The writer's life. Ain't it swank?

After my lovely day off yesterday, I'm reluctant to return to the cube. I crave the life that involves both good, interesting work and no formal office. Part of me wants to work from coffee shops and libraries and classrooms. It felt good just to write and revise and read and create my own day and get my creative stuff done. But… as nice as that kind of life is, sometimes it isn’t nice. I’ve had that life before, and I was afraid to change it, but I'm glad I did. It was often isolating. It’s hard to create and stick to my own daily structure. It was tough to make enough money. It just... was too much time for it.

I get way more writing done now that I have a full-time job. That seems backward, but it’s true. When I wasn’t working full-time, I was worried about money, which did me no favors, and there wasn’t the same kind of pressure to get the work done, so it was easier to procrastinate. There’s this idea of what the writer’s life should be--and if a person isn’t able to be in a situation where they have loads of time to write (the U of Iowa says 3+ hours daily), they’re not really dedicated.

I don’t think I’d ever, ever want a life (again) where my Main Job is to be a writer (or student-writer). There’s only so much creative energy a person can spend on that kind of work a week, and once it's drained, forcing yourself to keep being creative is self-destruction. My writing is best when its balanced out with non-creative-writing work. When I wrote too much, it soon felt just like going to the office minus the money. Kind of like Christmas every day—it loses its beauty and after a while, chocolate Santas aren’t awesome anymore.

My friends, the myth that “real” writers prove they are real by being so devoted to their craft and their path to success that they reject stuff like jobs, mediocre or otherwise, in the name of art, is a load of crap. There are allll kinds of valid, different ways to do life. It’s a very individual thing.

I guess, if I had my ideal situation (Universe? Hey, Universe! Are you listening?) I’d have some of both. Part of the time there’d be some structured career with responsibilities and someone to hold me accountable that includes a place to go to interact with folks and be involved in projects that are interesting but not the same things I work on in my creative life. Then there would be the creative life part, where I have flexibility and independence and get to follow whatever my intuition (or editor) says to work on.

I’m getting there. I actually like my office job (for once) and it’s a little bit flexible. I have days off (I’ll get paid for yesterday’s skip-day), I can work out of the office sometimes, I can go for walks or work out during the work day or come in from 10-6 one day and 7-4 the next. Still… there’s a career work/creative-work life balance that isn’t totally worked out there, and I’m not sure what to do to get it there.

Garden Level

I called in sick today. Yeah, sick of work! It’s fabulous: I’m in Nina’s Coffee Shop in St. Paul reading the amazingly helpful comments DK wrote on my most recent stack of poetry. She is not to be confused with my current professor, whose actual job it is to give me comments this semester. DK is my future thesis advisor, and is totally going above and beyond. Instead of giving her her own tiara and delivering fresh flowers to her house daily, which she deserves, I’ve given a donation to poets.org in her honor.

Next issue: I’m moving. My landlord’s a total kook and I’m totally sick of having no kitchen. I found a big cool place in a neighborhood that’s wedged in between 3 lakes, close enough to walk or bike to groovy urban stuff, but not in the heart of trend-o-rama hipsterville. However: It’s a garden-level apartment. Which means one could, if the curtains are up, walk straight up to the windows and look right in, or hell, swing one open and dive straight into my living room.

I just finished a book by a former professor on her rape and recovery. The rape happened, I learned, in a neighborhood very near to the one I’ll be in. The stats are there: A woman has more chance of being raped than she does of having her tonsils out. One in four women. One every six minutes. I’m generally conscious of this kind of thing, but the book (excellent book) renewed my bug-eyed scared-shitlessness and awakened (awoke?) my dormant rage against violence.

I want this apartment. It’s big and cute and there are nice neighbors and I’m within a stone’s throw of two little lake beaches. I won’t let fear drive me away from it, but you can bet your ass I’m going to get the landlord to install multiple window safety locks if she hasn’t already. Even so—the most disturbing thing is that there’s only so much a person can do—attacks happen on their way to the car at 7 a.m. They happen while boyfriends and children are home. Good locks get picked. All we can do is be as smart as we can and hope it isn’t us. Scary to relaize, yes, but also permission to surrender to the limits of what we can do.

I’m glad apartment hunting is done, anyway. The first few places I looked at smelled like cat pee.

