The Old Curiosity Shop

12:23pm: Snowbound: Mollusk-cide, Pedophiles, and Cake
The Universe has a funny sense of humor, and by funny, I mean brutal. I’ve spent the past two weeks whining about having to go to work when artistic urges have been thrumming in my soul. Voila, I am snowbound for 4.5 days. I took care of all my urges by day 2.5, was deeply-ridiculously-hand-me-a-cake pleased with myself. Passed out, and woke up as some form of shellfish.

Freshwater mollusk to be specific. Being a freshwater mollusk involved lots of pining for the ocean (uh, the freshwater ocean) and having no words. Apparently I’d used them all up so my thoughts were coming in grunts. Spending the entire day locked up in a studio apartment grunting is god-awful depressing. Mollusks are not known for their joyful dispositions. Woke up at 1:00 a.m. and had a vision of my life stretching before me: no promotions at work, no friends, crapping out the occasional piece when I get urges. In general: life as a mollusk.

It sounded so amazing that right then and there I came up with a plan for mollusk-cide.* Only, I live alone, so no one would know until the smell got really dreadful, and that’s just embarrassing.

( In which I witter on and on about pedophilia and cake )

8:55pm: I Heard the Wolf Cry My Name
Lately I've been having this reoccurring nightmare where I'm a waitress in a coffee shop, wiping tables as I watch the world go by. From time to time I'll flip open a newspaper and below the headlines I'll see the faces of my friends and acquaintances. Yesterday night one of the faces was someone I haven't thought about in years, someone I had dismissed at school for kowtowing to other people’s values. I woke up clutching my blanket, my heart pounding, deeply ashamed of myself.

Ashamed, because you see, I had gotten better grades than she had. Why was she in the paper? Why was I in a coffee shop?

All around me, people are taking off like rocket ships. I’ve got friends going to grad school, friends armed with fellowships sailing off to Tibet, to Antarctica. They speak, and I am filled with excitement. I can see the pieces of all their dreams falling into place to form the brightly colored fabric of their futures.

Meanwhile, I get up, I go to work, I come home and I write. It is the good life, it is a small life. I was a walking zombie last week because I was trying work out how to kill a princess with the most stylish verbs possible.

Lately the writing has bleed over into office life because there’s been a lot of down time. For the most part I try to educate myself on every aspect of the organization, but I can take only so many hours of reading credit card rules before my mind craps out and I am back to my verbs and princesses.

Today my mentor told me the key to his success was hard work. He saw the expression on my face and said, “Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself.”

My mentor is a dear sweet man, and I don’t know how to tell him how much time I spend thinking about princesses instead of credit cards, so my stomach curdles with guilt. It is quite possible I am going nowhere at work and I can’t tell him because there’s a wolf howling at my door.

This wolf is the sputtering flame of ambition that burns, keeps burning, will not stop burning.

“What’s the dream?” my mentor asked me.

“To write,” I blurted. “And go to business school.” Then I stopped. On my coffee table there is a stack of business school books. I’ve had them for about two months and I have not opened them. I tried to tell my cousin about my business school dream, felt the words trip up in my mouth and finally she said, “Go back and do a little more research. Tell me then.”

I meant to but instead I picked up a Donna Anderson book, I had liked her in my early teens, and the cover was spattered with numerous awards for best first novel. I thought perhaps I could learn something about the art of the plot from her. I threw the book down in disgust after a few pages. Her heroine was irritating, the prose was too contrived, in fifty years this book will not matter to anyone.

I flipped open Leonard Schapiro's translation of Turgenev's 'Spring Torrents’. Sank into it, lost my name, lost my identity, because the only reality that mattered was Turgenev's. Look, this is how he writes: "A large ball of red wool, glowing brilliantly in the slanting rays of the evening sun, lay on the floor beside an overturned carved wooden basket."

Such a simple line, but imagine a book filled with lines like this, very clear, very real and you have Turgenev.

In my wildest dreams I realize I'll die happy if I attain a tenth of Donna Andrew's commercial success, in my moments of soul numbing honesty, I know what I really want is to write like Turgenev but would sacrifice that for success, any kind of success.

I am self diagnosing the writing. Plot shaping and world building bewilder me. My prose is inexact and I lack the ability to skewer an image to the page. I need to scrub down my style, learn to build solid structures. I’m going on practice runs, experimenting with the types of stories I told myself I should never write: limp fantasies, young adult angst, ethnic angst, narcissistic angst. But what else? I must practice.

I have given myself until twenty five to attain some small sort of success along the lines of a couple magazine acceptances. In reality, I think I’m going to need fifteen years before I’ll be able to beat the writing into any sort of book shape. Then I stop posturing and get back to the computer.

It is slow going, trekking past each word to get to the next sentence, climbing from one sentence to the next in order to scramble past paragraphs, then pages. It is oddly soothing to have my vision filled with the jagged words, and the white pieces of space in between. If all is well in the world, they too fade away, until all I can see is some far off blur in the horizon, something fuzzy and indistinct that grows clearer and clearer as I catapult towards it.

But any time I stop writing, anytime I stop thinking about the current piece, I see the hours at work spent doing nothing and how they’ll add up to missed opportunities down the line, the things I haven’t told my mentor, the untouched business books. I think of all the aspiring writers I know who are funnier, more creative, have so much less to learn. I reread my pieces and I can see they are ghosts of authors I have copied, wince at my prose and how flabby it is next to Turgenev, next to Donna Andrews. Oh the world is filled with piles and piles of books and hoards and hoards of writers, but so few people who read. Will there be any room for me?

I stop writing, and I hear the wolf howling. It is hungry and I don’t know how I will feed it.

12:45pm: From the Notebook
1. The Dillard Diet

You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs. … Bad verb choices mean adverbs. More often than not, you don’t need them. Did he run quickly or did he sprint? Did he walk slowly or did he stroll or saunter?

