At last

I got into graduate school! At the university where I wanted to go. At a program that will teach me things. How strange it feels to have succeeded at what I've been trying to do for the last four years.

Recession Liveblog!

Actual lunchtime conversation with a gray-haired co-worker whose name I still don't know:

Him: Good afternoon. Will this explode if I microwave it?
Me: No idea.
Him: It's made of metal.
Me: In that case, maybe you shouldn't microwave it.
[pause]
Him: Did you know that if you microwave pantyh0se, it catches fire? I read that somewhere.
Me: No, I didn't know that.
Him: So if your pantyh0se are wet for some reason, you shouldn't dry them off in the microwave.
Me: Thanks. I'll keep that in mind.


Wine country biking trip I didn't pay for


The afternoon after the final party


The first cold day of the season

I haven't been blogging much--I see I skipped the entire month of February--but oh, how busy I've been! The tragedy (yes, tragedy) of it is that I've been occupied with such truly bloggable material at work. But I've been too busy working, and I can't blog about work as long as I'm still here, anyway. And given the situation (Stable job + nasty recession + 3-strikes-I'm-out on the masters application process), I expect to remain here for a good long while.


Yes, I did fail for the third consecutive year to get into a grad program. Every year that goes by is another mark in favor of selling out. The older I get, the more I would be willing to trade for the ability to afford a certain standard of living. The less I want to be sharing my living space with people I met on Craigslist, perfectly lovely people they may be. The more I long for middle-class comforts like the ability to go on vacation, maybe once a year, on my own dime without bankrupting myself.

But how to sell out? Is anyone even buying these days? This schmancy degree has got to be worth something, hasn't it?

...
...

Or not. Well, I'm employed!


Christmas in Midwest (didn't pay for this either)

The View from My Recession

We found a new flatmate. He's our thirteenth in three years. Or maybe the fourteenth or fifteenth; I can't keep track anymore. He seems to have two girlfriends. They spend alternating nights at our place, and my first thought was that I must be truly awful at recognizing faces. An ex-addict, current law student, barkeep, and apparently manslut, he does seem interesting, maybe a little too interesting, which is why he wasn't our first choice to begin with. But then, our first choices do keep on disappearing on us--

It's that time of year again; time to apply to yet another masters program that I may as well have picked out of a hat; time to beg profs who don't remember me for letters of recommendation; time to make up a coherent narrative in which I travel smoothly from point A through point B all the way to point C when the true story is much more Lynch than Hollywood; time to ask my boss for money; time for all this merriment, and ah, could it be a more wondrous economic clime?

At least I have a job. A full-time job, with so many people underemployed. I really should not be complaining. My own personal recession could be a lot worse.

I'm late to work all the time now, almost every day. But today I biked to the train at sunrise with brain and body in full revolt, and it was kind of nice. Arriving at the station I felt warm and awake in my windbreaker while everyone else yawned and shivered in their coats. Maybe that's what success feels like.

Screw narrative. This isn't narrative. I don't remember narrative. I don't read novels or stories anymore, I just click through blogs, follow links across the Internet, skim the Economist, apply to three radically different programs in three consecutive years; maybe the lack of narrative is narrative enough. I'm just confusing myself with words now and I think I need another tea. I'll be back again sometime.

2008: Not My Year

Rejected from grad school #2. I don't know what to do next.

2008 isn't M.'s year either. He's already failed two classes and is on track for failing another.

Revised New Year's resolution: QUIT BEING LOSERS.

I am nursing fantasies of disappearing for the month of August, biking from SF to Vancouver to Denver for the Democratic Convention, but let's see if any of that happens or whether all such fantasies be leveled by penury (as I can only extrapolate they shall).


---

Unrelated photo from last summer:

Craigslist: Lesson in Sociology, or Heart of Darkness?

I know you are slavering in anticipation of my latest catch-up novella. Here it is; you're welcome!

Sam--bartender flatmate--decided to move out with his girlfriend, causing M. to stop speaking with him for weeks. The Frenchy flatmates can't stand living with us anymore, so they're going back to France early March. To "practice their art" or something. Have I mentioned that the Frenchies and the Sam/girlfriend axis couldn't stand one another either? I can't say I'm devastated to see this particular arrangement reach its end.

Apparently we have no friends left--or none interested in living with us, anyway--because it became clear after a month or so that we would have to resort to Craigslist for the 3rd time. Perhaps we truly are as loathsome as our current housemates would have you think. Anyhow, M. was busy, so the secretarial task of coordinating Craigslist meetings fell to me.