It’s snowing in Saint Paul. It’s April—and this is weird even for us. But it’s beautiful. Big white flakes. It’ll be gone soon enough.

Some of DK’s comments on my work:

cool. fabulous. more than enough.
you could risk a couple moments
of smart, imaginistic self-portrait.
yes. yes. i see it like this.
be tough, abrupt, honest.
i love it as it is.
stanza could be a bit more fabulous.
maybe the “i” imagines what the lover is doing?
build to the finale.
this is done.
i think this is the end.
the end.

Why not

So, yeah. This week has been much less saturated with literary/poetry/writing/homework than last week was because I’ve been totally burnt out on that schtuff. We didn’t have class, and I actually got my prof to meet up with me to go over my work. Praise the Freakin’ Lord Almighty—I’ve been trying to get some attention from this woman all semester and she has no office hours. She keeps our work for weeks (And weeks! I still haven’t seen four of my poems I handed in forever ago. I’m beginning to think they’ve been sacrificed to the “junk in her car” gods.) and half the time when we get it back she either hasn’t looked at it or she just writes question marks on it. Hello, writing professor: Of all people, you should know how utterly useless it is for you to write a big “?” next to a poem.

The odd thing is, other times she’s right on. She’ll give helpful, solid feedback that we can actually use to revise and turn our stuff into a shining, moving piece of art. Then … with no warning, the helpful-professor-side goes back into hiding, and she returns to the confused, overwhelmed, incoherent self. Anyway: I didn’t mean for this to turn into a bitch-about-the-prof session. She’s… complicated, and going through some stuff that leads me to believe this is more likely about something being up with her, not mere incompetence. Anyway: I got feedback, I asked questions, she answered them, I had her explain some of her (non) comments, and it was the most worthwhile hour of my whole damn semester.

Eureeka. Moving on.

I’m still having weird dreams. This week’s winner is the one where I was on some Mexican island at an outdoor Mass with my two sisters, and Kirk Cameron (total Growing Pains era) was doling out the Eucharist while smoking a cigarette… which I desperately wanted a drag of, instead of the Eucharist. Ah, yes—dissect that one, friends!

A Call to Arms

Do Not be Silent

In the Epic of Gilgamesh,
Gilgamesh becomes a shadow of himself
because he is dead.
It’s an old story. It’s one of the first poems
of the first writings ever discovered.

King Hammurabi—
according cuneiform clay tablets
excavated from Mesopotamia—
declared that the gods charged him, as king,
with defending the poor and defenseless.

The greatest irony of
ancient tablets burned, crushed, looted
in the war with Iraq
(the oldest known evidence of human writing,
stories, poems, biographies,
lives, mathematics, economics, everything
ancient civilizations knew, cared about)
the oldest writings were laws
beginning with punishment for those
who brought false accusations.

The only weapons of mass destruction
destroyed in Iraq
were words.
Voices have been silenced.
Learn from them.

To my schoolmate who critiqued one of my poems and wrote “WHO?” next to my reference to Blake: THIS is Blake. He’s kind of famous.

I tried to go to the Jane Goodall movie at omnimax but it was sold out. I sort of went to church. It was empty, does that count? I went to the Institute of Arts instead, which is free (brilliant) and has William Blake’s etchings of the Book of Job up. Holy shit—they’re amazing. They’re as detailed as all the little lines on the dollar bill, and as tiny. And unlike drawing, you have to scratch out everything except the picture you want left when you ink it and stamp it, so you have to think kind of backwards while you’re doing it. They were so complex and totally cool (profound art review, here, I know).

Ah, Blake. I first met him in the good old 30 pound Norton Anthology in college. I had a huge crush on my professor because he could speak old English. And because he was hot. I failed an exam on The Dream of the Rood because I couldn’t understand all the freaking footnotes and had a hard time staying awake on account of my tall, willowy college freshman roommate (a ballet major) coming home totally trashed every night at 4 a.m. and banging around pots and pans to make macaroni and cheese.

I loved Blake then—and not just because the Doors named their band after one of his poem where he says something like (I’m paraphrasing from memory from 12 years ago, so…) “If only the doors of perception were cleansed, then would we see things as they truly are: eternal.” Also because he writes about tigers, he combines visual art with poetry. I realized on this museum visit that Blake isn’t as old as I thought—he died in something like 1830, which, as far as old stuff goes, wasn’t that long ago. When I read him in college I kinda lumped him together with Chaucer. Keep in mind that I was 19, when anyone over 30 still seemed geezerly, so I anyone dead before 1950 may as well have been before the dawn of time.