--Annie Dilliard and the Writing Life by Alex Chee, (courtesy of grumpymartian)

Printed out some of my pieces and highlighted every verb. Got confused. What is a verb anyway? Head reeled. Is wuss a verb? Is shape a verb? As in “castles in the shape of ice cream cones”? What about all the “is’s” and “wasn’t’s”? Do they count? I was under the impression they gave my writing a lovely lilting quality. Maintained this impression until I reached the bottom of the page and counted the verb-variety. Um, I have the verb vocabulary of a four year old.

Putting myself on a strict verb diet. No adverbs. Must brainstorm list of verbs and steep myself in them until I ooze action.

(Damnit. Now it’s really had to write because I keep worrying about verbs.)

---

2. Embracing my inner stupid

I need to shed my fear of being seen as stupid, prontisimo.
Seriously, my boss will explain something to me and my brain will freeze up and I start whimpering. Or, I’ll agonize for hours before getting up the courage to ask a question because omg, what if people think I’m an idiot?

Had a double ended epiphany a few weeks ago.

Part the first.

Whenever someone tells me they ‘hate stupid people’ or blah blah blah is so stupid, alarm bells go off in my head. Not only am I talking to someone who doesn’t understand that human intelligence comes in many different forms, I’m also talking to a judgmental asshole.

Whenever someone starts talking about how intelligent they are and how other people can’t understand them…they typically don’t have any friends. Not because they’re too smart for other people, but because they aren’t socially smart enough to deal with other people.

Conclusion: Anyone who is going to think I’m stupid and tell other people/make me feel horrible, is someone I need to avoid anyway.

Part the second.

I passed the stupid milestone a long time ago.

On my first day of bio class in high school, I asked the teacher if rocks had DNA.

I was trying to impress him.

Later that year I missed getting the high score on the evolution test because I said humans existed before dinosaurs. Following that I failed the pig dissection test because I claimed my pig was a hermaphrodite. I knew the little round things in the pig’s nether regions were either testicles or ovaries, but they really looked like kidneys. Hermaphrodite seemed more diplomatic than the truth: the teacher had given me zombie-pig.

So you know what? I’m so so done with worrying about my intelligence. Clearly there’s something going on up there because I manage to get out of bed everyday. Other than that, well, I’m slow. I like to retreat to a nice hide corner to think things over. It can take a few days. Or weeks. But, whatever. That’s the way I work.

---

3. Rejecting my inner wimp

Constructive criticism—real constructive criticism that is devoid of malice and only aims to help a person grow—is a gift. It is easy to compliment someone. Say something as simple as “I enjoyed that,” and they will love you. You don’t even have to read the piece.

But constructive criticism requires a real investment of time. You have to read the piece three or four times and pull it apart, think about what works, what doesn't. You become a co-author. Then you have to sandwich the analysis between lots of compliments and enthusiasm so the writer’s feelings don’t get hurt.

Even so, many people don’t want to hear it. They’ll argue, they’ll tell you you’re too dumb to appreciate their genius, and they’ll hate you for a moment.

I am lazy about my constructive criticism. I’ll only provide it on request, and even then if I get a lot of resistance, I’ll switch over to compliment mode. I have other things I want to do with my time that don’t involve getting yelled at.

I am trying very hard to learn to be grateful for constructive criticism. Not just on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level. I want my knee jerk reaction to be an overwhelming gratitude to someone for taking the time and effort rather than feeling like I’ve been punched in the face.

I hope this will carry over to all aspects of my life. My performance review is coming up. I know I’m making mistakes. I don’t know which ones matter and how to fix them. I want to sit through a feedback session with dignity and grace and sincerely thank my boss for taking the time to help me grow.

2:10am: The God of Elephant Heads
Late in the afternoon my parents and I brave the biting cold of New Year’s Day to drive to the Hindu Temple. We are not particularly religious but we believe in fortune tellers and wild streaks of luck that can flash out of the heavens and transform any venture. Whether the luck is good or bad is the result of a complex calculation derived from your character, the number of small animals you kill during hit and run accidents (we don’t make a habit of this but my mom swears she lost her diamond bracelet because she ran over a squirrel), and oh yeah, the will of the gods.

In the back seat of the car I am falling apart. It has not been an auspicious day for New Year’s. I am drained. I have been socializing with old high school friends, asking, asking, Who are you? Oh, who are you now that high school is long gone? Can we still be friends? and now I am tired of parties, tired of partings.

I fought with another friend and reverberations of my shouting are still thrumming through my head. Was I right? Was she right? Why can’t I handle conflict? My God, how am I going to stumble through life when I can’t even handle a fight with a friend?

“You’re going to a temple?” she said, incredulous when I bailed out of hanging out. “You’re not religious. You’ve never mentioned a temple before.”

( It’s because I hate going. )

6:40pm: “I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong”---Benjamin Franklin
I love New Year’s resolutions. They give me an excuse to shove the nasty business of self improvement under the bed for an entire year. Then on December 31st I’ll pull the whole mess out and draw up a road map for the New and Improved Me Version 6.2. I drafted thirty two resolutions when I was sixteen. Number eleven was to keep at least one resolution. Number twenty nine was to keep number eleven. I’ve forgotten the rest of them.

It’s a bad economy, the environment is going to pot, difficult times call for simplicity. One resolution this year.

I will not fear failure.

A fiction professor told me when he was a student someone told him he’d be alright because he didn’t fear failure. Panic attack on my part because I do.

In middle school I’d bawl my eyes out and attempt to slit my wrists with a butter knife (sharper ones hurt) because I got an 89% on a math test. There was a one percent margin between suicidal despair and the ability to live with myself. I shit thee not. Is it any wonder math was my least favorite subject?

Someone mentions the f-word to me and I’m out the door digging trenches doing or whatever it is you want me to do because there is no try, just do it, etc, etc.

But before I’m out the door, I’ll pause. Do I even want to try something if I can’t succeed? What if I don’t succeed? What if I just try and fail? Isn’t that worse than not trying?

So sometimes I don’t make it out the door. I just stay inside under the covers and sleep away the day. I’ll wake at dusk, head aching, dizzy because I have somehow missed the sun, and that’s when I know I’ve hit the rocky bottom of that beautiful pit called failure.

