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 June, starting from the bottom of the page.
June 19th, 2003: Today I realised two things about myself.
1) I have always believed that I should get whatever I want. A friend told me a few weeks ago that I seem to think that "the rules" don't apply to me, and though I found it sort of funny at the time, I've decided that it's really quite true. I think that I somehow imagine that the world will conform to me, like whatever I want will be adopted by everyone else. It seems contrary to nature, since I'm not an only child, and my family isn't super-wealthy, but nonetheless—
A simple example of this is when we order in food at work. Three or four of us will try to decide on a restaurant to call, and I'll think that I'm pretty open to anything, but the moment that I feel like Italian and someone else suggests Greek, I'm suddenly thinking, "Doesn't he care about my feelings? What if I don't want Greek?" I totally forget that we've had Italian the last three times just because I was really craving garlic bread or manicotti (with mozzarella instead of ricotta cheese, mind you).
The weird thing is that I'm not on any sort of power trip; in fact, I don't even realise that I'm feeling the way I am at the time. I've just been led to believe that if I want to be a doctor, I will. And if I want to skip class for a week and go down to Kentucky to visit my sister at UK, I can. I’ll do whatever I want when I want to!
I'm not fussy, though. I'm just particular.
2) I can't stand close-mindedness. Again, this is kind of a strange thing, since I was raised a conservative Christian, but close-mindedness is what made me leave the church, so it really comes as no surprise to me.
I realised this when I was discussing the war in Iraq with two of my co-workers. I'm not much for war in general, and I'm certainly not for war waged for incredibly selfish, power-hungry, money-grubbing reasons, but honestly, I don't purport to know anything about Bush's reasoning. Part of that is due, of course, to the fact that so damn much is being kept secret, but let's forget about that and focus on the issue at hand: close-mindedness.
One of my co-workers (who I’ll call Jack) brought up the war for God-knows-what idiotic reason, and I, very idiotically, had to go and tell him that I’m against it. He, very idiotically, asked why, and I (very idiotically, mind you) began to give my reasons. Well, after about two seconds, the other co-worker (who I’ll call Jane) announced that she needed to “walk away, just walk away”. Jack explained to me that Jane’s fiancé is in the National Guard and could, at any moment, be called away to fight. I replied with a simple, “So?”
Why is it that people automatically assume that I’m anti-soldiers just because I’m anti-attacking Iraq? This isn’t Vietnam, people. I wasn’t calling Jane’s fiancé a “baby-killer”, and I wasn’t spitting on him. I was engaging in a discussion where there were going to be two distinct camps, and I was completely open to what the other camp had to say. In fact, Jack and Jane were going to be defending their camp together, and I was going to be the lone soldier in mine. However, Jane was so close-minded that she couldn’t even bear to tell me her side of things because I was going to ask questions of her that she either couldn’t answer or didn’t want to answer. Seems kind of cowardly to me. It also makes me think that perhaps she’s only for the war because her fiancé is. I hate women.
And don’t even try to tell me that I should be open-minded about Jane’s close-mindedness. ‘Cause I’ll shoot you in the head.
June 14th, 2003: Today I talked to Eric Clapton.
No, seriously.
And it’s not like I don’t meet rock stars all of the time. I make it point to talk to all the bands that I go to see, you know. Or the good ones, at least. But this wasn’t backstage at some show. This wasn’t outside of the venue beside the tour bus. This wasn’t even in a hotel room after the gig.
No, this was at my place of work. Because, you know, Eric Clapton lives in Columbus part-time. His wife is from Columbus and his youngest daughter was born in Columbus and they have a house in Columbus and I work at a children’s science museum in Columbus where Eric Clapton and his wife and his youngest daughter come to play.
Today I was sitting at the service desk at the entrance to the area made only for kindergarteners, preschoolers, toddlers, and infants, when I received a call from the main service desk, telling me that a rock star was coming up to see me. I assumed that it was a visiting friend from any one of the local bands that I know. But then, out of the elevator stepped God himself.
No, seriously.
