Woo Lawd

Been quite some time, no? Let's see...a lyf upd8? Finished my first year; waiting on my review from the faculty to come in. The papers went fine, though I may be spending part of the summer revising one for possible publication. That'll take a shitload of work, however, as the paper just didn't crown as easily as I expected. On the to-do list:

-Employment? I have money saved up & probably don't need to work, but I'm terrified that I'll have a Bell Jar summer if I have nothing to get up in the morning for. Kidding? Ideally, I'd like to tutor, but I hear freelancing in Boston is pretty tough because you're competing with big groups like Kaplan & the like. May advertise, just in case. Thinking maybe an 8-week intensive course teaching high school seniors and/or college freshman how to write college level papers--with some literary crit & seminar-style discussion thrown in. This is mostly just a dream, but I figure it can't hurt to try. Otherwise, waiting tables, working at a coffeeshop, something like that, part time.

-A new place. If you're in the greater Boston area & know of any good places in Cambridge or Somerville opening up, give me a holler. Budget's around 600-700 on rent. I need out of my apartment asap.

Also, I joined okcupid...hahahaha. Whatever, it seems like a pretty classy site, & I need to expand my social circle or I'll hate Boston forever. Already had some interesting conversations there--and actually, a pretty good date? Don't feel like confessing details here, but I'm sort of interested to see where things go.

Other than that, just reading, looking around for a job & an apt, catching up on sleep. Not sure what to do with the blog this summer. Maybe I'll try and do the poem-a-day (poem-a-week seems more feasible now) thing again. Would be good critical stretching for me. I wanna start writing again regularly, & also take up exercise in a more serious way. I miss doing yoga every morning; might also start jogging, though that might require me to quit smoking. We shall see...

Hope ya'll's summer is off to a fabulous start. Boston's an oven again, but it has been perfect outside-reading weather for the past several days.

The Bitch is Back in Beantown

I'm officially back in Boston, lying in pajamas in my cold, dirty, empty apartment. As suspected, the place fell to shambles in my absence. So really, this was more a return to my maid duties than to my domicile. I should really deduct this service from the utilities I pay my roomies. It took about 45 minutes to re-organize all my books, which is one of those weird things I do, it seems, about once a month. I think I just really like to touch them all. There are so many. But now I officially have a shelf devoted to my 2010-reading-goal books (per the last blog post). I have no groceries, so I guess I'm ordering pizza and crying myself to sleep. Possible movie fest. I got the first three seasons of Six Feet Under for fifteen bucks at a Blockbuster that was going out of business. Those should tide me over through the semester, along with the million other movies I picked up at said Blockbuster.

I've been off my beloved ciggies for three weeks--three full weeks, in fact, as I made the decision the Friday night I got into PA. I had one with my aunt and grandpa (because they wouldn't restrain their addictions around me) and one today, after cleaning my room, just to check in with how it would feel. Neither was all that enjoyable, so I figure I'm pretty much good to go. Drunk smokes; special occasion smokes; once-in-a-while-with-my-still-smoking-roommate...these I will not kick myself over. I've just come to the conclusion that I no longer want to be a daily smoker, even though a number of my idols were lifelong puffers--Anne Sexton (at a whopping three packs a day, my god), Virginia Woolf (who rolled her own), basically every Atwood heroine, of course, Joe Camel, oh, and that queen from Brideshead Revisited. It's been shockingly easy--I just flushed one down the toilet and busied myself if/when a craving hit (which was not what I expected--less the burning desire to suck ash, as was the usual hint when I was still smoking, and more of a tightness in my chest, like a really really minor panic attack). Maybe I really was a poseur for those four years. Also, I can't believe I was a legit smoker for over four years. Wow, time flies, furrul.

Any case, classes resume in 9 days. I owe a bunch of people money. I have about 450809 textbooks to buy (mostly my fault, since I included upwards of 20 books on the syllabus for my directed study--thankfully, I owed several already). I fear I'll be blues-y until I'm too busy to acknowledge it anymore, but it was to be expected. The Jenny Wilson album, Hardships, deserves a retroactive inclusion on my best-of-2009 list, as I hadn't heard it until about a week ago. Also, the new Beach House album, Teen Dream, is really great. Probably not as good as Devotion, their last one, but still damn good. Check both of these out.