I’ve failed in so many ways, in teensy eating cupcakes I wasn’t supposed to touch ways, to large oohhh I wasn’t supposed to press that red button that says detonator ways but my most spectacular failures have been the moments of paralysis.

Last year I applied to over two hundred jobs. I got three. I failed 197 times. But the sun kept rising. And even though it should have stopped and exploded into fireworks when I got my offers, it simply rose again. That’s what it is supposed to do.

And I hear that’s what we’re supposed to do. Keep rising.

Here's to a wonderful New Year to you and to you and to you. Cheers.

11:29pm: Reality's Hairy Gut
So after I write my strategic plan for taking over the world, reality rears her ugly head, belches in my face and scratches her gut. I discover that face belching kinda sucks, the gut is prettier than mine, and reality is her same old self a little bit of the ugly, a little bit of the beautiful, lots of the mundane.

My week in clips:

( 1. Rejections should come with initiation rites. )

( 2. I google image deserts at work. )

( 3. Chinese women think I'm hot. )

( 4. Newspapers are for toolbags. )

( 5. My coworker is a higher life form. Possibly a robot. )

( 6. I was slacker in college and I'm paying for it. )

9:49pm: Work, Write, Run
School is a dangerous business for the neurotics of life. For the past ten years the sole purpose of my life was to complete a pile of assignments.

I derived a masochistic pleasure from completing each task. A finished assignment meant I was a good student, and therefore buried under the tangled knot of my neurosis, there was a good person. So I never looked up from my books to trace out the arc of the assignments, examine the path they put me on. If I did stop to pause over my reading, all I could see was tables filled with students hastily scribbling away, and if we all stopped scribbling to look up, what would we see? An expanse of ugly carpeting and cement walls light by florescent lights in a basement without windows, a basement where it was impossible to see Saturday fade into Sunday.

Looking up was a waste of time so I didn’t. I’m not sure many of us did.

And so sometimes it is a shock to wake up in my bed, walk to work and wonder how I got here, where I plan to go from here, and how I’m going to get there. For about three months I socialized like mad until I realized I was spinning in slow circles in the sand, socializing was alright, sometimes it was fun but all it lead me to were restaurants with the same food, the same conversations with the same coworkers.

Developed a three part mantra to cope with life: for the past few weeks I have thought of it constantly for the past few weeks I have been happy and sane.

(Except for when I don't meet my daily goals. Then I'm a basket case...as I have been all weekend.)

( Work, Write, Run )

1:32pm: fathers + children
She says, “What’s it like growing up with a genius?

You choke on your tea, and say, “Who?” but you already know. They’ve been saying it ever since you can remember.

“He’s incredible, you know.”

“There’s no one else on earth like him.”

And then they look at you. You’re five, and you know all the stories, that boy who grew up in India and could only breathe in numbers, that lanky teenager who won physics bets to keep himself in chapattis, that young man who scared his professors and impressed the Nobel Prizers, a man with a dream, the man with the dream.

Play with the dream in the sandbox, fall asleep holding its hand, and when he says it will be yours too one day--swell with pride. Paint your face in your mother’s makeup, wrap yourself in sheets and old sweaters, polish his shoes until they shine, slip them on and clunk around the house screaming: Here I come.

They tell you you’re just like him, and you know you are. Cultivate the same duck footed walk, the explosive temper, and wait. Wait for the seeds of genius he surely gave you to flower into strange and wild fruit that you will cup in your hands and show the world—see how they glisten, see how they glow.

Beg and badger your way into advanced math classes even when the teachers tell you you’re a borderline case, take physics, keep taking physics even though the equations spin around and around in an incomprehensible dance, because surely the numbers will call to genius that must be there beating inside of you, that must be there waiting to waken.

Keep waiting for it as you enter the marble halls of college. Give up the math, the physics, say you’re a natural born writer instead. Parade past the professors wait for the genius to call to one of them, any of them. Hate the girls who know they're talented, curse the boys who never doubted it, tell people you’re a work in progress, talk to you later, goodbye.

Grab a shovel, scrub at the ground, dig holes to China, dig holes to Japan, dig tunnels shaped like donuts in hopes of finding your own dream curled in the dirt, a fat white grub. There is nothing but dirt and skinny worms. Ditch the shovel, collapse on the ground.

Scream at the genius it’s time, it’s got to come out, this game has gone on long enough. Shake it by the shoulders and shout and shout but it’s deaf, it’s dead, it’s out for lunch be back later.

Stare at the sky. It is blue and endless.

He calls and he tells you he can see your future and it’s wonderful, you and the dream, god the things you’ll do with his dream. He needs someone like you who can use words and tell the world what a dream built from numbers means, needs someone who’ll get all the men and women of the world to stand to attention.

“And my God, you have what I need,” he says. “Now isn’t the time,” he says. “Five years. Maybe ten.”

And there it is, his dream shining over tunnels to China and tunnels to Japan, no donut tunnels, no grubs, just the clear prism of his mind blazing through the mud and the dirt of the world, dreaming, dreaming on and on.

Put down the phone and get on a treadmill. Run until your lungs heave. You can see your face in the mirror opposite, it is an indistinct blob, very red and blank from exertion, with hair plastered all over it. Keep running, but the view doesn’t change, the face is still red, still covered in hair, still exhausted, still blank.

Take off your glasses. Everything beyond the tip of your nose blurs, but still your legs keep churning, carrying you somewhere, going nowhere.

Find it’s easier to run this way.

Put the tea cup down.
Tell her you don’t know.








Rough night. Bad morning. Panicked so much when I wrote this that I almost started crying.

I walked into a liquor store once and they sold “Wandering Poet” sake in a small bottle for thirty three dollars.

If I drank a glass of it would I be doomed to wander the earth speaking only in verse?

EDIT: In an attempt to take myself more seriously, I am trying to submit everything I write. If you have any feedback on this/for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. What you have to say can only help me grow.
Thank you.

3:12pm: Miss Manners Gets on the Phone
I love my cellphone to the point where it might be a new born baby fresh from my womb oven smelling of cinnamon and apples. It beeps, I pick up. It weeps, I hush hush into the mouthpiece.