He was wearing a navy blue polo and khaki shorts rather than his usual white robe and white light bath, but it was God, all right. He and his wife marched right up to me and waited while I filled out an entrance ticket for them. I tried to think of something to say, but all of the wrong things kept filling my head. I couldn’t very well chant, “Clapton is God! Clapton is God!” at him and still respect myself in the morning. I couldn’t throw myself over the desk and hug him, thanking him for filling my childhood with the music that made me grow into the woman I am. And I certainly couldn’t tell him how much I adore him and want to bear his children with his wife standing right there. So I said nothing.
That’s right. Nothing.
I mean, I welcomed him to the area and explained the rules and handed him his pass and grinned back at him when he gave me a smile and a “thank you” in that gorgeous, gorgeous accented drawl of his. But I didn’t even let on that I recognised him. And I talked to him twice later on in the day, but I didn’t say anything then, either.
Because I’m so lame.
I discussed my problem with my older, wiser friend Eric after the fact, and he told me that I could have very subtly told him that I really admire his work. Of course! Brilliant! Admiration isn’t scary and stalker-esque like “I love you and want to have your babies” is.
I mean, for God’s sake, as it is, the man probably thinks that I had no idea who he was. He probably thinks that I’m some 21 year-old Britney-lover who doesn’t even know who the Yardbirds and Cream are.
Oh, the horrors of being born 20 years too late!
June 6th, 2003: I feel so liberated right now that I have a need to write about it. I can’t even describe what’s going on with me, though. It’s like I’ve been cured of cancer, like I’ve just been given a new life and now know the worth in being alive. Seriously.
After my last poetry class yesterday—where I read my poem that was written like a personal ad from the man in the moon and amused everyone—I went to Buckeye Donuts with Paul-who-is-a-friend-of-a-friend-and-went-to-see-Pedro-the-Lion-with-me-last-year-but-could-never-remember-my-name-until-this-quarter. On the way there, he shared with me the fact that though he’s been writing poetry for a while now, he didn’t know until this quarter that it’s his passion, what he wants to do with his life. He talked about how amazing it is to finally know what he wants to do and how he feels like the first two years of college were a huge waste of his time and how he thinks that next year is going to be the year where he really finds out what college is supposed to be like.
It was exactly what I’ve been feeling for the past couple of weeks, like it’s all coming together for me, like even though I’ve wasted two and a half years, I still have one left. Paul says that maybe undergraduate school is where we find ourselves and grad school is where we really get things done. I think that Paul’s right.
Once we sat down inside, Paul went to editing the poems for his portfolio while I watched passing pedestrians, but every now and then he would stop to discuss something. He talked about building his writing community like Jack Keroac did, something that I’ve been discussing with myself for three months now. He talked about looking for a grad school with creative writing professors who he would like to work with. I imagined myself going to Arizona State to write under Beckian Fritz Goldberg. I asked if he had ever seen the movie Orange County, half expecting him to laugh at me. Sure, it’s a pop culture thing meant for the masses, but it has a really great message. (The main character thinks that he has to go to Stanford, because his favourite author is a professor there, but when he meets the author, the author basically tells the main character that he can already write and doesn’t need anyone to teach him how to.) Paul totally understood what I was getting at, though, and told me how cool he thinks it is that we can be “intellectuals” and yet still manage to not be pretentious. I laughed at the thought of my being an intellectual.
I talked to Paul about my inability to write fiction because I care too much about who my characters are and not so much about what they do. I can write pages upon pages of character development but can’t, for the life of me, sketch out even a remote hint of plot. I told him that my whole life’s writings have been about my developing self, so I can only write about other developing selves. He told me that that’s beautiful.
This whole business of poetry has just made me look at everything differently. I don't mean that I now see the whole world in similes and metaphors; I just mean that I feel like I had no idea who I was only a few weeks ago, and now I feel like . . . well, I finally feel like I don’t have to look at the ground, searching for someone else’s footprints. I don’t have to be a doctor just to secure my monetary future. I don’t have to be a lawyer just to make my dad proud. I don’t have to be conducting research or editing the school newspaper or having beers with my professors to ensure good recommendation letters or anything else that my friends are doing. That’s not me. And that’s okay.
Cheesy, sure. But true.
