Westbound

This summer has flown away-- I'm not sure where it went. But I do know where I've gone:

Gettysburg, PA
Washington, DC
Philadelphia, PA
Boston, MA (many, many times)
Worcester, MA
Wakefield, MA
Albany, NY
Manchester, NH
Walden Pond
White Mountains

And soon, it's back to Buffalo for me. I'm going with less trepidation, less nostalgia, and more hope this year. Last year was definitely a big transition, and I've dealt with many changes, losses (see Elegy for a Dog post), and anxieties. But I've realized that I have, indeed, dealt with them. I suppose I'm a real adult now, and whatever comes my way, I think I'll cope with it.

The Thesis, Part Deux

I wrote a thesis as an undergraduate student. When I finished my thesis (which had a rather embarrassingly stupid title when I turned it in to my advisor; I have since changed "Are You There God? It's Me, England" to "Looking for England: National Identity in Post-World War II Britain"), I was certain that I was going to study 20th century British literature, with a focus on Irish expatriates. I was sure of this up until halfway through last semester, when I realized that I kind of only liked Samuel Beckett and sometimes W.B. Yeats, and I had no desire to read James Joyce... ever. And I loved my 19th century American class. And I wanted to publish my paper on Washington Irving and Kierkegaard and include it in my thesis. I wanted to read more about the theater and its development in the United States. (And I wanted an excuse to write about Artaud again, because really, not enough people read him. Go read The Theater and Its Double. Right now.)

So, here I am, back at the American Antiquarian Society, reading obscure novels about actresses. I'm going to read more into Kierkegaard, education and seduction, and look up a performance history of Rip Van Winkle, and doubtless give myself carpal tunnel syndrome as I prepare to write another thesis.

The strange thing is, I'm starting to like research again. I really enjoyed the hours I spent in the reading room at the Antiquarian Society this afternoon. I think part of it is handling old books. I love leafing through a book that went out of print a hundred years ago, that perhaps no one else has read since 1920. Those books have lives and histories of their own, and I can take these flights of fancy wondering where they had been and where they would go next, how it is that I stumble upon them. There's a wonderful piece in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, "The Mutability of Literature." Crayon picks up an old folio from the 17th century, and it begins speaking in an antiquated tongue. It had been on the shelf for over a hundred years, and couldn't believe that Shakespeare was more widely read than any other author of the time. I know that the books I'm reading might wonder at Hawthorne's popularity, Melville's ubiquity in American education, and, what interests me especially, the dissipation of theatrics and drama into every aspect of American culture except for the stage.

I'm almost done with being a student. I am still resolved to stop at my Masters degree and not get a PhD, but I'm now starting to appreciate the rare opportunity I have to conduct this kind of research, to read these obscure books, and to resurrect a few names that no one remembers any longer, but knowing myself that these names have something to say, that I should listen.

First Semester Re-Cap

Happy 2011! I'm back after the most grueling five months of my life. That's right, I completed my first semester of graduate school (I'm getting a Master's in English).

A lot has happened since I first started this blog about a year ago; I started off by posting about the books I read as a way to keep myself in a semi-academic mindset in the gap year between graduating college and starting graduate school. Now that I'm here in grad school, academic exercises do not require the kind of extra exertion that they did when I was out of school. Academics now take up a large portion of my life-- in this first semester, it felt like an excessively large portion-- and that requires a redirection of energies. Reading and scholarship will take care of themselves now; I have and will put in the necessary hours of studying, writing, editing, etc., but I need to be as diligent about not letting other areas of my life slide for the sake of scholarship as I was about keeping up with reading and thinking critically when I wasn't a student.

I will always think of myself as a student and learning will always be an important part of my life, but now that I have this first semester behind me, I know better what it's place should be. Academia is not the place for me, and I will be very happy to finish this program next spring. I value all that I have learned and I look forward to my remaining time as a Masters student, but I would not consider going for a PhD. Scholarship cannot be my entire life.

As far as this blog is concerned, well, I'm not really sure what shape it's going to take now. I want to hold myself accountable for being healthy, nurturing my relationships, and enjoying the new city in which I live. I suppose now its focus will broaden to include all the aspects of living on my own and shaping my adult life. Still much to be learned, so I'll keep the title as it is.

