home shortly after noon when I'm done teaching. This semester I've found that it's imperative that I get to campus ASAP in the mornings, as for some reason parking on campus as well as interstate traffic has been worse on a day-to-day basis than I've ever seen it. This means I'm out the door by around 6:30 every morning now when I would normally leave 20 or 25 minutes later.

I have, however, worked my schedule around most of this; yes, I may be tired in the mornings, but I can force myself to trudge upstairs, make coffee, shower (if I didn't the night before) and wake up before my drive. The time spent in my office between about 7:15 and 9:10 with another pot of coffee also allows me to continue becoming super-alert, and powers me through my teaching that follows thereafter.

Theoretically, if I wanted to, I could stay up all night tonight and all day tomorrow, but by the time I got home a little after 7PM I would be a total zombie, running on 30-32 hours straight of being awake, and an incredibly large amount of coffee. If I can't force myself to sleep tonight, that may be the only solution. After all, I can always crash when I get home and sleep until 5AM the next morning if I need to. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be a problem, really. The problem is actually staying awake that long and being functional while teaching/taking my own classes without becoming delirious.

Today was spent answering a few student emails and making a shopping trip to Walmart for the week. I've lost two more students who I had last week, and gained one more, in the past 24 hours. Yeah, it looks like the next week or so is going to be really sort of shaky before my roster settles down. I now have 18 students in one class and 22 in the other, and hope the proverbial smoke settles soon before we really get into the hardcore lessons and readings later this week.

The trip to Walmart was fruitful, at least, without being incredibly expensive. I got a few extraneous items (more shirts to dye, a Blu-ray copy of V for Vendetta to replace the one the former girlfriend took with her when she moved out), but mainly I got the essentials for around-the-house cooking, cleaning, and cat care.

I'm up first for workshop tomorrow night in our poetry class. The poem in the packet that we'll be workshopping isn't one that I'm particularly proud of, or even one that I was really planning to eventually workshop; it was, really, just one that I threw together (albeit a new one) to have something to provide in the packet. Because of the way our professor's workshop functions, we generally get to pick any poem we've submitted over the course of the semester when it's our turn, and he goes in alphabetical order down the roster to pick who's "up" for the week. This time, he decided to do it in reverse alphabetical order, and I'm the last one on the list alphabetically...so, of course, I go first. As we've only submitted one poem thus far this semester -- last week's poem on the first day of class -- that's the one that I'm getting workshopped.

The one I'm bringing in tomorrow is actually a poem I'm quite proud of, written about the murder-suicide death of a close friend's fiance (no, I'm not kidding). It's actually a poem that I would want to workshop, but alas. I may do it the next time around, but maybe not. It depends on whether I can write some more worthwhile work this semester in the meantime.

I've become rather lax about my actual writing work; I've been so uninspired as of late. I haven't sent out any new submissions to magazines or journals since November (I checked), and the only time I've been writing anything new since around that time has been for the workshop class itself -- so, really, it's not been much. I can't seem to hit a stride or catch a proverbial foothold upon which I can anchor myself and write some really good work. I wouldn't call it writer's block; I'd call it a general mindset of blah, what's the point sort of feelings.

There have been times where I've briefly questioned, internally, why I'm in the program. Not in a good lord, your work sucks, why are you here sort of sense, but in more of a what are you accomplishing with your life sort of sense. I've mentioned before that being in the creative writing program at Flat State University is a very insular environment, and I must keep reminding myself that my education is not real life, it's not anything close to real life -- it's school, it's a community of like-minded individuals who are killing time and burning money just like I am, a community of people who may or may not "make it" in the real world after all of us graduate, despite our best hopes, dreams, and plans. Rae got me thinking about this subject tonight after reading one of her own blog posts, but let's face facts, people -- five years from now, when all of us are done with our MA and MFA degrees, all forty or so of us in the department, mind you...maybe ten of us, if that, will actually be working in any sort of field that we enjoy, or that we even went through the program for in the first place. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that there are many more MA, MFA, and even PhD graduates out there than there are jobs in their fields to employ them.

This reminds me of a conversation I had about six years ago with one of my regular customers when I was working at the grocery store back in West Virginia. I told her that I had a Bachelor's in English, but I was working in a grocery store for very little money (about $6k a year at the time, $5.40 an hour, not kidding) because I'd applied for over 500 jobs -- yes, I kept count -- for everything from clerical/secretarial work to laboratory work (I had experience in both), and couldn't get more than four interviews, all of which rejected me.

"Look at me," she said, holding up her EBT card, "I have two MBAs, and I'm on foodstamps."

This conversation has stuck with me for many years not because it's heartbreaking (though it is), but because it taught me a valuable lesson: sometimes there's just not a place out there for YOU as a person to be able to survive, no matter what hopes, dreams, education, or degrees you have. I'm sure that very, very nice lady had hopes and dreams too, just like the rest of us -- but she couldn't make them come to fruition, and was instead forced to stay living in West Virginia, stuck there, needing desperately to be on foodstamps just to be able to eat.

