týr’s day
Tuesday 14 October 2008 | 12 cookies in the jar
The Brujo and his many 2007 tax-return papers are sprawled all over my study floor, as he doth render unto Caesar that which belongs to…well, I think it should belong to the Brujo, really; but he’s givin’ it up to Caesar anyway. Pyewacket watches with misgiving, both feet tucked carefully under her because it is COLD (seventy degrees! I’m wearing sweatpants). And today was had by all. Well, by most of us. Anyway many of us had it, and survived. And, some good things happened to me which I will now share with you while my love glares at his spreadsheets, because enough with the hand-to-brow stuff already. Sheesh.
• I showered this morning! It was grand. Admittedly I had to use a lot of soap.
• Then, courtesy of the involuntary weekend endometriosis crash diet (half-glasses of chocolate milk with all the Tylenol you can keep down), I fit into my skinny jeans! Which is the first time I’ve worn jeans since, oh, maybe March! (Since wearing jeans in summer here feels like wrapping your thighs in aluminum foil. Deliberately.) Weirdly enough, these so-yclept “skinny” jeans (beloved butter-soft thrift-store Calvins) are TWO whole numbered sizes LARGER than my looser-fitting, thicker-denim, over-long-underwear jeans (Target Levis—good for mountain towns and camping trips); which just goes to show you that American women’s clothing sizes were invented by Mad Men.
• Then I cycled to school. It was sunny and cool and pretty outside, with palm trees and students in flipflops. And I went to class (the lecture part of the creative writing course I half-teach), and had an office hour (to which nobody came, so I answered student email), and ate lunch (which I had made identically for the Brujo and myself—neufchâtel and smoked salmon wraps, and leftover roast potatoes with yogurt and scallion sauce), and went to workshop.
And then had a magnificent impromptu conference with the Duende.
It’s strange, how I always forget that other people can help. (I know! Sound of forehead striking desk; but gently, but wryly.) Especially smart, good people. Especially professors, from whom I always hope to hide everything and for whom I try desperately to perform, without letting any of the messy show. Works real well, of course.
And so when the Duende sits opposite me in his office, with all the wonderful books on the shelves, and he’s all twinkly and spritely and alert, and he says, very seriously and courteously, as though I’m the most important person in the world, or at least a minor Mexican dignitary, “Now, how can I be of use to you?”…and he really means this…well, I tend to go all to little wobbly mental pieces, like buttered toast, and so I actually wound up telling him what was going wrong, anyway professionally—to my surprise; but probably not his.
The short version, blurted out by me, wringing my hands in my sweatshirt pockets like an undergrad, went roughly like this:
Sir, I don’t know what’s wrong with me this semester. I used to be such a nice student! So responsive and appreciative and grateful, always raising my hand and asking good questions in seminar. Even when my papers were weeks late, I was always communicative and respectful. That’s how I navigated (and/or circumnavigated) academic requirements—with social skills. And now I’ve managed to start off on the wrong foot this semester with everyone—with the Young Lecturer for whom I so grumpily TA, with the Alcoholic Poetics Professor (who’s not even asking that much anything of us), with the Ladylike Modernist Professor who’s completely charming and reasonable. I even snapped at the department secretary [a crime akin to, I don't know, meanly shooting rubber bands at a little fluffy kitten—his eyes widened as he took in the full import of this confession]. I’m unbearably crabby and bitchy and I don’t like anybody—I know they’re lovely people, and I still have everything to learn from them—and still I can’t help it somehow—I sit in class snarling quietly to myself and giving off bad energy, and then when I do talk I take everyone’s head off and no one seems to understands a word I say, so then I withdraw and just sit there all surly writing essays in my journal or starting poems or, in the worst case, making lists of how I think they should teach their classes.
The Duende said, very simply: Oh, well, you’re done with school, that’s all. You want to be the one teaching. That’s fine. That’s how it ought to be. So you should finish, and just teach.
This floored me.
Because it was true.
So then we talked about all the ways I could be in class yet accept that I’m not in class the way other people are in class. That if I’m not thinking about what everyone else is thinking about, this is not a sign of antisocial personality disorder or that I’m not paying attention but maybe, perhaps, it’s that I’m done thinking in those ways and I’m thinking in new and other ways, about other things, which is fine. And how would it be to go ahead and come up with some bibliographies and outlines for the way I would teach the classes? And how would it be to write the essays not for the teacher, not for the course requirements, but for myself—really, for myself—I mean, really—talking about the things in the writing that interest me, and not performing the writing back to the Ladylike Modernist Professor in the ways I think she wants to hear them? Because, let’s be honest. I DID THAT ALREADY. TWICE. Jack of all trades, master of arts.
This all makes sudden and crystalline sense. Why the work which has me the most excited this semester has been prepping to teach the special topics literature class in the spring. (I’ve thought wistfully, in the library: I love this—it’s all the fun of researching without any of the icky writing part.)
“Well, and I’m fine with students,” I admitted. Pause. “Actually, I’m better than fine. I’m great with students.” It’s quite a reversal, I realize now, typing this; last year, teaching (comp) was my bête grisé and this semester, teaching (creative writing) been the thing that gets me onto campus when I’m dreading my own classes. “They write this terrible innocent drivel and I like it. I don’t have to pretend I like it; I really do! And I like them. I’m not mean or snappy with them at all.”
“Exactly.” He spread his hands. “You’re done being a student, that’s all. But now you just have to—you know, to finish. And then teach the way you want to.”
Suddenly he pointed directly at me, which I found a little alarming. “Maybe we don’t tell you this enough. Obviously we don’t tell you this enough! But you know this, right? I mean, you know you’re doing great? Because you’re doing great! You’re really doing great!”
Blink.
