a good reader
i read this short bit in the new yorker about coming of age via Great Books and he reminded me so much of me and how i was and am (i think i even dreamed of going to St. John’s College in New Mexico) and it provoked this thought train:
the summer of 1996 was the first summer i did not spend at home with my family in the woods of Northern Michigan, the first summer i lived completely independent of my parents. i was 19 going on 20.
mentioned here, 1996-1997 were some of the most confusing years of my life. i was somehow totally unprepared for so many things, and on top of that felt a constant exclusion from much of my collegiate culture for reasons i couldn’t quite pin down. i had friends (much beloved, like sisters), but i don’t think they understood how i fit in to that time and place and scene, and neither did i. i know this is not uncommon, but that makes it no less significant to my personal history.
for the summer of 96, i had signed up to be an intern at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC as part of UofM’s Public Service Intern Program (PSIP). i remember getting off the train in Washington DC, and my roommate, who had corralled me into going into the Program with her, greeted me there. i was so confused/relieved. i had stayed up most of the night in the smoking car on the ride from Toledo, Ohio reading and talking to randoms and watching the streetlights of the midwest and appalachia roll by, and as i got off the Amtrak, exhausted, i realized, pulling my trunk through the massive, chaotic train station, that i had no idea where i was going. absolutely no idea. perhaps i had an address? i seem to remember panicking that i didn’t.
so when Aimee appeared out of the crowd all i could say was “how did you know to meet me here?!” because i had absolutely no recollection of telling her what train i was on. but she was (and still is) smarter than me. she figured it out. and if she hadn’t been there, in those days before internet and iPhones, i have no idea what i would have done. retrospectively, that was a bad start and an omen. and then on my first day at work i found out that my stipend was half what i thought it was, so i was also basically broke too. i remember Aimee saying she had budgeted a meager $20/day to live on, and when i did the math for 60 days, i realized i had nowhere near enough money and had to call my mom.
besides that, there were (at least) three things that contributed to that experience being depressive for me and not the rollicking good time it might have been for others. First, almost everyone else, including my roommates, were interning at large government orgs and legal firms and had to be at their jobs by 8am. so they all got up early and commuted early together and sort of traveled in packs. my job didn’t require that, and so i was usually alone by the time i got up and commuted. i didn’t have their jovial comraderie all day long. secondly, they would also then go out after work together, but me being only 19 and without fake ID meant that I couldn’t go out for beers after work or go out with them most of the time on the weekends either. so i spent a lot of time alone, wandering the Smithsonians or watching TV at night. third, my internship was kind of a bust in that i did little to no work and learned almost nothing, but i don’t know if that is because they weren’t really organized about their intern program or if when i showed up they were like “this girl can’t help us” and i basically sat the bench for 2 months. so i spent a lot of time alone, and my internship was mostly pointless except to teach me what i did not want to do and how woefully unprepared i was to venture out into the world alone to find something i did.
that following year, my Junior year at Michigan, i grew into myself a little bit more, and i signed up to do something totally different the next summer, the summer of 1997. i applied and was accepted to be a participant in the New England Literature Program, moved to the White Mountains for the spring semester, and like the author of that new yorker piece, that was where i learned to read. this changed my life in that i learned that being literate is one thing, being a good writer is another, and being a good reader is yet another, and a valuable skill. so while i think my writing is average, i do think that i am a very good reader, and i am starting to wonder now, at this juncture in my life and career, if i can do something more than entertain myself with it. i have been looking into (*gasp*) graduate programs in Critical Reading and Writing (example). it will probably take years before i can imagine actually committing myself to applying or enrolling (the money! ACK!), but at least i think i might have found a path to focus on.
Filed in autobiographical | Tagged with NELP, new yorker | Comment (0)loose ends
i am way behind in writing about a lot of things because of the election. that’s ok i guess but i feel like i am losing track of things, and so this is gonna be a bit of a long brain dump.
i’m not going to write about prop8 anymore until something happens.
ideology and over-principled people are possibly prohibiting what could be the biggest leap forward for america in decades and causing it to be more like a small step. i guess some people are more into baby steps than great leaps. fear of the unknown. discomfort with ambiguity.
……………….
let’s back up a minute.
day of the dead: was a weird experience in that before we ventured into the streets, there was a discussion about white appropriation of other cultures and how someone else said the dia de los muertos procession in the mission was “just a bunch of lame white people with an excuse to dress up”. i’m ok with appropriation as long as it’s respectful, and used properly. in this case though, i was, personally, just straight up appropriating. but i felt ok with that; i’d never been and wanted to see this cultural event. i didn’t mourn, although i really enjoyed the thousands of laughing “dead”, and the celebration of life and death. i get tired of so much mourning. i also admit, however, that part of the reason that i went was that i wanted to wear my costume again. the costume turned out to be a little more interactive than i expected; a lot of people asked me to pose for photos. so much so that i lost my friends in the crowd because people kept stopping me. it was a little ridiculous. so much so that i got annoyed and finally started telling people no. this is not disneyland. i am not your mickey mouse. at that point i understood what was meant.