June 3rd, 2003: I spent two and a half very happy years as an English major, you know, jaunting along with my American literature focus area, anxiously awaiting the day when I would write my senior honours thesis on Hawthorne’s "Rappaccini’s Daughter" or Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener". Until last quarter, when I suddenly started feeling like I didn’t really care to write 40 pages on Hawthorne or Melville. Or any American writer, for that matter. It wasn’t just that I realised how superior British literature is (and it is); I realised that I didn’t want to spend nine months writing about someone else, when it’s really my own work that I’m interested in.
And right about that time, in walked Chris to the English undergraduate lounge, where I was wasting time looking up vegetarian recipes on the Internet. Chris is a college friend of my high school best friend, Tracey, and he’s known as Fake Plastic Chris to my friend The BIG K.N. and myself, because he looks so darn much like a molded-face Ken doll. Well, Chris and I were discussing English classes and English professors and how much I don’t want to write my honours thesis on Hawthorne or Melville, when he informed me that I should just make creative writing my focus area so that I can get my stuff critiqued in a classroom setting and fill my thesis with my own work. It seemed like such a brilliant idea that I cried over my two and a half wasted years. And then immediately signed up for an introductory poetry-writing class.
The problem was that I had no idea if I could actually write poetry when it came right down to it. I can’t, for the life of me, spit out even two pages of fiction, so I sort of figured that I was destined to write journal entries for the rest of my life. And while it’s taken me a long time to accept that my nonfiction has its own artistic merits, poetry is a sort of Holy Grail for me. So I figured that even if my poetry all turned out to be about love and rainbows and green grass, there would be at least one person in the class who would suck more than I do.
The class turned out to be the greatest thing that’s happened to my college career. Come to find out that I actually really love to chop thoughts up and distill them down to their most concise form. Who would have ever thought, with all of the rambling that I do on here? I wrote about affairs with married men and deciding what to do with my life and summers spent on the farm and the greatest show that I’ve ever seen (Jump, Little Children—December 29th, 2002—Charleston, South Carolina). Basically, I wrote about all of the things I would normally write about on here—except that I had to use iambic pentameter or write in villanelle form or focus on sound and enjambment. The class simply forced me to do something that I’ve ached to do all along but didn’t want to try for fear of failing.
And so I decided that I wanted to continue on my new-found path of radness, but I encountered a little hurdle in trying to sign up for the first class that I needed for the creative writing focus area. I found that I needed permission in order to enroll, and getting permission required auditioning for the class by submitting a portfolio of five or six pieces of my best work. Now, considering that the entire scope of my poetry consisted of five poems—and five poems that were still in first draft form, at that—I didn’t think that it was even worth the bother of editing them for submission.
But still, I set up an appointment with the director of the creative writing program, which I accidentally missed and had to reschedule. When I met her at her office, she informed another girl waiting that she and I would be having "a 2-minute meeting", so I already knew that things didn’t bode well for me. She basically told me that it was too late in my college career for me to be changing my focus and that there wasn’t even any guarantee that I would be accepted into the classes that I needed. Nonetheless, she told me to go ahead and audition for the fall meeting of the first upper-level creative writing class.
And so I did. And I got in, amazingly. The professor who will be teaching the class wrote me an e-mail the day that she received my portfolio and told me that she’ll see me in the fall. So apparently the people in my current introductory poetry class aren’t lying when they tell me that I don’t suck. Incredible!
It’s funny, because while I had absolutely no idea that I would ever make it into the class, those few days between the time that I decided to audition and the time that I was accepted were some of the most freeing and frightening of my college career. I’m used to just signing up for whatever sounds interesting, whipping out a couple of papers that I don’t care about and will never look at again, and finishing the quarter feeling that, you know, no matter how droll some of the old literature can be, it’s good to know where modern writing stems from. But knowing that there was a chance that I might not be good enough to do what I wanted to—well, that actually felt kind of cool, like for the first time in my life, I was being challenged. And then to find out that I’m going to spend next fall in a class full of people who have enough potential for this professor to want to teach them—well, that feels even cooler.
For the first time in my sixteen years of schooling, I think that I might just be doing exactly what I want to do. And who cares how poor I’m going to be for the rest of my life? It’ll give me something to write about.