Too bad I am a social disaster. I don't think I can adequately describe how much stress the whole ordeal caused me. I couldn't sleep. At work, I couldn't concentrate on my job. Possibly one hour's worth of work was done in those several days. Instead, I sent or received maybe a hundred emails last week. Then, after the interviews were over and it was time to start dishing out rejections, I began shunning email altogether. Every person we interviewed, save two, emailed me back telling us how great we were, how great the apartment was, how much they loved our cats, how well they sensed we got along with them, and of course, why we ought to choose them as our housemates. One guy attached a picture of his cat. A few offered to pay more in rent if we'd only accept them. How would I reject all these kind people who knew where we lived? What if we saw them around? Do we say we reject you because we find your voice grating, or because we just like someone else better? I couldn't make myself respond to these people. Merely skimming through their emails filled me with a measure of horror. When I did sleep, I had Craigslist nightmares. Finally I caved in and asked M. to respond to the emails for me. He thought I was nuts; he didn't see what the issue was, but he wrote the rejections in a matter of minutes, and lo!--I could sleep again.

Yes, I do have a problem.

Once I get past the feelings of dread, I can appreciate our Craigslist experience as a lesson on social groups. I don't know what it was about the cues we included in our ad--price? likes and dislikes? the way we described ourselves?--but the people we interviewed were a demographically homogenous bunch. All college grads: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford. All white, more or less. Mostly male. Most worked for tech companies or did research.

We interviewed two girls. One of them, it turns out, not only went to our alma mater but also graduated the same year as we did, and lived in my co-op while I was "studying"(ha) in Italy. We even have mutual friends.

As I said, two of the people we interviewed did not write us back begging to live with us. One of these happens to be a post-doc in the department where M.'s a ph.d. candidate. His parents are also faculty here, and he was a high-school classmate of M.'s good friend (the one who is also my boss's daughter).

In sum, I have learned that when you post an ad on Craigslist, the responses you get will be from a random sample of the local population. Further, when we go about picking roommates, how close they are to our social group has nothing to do with our decision.

Which two people do you think we picked?

Re-Resolution

I'm done applying. Again. For now.

Writing my statement of purpose was once again painful, a belabored reminder of both how much I hate selling myself on paper and how much my writing ability has deteriorated. I sat in a cafe, staring at my laptop screen with my hands limp over the keys, listlessly typing out the flattest sentences imaginable: I want to be in this program because... ugh, delete. I believe that this program would be the best environment for me because... no, delete. Also, I think that... ew, "also"? Delete, delete, delete.

For months and months now I've been writing material for the second grade, so it's no wonder I'm struggling with the adult stuff. And rather than taking classes requiring papers, I've been taking classes requiring problem sets. Then there's the issue of journals: I used to keep journals all the time, from the first grade onward. But ever since I started living with my boyfriend, I've found journal-writing to be nearly impossible. Hence the blogging, but I haven't been doing much of that, either.

I used to have a few friends I would email regularly--a few long emails a month, narratives really, unabridged stories that, if printed, would span five or six single-spaced pages. Whether or not that's desirable (probably not), at least it's writing practice. But I can't remember the last time I sent an email to one of these friends. A year ago, maybe?

I am anyhow awful at writing these days. Solution: blog more. Can I, will I? I think I will try.

Round Two

I'm applying to grad school again. Last year I was rejected because I applied to a program I wasn't qualified for. So I asked myself, "Why not do it again, just for fun?"

To which I protested, "No, no, it was too easy last time. This time you need to apply to something for which you are so supremely underqualified that it's laughable--a math program, say."

"I'm skeptical," I said. "I know less math than most high-school seniors."

"Exactly. You will work hard all year to fulfill the requirements, fail to do so, then get rejected again. That'll prepare you for 2009, when you can apply to and get rejected from a Ph.D. program in, say, applied thermodynamics."

"Oh, what the hell."

Which just about summarizes my life right now, with the exception of a multitude of parties. But the parties seem too boring to write about today--even more boring than grad school. So here are some more pictures from Milwaukee and Chicago.


Milwaukee: (gl)asses, because I'm secretly 12 years old

Milwaukee: bored self-portrait while M. rummaged joyfully through someone's record collection

Milwaukee: yum!