But here’s the rub: everyone else owns one too and they behave the exact. same. way. And you get a world where people answer while they piss in public restrooms, yammer away while hanging out, and probably text while they’re doing unmentionable and scandalous things that I can’t talk about because I’m rated G. Quasi G.

My cellphone addiction=cute, understandable, totally reasonable.

Your cellphone addiction= Me take it and pitch it over the balcony.

Final result, everyone should be required to pass a basic etiquette class before they’re allowed to own one, but Congress is involved in some teensy debate about health care and that shizzle and with the economy and well…

I think I’ll have to take things into my own hands.

I’ve come up with some basic cell phone etiquette rules. I have broken all of them except number six because I don’t know how to put people on hold. Actually, let me be more accurate. I’ve shattered all of these rules and made pretty pots out of the pieces. At the rate I’m going:
A) I will have no friends
B) I will have no one to call on my phone

Therefore this is my attempt to save myself from a life of doom. These are the rules. These are the rules I must not keep breaking, but I’m writing about them as a victim because it’s so much easier that way.

( 1. Do not pick up the phone if you can't take the call. )

( 2. Do not pick up the phone if you don't want to take the call. )

( 3. Be mindful of where you use your phone. )

( 4. When you're on the phone don't have side conversations with the outside world. )

( 5. When you're hanging out with the outside world, don't have side conversations with your phone. )

( 6. Don't put people on hold, call them back )

( 7. If someone tells you they have to go, let them go. )



Naturally these are subject to change depending on the scenario and it really boils down to some cute punch like: when in doubt don’t pick up.

Thoughts? Additions? Stories? Cookie? Cookies!

11:48pm: My Man Godfrey
I want out. There’s the kind of love they tell you never to have. It’s for, oh hell, let’s be original, let’s be fresh, let’s shake up the litany and say: a man named Godfrey.

Godfrey is sitting down at the computer and vomiting all over the page until there’s nothing left inside of you. Godfrey is this poem.

Read the poem all the time, read it between spreadsheets and homework assignments, send it to all your friends, read it until it echoes in your head, a great ringing bell and know—

You’re nothing without Godfrey.

But Godfrey appears once a month and it’s glorious and then he says, “Goodbye sweetheart,” and he’s out the door, to London, to Paris, to fucking Bali, who knows, who cares and it is goodbye.

Goodbye Godfrey.

Only it’s never goodbye, its Godfrey all morning, Godfrey all afternoon, Godfrey all night. Godfrey, as you walk to work. You chase Godfrey down white sidewalks lined with scarlet and mahogany trees that form a canopy overhead. Godfrey is in the golden mist of seven thirty a.m. when the city is just beginning to wake and the sun still believes anything can happen.

Godfrey peeks at you through spreadsheets you work on midmorning, whispers, “What are you doing darling? Come here, come home to me.”

You count the hours, count the minutes, arrive home, flip open your laptop and…there’s no Godfrey.

Godfrey doesn’t exist.

Godfrey is never coming back.

You tell yourself you’ve given up hope. Any reasonable person would get out. Any reasonable person would invest their time in something more lucrative, or at the very least, if it’s that bad, board a plane, sail off into the sky, and find Godfrey. Look for him in the cobbled streets of London, hunt for him in Paris’s bakeries, coax him away from the beaches of Bali.

Instead you wait. You bake jam muffins, take Hindi classes, talk to your coworkers and laugh at their jokes and ache a little inside. They think you’re mad: can’t talk about TV, can’t talk about sports, doesn’t understand pop culture references can only talk about Godfrey, Godfrey, Godfrey.

“Give up,” they say.

“Get a life,” they say.

And you find, indeed, you have lost the art of conversation. You don’t have anything to say except, Godfrey, Godfrey. Goddamn you, Godfrey.

You start going to the gym after work. You run on the treadmill because you hear that somehow, running on circles sets people free. You run like it’s going to turn you into a great white bird and you’ll circle around the poor pathetic gym and then bust out of the apartment soaring over the trees and you’re never coming back—

And your lungs give out, your head spins and you slow to a walk, slow to a stop. Get off the treadmill. Walk around the gym, dazed.

Crawl back to your apartment, cram a jam muffin in your mouth and curl up in bed with your computer, a half creature facebook stalking other people to live their lives and you open Word and write:

“I want out,”

and right there, there’s goddamn Godfrey, beaming at you.

Suddenly you can live with yourself. Suddenly you rather like yourself and the future unfurls her red carpet for you and Godfrey and that is all you need....

And Godfrey doesn't show up the next day and you scream, and you bang your head against the wall, stop because it hurts, and then keep banging it because you know even if you pack up your books, throw down the pen and scream at Godfrey to go away, and he goes and you become an investment banker who speaks in spreadsheets, you’ll still wake up every morning thinking Godfrey.

8:38pm: Namaste Adam Smith
I have become a working student.

( Hindi )

( Economics )

2:17pm: How to Get an A in College
When people told me the college paper is an entirely different beast than the high school paper, I laughed. I rocked papers in high school. They walked up to me, I fed them grass from the palm of my hand, shot them, presented the carcasses to my teachers and received accolades.

Then I got to college and was utterly utterly demolished in my first few writing courses. The college paper is a heftier creature, more wily, more complicated, existing on an entirely different plane of existence. I had to rethink my whole philosophy and rework my technique. While previously I’d just sauntered into the savannah and strangle the thing with my bare hands, in college I had to sharpen my hunting knife and hide in the bushes for a good week or so before I even caught a glimpse of the beast.

I learned to revise my butt off, do prep work weeks in advance and meditate about papers. However, even though my grades slowly climbed from horrifying to respectable, I still couldn’t get up to my former high school standards. I was doing solidly but not brilliantly.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” I told one of my TAs, after receiving yet another respectable grade for a slightly mangled beast. “I really want to know how to write a truly excellent paper, and I’m not there yet.”

“You realize you’re close, right?” the TA replied. “You shouldn’t even worry,” he said, damning me with another B+/A-.

Not helpful.

But, during my last year of college I finally figured out what makes a truly excellent paper in the eyes of the grader. Here are the papers that taught me what it was.