The magic 8 ball says MOAR BOOK RUH-VEWZ are in the near future. Stay tuned.

Brief jottings...

Confession: I should be writing my papers right now, but I’m tired and I’m officially finished with classes and I came home and had a cocktail too many. I wish I were blogging more; or rather, that I had had the time to do so over the course of the semester. I won’t lie and say that grad school isn’t rough—it’s a chaotic mess, frequently, scrambling to get through readings, trying to put together a coherent thought, a workable presentation, and now, a half-decent paper (or three, in the case of we first years). Class in and of itself tends to be exhausting; just getting through a discussion wears a body down. My brain is fried. My writing is muddled. My body is actually not too bad off; I walk probably three to four miles a day, just by way of commuting to school and back. But then, there are days when just putting a sandwich together for dinner is too exhausting, so you burrow in bed and read or pass out or do whatever it is you do in bed. There will be deeper, further reflections on this whole crazed semester once I’m actually through with it.

For now, I’m tipsy and a little sad. We had a departmental party tonight, full of naughty desserts, serious™ conversations, and more than a few awkward moments. But nonetheless, it was weird to say “see you next semester” to people you feel you’re only just getting to know. Anti-climactic, I guess. Maybe I’m just being mawkish; I still feel like a bit of a child in all of this. Most of the people I’ve gotten to know are real people, adults, who have lives on their own, incredibly separate from school. For the past three months, school has been my life, and my entire life in many ways. Perhaps the strangest thing to me has been that the most challenging experience grad school—thus far—is, in fact, what goes on outside of the classroom. Growing up; playing adult; trying to figure out what my place in this city is. Boston is a cold city in every sense of the term. And being locked away in my room, in a coffeeshop here, a coffeeshop there—I still feel somewhat alien here. I suppose, in short, it hasn’t been at all what I expected. In some ways, good, in others not so much—but I suppose that’s any experience, no?

Hopefully, I’ll keep up with this blog from here until at least the start of next semester, but I can’t promise anything until the eighteenth. I’ll be entirely hermited away until next Friday, churning out these papers, and then it’s off to Virginia to visit my loves for a week. I shan’t take the laptop, but will likely be tweeting from the phone. Until next time…

Also, here's what my bed looks like in paper-writing-time:



Also, here's my wild lion's mane--I haven't had a trim since I've moved here. Increasingly, I feel as if I should have been a Rossetti painting instead of a person.

Bits and Pieces

Some notes and details on things in my life right now:

-I eat some sort of variation on a deli-meat-sandwich about every day; a potato, cooked in different fashions, typically constitutes the ‘vegetable’ of my dinner. I must be braver at the grocery store, and soon.
-One of my roommate’s cats has taken a particular liking to me; the downside is that she frequently howls outside of my bedroom door for well near an hour as I try to fall asleep. She wakes me up sometimes, too. Though, admittedly, this worked to my advantage over the weekend, because she woke me up from my drunken stupor in time to warn me to run for a plastic bag to vomit into. Nonetheless, I need my fucking beauty rest. This needs to stop.
-Classes are fabulous, but reading a book of theory a week in addition to, like, a million other things, will take some getting used to. I spent about six hours today wading through Foucault.
-On that note, I’m reading Foucault for all three of my classes. And from what I hear from some English grad compatriots in other programs, this is a fairly universal experience. Is he really that great?
-I’m making friends, and am finally at the point where I can sort of count on having weekend plans. Yay! The bloody edge to this sword is that I spent a lot of this weekend hungover and incapable of being productive. And I spent far more money on booze than I should have.
-Though Boston, and my neighborhood in particular, seems to have a pretty substantial—and visible—gay population, I’m apparently still the resident freak. Honestly, no one bats an eye at all the fucking hipsters wearing girl jeans; I wear a pair out—me in girl pants, me, someone who actually sleeps with men—and I’m given glares like a fucking leper? Sheesh, give me a goddamn break, you hypocritical yuppies.
-I still want to properly review Inglourious Basterds, and am hoping to do some capsule reviews for a few others things I’ve read/seen lately—Halloween II, Angela Carter’s Wise Children, and Alice Munro’s Open Secrets.
-There will be more substantial updates soon. And pictures, potentially, though from my shitty phone. Things are generally smooth; I’m still a bit lonely and disoriented; we could hit grad-school-panic-mode soon; I think I’ll survive. Until next time.