I particularly want to make sure that I keep art in my life as I press onward with graduate studies. I did not take time to paint or draw at all this semester, and I noticed a change in my mood as a result, so I will probably use this blog to document some of my artistic projects (like the mural I started on the back of my bookcase in August, which I'm working on presently).

That's all for now; the new semester starts in less than two weeks and I intend to make it a more balanced one than the first.

Still Alive

I don't think anyone actually reads this anymore.

Anyway.

I'm almost done with my first semester of grad school.

This is harder than I had ever imagined. I've been pushed to my limits. Tears have been shed. Much sleep and a few pounds have been lost.

But I've gained so much being here, and I think I've become better for these past five months. I know that this experience will make me a better teacher. I have a new empathy for struggling students, the ones who just can't seem to get it. I've been there now.

I still hope to get it in the end. I'll write back later for a more comprehensive reflection, but until then, I'm writing until my fingers break.

Movin' Out

My life is slowly being packed away into cardboard boxes, stuffed and crammed into impossibly tight corners, waiting to explode into a new space.



(I have four boxes packed like that, nothing but books.)



This is my final week of living in my parents' house, which has been home for my entire life. This inspires certain thoughts.


I remember what it was like in the days before my older sisters left home. I was eleven when my eldest sister got married. Just a few days before the wedding, my father, my sister's fiance, and the best man stood around a huge map unfolded across my kitchen table and traced the route from Massachusetts to Kansas with their fingers. I was enthralled by the idea of driving hundreds and hundreds of miles away to a place that would instantly be their new home. I foolishly imagined my sister making the entire journey in her white wedding dress, and failed to comprehend why my mother was crying in the other room. There was a wedding and an adventure, and this was the best time of all because of the pleasure of anticipation; none of it had happened yet, but it was so close, just brushing the fingertips of the grand event. To the eleven year old mind, it was like 10 PM on Christmas Eve, and called for excited impatience for a day when everything would be different.

I expected great change-- my sister was now going to be a bride and immediately transform into a wife. The entire day would be filled with romantic magic. But we got up the morning of the wedding and Laurie's maid of honor and bridesmaid came over to watch a few episodes of Friends, and I sat on the swing outside until I was made to come in and put on my yellow dress. My hair was braided and sprayed stiff and had flowers woven into the twists, and then it was time to go to the church. The church did not look any different than it ever did; I genuflected and sat in the pew between Katie and our mom, as always. Then I watched my sister and her husband have their pictures taken, and we went to the reception hall, where there were no mysterious and romantic boys for me to dance with, no glittering aura filling the air or reflecting off the candle centerpieces.

Afterwards, my life went on and we all settled into a new normal. Laurie left and Diet Coke was now excinded from the grocery list. She had been living away at college for the last three years, so her absence wasn't completely foreign. There was an empty room in the house now, and my parents moved their bedroom downstairs to give my sister Katie and me free reign over the upper level of our house.

We could have had our own rooms then, something that most eleven and fourteen year old sisters would rejoice over-- but Katie and I were unusual girls. We decided to stay together in the same room we had shared our entire lives. Little changed, even when Katie graduated high school and began college; I was her only college roommate, since she commuted to school from home.

I was 18 when she married Eric, and much more comprehending of the significance of the event. The night before the wedding, Katie and I sat on our beds in our pajamas and talked, like we always had, the conversation ranging from the wedding to her moving to Maine (and how I was going to buy her a big ugly flannel nightgown for the cold Maine winters), to random childhood memories. I wasn't sad, though I was wistfully aware that this was the final night of us being the two Jaworek girls and that, from tomorrow onward, things would be different. It would never be like this again, and that was sadly sweet; childhood never lasts, and the final vestiges of ours were falling away. The next morning, we woke up early and padded downstairs to a breakfast of muffins (I took a cranberry one, Katie went for the double chocolate muffin), and talked with our parents at the table like always. Then it was time for Katie to change into her white dress, me into my pink one, and we headed to the church.

After the wedding, I returned to my half-empty room and for the first time, I was Jen Alone.

That room gradually metamorphosized into my own; my twin bed's twin was dissembled and stowed away in the attic, my desk and bookshelves eventually took the bed's place, our old stuffed animals were donated or passed down to Katie's daughters, and my own twin bed joined its counterpart in the attic when I upgraded to a queen-sized bed.