( How to capture the college paper beast that stalks about rainforests )

12:25am: Taking Over the World
The writer’s block is a frozen mass of um, something that’s solid and really hard to um break down. Yeah. Words. Diamond. Yes. I have a solid diamond writer’s block thing. Shouldn’t I be able to sell it on e-bay?

I have lost the art of conversation.

Thankfully my friends haven’t.

Me: I’m bored.
Azzy: I was bored, so now I'm plotting to take over the world.
It looks like it will take a while.
But if I can find 3 other people with about the same abilities as me who are down with the plan, we can complete phase 1 five years after graduating.
Me: Can I be one of those people?
Azzy: Do you feel like learning how to operate a data center?
And are you roughly guaranteed to have a way to generate 80k/yr in spending capital after graduation?
Those are the current requirements for things to move efficiently.
Me: …are you rejecting me?
Azzy: Kind of?
Quite frankly, you'd be very very useful at around stage 3 or 4
But stage 1 or 2, the endeavor has to be run very tightly, and is based on a bunch of tech you don't know.
Stage 3/4, we need people who can talk to the public, so there you'd be useful.
But stage 1 is just capital generation and research.
(Essentially we [CENSORED])
At around stage 3 things get very complicated, so, almost not even worth talking about it yet.
Me: But that’s where I’m involved. I want to know!
Azzy: Fine. Stage 3 is where we need to get the US gov't to grant us a very small legally independent country.
We basically want to do this based on developing some weapons for which testing them on US soil would be very bad, then do some lobbying saying essentially (but in better words): "We can give you bigger guns, but we need to have an extralegal zone to do it, because law prohibits us."If we ever get to stage 3, I promise I'll explain 4, but if any of this ever comes to pass, I'd rather not have stage 4 written down in chat logs forever, just in case.
Me: I have issues with that!
Azzy: Don't worry. Realistically, I have a good chance of getting 1 and 2 to happen, but not 3.


Censored= Azzy gave me the full details of his plans but asked me not to post these details on my blog.

I think this is the difference between genius and ordinary schmuck. Azzy gets bored and takes over the world. I get bored and I watch j-dramas.

9:31pm: I will not be defeated by writer's block.

1:02pm: German Correspondence Course
The most successful piece I ever submitted for fiction class was a mock facebook wall I wrote. Naturally some clever fiend just had to say, “Well, I don’t understand the point. Could you just turn in a real facebook wall instead of writing your own? What’s the difference?”

Honestly, the difference is that the real wall conversations are much better. My friends Erica and Alex are doing a German correspondence course via facebook, and every morning I stalk them diligently and spend about fifteen minutes laughing my ass off.

Um, I should probably ask their permission to post this, but that’s extremely awkward so I’m going to be a plagiarist and just post it. (I am going to burn in writer hell, oh my God, but that’s okay, this is so funny I’ll be redeemed for sharing it.)

( German Correspondence Course )

11:46pm: Last Night at College
Late Fragment, Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.


All day the agony of leaving has been sharp, relentless, the agony of leaving behind a full life, three years of loving, hating, and laughing with my friends.

Thank you for sharing moments of life with me.

4:49pm: Reading List
Two papers down, two to go. Promised myself I could have some time off to write this, since I’m ahead of schedule.

Book chat:
( Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner )


( Tyler's translation of The Tale of Genji )


( How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, Umberto Eco )


( The Sunny Side, A. A. Milne )


( Self-Help, Lorrie Moore )


( Poetry of Pablo Neruda )


( Girl Got Game, Shuziru Seino )


Confession:

I’m reading these books differently (minus Girl Got Game). I tend to chomp through fiction, but it is difficult to read any of these for more than an hour at the time. The language gets to my head, I must run around the room, I must fall off of a sky scraper, it’s too much. After a while, the rush wears off and I suddenly want to go for a walk or stare at the ceiling and think nice ordinary thoughts in nice ordinary language.

8:23pm: Thoughts at 8:28 p.m., the end of a grueling week

Somewhere in the world there’s a train pulling away from a station, and it’s a train I need to be on. Commuting two days a week to an internship in DC means I live by the clock. A split second is the difference between getting on the metro and catching my train, or having the doors squeeze shut on my fingers.

 

 ***

When I miss the train, I buy myself a pastry and walk around DC, admiring the Capitol. Next week I think I’ll miss it deliberately and go to Chinatown for Peking duck sandwiches.

 

 ***

Lemon danishes make me feel like I’m cramming a summer’s day into my mouth.

 
***

 

I’ve started thinking of interviews as conversations where I get half an hour to peer into someone else’s life.

 
***

 

If I could be born again, I’d ask God to give me a singing voice. When most people say they can’t sing, they mean they are shy. When I say I can’t sing, I mean my choir teacher pulled me out for mandatory after school sessions and tried to beat some sort of tune into it.

But some days, I think the only real way to express anything, is to stand in the middle of the road and belt out lyrics at the top of my lungs. Perhaps that’s why I have no voice.

 
***

 

During  the  morning train ride to DC  I watch  the sun come up over fields full of dead wheat and fall in love with America, the vastness of the land, the pink streaks of sky. When the train pulls into the station a wave of commuters, dressed in their uniform pea coats, scarves, and leather gloves, descends. Heads bent, they clutch their coffee cups and iPods, bumping elbows as they jostle past each other in order to catch the next train.
When I join them,  I am filled with an overwhelming hatred for my fellow human.

 ***

Music is dynamite. I wonder how people can stand to walk around all day plugged into their iPods. My favorite songs bring on a rush of adrenaline and all at once I am desperately in love, desperate for glory, desperate to sing, dance, jump off a bridge and go down in flames.

I don’t listen to music often.

 

 ***

Oh please, please, tell me the name of that train I need to be on. Tell me where it’s going and when I’ll get there.





Good night.
 

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12:35am: Dim Lamps

These days I believe in magic eight balls, my uncle’s palm reading nephew and that blind fortune teller in New York my mother swears by—any dim lamp that will shed light on the future. For the first time I have no idea what life will look like three months from now, six months from now. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, I don’t know where I’ll be, and lastly, I don’t know who’ll be in my life.

