| At the archives, breathing on Kate Chopin’s manuscripts. They’re handwritten, hard to read. I say something about an upcoming book on handwriting, how the author hypothesizes that at some point in the future people won’t be able to read anything but type. She nods and says she’d believe it, that in recent years there’ve been interns unable to decipher the handwriting of old documents.
Staring at the manuscripts reminds me that when I liked someone when I was younger I’d wonder what their handwriting looked like. I’d forgotten about that.
On the way back home I take roads instead of highways and think about how one of the reasons I like the place is because when I’m there things feel certain. | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment   |
| | silence is so accurate | | |
| | In the largest room on the top floor of the art museum I sit with a notepad and pen and Richter’s November, December and January. There are so many students roaming around, their eyes rolling against the walls with this bewildered look like they’re surrounded by books written in a language they don’t know. Skinny girls with long hair and clothes from the mall look bored and huddle together, I don’t like the kind of smiles they have, they’re not even really smiles at all. A boy stares at the Matissee and asks no one particular why all the naked women here look strange. I think about how teenagers make me nervous. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | pt 2 | | Time: | 01:00 am |
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| It’s like anything else I guess, some moments (days) it doesn’t take any real work to feel focused and hopeful, and others times there’s a black mood that stretches on and on and seems incurable. I am, like some character in a movie I wouldn’t like one bit, entirely sure of what I don’t want to do and not so sure of what I do want to do. So far the things I’m far away from aren’t things I miss – not graduate school or obscure Victorian texts or dissertation writing or even teaching, now – and maybe that will change or maybe it won’t, but what in the meantime? Reading and writing, sending out resumes for jobs I do or don’t want, wondering if I should go to school to do something I'd like to do, feeling horrified or excited or merely amazed that I live here now and not there and I am doing this and not that.
But also: this situation, I know – I’m reminded especially while I’m here – is in some ways one of privilege. The desire to have a calling rather than a job, the assumption that you deserve a position that will allow you to be creative or challenged or content is something you learn or something you’re given. My mother, who grew up with very little and put herself through college and then taught for thirty years at the same school, is so bewildered by me; I ask her if she loved teaching and she looks at me as if I asked her if she loved brushing her teeth.
So what has been gained, post-graduate school, so far: The last several months have been the best stretch of reading the best books since before I started school, and there’s this hope of writing, of making something out of it, and this experience of relearning the place where I grew up. Still sometimes fearful but also less afraid, still and too often judgmental and arrogant when it would be better to remember that compassion isn't a feeling that needs to be hoarded, that humility is a lesson that should be put to good use. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | needle in the hay | | Time: | 10:35 am |
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| | I quit. I had been thinking about writing about the details, listing all the awful things about this job or this place or what the head said to me during the conversation but there's no point in trying to convince an imagined or real audience of anything, and there's definitely no need to worry about recording it for myself in case I were to forget. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Only two weeks in and things are pretty much a mess, it feels like there's almost no such thing as spare time, reading four novels simultaneously and preparing four daily lesson plans and I can’t imagine how I would keep going, I can’t imagine how long I could keep this up without having some sort of nervous breakdown or something. Why did they hire me? It seems sadistic or masochistic or at least disturbingly misguided, now I realize that I must’ve been the only person who applied, the only person crazy or gullible enough to have considered the job.
Later this week I will have to walk into her office and tell her. I will say that I had been promised lesson plans, that I never would’ve accepted the position if I’d known there would be nothing to work with, that I would have to make everything up from scratch, I would’ve known right then and there that it wouldn’t work. I will say that I don’t understand how anyone could do this amount of work, let alone someone who’s never taught high school before. I will say that I don’t understand why this school makes you sit in a circle for a two week orientation and discuss the importance of communication and being supportive and then, and then. Who knows what she will say: that she is disappointed, disgusted, that I am a horrible person, that I am letting everyone down. The amount of people I will upset and inconvenience is overwhelming, I picture them standing together, multiplying, an angry mob. I feel incredibly awful about leaving, but I know I can’t stay, that it would be impossible for me and probably pretty awful for the school sooner or later, too.
Embarrassed is the word I want to use again, I guess. I was so proud of myself for having gotten this job, I thought that things had been awful for awhile but that I was smart and worked hard and was a decent person so when things eventually seemed to work out it seemed only natural, and of course things are often messier than that, this is clearly messier than that. I’ve never felt like I regretted very much before but this past year I've been so awfully heavy with this feeling, and now thinking about how I should’ve taken the other job or at least should not have taken this one. Maybe it will look less like a regret weeks or months from now, I don’t know, I hope so. So now I am going to go back to St. Louis – like something out of a movie, you know, the kind of crappy one about the uppity girl/boy who returns to the hometown after a decade’s absence because the luck has run out or because it’s important to learn to be humble. Of course leaving California is something I’ve wanted for awhile, but this is an awful way to do it, a depressing way of getting what you want. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| I don’t know, it’s kind of too awful or hilarious to say, but the truth is that the fantasies about leaving already have started to become plans, possibilities. There are a lot of reasons this school doesn’t seem like a place I should be, but the most glaring is the implausibility of 6 classes and 5 preps, a workload that seems difficult even for someone with actual high school teaching experience. I have tried, tentatively, to talk about this with the head, but the odd thing is, no one seems to care very much. I was told at some earlier point that many people quit working here because it's too "intense." Now I guess I have a better understanding of what that word actually meant.