And now I sort through it all and decide what to bring with me, what to keep here in my parents' house, what to throw away. This room will soon be vacant. Before, it was Laurie's and then it was passed into my and Katie's hands, and then left solely to me, and there is no one to take my place. Already, it feels like it's not fully mine, like my college was no longer mine during my final week on campus; I walked about by myself in those last days, remembering the places and people and felt that I was already absent. I was a ghost.

Will I haunt this room, this house? Katie haunts it still, so does Laurie: I still keep my bed to the left side of the room, perhaps to preserve the space for Katie's phantom bed, there are marks on the ceiling from our old glow-in-the-dark plastic stars, the carpet in my parents' bedroom is the same deep cranberry color that a 15-year-old Laurie chose, my sisters' chairs at the kitchen table remain vacant. Rooms store memories in their corners, even when those corners are empty and dusty.

Soon, I will leave this house and leave part of myself here. I'm just not sure what part will stay behind in these rooms, how much of me is left out in the backyard with the old spoons and plastic toys, long forgotten, rusted and buried and broken, but still there. And other parts of me will emerge in Buffalo from the strange new soil of grad school, my own apartment, Jarrod's presence, my natural mutability.

Everything feels so amorphous and jumbled together, though it's all wrapped in paper, packed away into tidy boxes and labeled neatly. I feel excited, nervous, wistful, hopeful, hopeless, afraid, ambitious, determined, and everything all at once.

You know? I wouldn't change that. I want to feel everything, think everything, and write this all down, as confused and inelegant as it may be.

Life Update

I haven't written on here in a few weeks. First, I want to note that I'm not nearly as sad as I was when I wrote that last entry on the day that my dog died. I'll always miss Sasha, but I know that it was her time and I had to let her go.

This month has been insane because I'm preparing for my big move. In two weeks, I'll be packing up my life and [cliche alert!!] shuffle off the Buffalo, where I will earn my Masters in English. I'm packing, planning, making phone calls, reminiscing, painting, and writing and moving in a million different directions at once (emotionally, that is; physically, I just get on one highway and head west until I hit my first Great Lake). The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity and emotion, and it's only going to intensify from here on out. Despite all the turbulence that necessarily surrounds this kind of life change, I can't contain how excited I am to embark on this adventure with my boyfriend, my best friend, Jarrod.

So this blog will undergo some changes in this process; I won't have as much time to write here, because I'll be writing papers for classes, studying, exploring my new city, and living. But, when I do post, I am certain that the quality of these scribblings will be much improved, because I want to keep this as a sort of portfolio of my work; after I hand in my papers for school and get them back with grades and comments, I'm going to make some edits to them and post them here.

In the meantime, I'll post a few things about this preparation period and my move (expect pictures!), and try to keep sane.

Teach and Learn

I may have mentioned before that I am about to start graduate school this fall, to get an MA in English literature. I'm still not entirely certain what my academic focus is going to be (since I have an array of disjointed interests like postmodernism, madness, theater, work and identity), but my game plan for what to do with that degree is to teach English at the high school level, preferably in a private school or prep school. With that goal in mind, I've been thinking about how to approach teaching; true, I need to re-learn how to be a student this semester, but I think it's best to consider the two in conjunction, teaching and learning. My goal is to be both a teacher and a learner.

One of my enduring interests in literature is the construction of identity through narrative, and I think that this is one of the most important things that I have to teach adolescents; they are responsible for constructing their own identities, and facility with language is essential in doing that effectively and resisting the narratives that others will attempt to impose on them. I want to start the school year with a creative nonfiction writing exercise in which the students think of themselves as narrators and characters. There are undoubtedly dangers and limitations in viewing one's own life in terms of narrative, but this exercise of actually constructing a narrative is one way to open the discussion about those limitations, the inability to capture reality and the self in words. I want my students to realize that narratives are everywhere, and to be thoughtful and critical of every narrative they encounter.

I don't think that it's unreasonable to introduce high schoolers to literary theory; many of the theories are rather easily explained, like Marxist criticism or feminist theory, for one thing. But more important is that I want to approach my students in the same way as Zarathustra regarded the Higher Men in the second half of the book: with an expectation that they are self-sufficient and capable.

