Man cannot live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of Katie. And by mouth, I of course mean hands. So read on, little ones, and fill yourself full on this month of July, starting from the bottom of the page.
Also July 15th, 2003: My local radio station asked me for three ways that I would improve them. I wrote:
1) I would never play Green Day. Ever. But if I was Andyman [one of the DJ's, who stays up all night on Christmas Eve, collecting money for charity over the air] and it was Christmas and someone offered to pay my charity $500 if I would play some Green Day, I would play "Basket Case". And nothing else.
2) I would stop taking so many of my damn cues from 97.1 [another local station]. Half of the time, I feel like you folks are listening to them to find out what's new and cool. Pick up a copy of CMJ and play bands while they're still underground. Good God, the OSU radio station has been playing The White Stripes for years now. In fact, The White Stripes were headlining the OSU station's free show on the Oval about two years before you guys even heard their MTV hit.
(Hint: Check out this little indie band called Jump, Little Children. They're going to be big soon—they're already big in the South—and you guys can say that you played them first. Sweetass.)
3) Remember the songs that you and your fans used to like. The two songs that made me love CD101 with all of my heart are Guster's "Airport Song" and Black Lab's "Wash It Away". I haven't heard them played on the station in about 5 years.
Did you ever read or see Roots? Yeah, think about that. And then play some more Beatles, goddammit.
July 15th, 2003:
To JD Bates, Adam Anderson, and Josh Whatever-Your-Last-Name-Is:
That happened when I was a freshman in college, and now I'm a senior in college. It's been three years, boys.
Move on. Get over it. Stay away from my site. Stay away from me.
I'd forgotten that you exist. Try to forget about me.
July 14th, 2003: This was one of those stretches of days that makes me consider how much human relationships please me. Being analytical to a fault, I sometimes lead myself to believe that I’m an introvert whose thoughts are clouded by the voices that enter through the holes on the sides of my head. But that’s really just not true. The truth is that the more I interact with people, the more I find out how I react to different situations, which leads to my knowing more about me overall. Plus, it gives me more chances to make a complete fool of myself, which leads to more analysing and a never-ending supply of material for my Huge Journal of Self-Loathing™ (i.e. this website).
This weekend started with a visit to my older, wiser, marrieder friend Eric in Michigan to see the band Mrs. Children. This band is from Columbus and plays a gig every Wednesday in a bar that’s practically in my backyard, mind you, so this was clearly just an excuse to tear a married man away from his family for a night, exerting power over him like the true Amazon woman I am. And I’m glad that I did, because our time together was truly just about as perfect as I would have wanted it. In a relationship plagued by plans gone awry thanks to family obligations and mismatched school and work schedules, one evening of expectations exceeded makes past disappointments seem like simple tests of endurance waiting to be rewarded. The band was in top form, closing with a cover of The Beatles’ “You Never Give Me Your Money” and returning Eric’s outspoken appreciation for their traveling to his state with gratefulness of their own for his attending their show. I was proud to know both of them.
After work yesterday, I went to the college-age meat market that some call “church” with my roommates Michelle and Bethany. Sure, it may seem funny for a borderline atheist to suddenly start attending church again, but I’ve never denied that it teaches lessons that can benefit everyone. Plus, I’m still very much open to the idea of discovering that God really does exist now that I’m old enough not to be persuaded by the silly threats of Hell and Satan that Christians like to cram down the throats of poor, unsuspecting children.
My usual church date, Jonathan, is on vacation right now, but his girlfriend asked if I would still sit with her at the service, and having never gotten to know her outside of the presence of Jonathan, I readily agreed. Michelle, Bethany, and I arrived ultra-late, but I happened to spot—Godknowshow—Liz amongst all of the other hundreds of cute, blond-haired high school seniors and brought her and her friend Jeff over to where my roommates and I were sitting.
After the service, Michelle got caught up in talking to her friend John Reuben (yeah, as in Columbus-born Christian rap superstar John Reuben), and Bethany was talking to one of our old high school friends, so I busied myself with Liz and Jeff until I looked across the sanctuary and saw the silhouette of my friend Aaron-who-I-met-in-an-English-class-last-year-and-who-has-a-local-band-that-I-love’s brother outlined in the candlelight (because it isn’t a proper college-age meat market without vanilla-scented wax and low lighting that hides teenage blemishes).