What will happen if I leave here? At some moments it seems like I am on the brink of ruining my future or my job prospects or my life or whatever. But there are other moments too, when I remind myself that I didn’t go through all the shit in the past year just to end up somewhere new and still unhappy, and maybe this is just another decision to make. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Tonight spent some time searching the internet for free maps and travel information about various islands with little success; only Canada and the U.S., it seems, are very eager to send out this kind of stuff, to actively recruit. Other destinations are more standoffish; Greenland apparently will not send you anything unless you are a travel agent. So instead I end up staring at an entry about islands on Wikipedia for awhile, and the list got increasingly obscure the more I scrolled; it wasn't quite what I had in mind, but there was something nice about reading names of unknown and uninhabited places. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Today's questions:
Are you nervous??? (Don't be nervous!)
You know they're going to try to test you, right?
How old are you? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Tomorrow is the first day of school. Over and over I think to myself, I am so nervous I’m going to throw up, and then of course I don’t throw up, the nervousness just stays inside and swims around, visits the different parts of my body. I think I must feel excited or happy somewhere, but there are so many other louder emotions to contend with, they're drowning any good stuff out. I try to remember if I felt like this the first time around but for a long time nothing comes to mind, it’s like trying to remember just any old random day from years and years ago. And then slowly, hazily, I remember the uneventfulness of the event, I mean, I guess, I remember why I’d forgotten: the inexplicableness of spending the first two days of high school sitting silently in “home room” for an entire seven hours, reading Maximumrocknroll (the newsprint made my hands filthy after about five minutes but we weren’t allowed to use the restroom until much later) and a Douglas Coupland novel about “computer geeks” in the Silicon Valley (highlighting favorite passages). Now that I think of it, it seems likely that I was too apathetic to be nervous.
Tomorrow though I will probably seem a poor sport if I read during the mural painting or capture the flag or the other fun, obligatory events in store. Ironically this situation, much like family get-togethers, conjures up a strange longing for adolescence when stand-offishness and bad manners were acceptable. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | “They think I am famous!” she called, through her thick flying hair. She smiled and grinned, in conspiracy, because she was not famous at all, only a pretty girl who had been married eight days. Her tongue was dark with blueberries she had eaten in the market – until Philippe had told her, she hadn’t known what blueberries wee. She smiled her stained smile, and tried to catch her soaring skirt beween her knees. Compassion, pride, tenderness, jealously, and acute sick misery were what he felt in turn. He saw how his first wife had looked before he had ever known her, when she was young and in love. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | The new issue of The New Yorker has a feature about a TV star who wants to be a movie star, or wants to maybe just give up acting; he says he is tired of being other people, that he wants to be himself. An "alternative rock star" from the 90's has a memoir coming out soon; I read multiple articles about it and they all say the same thing, she talks about how she hated being famous back then but also about how she wishes she were just a little more famous now because she'd like to play nicer venues. The TV star and the rock star are right of course, getting what you want is sometimes unnerving or unsatisfying and isn't actually what stops you from wanting more, wanting something else. Now that I'm here I'm onto something else, daydreaming this impossible version of my life where I live somewhere else doing something else. In some way this is an act of self-preservation; reminding myself that this is just a year long thing feels reassuring, a way of managing the reality of being utterly in over my head with the promise of a quick getaway. But even though in the last couple of weeks I've discovered that this job isn't exactly what I thought I was promised, I suppose I have to admit to myself that maybe that's only part of it. Since moving I've felt stupidly surprised and disappointed that I still do and say the same things and act and react the same ways, that I didn't lose any of my bad habits during the move, that I am, terribly, obviously, the same person. In the last few weeks so many people have told me how challenging this year will be or (the nicer version) how much I will learn from it. They mean professionally, but when I hear someone say this I end up thinking about things that are less concrete and more personal than that. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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For the first time since kidhood I'm letting my hair be curly if it wants to be (and oh, of course after years of suppression, it wants to be). Letting it be how it wants is easier and maybe nicer than trying to cajole and control and straighten it, even though it's kind of strange and messy and unpredictable. It's better than I expected, I guess, and it would seem that somewhere in here is an obvious lesson that I have to keep relearning. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Rereading all these high school novels and now spending time thinking about high school, not about being 14 or 15 or 16 or 17 which I have thought plenty about already, but about what school was like. I've put these memories so far away that they're nearly impossible to find, I sit and think and get these dim images of the "warrior" mascot painted in the hallway and the cigarette smoke in the girl's bathroom during lunch and always walking around with this teenaged armor of an open book or headphones or "weird" clothes or the blackest, angriest look and what it was like to see couples kiss in between classes or before or after school when I couldn't imagine how that would ever possibly happen to me and yet there they were, right in front of everybody, like it was no big deal at all. It's strange to remember after so much forgetting, it's funny to have these things that I'd have thrown away if I could've and now am glad they're still around.
There's multiple passages in To Kill a Mockingbird in which Atticus talks about how the first step of compassion is trying to understand why people do the things they do, "putting yourself in another's shoes," which I think at 15 must've struck me as some sort of hokey, feel good junk. It's this thing that I've heard so often that I don't think I ever realized until today that I've never tried to do it with any real earnestness or desire to get somewhere other than here, and I was sort of quietly amazed that putting it to use on an old, impossible case made my anger turn into something else. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| | I'm doing a lot of things I never thought I'd do. I guess someday maybe I'll even wear a tuxedo. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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gone_to_earth's journal