I busted out my pen and notebook when the museum guard wasn’t looking (you know, the scary smack-down of museum security) and scribbled this down: “…Blake’s etchings of the Book of Job are intended as a challenge to the belief that misfortunes are punishment for sin. The Book of Job was for Blake the apotheosis of lyric expression, a metaphysical commentary in the form of symbolic narrative. Job’s journey parceled his own creative struggles and spiritual awareness—it’s not to be read literally, but spiritually discerned…”

Then, there’s his commentary on the creative process, which is so RIGHT ON:

Five states of Experience:

Innocence
Experience
Revolution
The Dark Night
The New Life.

If Blake were alive today and looked anything like my college Literature professor, I think I’d have a huge crush on him too. Symbolism! Philosophy! Narration! Spiritual awareness! Dark night of the soul! Swoon. Amazing poet. Amazing artist.

Whine, whine, bitch, bitch. Ah, that's better.

March 31: Blugh. It was 82 and sunny on Monday and everyone was flooded with happy endorphins and hope—hope!—and now it’s gray and cold and crappy, crappy and I am full of the blues. There is, as GK says, a mysterious law that says that the return of craptastic weather after springiness is the direct result of hope. There’s a Beth Orton song that goes something like “If I’d never seen the sun shine/I wouldn’t mind the rain.” Yeah, that’s today.

My most favorite people are out of town or busy and I am alone. I’m feeling too quiet and contemplative to force myself to go out with someone else just for the company. At least the gray is an excuse to stay in and be whiney and blah, but really… I’m pretty sick of the inside of my apartment. There’s plenty to do here—sift through stacks of papers and get organized, read, do homework, laundry, watch the latest Netflix arrival (a war documentary selected by my sweetheart—hello, depression!), write and send out submissions and such productive results-generating kinds of things.

Rather, I’ve decided do something effortless that involves being around people I don’t actually have to talk to, which leaves me with going to a movie (it’s a perfect movie day) and church (which I may or may not follow through on).

April. Bring ooonnnnn April.

Meanwhile, I notice I have a few more visitors that I don’t know. Someone from Denver. Hello Denver! And Brooklyn (Buck? Is that you?), someone from somewhere in the US who visits me in the middle of the night (Hello, uh, unknown insomniac!) and Malaysia. Drop me a comment, people. Say hello.

MFA. Values. Career.

JM’s talk last night was awesome. He talked about the writing industry when he started out in the late 60’s, an how near the end of his MFA (or MA?) he was getting calls from the likes of Stanford encouraging him to come teach. Not because he had published or was known for his brilliance at the time, rather, because that’s how many jobs in the industry there were, relative to the ratio of people with advanced degrees. It wasn’t hard to for a writer to find good work.

That totally floors me—I can’t imagine getting phone calls right now, as I near finishing my MFA, from any school, much less a top notch one, recruiting me to work in their program. It’s sad. I think of the biomedical engineers at my job who work really hard and are really smart who get recruited and offered big salaries with signing bonuses, and I think: I’m smart. I work hard. I’m earning an advanced degree. What I have to offer contributes something significant and necessary to the world. But today, writers with MFAs have a 1 in 200 chance of getting a full-time teaching job (confession: I got that stat on someone’s blog). Furthermore: teaching isn’t writing. The chances of me being a professional poet who makes enough to live on after graduation: pretty much 1 in 9 quadrillion.

Obviously, the job prospects aren’t fueling my drive to do all this. This isn’t a shock. (To all the whiners who say “MFAs are useless! They don’t get you jobs!”: Duh.) Jim talked about whether or not writing poetry is “work.” He said if you call writing poetry work, you’re automatically a failure (unless you’re one of the very few who makes a living on selling the writing). Therefore, we may not want to call it work. Not in the career sense anyway.

If I don’t exercise my drive to create works of art, and to use writing to do my job to send a voice into the world, I can’t really do the other things in my life well. So writing is a sort of work. It’s a calling, a drive and sometimes feels like a curse. But having this calling feels much more like an honor than a curse most of the time.

