No! I Refuse! I… I… I’m Going to Grad School!

Honestly, I never quite understood the Urgency of the desire to go to grad school is until I got an eight-to-five Job.

Maybe I just haven’t learned the knack of living with such intractable constraints. But, I honestly can’t figure out how other people balance work and family and hobbies all in 24 hours.

That is the greatest obstacle to Resolutions.

Usually, resolving to do things is easy. I could promise to do anything. But suddenly I have limitations. And my job has brought out the cynic and pessimist in me. Suddenly, I rarely think about aspirations and dreams so much as processes and the clearly attainable.

Since becoming a grant writer, I have become obsessed with budgets and strategic plans.

But, I will not let that stop me now. I shall make promises and keep them this year because, really, it’s the End of the World, and so I need to make this one count.

Anyway, the aspirations are divided up into writing goals and life goals, because that’s the only distinction I make on a day-to-day basis.

Writing Goals:

1.  Keep writing at least once a week in Scribbler’s Doorless Room. Make at least one post every month about writing. Do a book review every two months. That sounds manageable.

2.  At some point, write a story/essay/play/poem every day for a week and post it in Scribbler’s Doorless Room. If that works, go for a month. If that works, keep going until exhaustion takes hold.

3.  Write one new story/essay/play/poem and revise one old story/essay/play/poem every month.

4.  Submit my “finished” plays to more competitions.

5.  Film “The Fear of”.

Life Goals:

1.  Be a better grant writer and copywriter. … And figure out what that means. Getting more money, I suppose. That works for me.

2.  Get into grad school. Or reapply.

3.  Or get a Fulbright. Or reapply.

4.  Or get a job teaching English abroad. Or reapply.

5.  Or get a salaried job writing copy or grants. Or reapply.

6.  Or get a job with AmeriCorps and do good work.

7.  Read at least a book a week.

8.  Laugh and smile more often, so as to confuse my enemies.

Scars

There's a scar on my head from where my sister hit me with a rock. When I was three and she was five we were camping and she decided that she wanted to throw a rock just as I was running in front of her. I've never seen this scar, but people Tell me it's there.

Two years ago I got "remember" tattooed to my left wrist and the first "r" healed into a tiny, raised scar like braille. I can read "r" by touch.

A few months ago, Reflex made me catch a broken pint glass. If I open my hand wide I can see a thin white line, like a Smile. It arcs upward to the first joint of my thumb where I can still see a raised scar from when my sister closed the metal joint of a reclining chair on it. That's the first time I can remember Bleeding.

In a creative writing class I sat between two women and we were on friendly terms. They were good writers. It wasn't until spring warmed up and both started wearing t-shirts that I saw the woman on my right had scars all along her left wrist "the right way." The woman on my left had raised, horizontal scars all up and down each arm.

After that day in class I went and met K at Aspekt Cafe. I told her about creative writing. She nodded and said, "Sometimes those last your whole life."

Today C drove me to deliver a grant to the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans. The text was well over a hundred pages long and I spent 10AM to 11AM  meticulously putting together all three copies from about twenty individual documents. My heart raced so badly I was afraid someone might hear. After we delivered the grant we drove back over the industrial canal, left Orleans and entered St. Bernard.  C indicated a scar on her right hand that she got in Haiti.

"I hope it doesn't fade," she said. "I'm proud of my scars."

"I have one on the back of my head," I said.

"How'd you get that?" she asked.

"My sister tried to kill me."

"Oh?"

"It's a joke. We were camping and she threw a rock and it hit my head. I nearly died that trip. Not from the rock, but from drowning." I said, "I've nearly drowned a lot and that's probably why I don't like to swim."

Exile

A few days after I moved into my temporary apartment in New Orleans, Gilligan moved into the apartment next door.  The unit was also owned by my landlord, Scott.  Monday night I walked out the door into the after-dark heat and saw Gilligan, a skinny, white hipster in a wife beater and straw hat, talking to Scott.  Gilligan had recruited two local kids to move his things from the U-Haul truck into his apartment.  I went to get food.