Chicago: we're in there somewhere


Chicago: the great rib massacre of '07

April Is the Soberest Month

That's the idea, anyway. No alcohol all month, and no dining out. Exceptions will be made (a) if M. throws a tax-themed party around tax day, which is possible, and (b) if someone offers to take us to a fine dinner, which we could never refuse in good conscience. If all goes as planned, we will end the month slimmer, healthier, and with many extra dollars in our bank accounts.

Last weekend I was looking for jeans at a thrift store and a girl approached me. She was a hair stylist at a posh salon, and asked me to be a model for a "hair show" previewing this season's new cuts. Or something. I'm not sure if I should do it; on the one hand, it's a free fancy haircut; on the other hand, I'd have to strut around on a stage and make a fool of myself, probably trip, fall, etc. And everyone I know (admittedly, only a handful of souls) would make fun of me for being a hair model. Probably for the rest of my life.

I scanned the New York Times headlines one day last week and noticed that one of the op-eds was written by someone I know. Someone whom I'd almost, but not quite, label a friend. We used to talk frequently in the last year before college graduation. We played dozens of games of pool, laughed at Craigslist posts, and devised a rather mean-spirited Craigslist experiment involving a false identity and the "Casual Encounters" section. (I blogged about it afterwards, in fact, but that blog is long gone.) When graduation approached and I hadn't yet found a job, he offered to help find me one. But then I found this job, he moved east, and I haven't talked to him since. It was kind of surprising to see him on the op-ed page--but not that surprising.

I told Zoe about it on our fortnightly yuppie lunch date. "We went to a top school. We're going to be seeing stuff like that more and more often as we get older," she said. Indeed, I can already imagine my classmates in government, on the Supreme Court, as public intellectuals, as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Nobel laureates. They're well on their way. They're in Harvard Law and the Kennedy School and the Brookings Institution; they're working for Senators; some, like M., are getting phds in the sciences and will go on to cure Alzheimer's or write algorithms that revolutionize computing. Meanwhile I am in this floodlit box, blogging about how I am in this floodlit box. But most importantly, I may be a hair model, how exciting! My education is, like, totally paying off.

Here is my advice to past-me, who, regrettably, will not be reading this anytime soon:

Take calculus in high school. Don't make that idiotic pledge to avoid college math at all costs. Don't muck around in archaeology and romance languages and "poetics" and "observational astronomy"; and, by God, find a job outside of the library's media basement. Do research. Don't worry too much about specializing, much less finding a "calling," just yet, but take rigorous classes and pick up real skills. Don't be a dabbler in the arts when you don't intend to be an artist. Don't maintain a long-term, long-distance relationship with a demanding boyfriend who won't tolerate your finding summer jobs in other cities, and whom, it turns out, you aren't so crazy about, anyway.

And, as for present/future-me:

Quit being a social-anxiety poster child and do things. Sometimes this will involve talking to people, and it will be awful. Suck it up. Moreover, you will have to stop reading The Economist cover-to-cover every week, and instead read things that seem--at least at the outset--less fun. Textbooks on statistics or econometrics, for example. And statistical-software primers. At home, instead of following the minutiae of the moment's political debates (these are my soap operas, my sports-fandom), you should enter data onto Excel spreadsheets. In theory, you and your boyfriend will soon use these for independent research. The articles, when they are published, will be your Silver Bullet; the best schools will compete for your talents and you will live happily ever after. (I don't really believe that, but a publication or two certainly can't hurt.)

Anyway.

Restaurant pictures are forthcoming.

Woe Is Me

Remember how I said, not too long ago, that I would soon find out what I would be doing with the next two years of my life? Well, I oversimplified. The idea was that, if I were admitted to the masters program I applied to, my next two years would be spent going to school. And, between the confidence of my boss and my boyfriend--and the program's relative obscurity--and the perceived non-shoddiness of my application--I thought I would be admitted. But I wasn't.

Now, what to do? I don't know. I have few ideas, fewer that sound easy and none that sound both easy and appealing.

I could stay at this job, and stay bored and mediocre (but comfortable!) for the rest of my life--but on second thought, I really couldn't. Another year, in fact, would be unbearable.

I could consider, in the future, applying to graduate schools in other parts of the country, knowing that accepting an (as yet hypothetical) offer from a faraway school would mean leaving someone with whom I can easily imagine spending a non-trivial portion of my life. (This is the secular skeptic's bet-hedging, anti-romantic, ultra-cautious version of "He's the One 4-ever! *gush*", I think). As far as options go, this one falls halfway between unattractive and unthinkable.