For those of us who want to contribute to the domain (as in, not people who write in a paint-by-numbers hobbyist way), not really being able to call creative writing “work” without looking like a failure (because we don’t support ourselves on it) is detrimental. In our society, people identify one another by monetary value. The more money you make at doing something, usually the more valid it is, and its acceptable to squash people in the process. I’m thinking of big-wig CEOs, here, who make a shitload by doing unethical things like firing the less-powerful. It’s like a grown-up, much more harmful version of musical chairs. What do little kids do when you’re down to having the 1 chair left in musical chairs? They grab the other kid and throw them out of the way to get it, that’s what.

When you go to a party, people say “So what do you do?” imply “…for a job” not “…that creatively fulfills your soul” or “…to contribute to the world.” The latter question, “What do you do to contribute to the world?” could be answered with the name of a job—many of us have jobs that suit us well, tell something about our identity, and that we love. But it doesn’t have to be a job. This question opens up the possible answers to other values a person might have and things they might pursue. For some people how they earn a living is not what they mainly identify themselves as. So: Am I a writer if it doesn’t pay for anything?

I suppose it all comes down to values. I could blah blah blah about how fulfilling my drive to write makes me feel rich, an that’s what really matters, but we all know that’s a bunch of crap. There’s a paradigm shift that would need to happen to really value writers again. I suppose if it took 35 years for our society to go from one extreme—with universities recruiting fresh MFA grads—to the other extreme of people saying screw-the-MFA because it will do nothing for their career—that it could possibly evolve again in my lifetime.

It’s the politics of all this that gets me down. I’m starting to send stuff out and get some things accepted, and there is a whooooollllle world of drama attached to who is publishing what where, and who is going to make it and who isn’t, with all kinds of jealousy-filled fit-throwers and sabatogers and barnacles that drag down the ones who progress and all kinds of resentment-caked-pity-parties for those who don’t. Lots of people want to grab the other kids and throw them across the room to get one of the last chairs before the music stops.

This is all poison to our industry. We’re letting money and the fucked-up values of our culture turn writers against each other when really, we’re all on the same team, here. What needs to happen is for all of us to do our work respectably, to support it buy buying and reading it. We need to let go of the musical-chairs mentality that says “There’s only room for a couple of us at the top, and I’ll kick you out of the way to get a chair up there if I have to.” It’s self-sabotage. It creates festering wounds in our domain. I, for one, am not going to participate in that. If I can avoid it.

What to Write When a Bath is too Beautiful

This poem is for Jim Moore, in honor of the poem “What to Write When a Landscape is too Beautiful.” I’m meeting Jim tonight at school. I’ve read his book Lightning at Dinner so many times I know that he mentions sparrows 42 times in it. He’s amazing. Maybe if I move to Italy and get a flat overlooking sparrow filled trees and orange clay tiles with a sparkling sea in the distance and if I ate gillatto every day I could be half as good.

So here’s the poem, which my professor called pretentious and self-conscious. I think she's wrong. I think it's pretty. Brilliant? Probably not. I'll revise it. Pretty? Yes.

What to Write When a Bath is too Beautiful
For Jim Moore

You do not need to say
hot water
frosted skylight
shuffling snowflakes
steamed tiles
curved porcelain
lovely body
melting salts.

Forgive my not moving
for a pen and paper
to write of
jasmine oil,
jasmine oil,
jasmine oil.

The highest point above the observer's horizon

Zenith

It is not the sun.
It is not the North Star.
It is not the bridge hanging lax above the river.
It is not the weathervane atop the barn.
It is not the cluster of seeds on a palm tree.
It is not the attic filled with bats.
It is not the fan blowing dust under the furniture.
It is not the roof pillow on a fort of couch cushions.
It is not never with you.
It does not move.

It is the sun.
It is the North Star.
It is the bridge hanging lax above the river.
It is the weathervane atop the barn.
It is the cluster of seeds on a palm tree.
It is the attic filled with bats.
It is the fan blowing dust under the furniture.
It is the roof pillow on a fort of couch cushions.
It is never with you.
It moves.

When you spin, it does not spin.
When Earth rotates, it does not rotate.
When you are in the house, it is in the house.
When you are in the barn, it is in the barn.
It may not be the fan, the seeds, the bats.
It may be the fan, the seeds, the bats.