I am lying to myself, actually. I know. I can hear the whirring wheels of the present rushing headlong into the future. I know each turn takes me further away from the various people I used to be, and thus the people I used to know.

( Detours )

5:25pm: Welcome Home...
May a sea serpent named Cataluna rise up from the foamy depths of the Atlantic Ocean and stangle me to death should I ever again make an airplane meal of:
A) California rolls
B) a Mrs. Field's chocolate chip cookie
C) virgin bloody Mary mix


On a brighter note, I am now closely acquainted with the upstairs toilet. There's brand name is stamped onto the lid like a tattooed name. Who knew?!

On the darker side, my parents are about to kill me because I keep singing my new song of woe between bouts.

"I am vomitose going on comatose
I know that I'm naive.
Pasteries I meet tell me that they're sweet
And willingly I believe.

I am vomitose going on comatose
Innocent as a rose..."

Ta. The savage wild call of porcelain, resounds in my gut and I must flee.


Edit: Okay, it's no longer funny, someone plz kill me and put an end to this misery. Kthanxbye.

12:31am: This Girl's Life (Rough Draft)

Merry Christmas everyone!

(This is usually how I write English papers.)

Assignment: Come up with what I want to spend the next fifty years of my life doing and a plan to achieve that goal.

Due: May 2009

5:38pm: Jakarta Kitchen Maid
at five you wake me
tapping on the door.

i dress for work in the dark
and curse this life.

in the kitchen you give
me breakfast

and pack lunch
without a word.

after i leave you will
spend the day cleaning

my laundry, my room
my floor, my toilet.

i still don’t know your name.
do you bless this life?

at nine i stumble home
you take my coat and shoes

give me dinner and
don’t say hello.

once i saw you
smiling while chopping lettuce

you stopped when
you saw me.

at ten we silently
retreat for the night

you to your cramped
kitchen bunk.

me to my king
sized bed.

we were all sisters
in a previous life.

8:03pm: Take Off
Written a week ago…

When the plane to Singapore lifts off, a grimy layer of insecurity slides off of my shoulders. It falls somewhere in the Jakarta cityscape that is receding from sight, from memory. I’d rather be flying home than taking a week to see Singapore and Malaysia. Our travel plans are ridiculous due to ticketing issues. My mother flies into Kuala Lumpur and I have to an eight hour train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur ahead of me. Still, I am happy, exuberantly happy.
It wasn’t that I was unhappy in Indonesia, it wasn’t that anyone was unkind but rather that everyone did their duty so very dutifully. Spare me from gratitude. It is carbon monoxide poisoning. You do not know you are dying until it is too late to save yourself. How can you complain about oh- lack of conversation, loneliness, clashing value systems, not being loved- when someone who owes you nothing is steadfastly doing their duty towards you? Instead you bend and you berate yourself for appalling ingratitude until the stone monuments in your mind begin to crumble to dust.
I did not realize any of this until the plane left the ground, the world fell away, and I felt lighter than I had in weeks.
I had thought I was incapable of talking to people, had known that college and friendship was a delusion, but at the Singapore train station I strike up a conversation with a Malay dentist. She tells me about planning outreach programs in village schools, giving it all up to immigrate to America with her children, hating America and its stressed out materialistic culture, and how much she loves the warm relaxed pace of Malaysia. She gives me her address and tells me to call her during any emergency.
Perhaps, I’m too happy. Later when it is dark and the train still hasn’t arrived at the station I walk down the corridor and ask the first person I see when we’ll arrive at the station. The person turns out to be an architecture student who follows me back to my seat and plumps himself down. After a few minutes he gives me his number and address and insists I call him if I want someone to show me Kuala Lumpur. I huddle into my seat. He shifts closer and asks me for my screen name. His phone rings. He picks it up and I hear him say “American”. Two years ago I would have taken his friendliness for granted. Then, I imagined I had been granted an immunity (is this innocence?). Two years of nothing in particular happening at college, lets call it life, and my immunity morphs into a fear of male strangers.
When the train arrives he escorts me to a taxi and sends his regards to my mother. Safely ensconced in the taxi I decide he is a very nice boy, but I feel lucky rather than immune.
The taxi driver wants to know who I am and where I’m from. We stumble through a conversation, navigating past my strong American twang and his lack of English and I explain I’m Indian and Chinese.
The taxi driver winks at me and flashes me a thumbs up: “Very cute combination.”
I give him my best smile. Compliments have been rare this summer, and this is delicious.
Perhaps I still have some immunity.
Kuala Lumpur is a brighter, cleaner version of Jakarta. The roads are lined with the same lush greenery and tropical flowers, but here traffic moves instead of remaining bumper to bumper for hours.
I learn I am not a unique product. 25% of Malaysia is Chinese, 10% is Indian. There are frequent inter-marriages, and yes there’s even that extra dash of Malaysia (which is almost Indonesian but not quite) that I thought made me unique.
I start angsting because I realize I can’t angst about being unique anymore.
At the shao lin style temple my mother gets terrible excited because she thinks there will be monks and kung fu. I remember that a long time ago, back when my father was always away on business trips, she was the center of my world, as she has been these few weeks.
There are no monks, and there is no kung fu, but she takes me through the steps of prayer. Put money in the donation box. Take the incense. Light it. Stand before each alter. Bow your head, repeat your prayer. Do not scream if the falling ash burns you.
She tells me to pray for the health and wealth of everyone I care about. Then, and only then, can I pray for myself.
We visit the Islamic Museum of Arts. The museum was only built ten years ago and the collection is green and crude, but housed in a building that is worth visiting for its own sake. It is white and spare, full of empty spaces occasionally relieved by an outburst of intricate inlay. In front of the elevators is a large room that has a sheet of glass on either end. One end overlooks a blue star shaped fountain, the other a wave of trees. In the middle of the room there is a carved dome. In the mid afternoon sunlight, the gold blazes and the room is a dazzling, fiery white. It is a reminder that God is perhaps not the material, but the absence of it- ironic for a museum.
In Singapore we shop. I believe money is meant to be hoarded in a great nest underneath your bed. My mother takes it a step further and believes spending it takes a few years off of your life. This applies in all cases except: A) delicious Asian food B) overwhelming cuteness.
Overwhelming cuteness means so cute it’s a squeegasm.
Then we buy, no questions asked.
(We have the taste of five year olds. Seriously. We keep ignoring boutiques in favor of shops filled with stuffed animals and hair clips.)
This policy worked quite well until we ended up in Takashimaya, a Japanese department store.
There was a particular display that involved pastel colors, fat smiling cats on plump purses, hats, Kleenex box covers, walling hangings etc. etc.
Squeeeeeeeeee!
We looked at the price tags. I pulled out a calculator to make sure I’d approximated the conversion correctly.
So cute. So expensive.
My mom glared at me.
I put the calculator back. 1.35 Sing dollars = 1 US dollar, so it’s cheaper anyway, right?
Squeeeeeeeeeeee!
Squeeeeeeeeeeee!
Squeeeeeeeeeeee!
The sales person, who knew an easy mark when she saw one, kept trotting out and piling more and more in front of us.
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
What can I say? The cuteness lead to a sensory overload that fried our neurons and rendered my mother and I temporarily incapable of doing math.
At the very end I calculated the price in USD.
Complete and total wallet massacre.
I considered throwing the calculator out. That or going on Prozac.
So cute + So expensive = So damn broke.