……………….
even further back: while at my mother’s house on our recent trip to michigan, she handed me a shoebox full of letters. i instantly recognized this shoe box, and immediately asked “DID YOU READ ANY OF THESE?” “no, of course i didn’t”, she said.
the shoebox was full of letters i wrote during the summer of 1997, during time i spent in the New England Literature Program (NELP) living in the woods in new hampshire getting all existential and naked and poetic and naturalist to my then-boyfriend who was back in ann arbor. when i left for new hampshire, we had been dating for about 7 or 8 months i guess. i broke up with my highschool boyfriend for him the summer before, in 1996, when we interned in DC together. he should’ve seen it coming.
anyway, he returned all of the letters to me that i had written him when i broke up with him later that summer, after i’d returned from the woods and had a whole new set of hippie poet friends and determined that a rich jewish boy who drove a yellow corvette and was studying to be a lawyer really wasn’t what i was looking for. he didn’t return them to ME, actually. he came over to my house while i wasn’t home and gave them to my roommate, and then proceeded to cry on her shoulder. she said i broke his heart. i don’t remember the breakup, really. to be honest, i think i just pushed him out of my life very quickly so that i could start being my new self as quickly as possible. i brought the letters back with me to california but i have yet to look at them. i don’t remember ever reading them again after he gave them back, and i can’t bring myself to read them now.
i told this to someone, and he excitedly said “OH MY GOD YOU SO HAVE TO DO MORTIFIED. i had thought of this too. because i no longer have many, if any, of my high school/college journals, these letters may be the only representation i have of my younger self, and could perhaps contain some very comic material. but the reason i can’t bring myself to read them now and why i am not excited about the prospect of publicly sharing their contents is that although that summer at NELP and the few months afterward was a great opening and growing experience, sometimes opening hurts, and i feel ashamed of what i think is in those letters, of what i think i wrote. there were things said and done in that raw communal setting that i am still not proud of. that i still turn over in my mind. i feel ashamed of what i probably said to him in those letters, from that place, that time, that me. i remember a very tearful phone call in which i did the whole “YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND” routine, which was really me just saying “i’m telling you that you don’t understand because i want you not to. i want to have a reason to let you go.” i’m ashamed of the lies i know i told him and myself, about who i was, about love. most of all, ashamed of how i treated him, as a person, and how i might still treat people like that now.
even more than what is probably in the letters, in the few months after i got back, i enjoyed a certain hubris. a belief that i was more powerful than i was. i was young and blonde and tan and poetic and free and i could do whatever i wanted to do! oh, how i got brought down HARD from that pedestal a few months later in a way that is too personal to be discussed here. and maybe it’s that – maybe it’s the dark winter that followed that bright summer that is making me feel so ashamed of that time. maybe it’s that i feel like i was punished for that summer, for that hubris, and because i feel like i was punished i feel like i was a bad person. and maybe it’s that bad person, whether real or not, that is keeping me from reading the letters. maybe i am not remembering myself correctly; maybe i am wrong. maybe i was being more honest with myself then than i remember, but i don’t think so. the person i am remembering – i don’t want to be reacquainted with her. there is a certain part of me that i would like to leave in the past. she still shows up sometimes, in my darker moments, and when she does i don’t like her. and so i feel like reading the letters will maybe only remind me that she’s still here, and not really in the past. that i haven’t changed as much as i thought. and i’m not sure i’m ready for that right now.
ariel is maybe writing a book about her raver years, and she faces her former self with such openness. i’m not sure what it would take for me to do that. maybe because the context of my late-teens/early twenties wasn’t that “cool” that i have a hard time looking back – there weren’t awesome characters and crazy movie-material escapades and edgy west-coast rave parties providing the scene for my sex, drugs and alcohol; it was dirty basements and trailer parks and midwestern towns where nothing ever really happened. who would want to revisit that?
……………….
on sunday night we went to see Synecdoche, NY, the new film by Charlie Kaufman, who also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. the script was fantastic, and while the movie took a little longer than it needed to to get where it was going, it was really wrenching and beautiful. it was hard for me to watch. movies that delve into regret about how one has lived their life, even though i’m still relatively young and have relatively few regrets, make me incredibly, incredibly sad. i think my deepest fear, perhaps, is a fear of regret. but outside of myself, this was particularly difficult to watch right now because there are a couple of my loved ones who are currently struggling with this – with regret – really deeply. who are at points in their lives where they are having trouble looking forward and only looking back, wondering what could have been different, and to see characters in this film that so resembled them broke my heart.