Architect's Map

It’s raining today and I so wish I were in my bed at home under my skylight with the deck door open to better hear the spring rainy sounds. I wish I had all my writing stuff with me (the “input,” I call it—my books and notebooks and photos and music and a beverage—probably tea, as that is all arty) and was writing.

However, I’m in a cubicle eating leftover Thai food with a philodendron and a book on screws. I mean, hardware for medical implants. Those kinds of screws.

My class is writing poems that bring a domestic thing into the center of the poem—it’s supposed to be political. Not as in “I was folding laundry/ and it dawned/on me that/Bush sucks!” but more as in … the silenced issues of domestic craziness.

What came out was interesting: I wrote a poem of a story I did a long time ago that I meant as fiction but oddly… I then realized that almost all of it is TRUE. This was my life—and this is how I learned to knit. (I did, indeed, suck at it and I’m not enough of a perfectionist to ever knit. I have no patience. I will end up hurling the needles and scraggly pot-holder across the room).

I need to revise the poem. Perhaps I’ll post it.

For now, here’s something else for you. It’s a first draft I’ll probably revise this week before class.

Perhaps the love you feel belongs to you.

I am intimate with
the jellies and knobs
of the human spine. Hinged. Rooted.
The trunk of a sycamore.

I know what it is
to stare before sleep as a child
at the same cracks in the ceiling
of our aching house as my father did.

I learned elements on the periodic table
draw together with a purpose,
a drive to make us,
and to make all things.

I once floated on my back in the Indian ocean,
turned my head and saw a man-o-war
floating next to me,
dark veins like an architect’s map.

I believe a creature of nature
is formed of forces and atoms
fiercely determined to unite and abide

but indifferent to our passing.

Superior, yes.

I spent the weekend alone at a cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior. The cabin was small—1 bedroom—with raw wood walls and fire-stove heat and huge windows overlooking the lake.

Lake Superior is massive and this time of year it has floating ice bergs, small ones, and it has broken up the plate of ice cover and stacked it to the side so the melted waters can make their way north. It’s hilly and covered in bare birches.

I needed to write. I’ve been so busy preparing for my advance poetry writing class… that requires very little actual advanced poetry writing (don’t get me started)… that I needed to put the busy work aside and actually do the creative writing I’m drawn to do.

Going there and being in that environment and alone and giving myself permission not to read things or do exercises that aren’t inspiring—it opened the floodgates.

Friday night I read some Mark Strand, who I recently discovered (see below). He’s got a fantastic collection of essays. I started Mary Oliver’s book on crafting poetry—helpful so far. I’m trying not to let some negative things I’ve heard about her taint my image. And I wrote.

The next morning I made some really fantastic coffee and breakfast and sat in front of a view of the lake and I wrote more. Then I went to Split Rock Lighthouse and went for a walk to the lighthouse, around it, out on a narrow stretch of rocky land and through the woods. The weather rocked—I actually had a little tan. In March. In Minnesota.

Then I got a massage. Sigh. It was wonderful. My masseuse and I talked, and she told me she’s begun renting out her cabin and is trying to start creative workshops there in a studio space. I said I want to lead creative poetry workshops, and she invited my boyfriend and I out to stay at her cabin in May and asked me to consider running a workshop there for poets. It was all very serendipitous.

Then I returned to the cabin where I made myself dinner. I had wine. A fire. A view of an oceanic lake. A teaching prospect. All was well.

In all, I wrote or edited 15 new poems, read some of 4 books and wrote in my journal. It was exactly what I needed.

Sex.

I'm just curious to see how many more hits I get with sex as a title.

While I’m at it, why don’t I add Iraq, Angelina Jolie, NASA, paternity testing and daffodils.

Speaking of Angelina Jolie, WHAT is the fascination? She’s a person living her life. She happens to be pretty and good at her job and values making a positive difference in the world. Do we need to decend upon her like a swarm of hungry locusts every time she goes to the store? Read about her because her relationship with Brad Pitt has some parallel message for one’s own romance with the office UPS guy and this links them us up like kindred spirits?

Just for the hell of it, lets add the name of the current poet Laureat, Billy Collins.