More appealingly, I could strengthen my candidacy and reapply. But I obviously didn't cut it the first time, and how much can really change in nine months?

M.'s answer is always the same: self-teach and publish. And then, go for a Ph.D.

I'll try, but I don't exactly have high expecations.

Part of my trouble is that my interests are a poor match with my temperament. My classes in college overrepresented certain populations: the frats, the sororities, and, more generally, the social types. My classmates were the kinds of people who studied politics because they wanted to be in politics, who studied international relations because they were interested in being international lawyers or businesspeople or diplomats or advocates for various causes. Such was my perception, at least. These kids spoke up in class, and participated in debate, and many of them went off to law or business school after they graduated. Those who decided to pursue politics spent their college years in a networking frenzy. They worked for their local Representatives, or at the Department of State. Meanwhile, I don't like politicians; I don't even think I like people who like politicians. I rarely like businesspeople. Hell, I don't even really like people.

I became interested in politics and IR from a theoretical, strategic, and ultimately, descriptive (as opposed to normative) perspective. I like studying, I like writing, and I like empiricism. M. says that for these reasons he thinks I am better off going into academia. But academia in the "softer" social sciences seems more political and more hierarchical than the harder sciences. And getting into an acceptable Ph.D. program would be so terribly, extremely difficult--much more difficult than the program that just rejected me.

Maybe I should look into developing new interests.

Or, if anyone reading this happens to be the editor of The Economist, I've read your Style Guide about a dozen times and I think I'd make a decent assistant copy editor.

---

At least I can't complain that it hasn't been a gorgeous winter.

Kauai

In a word, unreal.

In more words, by our second day there we were already scheming to find a way back. Now, a tentative plan:

1. Achieve academic success in a variety of fields
2. Acquire capital
3. Over decades, build an empire
4. Do not retire; instead, expand empire
5. Steer ample progeny into strategic industries
6. Buy holiday mansion on beautiful tropical island
7. Remodel mansion on beautiful tropical island
8. Paradise

At least, that's what our boss has done. And how it's worked out for him.

I have never known a truer capitalist, a truer empire-builder--a truer American, really--than my octogenarian boss. And I mean that in the best possible way. I wish I could tell his story here, as it's remarkable on a million dimensions, but the last time I wrote too freely of my boss I earned myself a list of brand-new enemies.

Somehow, the man himself was conspiculously absent from that list. I still wonder whether that's because old men have no use for grudges; or, more plausibly, whether something peculiar to his character made my sins seem irrelevant to him.

I am someone who keeps grudges, who takes offense and who is often slow to forgive. I'd rather not be, but so I am. Yet I'm still young, with relatively few experiences: compared with my boss, I exist in a small space. Maybe I have no sense of perspective. Such petty blights as grudges could very well recede to insignificance against the background of a long, full life.

---

Soon there will be pictures.

Science and Debauchery

Apparently being a published scientist involves scheduling interviews and otherwise acting as your own PR agent. Who knew? M. has been running around trying to manage what looks to me like a science-media frenzy. But as I told him yesterday, unless his stuff ends up in the science section of The Economist I will remain unimpressed. Well--that's not strictly true, but an article in my favorite news magazine would definitely win me over for life.

On Monday, unsuspecting, I went to a workplace holiday party with Bartender Flatmate as his date. The restaurant he works at rented a swank downtown bar for the occasion, but we got kicked out a few hours too early when an irate co-worker mooned the audience during the gift exchange, I QUIT written on his ass. Restaurant workers are a rowdy bunch, and soon the whole inebriated lot surged into the quiet street and into an empty, ill-prepared bar.

Sober I wasn't, but still I think I was the most sober person there. Strangers approached me and drawled all sorts of nonsensical things. Bartender Flatemate pointed out his workplace crushes one by one and, later, smoking on the street, confessed to his "#1" that he liked her. One girl, who acted as though she was on speed but was probably just maximally "type A," was talking to me about one thing or another when a raving drunk came up to us, pressed us together and shouted, "Two of my favorite girls. TOPLESS FOR THIRTY DOLLARS?"

"Come on, you ain't got thirty dollars," the girl said.

"Hehe, I'm BROKE," the guy admitted. "Free, then?" I think he was looking at my face for at least ten seconds before he realized he'd never met me before.