A few weeks ago, I read an article on Zarathustra and Socrates as teachers of virtue; both initially made the same mistake of assuming a position of privilege and descending to their students. In Nietzsche's reading of the Apology, Socrates chose death because he realized the inherent failure of his work and was committed to the idea of being the fool who would be taken seriously. The teacher of virtue must certainly take his work seriously, because virtue is of the utmost importance, but not himself; he must maintain a sense of irony about himself, and Socrates would not do that, so he chose death. Initially, Zarathustra insisted on being taken seriously as well, and he also failed to reach his students when he descended to them from a point of privilege. Zarathustra, however, succeeds as a teacher when he chooses to be a squanderer and a fisher of men from a mountain top:

"What to sacrifice! I squander what is given me, a squanderer with a thousand hands: how could I call that-- sacrificing? And when I desired honey I only desired bait, and sweet mucus and mucilage, for which even the mouths of growling bears, and strange, sulky, evil birds, water:
-The best bait, as huntsmen and fishermen require it. For if the world be as a gloomy forest of animals, and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, it seems to me rather--and preferably-- a fathomless, rich sea;
--A sea of many-hued fishes and crabs, for which even the gods might long, and might be tempted to become fishers in it, and casters of nets, --so rich is the world in wonderful things, great and small!
Especially the human world, the human sea: --towards it do I now throw out my golden angle-rod and say: Open up, thou human abyss!"

Zarathustra approaches teaching as an overflowing of his own joy and wisdom, and the way to attract students is to throw out that excessive happiness, to lure them up to his height instead of him descending down to them. I want to teach in a similar manner, by imploring my students to "climb mountains" with me. I should not view them as deficient, but as capable and striving. I should challenge them to raise themselves, and show them how to do that by challenging myself constantly; I will also be a learner and model the life of a learner and striver for them. This is one way of avoiding the stagnation and complacency that has made me wary of teaching in the past; I have a responsibility to constantly improve myself, for myself and for my students too.

I want my students to view themselves as self-sufficient and to foster their independence. I know that they will not all love literature, and I might fail in reaching any of the goals I set for them, but it's important that I do it anyway.

Choose

I've taken a bit of a hiatus from this blog, and now I'm returning with an uncharacteristically personal post.

I applied to grad school this winter, and most of the schools to which I applied have sent me their verdicts. Most of them are rejections. Despite the PhD path essentially eroding beneath my feet, I have a myriad of chioces in front of me.

This is a strange time, and I'm trying to capture it. Since Jarrod and I set off for Buffalo last Friday afternoon, I have been dwelling with the surreality of making decisions that will significantly impact my future. It is a poltergeist that simply stares at me, waiting for me to choose. I stare back, searching for words to explain myself.

At this time last year, I was so enthusiastic about academia. I had the unfounded confidence of a college senior, still ensconced in the certainty of a few more weeks of undergraduate education. That I would continue my education on the graduate level was an unrefutable truth in my mind.

"What are you doing now?"

That question had followed me for the first two months or so after graduation, and while it was repeated ad nauseum, I had an acceptable answer: "I'm applying to grad school."

"What have you been up to since graduation?" The question re-surfaced in an unlikely place, a movie theater in Worcester. I was there with two friends from college, and we ran into another Assumption graduate. And this time, I didn't have an easy, terse answer. I hadalready applied, and all of the schools I had heard from at that point had rejected me. I couldn't say "grad school," so I said, "Substitute teaching."

"Oh, how do you like it?"
This fellow alumna is a middle school teacher, and we were once in the same pre-practicum education seminar. I quit the concentration after a week and felt liberated, and certain that I would never resort to teaching high school. I would teach college.

"I hate it," I said with a laugh, and absolute sincerity.
It's been a rough school year, with shockingly bad behavior from the students and lack of support from other teachers and administrators.

But I don't hate teaching. I applied for PhD programs because I love literature and I want to teach it. I would still like to teach it to college students who share the same enthusiasm for writing and reading, rather than trying to generate it amongst teenagers in a high school, but it's infinitely better than being trapped in a cubicle, doing work that I find mindless and meaningless. Teaching is an option again. But on my terms this time, not the version of teaching set forth by a college education department or by disconcertingly placid elementary school principals who are horrified that a substitute would dare yell at a group of out-of-control first graders.

There is no path before me; I have to make my own. I am blessed, though, to not have to make it alone, because I have Jarrod. And while I still feel that uncanniness shadowing me, I know that I have the power to create a life that will be fulfilling, challenging, rewarding, and meaninful. A job cannot do that. Grad school cannot do that.

Only I can.