When I came back, the same kids were moving his things to another unit owned by Scott.  Scott explained that Gilligan wanted more space.  Scott would accommodate as long as M cleaned up the new unit which wasn't ready for occupancy.  Before I get in the door, Gilligan stopped me.

"Hey, Scott tells me you're a grant writer."

"He did," I said.

"Yeah, man.  Hey, I'm from Mississippi, but I'm coming here from New York.  I'm a musician, but that's not what I'm down here for," he lit a cigarette and squatted on the broken pavement.  While he spoke, the next door kids moved his things, one weird shaped box by one strange instrument at a time to the new unit.  "I've been traveling around from one city to the next.  I'm working on making this non-profit website where people can post videos talking about how much they love the United States, how much they love their city.  Because it's all about love, man."

I looked over my shoulder at his truck.  "Love" was written on the windshield in spray paint.  It took another ten minutes to escape his monologue.

The next day, Scott was amused and horrified.  "Last night Gilligan brought a woman home and I told him he couldn't have house guests without prior notice.  A few minutes later I heard this ding-ding-ding sound and I went outside and found them in the U-Haul.  The guy is serious about this love thing."  I hadn't heard anything, but for some reason this seemed reasonable.

A few days later, Scott was fuming on the porch.  "Do you know what he did?" Scott demanded.  "He hasn't paid rent.  I've driven him all over town to get health insurance, to get registered, to meet people in the music scene and he hasn't paid rent.  Today I told he needed to pay and he wrote me a fucking poem!  He even folded it up into a little airplane and threw it at me.  It's all about love and talking about how I'm the man.  Man, suck my dick."

The next day I could sense that fox holes had been dug between the two units.  Scott was in the kitchen, pacing.  "He hasn't cleaned up the place.  He keeps says that was never our agreement, but it was.  Now he's pissed off because the unit doesn't have air conditioning when I told him it didn't and if he wanted air conditioning he could live in one of the other units.  This is ridiculous."

Over the next week, Gilligan-updates became a regular and entertaining feature of my day.  I never witnessed any of this, but I could sense a tense, wrathful paranoia settle around my apartment and the two immediately adjacent.  It reminded me a little of 2008, when all anyone could talk about was how the word was Ending, but I still went to work every day.

After I got home one day, Scott carried in a bag full of locks and knobs.  "I removed all the locks from his apartment," he declared.  "He tried to change the locks.  Last night he broke into Naomi’s apartments and tried to steal one of the air conditioning units.  I'm done with this."

On Wednesday I had to stay late at the office working on a grant.  Grant writing is a strange process.  You're responsible for the financial health of an entity in which you have no time or ability to invest yourself outside of the facts and numbers.  It's a delightfully absurd and alienating endeavor.

When I walked into my apartment, Scott, two very large friends of his, and one of the other tenants - a young woman, bartender from New York named Naomi - were sitting in the living room celebrating.  Gilligan was gone. He had, once again, broken into Naomi's apartment and sat there until Scott and his friends came and forcefully evicted him.

"I think there's something wrong with that guy," Naomi said.  "He started hanging around the bar where I work.  My coworkers said that he made them nervous.  He slept with one girl and ever since all three of them don't want him around.  My manager banned him from the bar for life."

"He got banned from a New Orleans jazz club?"  Scott looked at her with shock and revulsion.  "There's no greater low."

Yesterday I came home to discover my apartment locked.  Due to a complicated series of poor decisions, I didn't have a key and so I called my Scott, my housemate, and anyone I could think of who might reasonably know how to get in.  My housemate, Lee, eventually called me back.  "Dude, didn't you here?" Lee asked.  "Gilligan came back and started something in the street.  He and Scott were both arrested."

"Oh," I said.

It was a hot night and the street lamps were shining.  Across the street a high school party of Hollywood proportions was in full, angry swing.  There were kids on the street screaming into their cell phones, beer in hand.  About a tenth of the houses on the street are blighted, but two streets over all the houses are newly renovated and the pavement is fresh and flat.

And that's mostly how things stand.  There really is no conclusion to this story.  No revelation.  I asked a friend to move me out that night and now I'm crashing at another Americorps member's house.  It just seems odd to me the way stories relayed and related suddenly turned my one-time home into a locked apartment.