Maybe the high point of the evening--though there were so many high points--was being hit on by a self-loathing loser while Bartender Flatmate was talking to his crush #1 outside. The guy had long, unkempt hair, equally unkempt facial hair, a long flannel shirt, pot belly, and a bitterly self-conscious way of talking.

Loser: Are you calling someone on the phone?

Me: I'm sending a text message.

Loser: I don't know how to send a text message.

Me: I can show you if you want. It's not that hard.

Loser: No, I don't need text messages. I don't have any friends.

Me: I don't either, but if you send a text message you don't have to talk on the phone.

Loser: So, are you here to pick up somebody? Everyone's here to pick up somebody.

Me: No, I'm not. I'm here with my roommate for his work party.

Loser: Sure, uh huh. I believe you.

Me: Ok, fine, don't believe me.

Exit Loser; enter Bartender Flatmate. But later, Loser returned.

Loser: (Taps me on shoulder) Do you think that guy is cuter than me?

Me: This guy? He's my roommate. I don't know.

Loser: So should I just give up then? Just like every time?

Me: I have a boyfriend. I'm not looking for a date.

Loser: Sure. Well, I have a girlfriend.

Me: Ok. Well, you're welcome to hang around if you want.

Loser: Fine. I'll go. It's clear I'm just not cool enough for you.

After that, I was fully ready to escape. We got back to the apartment at around the same time that M. was arriving from the airport. He was in New York for a three-day uber-bender and his friends' ultra-extravagant wedding. The bride was the Boss's daughter, whose father is taking us to Hawaii next week. I haven't had anything resembling a vacation since March. I am looking forward to it.

Time-Fill Redux

My flight back from the homeland was terrifying. I am intensely phobic of flying anyhow, so the frenetic jerkings of an unusually weatherful flight just about spelled the end of me. Forget tumbling to an earthbound doom; at some level I know rationally how unlikely that is. On the other hand, the danger that my heart might explode? Too likely. As the plane bucked to and fro last night I wept like a frightened child, biting down on the corner of my Economist to keep myself from screaming out loud. I shuddered and shut my eyes. I wished M. were there; I thought about calling him and my mother to say goodbye. Ultimately unnecessary, as here I am now to write about it, but still I am more or less certain that I lost a few years off my life last night.

My sojourn down south and my near-death-like experience left me in a foul mood. M. took me to dinner upon my arrival and I spent much time staring at walls. My math percentile on the GRE was disappointing, my writing score even more so. (Writing, by God! Isn't that what I do?) I resented M. for having too much fun in my absence, more fun than he ever has in my presence, enough fun to leave him dead tired and more ill than he was a week ago. I ruminated on not getting into graduate school and laboring at my boring job on into a banal perpetuity. Twenty-four hours away from the oppressive homeland have proved a tonic, though: I feel quite a bit better now.

Nonetheless I have a dreadful case of writer's block. I am trying to finish my personal statement for the graduate program before New Year's and I don't believe I have ever produced such a textbook example of hackneyed tripe. (With the possible exception of my GRE.) It is as though I am following some middle-school essay template. I write sentence by sentence and each is stilted beyond all redemption. What is wrong with me? Have I completely forgotten how to write? Maybe I need to blog more.

Apparently I forgot how to write transitions, so now I will say that we are hosting a big ole New Year's party at our apartment again. Rockstar Friend was supposed to drive up from L.A. to DJ, but he flaked. The news of his treachery came on the same day that Bartender Flatmate (who is also DJ Flatmate) learned that his pernicious new employer had scheduled him to work until 2am on December 31 and then beginning at 8am on January 1st (is that even legal?), meaning in essence that M. will need to man the turntables for more than four hours on end, a feat that will at best try and at worst exceed his abilities. Now he is playing record after record with his headphones on, singing along to the pop. He used to disdain pop, music snob that he is, but he has learned after many an unsuccessful party that the kids want to hear New Order, they want to hear Kelis, they want to hear Outkast, they want to hear The Cure and other hits from 1 year ago or 10 years ago or 20, not the too-hip underground dance stuff coming out of Brazil these days. I think he secretly relishes the pop. Under no circumstances will he play Kylie Minogue or Shakira, however.

Why am I telling you this? Because it is a way to procrastinate, and blogging is among the many fruits of my bad habit. There was a reason why I used to blog regularly during my last year in school, back in those ingenuous days of this website's doomed predecessor. There were always papers to write, and so there was always blogging nonsense to write. Very offensive nonsense, apparently.