Sent the following e-mail to my dad:

Hi Dad:
Mom and I squandered the family fortunes on cute things with cats today. Plz. admire them when we come home and do not ask for the bill. That would be untactful and rude.
How are you?
More importantly, how’s business?

Love,
Me + the cats

My mom and I just talked it over.
We’re going back tomorrow.
We talked it over and there’s one backpack with a little cat peeping out of the pocket we can’t do without.

…We’ll take the money out of the food budget.
…For the next six months.


Addendum:

For today and tomorrow night, I am on my own in Singapore thanks to the abominable knot that are our travel plans. I am terrified by how much I hate it. I am grateful most of today was taken up by escorting my mother to her flight, but tomorrow stretches before me, terrifyingly empty. I’ve never spent a night at a hotel by myself. I spent a few hours wandering around the mall just so I could drown my loneliness in the ceaseless waves of people.

1:42am: Temporary Security
Some days I worry about privacy. The interiority of my life—more than most of my friends, more than most of my relatives, perhaps more than I know about me— is online. There is a blithe blindness in writing publicly. I am not considering the friends of the friends who potentially have access to this, the person who found this on a computer’s browsing history I forgot to delete, or the people who will track me down years from now.

Yet, when I stop to censor myself, to narrow the broad range of topics, to eliminate this or that person from today’s rant because my words may get back to them, it feels as if fetters are locking themselves over my wrist. I don’t want to be prudent; I want to write as if this were a cheap diary with a lock that I hid in my underwear drawer. It is not satisfying otherwise.

Instead I tell myself that there are so many people online, so many things to do, and so little time. I don’t imagine anyone could be particularly interested in stalking me.

So wrote the girl who posted her address online, the suicidal boy who transferred sophomore year, or the high school freshman who described her fantasies about her crush in explicit detail. No one seemed to care in real life, and it seemed impossible that anyone would bother to read them online, so they described their lives in morbid detail.

I read their blogs, waded through pages of bad writing and spelling mistakes written by people I barely knew, because I found it fascinating to watch their masks crumble to pieces on their faces.

Columnists like Anna Quindlen have written articles mourning the disappearance of privacy for the internet generation. I’m not sure how I feel. In high school I shared my blog with school mates. Most of the people I knew well did not read it. Somehow though, I got to know a small circle of people whom I never would have imagined befriending: upperclassmen I was too shy to talk to, underclassmen I had no classes with, people I liked but somehow never saw. I’m still in touch with several of them now. I love hearing from them, I read their updates, and I think about them from time to time. I hope they are doing well.

Sharing blogs with my college friends has allowed us to describe the details of our lives, capture the intensity of our emotions in the moment, or just rant about or day, at our own convenience. The key to relationships is time: time to sit down and talk over lunch, time to check in with each other, and that doesn’t happen often. Being able to read what’s going on in each other’s lives prevents us from falling out of touch when we don’t see each other.

Yet, I am worried about the day I slip up- perhaps I already have- and an employer reads something bad and fires me, or a friend of a friend of a friend that I wrote about somehow gets this address and reads something cruel I wrote about them, years and years ago.

What I really worry about though, is vulnerability. In my last blog a couple people left vitriolic anonymous notes that stung for months afterwards. I worry what I post is too honest, too full of emotion, and I have just sauntered naked across the screen for everyone and their pet elephant. Then one day, when I am comfortably ensconced in my post as mayor of New York, all of this will come out and my career will crash. Or that you, right now, are judging me. Are you the boy who sits next to me in class? Do you laugh when I write about despair because I know nothing about despair?

We are taught not to cry in public when we are small. It is loud, it embarrasses our parents, and it disturbs other people. Rather, we must put our best foot forward, learn to shake hands with a firm grip, and perfect our smile for the camera because the moment we are born we are entered into a grand competition for resources in the world: food, shelter, and the means to obtain more of each.

We are told to practice impression management because it will help us during interviews. We learn to present our best self, gloss over our mistakes and failures, and focus on moments when we have outshone everyone else around us. The result is a toxic cycle where everyone constantly feels outshone and constantly tries to outshine everyone else. People around me still talk about their SAT scores.
“Ooh man, I studied so hard and it paid off. I got a 750 on math.”
“Really? I took it cold and got a perfect score on math.”
“Oh, well, you know I didn’t study that much. Besides, they gave me a scholarship. Pretty awesome.”
“Sadly, I’m not eligible for a scholarship. My family makes too much money.”

Similarly, it becomes natural to snap something sarcastic at someone who hurts our feelings instead of saying: “You hurt my feelings,” because feelings make us vulnerable.

