2005

Every year I write a poem on New Year's Eve called "New Year's Eve." Last year, I was as down as I've ever been, and the poem was only saved (maybe) by a phrase I wrote later. This year, I'm thinking about LitJ, and Faultline, and my sister's international relations' grad school applications, and my mom's New Years' party (for which she has instructed us to indivudally behead and stuff tiny grape tomatoes). I haven't been writing much, but the well doesn't feel dry. Just frozen over, maybe, since we are in the Arctic land of Minnesota (where it snowed all yesterday and is still very pretty, since St. Paul, in an effort to save money, doesn't plow its streets).

Anyway, 2005 was a good year. I was just thinking about my blog entries from earlier in the year, and immediately the word "gleeful" came to mind, an adjective I never would have thought I'd be using to describe myself one year after that miserable New Year's. Glee really is a strange and complex state, isn't it? I feel proud of English that we have a word for it.

Minnesota...

...is a place for work. My sister introduced me to her to-do list method, and I have just crossed off a sizable number of items, including finishing all my applications (except UCI)! Hooray!

I just know I'll be cranky when I'm 87. How can one prevent it?

Recovery

I celebrated the holiday season by taking a red eye to Boston--during which I slowly remembered each item I forgot to pack in my frenzy to finish applications and leave the house--and then went straight to the Harvard Square Kinko's to print out my PhD applications. After that I trudged to the Harvard registrar to get my freshman year transcript, and on the way my suitcase broke; bleary-eyed and struggling with my broken luggage, I remembered why I never felt like a Harvard student...

I've been recovering ever since, and have my New Year's resolutions all picked out...

Faultline Office, how do I love thee?

My apartment feels tiny and smells like Kettle Korn, so thank the gods of Kreiger Hall for the office.

I just submitted my first application!!! Of course, that's not including all the supplemental forms, recommendations, transcripts, and the like. But it's a nice start.

The Library

When I think about writing a paper, I think of a huge library with movable stacks, and to really work on the thing you have to get down into the maze and stay there for a while. The way of thinking is almost like a different physical place, and it take an effort to get there and to stay there. It wasn't always like that for me--I think I could concentrate without such an effort--but that may just have been because I wasn't writing such complicated papers.

Oddly, I experience litereature as *social*. I don't do that well with something I've read unless I can talk about it, so writing about something I haven't discussed with anyone in a while can be especially hard.

Tibby the Alligator

This personal statement thing is HARD HARD HARD. Did you know that you have to write a little dissertation proposal? Well, you do. My fake dissertation is going to be called "The Long Arm of the Confessional."

I'm still having a little sudoku problem. It's gotten me thinking about my vaguely synesthetic tendency to attribute colors and--it turns out--personalities to numbers. For instance, 2s, 3s, and 4s are among the easiest for me to notice are missing in a row, column, or box. Is this because they're distinctively shaped? No, it's because they're yellow, blue, and green, so they stand out. They're also all nice numbers: 4 I've always felt a kinship with, 2 is solid but a little more stuck-up, and 3 is sort of an everyman of a number--gentle, reliable, strong--and has really been growing on me. 5 (reddish/goldish/colorless), 6 (red), and 9 (orange) totally blend in and are impossible to spot and have nasty personalities, although 6 isn't that bad and 9 is the absolute worst. 7s (purple) and 1s (white) are pretty distinctive but remote; more like celebrities than real people. Anyway, it makes the whole mindless activity all the more addictive.

Late last night, in a sudoku-induced trance, I wrote a poem called "Not the Easiest Bridge to Be in Love With," and I kind of like it.

Marianne Moore had a pet alligator as a child, named Tibby. I mean, is the woman trying to be a caricature of herself?!? Actually, I've noticed that pretty much all Moore criticism points out that all other critics condescend to Moore, promises not to condescend itself, and then goes ahead and does it anyway. But not me. I genuinely think she's fantastic and the idea that she was a batty old lady makes me bristle.

Can you get it at CVS?