My god, it is a million ayem. How am I not sleepy?

A happy end of 2006 to all. For me it was a boring year, a stable year, ultimately a decent year. If all goes as planned I'll be back to blather on the other side of it.

Postscript: I don't know why my post from mid-month is cut off, or if it only shows up that way on my computer. Either way, bugger Blogger.

The Toil of Trace and Trail

I could write a few boring, er, gripping paragraphs about applying to graduate school and taking the GRE, but I don't think I will.

Instead, in the aftermath of an exceedingly bad coffee prepared by an unpromising trainee, I will write about my absurdly sheltered, weirdly happy childhood.

My childhood was happy, even in the absence of such supposed prerequisites to happiness as friends and TV. For an accurate illustration of my blissful pre-adolescence, look at this photo:

There I am, circa 1992, apparently unaware that I'm wearing bright pink socks with profoundly un-cool, jungle-themed tye-dye shorts.* My classmates shunned me, because I was the kind of kid who brought diagrams of rabbit skulls to class for extended (and unsolicited) show-and-tell sessions, but I didn't fret: I could always count on the neighborhood curs.

The black one to my left was Meeka. The gun-totin', BMX-racin', animal-husbandin' hillbillies across the road owned her since I was four or five, and she remained my official best friend up until adolescence, when I finally realized how crazy "my best friend is a black dog named Meeka" sounded to real people. I'm not sure what kind of mutt she was--probably some kind of lab mix. But she would be at my house waiting for me when I came home from school, and would return to her owners only to sleep and be fed. I talked to her, told her stories, and got in "arguments" with her long after such behavior lost its age-appropriate cuteness and strayed into social weirdness. I also convinced myself that Meeka possessed near-human levels of intelligence, and that she would doubtless save me if I were ever lost or injured.

The mutt on the right is Sheva, the dog my parents let me have in third grade after years of my begging them for one. Believe it or not, she's still alive, albeit a decrepit, betumored centenarian in dog-years. At the time this picture was taken, though, she was barely beyond puppyhood. She and Meeka were jockeying for local dominance, snarling at each other and clashing bloodily from time to time. Their fights both frightened and intrigued me. I observed the dogs for hours every day, noting their body language and patterns of dominance and submission, and recording the details in my journal. As you might conclude, I was a dangerously hip child.

My reading preferences closely reflected my "social" life. Throughout most of elementary school, I was reluctant even to touch a book that didn't have a picture of an animal on its cover. Human interest stories reliably bored me. I read, instead, books like Jurassic Park (a dinosaur on the cover), Black Stallion books (horses on the cover), Clare Bell books (they're rare, sadly, but they had to do with an ancient race of intelligent cats), and especially books about dogs and wolves. I loved Gary Paulsen's stories of sled dogs in Alaska, for instance. And my absolute favorite author was Jack London, whose Call of the Wild and White Fang I must have read at least ten times before I had the smallest inkling of their pseudo-socialist themes.

I glorified these fictional dogs and their brutal lives. I found beauty in descriptions of "gleaming fangs" and "lips writhing and snarling," torn jugulars "spilling life-blood," gnashings and lashings and slashings. In writing my own stories I aped London's style as well as I could. My magnum opus, a sixty-page "novel," contained a series of violent dogfights and culminated with a grisly scene in which a pack of wild dogs kills and eats a panicked doe. Upon which her jugular spills life-blood and the dogs, gnashing their gleaming fangs, slash at her underbelly and partake, snarling, of her soft, warm flesh. What a sweet, gentle little girl I was!

I glorified, too, the "toil of trace and trail," as the oft-overwrought London referred to dogsledding. I romanticized the "primordial urge" that supposedly lay dormant in all dogs; I imagined that underneath, even the neighborhood mongrels who were my companions felt some inborn yearning to be strapped in a harness. I fantasized about Alaska (the Land of the Midnight Sun, in florid-speak) and dreamt of one day commanding a dogsled team in the Iditarod. I would breed huskies, I thought, and find a wolf-dog to be their leader.