I really enjoy Aaron’s brother, Joel, but never have anything to say to him, so I just planned to ask if his older sister was there so that I could carry on some sort of not-wholly-significant-but-much-more-significant-than-standing-around-waiting-for-Michelle conversation with her. As fate would have it, though, Joel happened to be standing with the members of my friend Joshrea’s band, so the potential for someone having something to say was heightened four-fold. I approached rather cautiously, not totally sure that they would welcome me into their chat, insecure beast I am. But Genevese’s lead guitarist immediately struck things up with me and Joel talked to me as if he knows me as well as his brother does and it turned out that Liz knows them all, too, and the world was small again and we all went out for ice cream at Graeter’s afterward, whereupon I learned that it’s really very easy for me to talk to Liz, even without Jonathan around to mediate. I also learned that I really need to marry a man who’s willing to kill spiders for me.
And then tonight, I went with Aaron to see Pirates of the Caribbean. I have to admit to you that this particular outing of ours came about due to some really choice stalking of mine, though I would never admit it to Aaron. See, after a really intense work out last Wednesday (and by “really intense”, I simply mean that it was the first time that I’d worked out in what might have been two years), my legs were aching, so I waited for the bus outside of the student union to take me to my afternoon writing class. I had been there for about ten minutes when it finally came ‘round and I climbed aboard, but as soon as I did, I looked out of the window and saw Aaron walking by with another boy and a girl. My immediate thought was, “Oh, if only I’d walked!”, evidently not realising that my having walked would have put me ten minutes ahead of Aaron’s group. My second thought was, “Who are those people and why has Aaron chosen them over me?”, evidently not realising that Aaron hadn’t seen me and therefore hadn’t exactly chosen anyone.
Still, I was incensed with jealousy. I mean, I’ll readily admit to being the jealous type and all, but this was a sort of jealousy that I hadn’t felt before. It was immediate and overwhelming and actually left me feeling depressed. And I mean, it’s not like I don’t admit that I have some sort of thing for Aaron. Not really a crush, per se, because I don’t mind when he dates girls, but more like an absolute non-understanding of why he isn’t rushing to make me his wife when he knows that I refer to him as The Prettiest Boy in the Entire World™ in my head and when he tells me that he can’t talk to other girls with the ease of talking to me. Maybe that’s precisely the problem, though; maybe he thinks that I’m obsessive and sisterly. Blech!
Anyway, so, I saw him walking with these people and felt the need to steal him back from them, and imagining that he was headed for the same English building that I was, once I was off of the bus, I looked down the sidewalk leading to the building for any sign of him, and there he was. I had to make a big show of it as if it was such a random occurrence that we would meet like that, when in fact, I was more or less stalking him like someone not-so-sisterly-but-very-obsessive. We had been e-mailing each other all morning about a possible get-together this week, as it was, so we just went ahead and decided upon tonight.
Aaron picked me up about 15 minutes late—he’s very reliable when it comes to lateness—but he made up for it by remembering that I was wearing a skirt similar to the one I wore when we went to the Pedro the Lion show in Cleveland more than a year ago. The movie itself was very enjoyable (thank you, Johnny Depp’s make-up artist, for your fine use of black eyeliner), but more than that, it was nice to be the presence of someone who’s just a picture of calm and cool. Aaron refers to these excursions of ours as “chillin’”. And he’s so damn chivalrous, too, always unlocking my side of the car first and sending me e-mails to thank me for “chillin’” as soon as he gets home. And he writes poetry and sings and is attending grad school and likes to travel and won’t watch movies with extraneous sex scenes and—good God, I can’t wait to marry him off to one of my gorgeous indie rock friends so they can have gorgeous indie rock babies that they’ll name Katie. All 12 of them.
Yes, so, as I said, I like friends and acquaintances. And if I ever lie and say that I just want to stay home alone and not talk to anyone and wallow in my own introspection, I’m clearly just in the mood to hear you beg for my company.
(By the way, if anyone would like to meet this Aaron and his band, they’re playing an acoustic set with Genevese this Friday at Victorian’s. It’ll be early and free!, and I’d love to bring you along with me.)