Call and Response: A found poem

From the bathroom walls in Minneapolis:

I’m half Raskolnikov, half Sidney cartoon
. Can I be loved
. Who doesn’t love words?
I am the formless one. The secret angel and scarlet whore
. The observer is the same as the observed.
I am right. Your stupid.
. Crapola.
. Your = possessive pronoun
. You’re = contraction for you are
Why follow the crowd when you can crowdsurf on top of it?
. What’s a crowdsmurf?
I sure as hell ain’t getting no ass.
. Your double negative is unnecessary.
Not so. It’s part of the meter and rhyme. Colloquial language.
. The joke is in your hand.

Keeping Things Whole

Today I exchanged e-mails with the former poet laureate of the United States of America, Mark Strand. You know, because apparently I just exchange e-mails with really talented, famous poets.

And isn’t he a handsome fellow to boot? He was featured as the poet of the day over here. I looked him up, read his profile and listened to him read a couple more poems (all while working in my cubicle)—technology is awesome—and I loved his work.

I decided that I’d write him a letter right now. So I did—I told him how I think his work beautifully and skillfully and very subtly brings together elements of the larger universe (air, planets, cosmology) to hold up the smaller, closer meaningful stuff of everyday life. It’s gorgeous. The guy’s got skills.

I attempted to say this to him eloquently mindful that such “You’re great! Your writing touched me!” drivel must get old but that I wanted him to know that he has moved one more soul. I was thankful to have come across him and will be reading his books. I hoped that such things as my letter matter to him these days.

He wrote back a couple hours later (let’s hear it for technology one more time) thanking me for my letter, and said he wishes me all the best with my own work, and he appreciated it.

I feel good. If I were a poet, even a rich and famous one, I’d appreciate it if I touched the life of a stranger 2,000 miles away from me. And I’d like to know. I believe I will make a habit of this letter-of-appreciation sending.

Keeping Things Whole
by Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Oh, that's just someone's sacrum. So, can I call you sometime?

Today I am treating myself to a tall caramel mocha java swirly steamy cup of fattening, expensive yumminess. It’s Jeans-Day at work (“Casual Day” means Wear the same stuff that barely passes for professional attire only jeans instead of cargo pants!) and I actually slept through the night without having scary-ass dreams last night. I’ve had a shit-hole of a week (Surprise!). It could be a combo of stress and pissed-offness and probably the two gin and tonics I drank before bed, but one night I dreamt that I was on a blind date with some obnoxious guy when my sister walked up and dumped the contents of my purse on the table and a human sacrum fell out. I had another bone dream the next night, only far more disturbing and creepy. I blame it on reading the Stephen King book on writing—he keeps using excavation as a metaphor for the resurfacing of memory and material and so on.

Hey! Check out this cool picture of Saturn:

Polite Society: For the Birds

"If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway. If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It’s what I have."

-from "On Writing" by Stephen King

Cathartic Bitch Fest

Friends, I’m tired. I’ve been working on this paper for over a week, and I have poems due today (including one I will have critiqued by the class) and a presentation to do tonight.

That’s just for class—my full-time day job is a different story.

I’m nearing the end of my third academic year. This is my THIRD freaking year of this. On the days I have class, I’ll work a full day, drive allllll the way across the world for three hours of class and get home at 10 pm. God help me if I have anything else in my life I need to get done. The nights before are spent getting ready for it, usually neglecting things like dishes and picking up after myself. So the day or two after is usually spent scrubbing crust off of frying pans, raking dirty clothes into the hamper, watering dying plants and starting the homework process over again. This morning I got up at the crack to scrub a pile of dishes before work. I'll eat all three meals at a desk today.

I realize all this was a choice—and I’d make these choices again. I love what I study, I’m proud of my degree and I’m so glad (and thankful) to have a job that supports me. I’m a better writer, I’m excited about my thesis project, I love my friends and colleagues. And (drum roll), I’ve had two pieces published recently. One in Project for a New Mythology and one forthcoming in Prairie Poetry. Hooray! I know that when the coursework part is over, I’ll really miss the structure and community, blah blah blah blah blah blah.

However, I’m weary. And right now, I’m so sleep deprived that the woman in the next cube who just had a baby 6 weeks ago looks better rested and fresher than me. As for this paper and presentation: What the hell. People, I know how to write a freakin’ paper. I got a four-year undergrad degree in literature and I’ve been getting my MFA for three effing years. Give me a damn break. And presentations: I loathe them. They make me sweat and stammer and my mouth dry up. I’d much, much rather spend my time revising my work and sitting down with my professor to go over her comments so I can revise them again.