This brings me back to the picture above. Meeka, Sheva and Flor (a gentle German shorthaired pointer who is standing behind Meeka) were certainly no wolf-dogs, but I intended to make a dogsled team out of them anyway. I made them stand still, in an upside-down V formation, tied them to ropes, tied their ropes to a central rope, and tied that rope to one of the bricks that my father had left over from building the foundation to our house. Then I cried, "Mush! Mush!" and stomped the ground behind them. They only turned around to watch me bemusedly. I went back to the house and tried to coax them forward with treats, but the dogs just tangled themselves in each other's "traces" until I gave up, a bit disappointed that I'd failed to tap into the beasts' collective memory.

Fifteen years later, I'm blogging at work while drinking beer I snatched from a holiday office-party. O, how things change.

* That outfit is actually not half bad, compared to what I would usually wear in those days. Aquamarine or purple tights with stirrups were frequently worn, along with mismatched socks and maybe a bright green visor. Even worse, I would wear a big, baggy T-shirt with pictures of wolves or cheetahs on it. And god help me, I'd tuck it into the tights--asymmetrically!--such that there were bulges all around my waist. My mother would meanwhile keep my bangs trimmed short--also asymmetrically, as she was not adept at cutting hair. Now imagine being in a class with this freakish child as she's reminding the teacher of the homework she'd forgotten to assign. My classmates hated me.

Worry

My sense of dread is back. I had lunch with my advisor today, and he seemed worried that my letters of recommendation would be the death-knell of my application. Naturally, this made me even more anxious than I already was. The fat, murky question mark that hangs so drippingly over my future looks ever fatter and murkier.

I bought GRE study books yesterday. I opened one up last night and there in its introduction it recommended an absolute minimum of four weeks' worth of study. I'll have exactly ten days. My life, of course, is a sloppy amalgam of near-hits and near-misses (do "near-hit" and "near-miss" mean the same thing? Be damned, you English language), with a good dash of poor foresight thrown in, so by necessity there must be at least one extra confounding force. This time, its name is Sam.

Chris moved out last night, after a month and a half of escalating passive-aggression wars, and lo! Our instiutional alcoholism runs deep, for we have traded a sommelier for a goddamn bartender. Sam, our new roommate, is my boyfriend's good friend from his old high-school bartending days in the industrial Midwest. M. borrowed a car to meet Sam at the airport today, and immediately--in the early afternoon!--they hit the bars.

My worry is this: M. has poor impulse control. Sam, a bartender by trade, will persuade him easily to share his hours, drink heavily, and spin records late into the night. These activities will be particularly likely to occur over the next week--i.e., the zero hour--as Sam goes searching for jobs in bars and M. happily follows. As I am nervous of disposition, their reveling at late hours will mean sleep deprivation and more anxiety for me. Catastrophic exam results may follow.

In the longer term, I worry how this will affect my relationship with M., which is unbelievably healthy for the moment but which could credibly deteriorate under stress.

Even were I to get into the masters program, I live paycheck to paycheck and cannot even conceive of how I would pay for it. So I worry about money. Yes, I know: welcome to the human condition, Penitent.

Looking beyond myself for a moment, I worry too about my family in Southern California. My brother, it seems, is in a depression so severe that his physician warned my parents that he was a danger to himself and recommended that he be institutionalized for a week. He agreed, instead, to some kind of intensive outpatient treatment, but I worry.

My mother worries, but her solution is to pray. To pray very, very hard. I did not want to irk her on the phone and tell her that her prayer, with all its fervor, was far more to her benefit than to my brother's, but I did say: "Medication works. You need to get him to take medication."

Imagining myself in his place for a moment--which I suspect, at its core, to be a psychological world similar to mine, but ten shades darker--I see how group counseling could be oppressive in itself. How the dingy institutional settings, the self-awareness of dysfunction, the judgment read into a ring of strange faces, could depress someone mightily. On the other hand, I told my mother, I have seen what good psychopharmeceuticals have done for my boyfriend and for my friends.

My parents are being idiots, though. "I don't think he should go on medication," my mother said. "He's been drinking alcohol, and alcohol could react with the medication."

"Then get him on something that doesn't react with alcohol."

"I don't know about that. I also think he should be doing the counseling so he can get over his alcohol problem. You know, your grandmother's sister was an alcoholic and she killed herself, and I'm worried that he has her genes. And alcohol is a depressant, you know, so it is probably making him more depressed."