So, You're the Grant Writer

My landlord introduces me to everyone saying, "This is Sam, my housemate.  The grant writer."  At first, I found this flattering, but lately it's becoming a little unnerving.  My identity, it seems, is inseparable from my duty as an Americorps member.

The past week has been a Harrowing trial of orientation and job training.  My colleagues are all, predictably, very well educated, adventurous individuals with some pretty impressive stories.  Whenever we have to introduce ourselves, we do so going around the room, rattling off some personal details and stories and then fading in with the rest of the exceptional lot.  This has not been the case for me.  It seems every time I say my name, one of my superiors looks at me with an intrigued, hungry look and says, "So, you're the grant writer."

When I worked for the Iowa State Seed Lab a few winters ago I remember being introduced to all the researchers and staff.  All of them were middle aged professionals in white coats.  The HR woman then pointed into a corner office where a young woman in a blue bandana and grungy clothes sat slouched over her computer wearing gigantic headphones.  "And that's our grant writer," said the HR woman.  The grant writer waved without looking up.

That's what I feel like I'm supposed to be.  Some harried goblin, squirreled away in the corner who has worked out an understanding, a pact with the world around him.  Leave me the fuck alone and I will bring you Money.

My week has felt much like I imagine life must be for a priest at Notre Dame.  Called to a position of peace and contemplation and surprised to find Americans at every turn.  Unable to find Solace anywhere else, I've mostly locked myself in my room with A Dance With Dragons, my notebook and trying to avoid listening to Simon and Garfunkle's "I Am a Rock."

But, I have a Desk.  And I've found coffee shops, bananas, bars, and Bourbon Street.  Mostly I'm very happy to have a desk for the first time in my life, one where I shall conduct Work and Business.  Furthermore, it is not as hot here as I thought it would be.  I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, the PR woman.

"Yeah, it's a cultural thing, really.   Everyone loves to complain about the heat even though it's the same heat every year," she said.

These are my very muddled thoughts right now.  I have sequestered myself in the Who Dat Cafe and have spent the afternoon writing and reading.  A good day by any measure.  Still, this is a poor excuse for a post.  Please forgive me.

I have faith that in a few weeks I will get my barring and suddenly everything will become clear.  But last night my landlord told me, laughing, "You're in New Orleans now!" as if to negate all further discussion on subject of clarity.  He added, "One thing I will say about this city is that it's a great place to grow.  To find yourself.  It's a free place.  As far as the nightlife goes, alternative lifestyles, music, sex, drinks, all that stuff."  Now I have a mental association between being young in New Orleans and an erection.

A few minutes later, the musician who moved in next door, also my landlord's tenant, texted him.  The guy hasn't been paying rent.  The landlord is prepared to change the locks.  My landlord stared at the phone, baffled and angry, and then looked at me saying, "Do you know what he did today?  When I asked him for rent, he gave me a poem!"

This evening I shall go out and sing karaoke.  I only hope they have the Gin Blossoms, Oasis, and Counting Crows.

Book Review: Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird

Though I just finished reading Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life I have heard about it and been assigned excerpts from it in several of my writing classes.  I think it is everyone's favorite book on writing, even if they disagree with it.  After reading the first two pages, I decided that I didn't care whether or not I learned a damn thing from Lamott about writing; it was just fun to read and that was good enough for me.

In that respect, Bird by Bird is a wonderful and refreshing contrast to King's On Writing.  It's a charming, hilarious, wonderful book and I would recommend it to anyone.  I think that the LA Times review did it the most justice by describing Bird by Bird as "warm" and "generous."  In the end, I do think that I learned more about life from Lamott than I did about the craft.  This is probably why intro to creative writing teachers assign this book all the time.  Freshman writers need about as much advice on art as they do on any other aspect of their lives, so Lamott is a good and thoughtful catch-all.

Anyway, enough generalizations.  Onto the meat of the review.  ... And here is where I run into problems.  Bird by Bird is, for lack of a better term, a bit scatter-brained.  This isn't a criticism, because it really works here for a variety of reasons.  It just makes a sum-up difficult.  Lamott breaks the book down into chapters, but those chapters are generally brief, capricious essays on themes more than in-depth discussions on aspects of the craft.  It's a peculiar book, but that's not a bad thing.