I have (hold on, let me count them…) ten more weeks left. Then I’m done with coursework. D.O.N.E.

Sweet boys like sweet potatoes

Libraries: They are good.

It’s true: literacy equals education equals freedom. For instance, when the press was invented, people could read the bible for themselves for the first time, which facilitated the exposure of religious and political oppressors, the ability to develop one’s own ideas and interpretations and eventually lead to things like a thesis being nailed to a door. Books breed empowerment.

Before that, even, the oldest writing modern human beings had of was a collection of cruciform scripts that were held in a museum in Baghdad. In the beginning of the war, thes tablets were annihilated. This is among the many tragedies involved in war, but I digress.

Libraries, as we commonly think of them now (collection of media materials for public use) as opposed to originally (collection of records, usually archives, or private book collections) are under appreciated and under serious threat. When I lived in Australia, I was surprised to learn that there is no such thing as a library fine there, because libraries don’t need the money. They’re all funded by the government. Due dates? Just a suggestion that rely on a person’s politeness, not a threat of a fine. Why the United States hasn't followed suit is beyond me.

When I was at Oxford, I had a card for the Bodleian Library (which holds ancient books, and a copy of everything printed ever). Before classes started, I had to stand in front of a crowd of serious-looking officiators and put my hand on a leather bible and recite something like “I promise not to harm any book, take any object out of the building and I swear not to ignite flame or fire in this library…” Even then, a library card there doesn’t allow anyone to actually leave the library with anything. See the picture? That's a book at the Bodleian that is chained to the wall for its own protection.

The library is, of course, beautiful, as many of them are. And there's nothing like a book--they smell distinct. They have little marks in them where some mysterious reader once felt moved. Or maybe they're new and stiff and white and pretty. Maybe they have a loving dedication written in the inside cover. Books, aside from entertaining and educating and generating ideas—they are very aesthetically pleasing to hold and see and to give to loved ones.

And libraries—if there is one thing that can be done to improve the world and the quality of lives in it, it’s to give them access to information. Libraries facilitate the self-sufficient improvement of lives, children’s lives, and thereby communities, countries, and the world.

There’s my big spiel on books and libraries. All this to say—I love libraries and I use mine often. I listen to audio books in the car. Right now, I posess a totally random small-print-run book of cosmology poetry--really weird and unique and cool--that I doubt I'd have found elsewhere.

Before I allow myself to go to a book store (where I will spend a ton of money), I make myself go to the library first. It’s like shopping only low-risk and free. What other place could you drop by and walk out with an introductory lesson to the Portugese language, a CD of monks chanting in India, the diary of Virginia Wolfe, a list of the most lucrative stocks in 1995 and a photograph of a star exploding 6 billion light years away, and all for free? If you’ll excuse me, I have another chapter and a half of Jane Austin to read before I trade it with my neighbor’s copy on Lewis and Clark.

It's been ten minutes. Am I rich yet?

I just created an investment portfolio all by myself and traded my very own stocks. I have a 401K and company stock and done CDs and all that jazz, but usually I sign up for the account, then leave the “Dollars! Be fruitful and multiply!” part to the nice man behind the Big Metaphorical Curtain. They take some dough out of my check. I get something in the mail that I may glance at before filing away, hoping that it’s all steadily growing without much of my involvement whatsoever. And when I retire—surprise!—I’ll have a lot of money all managed by Someone Who Knows What He’s Doing. Which is not me.

I am a tourist in finance land no more. I'm done with these beliefs: "I'm not a math or finance person. I don't think I could be good at it. It isn't my personality. I don't understand it. I better to ignore it and entirely trust someone else with it." crap. No more of those thoughts. I'm a beginner, yes. I read a book, and I understood most of it. I did some research on the Web. I looked up words in the dictionary. I found some Web sites. It’s really overwhelming. But: I created a new account. I have access to free advisors, which I intend to use. And with that, I am learning how to manage this myself. It is, after all, mine, and money, if cared for, can do good things.

There’s a handy thing online that asks you a bunch of questions then makes recommendations to you. So I did that and got advice. Then, I researched what’s making money out there right now, got the code for a few Big Hitters and traded some of what I had for something else. I’m starting out slowly—with a moderate amount until I’m more comfortable with it all. For now, I feel empowered and good and rather grown-up.