I hadn't known that about my grandmother's sister. My family doesn't talk about such things, at least not with "the kids." But I realized on the phone with my mother today that my parents' teetotaling is so fanatical that it's dangerous. It means they tread in ignorance. That my mother sincerely thinks my brother's occasional drinking is as much of a danger as his suicidal state of mind is plain crazy. Has it not occured to her that alcohol might be a way he copes with his unhappiness, not a cause of it? That it might be a way he copes with a social anxiety that's much worse than mine? That, independent of depression and drunk driving, alcohol need not be a problem? That a single great-aunt with alcoholism is probably a statistically insignificant predictor for addiction? And so on.

Then there's the news. Reading anything about Iraq makes me feel ill. I did not exist during Vietnam and I wonder how it compares. My advisor, who did exist during Vietnam, works at a conservative think tank and he thinks Iraq is worse, that this country has been torn apart even more by this war than in that earlier era, draft and burning monks and 4 dead in Ohio and all. I don't know if he's right, or if comparisons matter.

Well--time's a-wastin', and there's yet more worrying to be done.

A Call to Action

All right. That's it. The time has come to shake off the detritus of this latest useless year and give some form to this sorry life.

I remember when I was a teenager, 16 and shifty and dating A. in secret. My parents didn't know about A. at first, but nevertheless they were worried sick that I would fall, like the fragile daughters of lore, into the arms of some leather-clad bad boy and from then on all would be lost. My grades would plummet, I'd spend all my money on makeup, and soon I'd be out at the lot parties with the bad kids, doing wipits and making out with the football team. My mother bought a book called Reviving Ophelia which was all about the crisis of adolescent girls--eating disorders and depression and promiscuity and drug abuse and all that good stuff.

As it was, my mother misspent her money on that book. I dated A. for the rest of high school and far from threatening my good marks, he was doubtless a stabilizing force. My parents bought into the talk-show hysteria and they were wrong, at least about me. Not that anyone should find that surprising.

I've been reminded of this lately because these days, M. is the one who shoves me toward action. It's largely thanks to his persistent bullying that I have decided, at the last possible second, to apply to graduate school this winter.

"I can't do it this year," I protested. "My recommendations will be laughable. I don't have the prerequisites. They will throw my application in the garbage."

"Well, so what if you're not good enough?" He said. "You'll never be good enough. So apply now with all your flaws, or admit failure. I think you have a chance. I have never had the prerequisites for anything I applied to, and who cared? Do you want to be working in that office all your life?"

That did it. I won't admit failure, even if I fully expect it. And my job brings me no joy. So here I am, scrambling to arrange standardized testing dates and letters of recommendation, a "statement of purpose" and emergency meetings with my Hoover adviser.

M. is applying to a Ph.D. program now and the odds are stacked neatly on his side. The chair of the admissions commitee owes him both a good sum of money and a fat favor. And unlike most masters students, M. will be published in a big-name, peer-reviewed journal soon. In this case, envy is no sin: it is a call to action.

By the way, and this is wholly unrelated, my French housemate just made a vat of thyme-infused ice cream for her husband's birthday and I hereby declare it dangerously delicious.

Revoked

I gave up with the “cast of characters” post. I don’t want no cast o’ characters. How lame and “meta” was that? And why was it necessary for me to name everyone after saints? Two words: it wasn’t.

One of the reasons why I haven’t blogged recently is that I’ve been busy at work—and obsessing over politics, a disease if you ask me. But another reason is that I can’t commit to anything these days. A good idea one day seems stupid the next. I want coherence but I can’t seem to provide it. Just as I want to build a life, a formidable self, but persist in being a dilettante, a weaver of plans with no execution.

I want to learn calculus. I want to learn logic. I want to learn formal linguistics. I want to learn computer science. I want to learn biology. I want to read this book, and this one, and this, but alas! The time goes, and I do terribly little beyond my job. I want to leave and I want to stay. I want to be a specialist and I want to be wise in all things.

I don’t want to do the best I can so much as I want to do better than everyone else. There’s a reason why I went to a schmancy-pants college; competitiveness is in my nature. The feeling, not entirely misplaced, that I am being trounced “at life” by my peers is deeply demoralizing.

I can’t even keep a blog. Can I repeat that, for emphasis? I CAN’T EVEN KEEP A BLOG. Even silly fourteen-year-olds can keep blogs. My mind is in disarray. My blog’s title fits, I suppose. Undersecretary of disarray. I wasn’t even “together” enough to be the goddamn Secretary.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, etc.

I would say, "next time, I will write about politics and the elections," but if I did, you would be unwise to believe me.