July 2nd, 2003: I’m taking summer classes this year, which is usually something that I don’t do. In order to audition for my upper-level writing class for winter, though, I needed to get the lower-level Introduction to Writing Creative Nonfiction class out of the way at some point, and the lull of summer gives me plenty of time to write. I also figured that I might as well get a general education class out of the way while I was at it, so I signed up for a philosophy course.
The first meeting of the philosophy class was last Monday morning at 10:30, so I arrived around 10:15 and did the usual first-day look-over of my classmates waiting in the hallway to see if I knew anyone. When the room cleared a few minutes later, we all went inside, and all of the acquaintances began chatting about past and future quarters while I sat pondering which of them would be most interested in rock music and literature. The professor stepped in a few minutes later wearing a sleeveless t-shirt, but I forgave him for that when he spoke and this beautiful British accent filled the air. He welcomed us to his class on statistics and decision-making, quite different—and quite a bit more boring—than what I thought that it was going to be about. However, my disappointment was curbed by the fact that a good ten minutes after class had started, a stream of people—who had evidently thought that we were just leftovers from the previous class—filed in. As luck (or fate) would have it, one of them happened to be Bryan, the near-brilliant poet from my writing class last quarter. And so I didn’t have to sic myself on anyone, after all. Then, the professor asked if anyone had any personal questions for him, and I inquired about how many times he’s had tea and cake with the Queen mother. It was good to get a laugh on the first day.
Then, at the second meeting, a woman approached me during the toilet break and told me that she was one of my mom’s students back in the day. She said that as soon as she saw me in the hallway before the first day of class, she knew that I was Katie Ett. She had wanted to tell me then how sorry she was about my mom’s death but wasn’t sure how to bring up "such a sensitive issue". She told me that she didn’t find out about Mom until about seven months ago and was so shocked to hear it. It was great to be able to talk to someone about what a great teacher and an even greater person Mom was. So yeah, philosophy is good.
Creative nonfiction is a bit of a different story. It’s a three-week intensive course that meets for three hours every day, and I went into it with the greatest expectations that I would come out feeling as if I’m on the right track to becoming the famous author that I desperately want to be. My hopes were only heightened when I entered the classroom and found that my professor is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated former New York Times/Esquire/Atlantic writer. He was exactly who I was looking for, someone who knows how it’s done and how to get it published.
The first three days of class were pure bliss. I introduced myself as someone who’s been writing for years but never knew that it’s really what I want to do with my life until very recently. I turned in a few paragraphs of the piece I was working on, and the professor only offered encouragement, saying that he liked my style and humour. When I handed copies of the completed work to him and the rest of the class, I just knew that he was going to offer me the perfect blend of constructive criticism and praise. I knew that he was going to love it.
But he didn’t. Not at all.
I had written about my love of the South and how I over-romanticise all aspects of it, how I have this great affinity for things that Southerners hate. Like kudzu, for instance. I listed four points, numbered them accordingly, and wedged them between an introduction and a closing. I thought it turned out pretty well.
I was wrong, evidently.
My classmates each read over the piece silently with a few snickers here and there. They highlighted their favourite parts and told me that they were amused, just as I’d wanted them to be. But then the professor cut in and announced that he couldn’t find a point to my writing, said that he kept waiting to find some substance in it but that there’s none to be found. He told me that there’s no use in writing if I’m not doing it to service my reader with information. He told me that just being amusing isn’t enough. He told me that I might as well stop writing right now if entertainment is all I have to offer. He told me that I need to provide specific names of places and offer reviews of them to create a travel piece. I told him that I would not.
Someone else broke in, a woman in her 50’s who takes every opportunity to talk about herself and all of the drugs she used to use back in the day. She began talking to the professor as if I wasn’t in the room, saying that my list was a sign of lacking writing skills and that by accepting my piece, he was only perpetuating the decline of the art of the wordsmith. She told the class that kids like me are going to be the downfall of the creative nonfiction genre. The girl next to me poked me in the leg with a smile that was supposed to be comforting. The class stared at me as I sat chuckling under my breath in disbelief.
So, needless to say, I’m not too excited about presenting my next piece to the class this week. Maybe I’ll start looking into that whole biology/pre-med thing again. Or maybe I'll just console myself with the fact that the professor didn't actually win the Pulitzer.