Part of the reason this meandering style works is because Lamott is a master of the illustrative anecdote.  Throughout the whole book there are seamless transitions from the frame of Lamott's writing seminars, to stories from her life, to discussions on method and art.  Reading Bird by Bird is kind of like being led around the playground by a three year-old in the grips of a sugar rush.

Where Lamott excels, though, and I've noticed this in her other writing, too, is in her visceral descriptions of paranoid rumination and malcontent, vicious cycles.  Reading Lamott is very cathartic.  I thought I was the only person who felt a whirlwind of gratitude, hatred, self-loathing, and inspiration following a crit group.  This is probably the real Reason why everyone Loves this book.  It speaks to our darkest, most chaotic feelings as sensitive individuals, absolves us for it, and then tells us to move on.

I want to hug this woman.

Frankly, I thought that this would be a very easy review to write, but I'm struggling.  So, I'm going back to Lamott's very early piece of advice on writing: small assignments.  What I really want to talk about, what fascinates me about the book, is Lamott's philosophy on writing.  She has a lot to say about the craft, style, publication, jealousy, libel, assignments, and a plenitude of of other topics -- in fact, she has a book's worth of things to say -- but her Introduction is what sticks with me.

She begins with the frame of her own life as a teacher and writer and says that a question she's frequently asked in interviews is, "Why do you write?"  Her standard reply is to quote John Ashbery and Flannery O'Conner, "Because I want to and because I'm good at it."  but she goes on to describe her students' motivations to get published and become famous and she says that she tries to help everyone come to see that writing, creating, engaging with the world as an artist is a miraculous, beautiful compulsion.

Why write?  Because we all deserve and need to share our own particular experience.  That is what I love about Lamott's philosophy and where I agree with her completely.  The book is saturated with raw enthusiasm.  Lamott wrote this book for You, individually, so that You would have the courage to tell your own story and see that as a right, not a privilege.  Or Lamott is far better at duping me than I'd care to admit.

Something else that Lamott mentions in the following chapter about reasons to write struck me as, if not unique, then at least an unusual defense.  She says that the greatest reason to write is, essentially, for the love of books.  "... Books are as important as anything else on earth.  What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.... My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.  Aren't you?"

This is why Bird by Bird is fantastic.  Because it is an altruistic message that encourages the reader to be grateful and generous.  Right now, I'm going through a challenging transition in my life.  I owe my mental stability to friends, family, A, caffeine, liquor, and books.  Lamott and George R.R. Martin are helping me get through this.  As a result, I want to read and write more.  It seems like the least I can do.

Scared Shitless

This isn't a real post, but I've been breaking promises.

Have you ever had one of those experiences where you worked very hard for something and by some miracle you actually got it and instead of feeling exuberant you just sat there thinking, "Well, shit.... I hadn't planned on that happening."  Well, that's how I feel right now.

A few days ago I was offered a grant writing job with the St. Bernard Project in New Orleans, a nonprofit rebuilds and renovates houses for people affected by Katrina who do not have the money to help themselves.  I accepted the job and have not stopped running since.  Probably, I won't be out of panic mode until this time next year.

I want to live in New Orleans and do good work.  Above all, I want to have an adventure and do something that scares me.  The trouble with the last item is actually getting your wish.

In a week and a half I will be in New Orleans.  Today I got housing squared away.  This week has been a blur of planning, taking leaps of faith, and trying desperately not to forget anything.  I'm sad that I'll be missing two weddings and won't be able to visit a friend from Germany.  Most of all, I'm very sad I'll have to leave my love, A.

But, then, what's the point of going through life comfortable?  One just arrives at death asleep.

A week and a half from now I'll be in one of the oldest cities in North America.  One of the meccas of music and performing arts.  A reputable hedonist capital.  And I'll be there doing what I do best: writing.  I'll be persuading people to help support people who have had a much harder, scarier time than me.  I'm going to leave my home to convince others that we all want and deserve to go home.  Doesn't sound like a bad way to spend a year.