First Day After-Jitters
Song of the Hour: Two-Headed Boy, Neutral Milk Hotel
Not even the OCD-carniverous UNC ants chewing through my sandals and feet can dampen my mood today.
My day, spent in morbid anxiety of those shitty "let’s go around the room and talk about ourselves" first-of-the-semester class moments, has ended smoothly without having to say a single word besides "I’m here" in one class. And, after scrutinizing several syllibi, no oral presentations. Life is good.
$350 in books, and I’ll be set. Not too bad– last semester was a lot more than that. My teachers range from slightly-doddering-yet-well-meaning, to completely challenging if not downright bizarre. My Psych 240 (Personality) teacher spent an hour and ten minutes rambling about betrand russell, ghandi, hillman, the prevalence of suffering in the world according to and catagorized by continent, his own trials and tribulations as an artist, english teacher, clinical psychologist treating war vets, and methodist theologian in a way that kept me both rapt, and constantly on the verge of laughter in the way he looked everyone in the eye challenging them to define themselves. He read us a lot of (amazing) poetry, some of which he wrote, and just. wouldn’t. stop. pressing us. He’s a character, that one. his take on peronsality:
Too Many Names
Monday entangles itself with Tuesday
and the week with the year:
time cannot be severed
with your weary shears,
and all the names of the day
the water of night clears.
No man can call himself Peter,
no woman Rose or Mary,
we are all sand or dust,
we are all rain in the rain.
They have told me of Venezuelas,
Paraguays and Chiles,
I don’t know what they’re talking about:
I know the skin of the Earth
and I know that it has no name.
When I lived among roots
they delighted me more than flowers,
and when I talked to a stone
it echoed like a bell.
It is so slow the spring
that lasts the winter long:
time has lost his shoes:
one year’s four centuries.
When I go to sleep each night
what am I called, not called?
And when I wake up, who am I
if it wasn’t ‘I’ who was sleeping?
This is to say that as soon as we
are thrust out into life,
that we come newly born,
that our mouths are not filled
with all these dubious names,
with all these mournful labels,
with all these meaningless letters,
with all this ‘yours’ and ‘mine’,
with all this signing of papers.
I think to confound things
mingling them, hatching them new,
seeing through them, stripping them naked,
until the light of the earth
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous integrity,
a crackle of starched perfume.
— Pablo Neruda
This is gonna be a great class, no?
Anyway, I’m sure my attitude will change abruptly when my insane number of long-ass papers are due, but for now, it’s good.
Did I mention I was taking a "Philosophy of Film" class? It said in the course guide, "Ethics of Film" which was far more interesting, but it’ll do nonetheless.
Does all of this academia talk make those of you who are home-free nostalgic? envious? happy you’re away from it? 3 days ago, the thought in the car of school starting again made me contemplate a slight swerve into a head-on collision with a mack truck (am I kidding?) but as chrissy beat into my head, "life is short, but it is wide, and this too will pass". I know, I’m a whiny child of privilege, I just don’t have the energy anymore to resist the suction of tedium. I’m ready to move out and move on and DO something, you know? But I also know that school’s not a bad place to be, and I need to keep telling myself that, finding the seratonin producing aspects (joy, whatever) and focusing on that instead of oppressive sense of perfectionism that equates all my work and study into disappointment. If I could remember more of what I’ve learned so far, I wouldn’t lose heart so quickly. The survey course of Brit lit from romantic-modern, finished a scant 3 months ago, emphasized the pre-raphaelites pretty intently. The pre-raphealite class I attended this morning was only vaguely familiar in content, writing notes on things I know I knew well in May, but have since forgotten. Are you like that? Am I just retarded? If I knew I was going to be this retarded so young anyway, I would have smoked more pot when I was younger. Alas.
This is long as hell. Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to print anyway. I keep thinking more and more about grad school, and talking to Brian at lunch put it clearly: I think, that if I find some kind of meaning again after this involuntary nihilistic deconstruction of mine, I’ll pursue an MFA. If I don’t, I should move on with either Biological or Clinical Psychology. For a plethora of reasons I won’t bore you with (again), that’s the crux of it. The world doesn’t need a nihilistic writer, you know? There’s suffering enough. No need to rub the noses of the masses in it.
That leaves me a year to get my shit together. That’s not long, is it.
better get cracking.
love.
August 25th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Does all of this academia talk make those of you who are home-free nostalgic? envious?
Absofuckinglutely. I miss the days when things made sense. I’m surrounded by people who take what I learned in college and beat it to death with a rock for a living.
September 2nd, 2006 at 9:36 am
Let’s put it this way: If I knew I was going to die at 40, no let’s say 45, I would pursue degree after degree taking on more and more debt to do so, knowing that I would never have to pay it back at 40, I mean 45. There is nothing as wonderful as being in school. Yes, you get sick of it, but after you leave school, no one will ever ask you what you truly believe, or what your true opinion is ever again, at least in the workplace. Or maybe other people just have better jobs than me.
As for the MFA debate. I think maybe your decision should have less to do with your nihilisitic struggle and perhaps more to do with, what is it you want to wake up and do every day for the rest of your meaningless/meaningful (depending on what you finally decide) life.
If you want to teach and are sure you can have your first novel well reviewed and recognized, then a MFA makes sense. If you do not want to teach, and you want to actually help people, go the psych route.
If you are one of those people pursuing an MFA for your own artistic edification, my advice is, take the $10,000-$40,000 you would spend on an MFA and go to Belize for a year and write.
It’s not that my MFA is meaningless, it’s not, I loved my professors and that time, and I did learn a lot, but there’s an MFA cookie cutter effect that you’re left with and have to spend a year reversing if you want to publish that well reviewed novel for teaching. I want to teach, so in that way it was worth it, b/c I can’t teach without it, but otherwise, I don’t know.
In short, too late, you are too smart for an MFA, in my opinion. Use your genius elsewhere. Writing belongs to you always degree or no degree. Enjoy walking through campus on a good fall day. Shit, I miss that most of all.