No wonder blogs are so compelling. It’s a relief to know how vulnerable everyone is behind the impervious iron smiles that go up every day. It’s a relief to know that other people are just like you: more vulnerable, fragile and beautiful than you could possibly imagine.

It’s also a relief because now you have blackmail material on them.

I am going friends only this summer for my internship.* Please leave a note if you've been lurking, and you'd like me to friend you.


*Mostly because I have a bad bad feeling that during my last internship my boss could have/maybe/probably did read this.



"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
-Benjamin Franklin

5:48pm: <3 From the Universe
A heavy depression has been settling on my shoulders during the past few days. I got a flat B on the paper I’d poured my soul and a revolution into. Furthermore my grant proposal to fund an internship in Baltimore was soundly rejected without the saving grace of an interview. Finally, the thought of summer vacation makes me feel queasy.
As of now I have two internship offers. One is a Baltimore internship that seems low on content and resume value, but means a quiet summer hanging out with my friends. The other is an internship in Indonesia that has high resume value, and is somewhere on the Richter scale in terms of emotional stability. My emo poetry stage in life can be attributed to Indonesia. Even so, I have written a grant for funding for it too because I am a slave to my resume. Anyway. Everything else I applied to is somewhere between those two. I’ve been dealing by burying my head in books and hoping it will work itself out by May.
Cue in much angst, depression, and a general feeling that I ought to spend my life wasting away by a window over looking a pond. Woe is me! I worked and got poor results. I asked the universe why it had no validation for me. An A. Big shiny trophies. Parades. Pickles on sticks. I’d settle for pickles on sticks. I like pickles. But no. The universe seemed to reply that I was an untalented caterpillar I will never rise to the heights of butterflies. No metamorphosis in store for me...

It would have been appropriate if a deus ex machina had entered my life and sang songs and strummed a harp about how great I was and how my papers kick major ass…
Sadly the universe did not consider such actions appropriate.

However, it did send me an e-mail.

Dear Student:
Congratulations! You have been pre-selected to be a student tutor. No interview or application needed. Pay is __Double My Current Salary_ and hours are flexible!

I danced madly in my chair. I’ve always had this sneaking desire to be a writing tutor, but you have to have an English professor recommend you, and the way my papers are going that’s not happening.
Then I read the note at the end of the e-mail:

Note: We have pre-selected you to tutor in statistics.


Hang on while I giggle hysterically.
Math has only been my least favorite subject since I was thirteen.
Whenever someone asks me for help with it, I start hyperventilating into a brown bag because I have absolutely no confidence in my skills. I make lots of mistakes.
This is what happens when I help my friends with math:

Me: Hem hem, er er, oh pardon, I told you to do the wrong thing. Hang on let me think about it…ah, can I get back to you? *nervously shreds brown paper bag*
Friend: Sure?
Me: *frantic phone call to my dad* HeyhowdoIdothis?kthxbye!
*turning to friend*
I have it!! It’s really not a huge issue…you do la la la wa wa wa awooga.
Friend: You do what now?
Me: Oh dear…I messed it up. I’m sorry, it’s been like two years since I did any math and I wasn’t very good at it and I know I suck but I don’t mean to suck. It’s not my fault…Hang on let me call my dad. *dials number*
Friend: It’s okay, I figured it out. Also, you look kind of ill, are you okay?

I’m sure I’d make an excellent tutor.
And by tutor, I mean target for angry math students to throw tomatoes at.

I shook my fist at the universe and informed it that this was not validation.

Shockingly, it obliged me once again, and I got my second e-mail of the day:

Dear Student:
Congratulations! You have been selected to receive the ________ internship grant award for your summer internship in Indonesia. It was very competitive and only one student was selected. If for any reason you choose not to accept it, please let us know as soon as possible so we can notify wait-listed students.

I ooohed and felt my chest swell with pride. Then I read it again and the full ramifications sunk in. Funding for Indonesia. Must make decision fast. Can not wait till May and hope for the best.

Cue in long bouts of trying to decide if the ability to put internship and grant award on my resume is worth going absolutely fucking crazy and potentially trying to set off a volcano to bury the entire nation Pompeii style. (I did mention that I have issues with the place, didn’t I?)

I had the good sense to stop asking the universe for validation, but it wasn’t quite done yet…

This morning, as I walked to Moral Philosophy class, I realized the decision is so difficult because the two internships are exactly equal to me. They go around and around in my head. Indonesia. Resume Gold Star. All expenses paid. Award. Extreme loneliness. Culture shock. Boring work. Baltimore. Resume filler. I pay the expenses. Low prestige. Friends. Second home. Boring work.
Whee. Massive indecision. Whee. Massive stress because I hate not know my plans and holding out on people. Whee. Brain nearly shuts down. Whee. Panic. Panic. More panic.

Clearly the thing to do was shelve the issue and concentrate on other things. I thought about moral philosophy instead. My professor is wonderful. He rehearses his lectures and then freaks out in the next class if he thinks he screwed up. I have so much love for him.

He proceeded to begin today with a critique of his last lecture.

Professor: You just want to apologize for Monday’s lecture. It was terrible. I didn’t make many clear points…I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I want to say that I’m under a lot of stress right now.
Me: It’s okay. We all have off days! Hug?
Professor: I’ve got to make a commitment about what to do with my summer, and both of the options are just as good as the other.
Me: Seriously man, could we talk about something else…?
Professor: I have to decide where I want to go surfing. Costa Rica…
Me: Surfing? You jackass.
Professor: or Indonesia.
Me: ...!?!! *gibber*
Professor: Now there’s a principle of philosophy that illustrates this very nicely. Buridan’s ass is this donkey that can’t decide between which two stacks of hay to eat…because they’re so perfect. Only in this case it’s Indonesia and something else.

He drew a donkey on the board. On the left side he drew a squiggle and labeled it Costa Rica. On the right side he drew a squiggle and labeled it Indonesia. We spent the rest of the class discussing decisions and Indonesia while I attempted to end myself with a pencil.

I shall leave you with his concluding words:

Professor: You know what the ass does in the end? He can’t decide, so he shits himself, goes crazy and starves to death.