Filed in autobiographical, tv, books and movies | Tagged with NELP | Comments (7)the five questions game
via emily @ strangechord:
my answers to her five questions:
Filed in me myself and i | Tagged with NELP | Comments (4)notes.
i hate it when i write a whole post in my head in the shower in the morning, or in bed the night before, and then when i get to my computer to write it down…. blewp! it’s gone.
one of the things that i do remember is a list of things i want to accomplish within the next 5-7 years of my life:
1. travel to asia. status: going! i am completing all my paperwork for the trek to Nepal in 2003 today! hopefully we will also get to spend some time in south east asia, as we will have lay-over stops in places like Bali. woo hoo!
2. hike the appalachian trail (or at least a good portion of it). i fell in love with the Apps. when i lived in New Hampshire, and have wanted to go back since. status: maybe i can convince andrea to do it with me in 2004?
2.a. erik’s comment reminded me of another thing to add to my list. i want to be a NELP instructor!! NELP (the New England Literature Program) is a umich program where you go to live up in the woods of new england for 6 weeks and learn about the literature and culture of the area. I was a NELPer in 1997 as a student, and i would LOVE to go back as an instructor. status: i have no idea if they’d even have me, but this might be something to do just before hiking the trail 
i’d have to take a whole summer off work to do all that! oh no!
3. get a job overseas, particularly some kind of service/education job. right now my best bet is to go overseas as a teacher, although i’d also like to go as a writer (ha!) or even on some sort of environmental/ecological/conservation corps kind of thing. status: i may have an opportunity to go to China to teach english in a semi-rural area with the man i am working for on the weekends right now at brainchild. he wants me to help him set up a curriculum for ESL and then help him to start an education center. there are already a lot of ESL centers in the major cities in china, but they cater to businesspeople and ususally cost a lot of money. he wants to start one for more rural people who are looking to go to college or get better jobs, which i think is great.
4. notice how going to graduate school is not on my list of near-future plans? people keep asking me about it, and you know what? i’m not interested in plopping down another $50-100k to go back to school right now. i don’t want to be a lawyer. i don’t want to get my MBA so i can go to work for some corporate firm to make a million dollars before i’m 30. i have multiple friends right now who are tearing their hair out studying for various entrance exams, writing the dozen requisite essays for MBA applications, flying coast to coast doing “interviews” with schools, and totally freaking about getting into the ivy league school of their choice. i figure i can go to graduate school any time for the rest of my life if i need to. my mom went in her 40s. i can only go trekking in Nepal and hike the appalachian trail while i’m young and vigorous, no? once you go to graduate school you’re stuck with loans and crap and then you have to get a job right a way to pay for them, and you’ll probably end up getting married and having rugrats and never going to China. so i’m planning on living while i’m young, and can get my law degree or MBA when i’m older and actually WANT to waste the rest of my life working.
(sidenote: jay, i know you a reading this, and no, i don’t know if you even want to do anything of these things, so yes, we have a lot of stuff to plan and talk about, but no, i am not planning my life without thinking about how you will be there with me )
so, as you can see, most of these things are going to require me to get my ass out of DEBT so that i can periodically quit my job(s) and either live in the woods or move to asia. sooo…. i needs to stop blowing all my $$ and get my ass out of debt!!!
this leads to another thing i wanted to talk about. why is it so hard NOT to spend money?? i find myself telling people “i’m trying not to spend any money right now”. why do i have to try to not spend money?? it’s so weird to me, but it’s true. i get my semi-monthly dose of support for not spending money whenever i get my new issue of Adbusters Magazine, which helps to remind me and to remember that spending all my money is NOT a good thing. i wish i could be more like shannon who only has 2 pairs of shoes and is very good about not blowing money like a drunken sailor (as my mother likes to say). i however, have major “buyological urges” – especially when it comes to vintage clothing and records — i have to stay focussed, keep telling myself that i don’t NEED all that crap and it’s all made in sweatshops and will just end up in landfills–and it’s oh so hard! ugh. anyone have any words of advice on this?
other words of advice i’m looking for: i am really having serious trouble sleeping. i’ve always been a light sleeper, and i really don’t want to start taking sleeping aids every night, but i am so damn tired and it’s getting really annoying. suggestions?
Filed in autobiographical | Tagged with NELP | Comment (0)