So LOC asked for my CV to help her write my recommendation, and I realized that I don't really know the difference between a CV and a resume, except that I have one and not the other. I think a resume is specifically your employment history, and a CV is more like "professional" stuff, conferences, publications and the like. Haha. Is that right? At least it allows me to finally remove WAND and Camp Favorite...why can't I ever work places without silly names?

At the end of the page I was listing all my little committee and planning stuff, since I'm trying to sell myself as a good contributor to grad student life... and it seems wrong not to include that I've thrown several successful parties at which grad students have mingled and enjoyed themselves. I have a chimenea*! That must count for something, right?

*Broken, but still!

Arnold's Lack of Pity

The whole long and public process of appeals and requests for clemency in the Stanley Tookie Williams case almost makes his execution (scheduled for midnight tonight since Arnold has deemed him unrepentent) into a public hanging. I have no real opinion about Williams's guilt and/or redemption, but the thought that we still have the death penalty shocks me anew each time I hear a news report about this case. It seems, for want of a better word . . . barbaric--and terrifying in its implications. How could we still do this?

Bad Apple

I've always thought that Apple was a good, consumer-friendly company, but now I'm not so sure. At the same time last month, the CD drive on my computer and my Ipod both broke, so I've spent a lot of time waiting around at Apple store "Genius Bars." Right now my computer is ok except for the CD drive and the fact that the hard drive might break at any time too, but I learned that the warranty is totally voided because there is a tiny dent in the laptop's titanium casing. And the way each "Genius" has dealt with my computer makes it seem like Apple is trying hard to void as many warranties as possible. I guess that's reasonable, but it really dampens the feeling of good customer support.

My Ipod, on the other hand, is dead, dead, dead, and the warranty has expired. What surprised me, though, is that the "Genius" told me that Ipod hard drives are known to only last for a year or two! I mean, no one buys an Ipod thinking it's such a short-term thing, do they? A temporary Ipod seems like a very different kind of purchase from one that will last until new technology becomes prohibitively cooler, which is certainly what I thought was the deal. I was definitely not the only frustrated person in the Apple store, and I just can't believe it's good for business to dish out so much disappointment. But is there any silver lining here for my poor machines?

On another botanical note, I am, according to OK Cupid, the Wild Rose, a random brutal love dreamer. Huh? I'm not brutal! But I'm not gentle either, really, and that's the other choice. Anyway, it's a good time but it's no Myers Briggs.

Civic Duty

If you live in the OC, don't forget to vote today! We seem to vote constantly around here, but this one seems worth doing. If the wacky fringe-right candidate splits the Republican vote, Irvine could have a Democratic congressman. Yeah!

Parsifollies

Is opera all about artiface? Or is the suspension of disbelief just the price we pay to listen to great music while we see a play? I mean, these people are SINGING, and you'd have to be stubborn not to acknowledge that that's a little weird.

In a "fun" opera--i.e. one in which the tunes are catchy--the artiface seems to heighten the sense that the world is full of possibility and that human foibles are things of beauty. In a "serious" opera--for instance, the non-hummable Parsifal, which we saw at the LA Opera last night--the unnaturalness of the stage conceit seems more to suggest that we are viewing somethig non-human, abstract, allegorical. I kept picturing a production set in outer space.

Of course, that might have been partly because of the entirely blue-white stage design, whose most distinctive feature was the repeated 10-minute-long descent of an enormous glowing sesame bagel. There were also a vampire, a mummy, and a zombie-child, as well a a garden (composed in typical SoCal fashion of a few strategically placed silver versions of birds of paradise) full of magical seductresses, each of whom wore a nice, simple, Modern Bride-type wedding dress, a wimple, and carried a little ax. No wonder Parsifal was confused.

Anyway, it was an Event, and I have to go atone now, or I'll never be able to reuinite the spear with the grail.

The highest common denominator

That's what I want my poems to appeal to. Does that make sense?

Application essays can sure mess with the brain.

Just had my last class, and I'm sad. They were so cute.