Unexpected Good Things

Spring semester: day twenty

For the haze that my work week usually is (and still is this week), there have been a few unexpected occurrences that I think can be marked down in the "good" category.

For example, surprisingly enough I've been pulled aside on no less than five occasions during the past two weeks by not only my friends and colleagues, but our esteemed professor as well (which is a big deal, yes), to be told that my poetry this semester is really good.

This, as I've alluded to (or outright said) before, is simply shocking to me. While I do take my work seriously, I've never thought I was that great and have fully admitted it in the past -- there are writers in this program who are leaps and bounds more talented than I am, writers who spend hours crafting lines, tone, line breaks, cadence, etc., and it shows in their work, which is always masterfully written and tends to speak to the proverbial soul. I'm not one of those writers. Most of my poetry is generated from a simple idea, off-the-cuff, and is laid out in lines and line breaks as I write it. Even my best poems I generally don't spend more than an hour on. In fact, some of my worst ones (well, "worst" in my opinion, anyhow) I've spent more time on than my good ones. Poetry isn't like fiction writing -- most of the time it doesn't have a plot or a story arc that it has to follow to its eventual end. There's no time or space for in-depth characterization of the speaker. It usually has to be succinct and direct, get to the point quickly, and be relate-able/understandable in some fashion all within the confines of however many lines one wants to write. I've always seen fiction as a scientific sort of art form, and likened it to the school of Arts and Sciences. It takes scientific skill and a scientific mind to write good fiction, fiction that pops. Poetry to me has always been more of the Fine Arts side of that coin -- like painting. We as poets are really painting word pictures, snapshots, in-the-moment mixed media word bursts. So yeah, it's quite different.

Yes, I realize how absolutely pretentious that sounds, though that wasn't really my intention.

But yeah, anyway, apparently a large chunk of the department likes my stuff this semester. Even my latest poem in this week's workshop packet, which -- and I'd like to make this clear -- I hated, and wrote in about ten minutes.

Sometimes I think that this is all some sort of coma dream, and I'll eventually wake up and realize it's still December -- and I'll have to do all of this again.

I do have a new piece I'm working on now, though, and I really like it. That probably means that next week I'll submit it to the workshop and everyone will hate it. Oh well.

At this point, most of us have now met with our visiting writer this semester, a poet about my Dad's age who is also a huge Wilco fan and a blues guitarist. I can dig it. I met with him yesterday for about an hour or so, and will be meeting with him every Tuesday through the rest of the month at 3:45 (it's one of the few times that both of us were available, as both of us have packed/limited schedules). He did a reading at the library and then an informal, open-to-everyone talk yesterday afternoon, but I didn't go. I don't usually go to these sorts of readings or talks on principle -- for one, I'm generally not interested, but for two, I don't really want my opinion of a visiting poet's style or subject matter in his/her writing to subconsciously taint or otherwise subtly influence my thoughts regarding the feedback I would receive from him/her in our one-on-one meetings. With professors or visiting writers I've had who have published books, poetry or otherwise, I try to avoid their work as much as possible until after I've taken a class with them; I want the class environment to be just that -- a class environment. Even with the visiting writer, which isn't so much a class as it is an intensive, one-on-one workshop that lasts for a month.

The only exception to this rule has been with our esteemed poetry professor, who puts out a new book every year or two. I'd read (and still continue to read) all of his work regularly, as all of us at this point know him on a personal level as well as on an academic level. After my time working with a professor or visiting writer is over, though, I'm generally interested in seeing what they've written. Just not before or during that time.

Another reason I didn't go to the reading/talk was that I had already been stuck on campus for three hours longer than I normally would have been (the journal staff had a meeting I needed to attend), and I really just wanted to go the fuck home afterwards.

Once I got home, I ordered three pizzas, two 2L bottles of Mountain Dew, a big box of chickenstrips and an order of breadsticks from Papa John's -- using my free Super Bowl pizza code as well as a "family meal deal" thing they do -- for $36 total. I now have enough pizza to last me over a week and am considering freezing some of it in Ziploc bags so that I can make it last. This negates any real need for me to go grocery shopping for myself for the next week or so as well, aside from the barest of essentials I might need (i.e. toilet paper, cat food, coffee, cigarettes, etc). Two of the pizzas I haven't even touched yet.

Annnnnnnd the next thing I remember is waking up on the couch at 3:45AM.

Seriously.

On Thursday afternoons/evenings, I get really tired after I come home and eat, regardless of how much sleep I got the night before. Wednesday night I went to bed around 9 (yes, I know, early) and got up at 5, so it's not like I was sleep deprived. Still, there's something in my body/brain chemistry that tells me hey Brandon, you don't have to get up and do anything tomorrow -- it's your weekend, so you're going to sleep. And then I pass out. I do vaguely remember going to lay down on the couch, because Pete (my big male cat) jumped up on my chest and laid down with me. This was, approximately, 7PM or shortly after. This means that I was passed out -- unconscious, dead to the world, and completely un-wake-able -- for almost nine hours. On a small, two-seater loveseat couch from the 1970s, with my feet hanging over the arm on one end. Don't ask me why or how I could do this -- I don't even know myself. It's not exactly comfortable. Being a grad student functioning on short snippets of sleep here and there throughout the work week has apparently given me the ability to fall asleep anywhere, at any time, and in any position -- comfortable or otherwise. I consider this a useful life skill, and/or possibly the most useful thing that I might get out of grad school as a whole.

There have been other good things going on as well, but they're all little things. I did get a load of student papers yesterday, but at first glance the vast majority of them appear to be properly formatted and somewhat intelligently-written, so that's good. It'll save me time grading them this weekend. I've also finished two new poems and have started on a third, so that's good as well. I also think the $8 bottle of high-end, high-mileage engine/fuel system cleaner I used is helping the Monte Carlo as well, as after a week's worth of normal driving she seems to be getting better gas mileage, as evidenced by the fact that this week she only took nine gallons of gas in her tank as opposed to the normal eleven-to-twelve at her regular fill-up time. That means she's getting about 17-18mpg when, previously, it was about 14-15 or so at best.

Yes, I realize that by today's standards, 17-18mpg is almost laughable. Keep in mind that my Monte Carlo is a Z34 -- the sports car version, and that she's sixteen years old and has two bad spark plugs (which causes misfiring engine cylinders = lost gas mileage) and four really old tires that need replaced. With all of those factors against her, 17-18mpg is remarkable, and I'll take what I can get as long as she keeps running. Which, thankfully, she has. Next week she'll cross 220,000 miles.

This weekend will be spent doing some busywork-like homework, grading papers, and finalizing my taxes. I've drafted out my taxes, so I know approximately what I should get back from the feds and the state (about the same as usual, around $1100-1200 total) but until I finalize everything, I won't know for sure. I've got a little more than a month before I fly back to West Virginia over Spring Break to visit my friends and family, so if I want my refunds before then (in order to, y'know, not have to spend a lot of my own money while I'm there) I'll probably have to have them direct-deposited into my bank account -- something I've not done before with my taxes. This will also be helpful, however, because my credit card bill came in the mail this week, and it's not exactly small.

But, things are getting done, good things are happening here and there, and it's the weekend. I'm trying to look on the bright side of things, because this may be the last semester I'm able to do so without being completely swamped with shit to do every waking hour of the day. And that's a good thing in itself.