“Um, yeah. I mean, no. No, I don’t think I’m doing alright at all. Actually I was thinking about dropping out.” I managed not to wail, But how can you say that when you’ve been pissed off at me ALL SEMESTER LONG! When you hardly look at me! When you ignore everything I say! Where is the love, Señor, where is the LOOOOVE?!
He politely ignored this, probably because I didn’t say it out loud, and pointed at me again. “You, you’re the real thing. You’ll teach. You’ll write. You couldn’t not write. You’re just paranoid.”
Can’t argue with that.
The Brujo has by now become punchy and is waving the white-out wand and husking his Miles Davis impression. “What do you mean what amount do I want refunded to me, mothafuckas? I want it all, man, I want my shit back, you know what I’m sayin’? Total payments…amount I overpaid…total withheld…my signature….” Pyewacket’s sacked out on the stack of W2s. My own eyes are grainy and I’ve had nothing for dinner but cheese and crackers. Sufficient unto the day is the academia thereof.
Walt’s calling now, so I’d better pick up.
May Woden treat you all as gently as Týr treated me. Part II tomorrow.
12 cookies in the jar
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Brava. It’s about bloody well freakin’ time somebody you might believe told you how awesome you are. I’m so glad this happened today.
Well first, knowing someone else has the same Calvin sizing problem makes me feel better. I swear I should just rip the size tag out of them. One of our fabulous poet friends thought I’d bought them thrift but no, I just loved the hell out of them until they reached that same butter-soft perfection.
And being done with school…ahh. I reached the same point at the same time and dealt with it by distancing myself from the entirety of the program. That’s why no one saw much of me…well outside of work. There comes a time when it’s less about enjoying learning and feeling like you’re getting great feedback and it becomes more about contemplating how many classes you’re going to miss and wondering what you’re going to say to that fucker in workshop the next time (s)he tells you they don’t get your work.
So don’t be hard on yourself. You’ve perhaps reached this point sooner than some of your classmates and all it really means is that you don’t need the program anymore except for that whole degree part. And isn’t that really what the whole program is for? So teach, write, and forget about feeling the guilt.
Oh Un! That is EXACTLY the kind of thing you want to hear a mentor say, because it is true and bolstering without being cloying or disingenuous, and humbling without being heavy. Proud of you, I am.
Oh, celebratoriness! You’re doing great and you were told so by someone you are willing to believe! And the done being a student thing? Makes perfect sense. Also “He politely ignored this. Probably because I didn’t say it out loud” makes me grin (still abstaining from winky emoticons, however).
And if I could? I’d have you all over for tea and chocolate, and we’d sit in the back garden with stacks of books talking and giggling until our jeans no longer fit and we ran out of chocolate.
I’m starting to wonder if getting master’s degrees isn’t kind of like having kids—you should really do it when you’re younger, before you realize what you’re getting into. The Cambridge one was pretty painless (well, there were occasional essay crises, and a good quantity of seasonal affectivity, but overall I was in bliss, because it was so completely self-directed, and everyone was so bright); while the BU one, only two years later, was already much less pleasant; and now, a decade later, I feel a full decade crankier and much less impressed with everyone, including myself.
I could seriously go for some tea and chocolate and giggling right about now. Sigh.
@Kimba: seconded, sister.
Alcoholic poetics teacher? Your code is impenetrable. Now give me back my head, I’m still using it.
Oh now, driamond; your head has never yet been removed by me!
I think. Yet.
My code is only supposed to be impenetrable to G••gl•, which, in fact, I think (touch wood) it is. Unless the alcoholic poetics professor has taken to g••gling those exact search terms late into the night. Which, also in fact, is not impossible.
Since you are the only State School victim who reads or anyway comments on this ridiculous excuse for a blog-shaped object, I think you should get some kind of serious commendation and/or baked goods for your unfailing in-class diplomacy (and failure to rat me out as a screaming lunatic)—a diplomacy which, by the way, frequently rivals that of James Earl Carter; and for your general affable demeanor, which is invariably genial and humane and, goddammit, what I’m TRYING to say here that it just does me plain good to see you in class, week after week, sharp-witted and decent and non-brainwashed as you are.
Okay enough with all THAT nonsense. Here, here’s your dang head back.
You’re still a student? How did I miss that little bit of trivia? I thought you were done! No wonder you’re miserable.
This will probably sound silly but I love the way that bits of your life are revealed through your entries little by little (at least for those of us who are still trying to break the code). When I have time I like to go back and read the archives, trying to piece things together like a Barbara Hodgson novel. But then of course there are those times when I completely put my foot in my mouth, and then I really wish that I could be at the backyard party, giggling and eating chocolate and asking you a zillion questions. For instance, is the cat really Pyewacket?
I’m so glad you got the boost (and the shower!) you most definitely deserved.
“—you should really do it when you’re younger, before you realize what you’re getting into.”
Sister you said a mouthful!
So um, is this mentor a member of the graduate faculty, and if so… JEALOUS!
This is lovely. I know exactly where you are because I have been there and been there. This is why my late great mentor had decided that he far preferred teaching undergrads to grad students: the grad students, he concluded, “are done learning”. “They know everything.” Well, that was a cynical view, but true to some extent (my kingdom for the chance to learn from him again–to know less, this time around). But he was right. I was done. I needed to write, to teach. And I like teaching. It is much like being a mother (and yes I really should have done that years ago*). I agree with you about it being all the great research bits without the icky writing bits. I’m done and done. Every time I threaten to go back for a phd (god forbid) I remind myself of this.
Great post. And now I see Toni Morrison lurking in your sagacity unfurled section, which confuses me…the breaks and all. But I like it. I do. I am all about her these days. I thank god for her these days. I shiver.
I’ll be there for the tea and chocolate. I am already there.
*but now I’m should-ing all over myself, Stuart Smalley!