I've never had a job that's paid over $9 per hour, and never expect to find one that pays that well ever again, regardless of the fact that in a little more than a year, I'll be graduating with my MFA. The closest I ever got to my "dream job" was when I was a reporter/webmaster for the local newspaper. I got to live my Clark Kent fantasy for a little over a year, minus the alter ego. Still, I have friends who have graduated from much better schools than I have who are making a fair amount of money in the newspaper business even now. They'll be the first ones I call when I graduate if I can't find any work.

The rest of us? I'm sure several of us will find work adjuncting for either our own school or some others, or going into junior/community colleges to teach classes. Some others will go into the publishing business, some into editing, and a few will probably find a job that is somewhat close to what they wanted to do with their lives in some respects. Some of us may even be able to make a real living by becoming full-fledged-and-semi-famous popular, published authors. Being realistic, however, most of us will be down and out, looking for work anywhere we can get it, and if we can't get it, moving onward to work towards a PhD (provided a school accepts us and/or we have the money to do so). That's just the facts. That's what writers have to deal with in their chosen profession, and it's something a lot of people who aren't writers will never understand -- we either "make it" or we don't. If we don't, we either go back to working in retail or some other equally awful job in order to pay back our student loans, or we rack up more and become "professional students," moving forward with a PhD or even post-doctoral work in a school someplace else, living a year at a time and hoping something will change and/or fall into our collective laps.

I make no bones about it -- as much as I would absolutely hate to do it and want to kill myself every night after I got home from work, I am fully prepared to go into working in retail or in a grocery store again if it's that or being homeless/starving. I have bills to pay, I have cats to feed, and I own a car that needs gasoline in it if I ever want to be able to leave the house. My point is that in a program like ours, which is so incredibly insular, I think a lot of us are living on false hopes and dreams and are not going to be prepared in the least to enter the real world after graduation. It's sad to say that, but I really do think it's true. Most of these kids are just that -- kids. Most of them have never been out of school for any length of time or forced to live in a real world environment. These are kids who have gone straight from high school into undergrad, and then straight from undergrad into graduate school, all on the assumptions that once they finish their Master's degree of whatever they're studying, the world will be throwing jobs at them like they're Bon Jovi and jobs are panties. Let me tell you, this does not happen.

There are only a few of us in the program who are my age or older. All of us of that age are in the program because we want to be, yes, but because we also know that at the time we joined it, it was probably the last, best option for us to actually further our collective educations and find a way to pay the bills by teaching at the same time. Of those of us who are older, all of us have spent time in and worked in the real world in some fashion or another and know what it's like.

As Ray said in Ghostbusters, "I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

I've worked a plethora of jobs over the years. I've been a cashier, stocker, or both for four different grocery store chains. I've worked as both a laboratory assistant (mostly clerical work and cleaning) and as a laboratory technician (mixing formulas, making mediums, and doing other technical/mechanical stuff to keep a fully-staffed microbiology laboratory running). I've been a newspaper reporter for two different newspapers, as well as a webmaster/layout designer for the last one. Since 2005 I've also been running several online businesses printing/selling t-shirts with designs and art on them. Now I'm an English instructor and graduate student -- and a damned good one -- but being able to say that, or anything else about what I've done over the years doesn't guarantee me any degree of success after I graduate. There are no guarantees of anything, and there's a much greater possibility that some of us, regardless of age or experience, may have no hope whatsoever after graduate school, especially in this state and with the economy as bad as it is.

These are all frightening thoughts, to be sure, but for now all of them are out of my hands as well as everyone else's hands. This is why I live in the moment. This is why I'm able to remain calm and laid back about most situations -- I don't worry about things I can't control, and likewise I don't try to control those things either. I deal with problems as they come up, and deal with them in the most efficient, all-encompassing ways possible. Why plan ahead? Why worry about the future? The stress will give you high blood pressure and/or a heart attack, and you'll die an early death all miserable and alone.

I've always followed some version of this life perspective since I was a child, and even more so now that I've been single for almost six months. I focus on the present, on the day-to-day. Am I able to plan ahead for some things? Yes, of course. But in the vast majority of my daily life, I just tend to wing it. You can't plan everything. I know I can't. If you try to plan too much, or think too far ahead, you'll go insane. Is anyone's life stable enough to plan a year ahead anymore? Even six months? I know mine's not. And I bet yours isn't either. So live in the moment. Are things good for you right now? Do you have a home, a car that runs, a job to go to and someone (in my case, three little furry someones) who is happy to see you when you come home? Today, do you have enough food to eat, running water, and electricity? If you answered "yes" to all of these questions, then don't worry about what's going to happen a year from now, or five years from now, or what-have-you. Focus on your life now, because it could be much worse. Focus on the people in your life who care about you. Follow your dreams, yes, but take care of the important stuff too. Realize that the "big picture" is not set, and, in fact, is ever-changing. But most importantly, realize that things may not work out the way you want them to, and if they don't, oh well -- that's down the road, and out of your control until you get there. Trust me, living life on your own terms, taking things as they come day by day is a lot less crazy and hectic than planning for every little eventual detail.

On that note, I'm going to attempt to sleep for a few hours before I start my day at 5AM. Hopefully this post, however, helps you deal with your life a little better than you did before you read it.