Accidental Southern Belle

What I Learned in College

My coworker occasionally sends me links to this blog, The Blue and White's Blog. Which sucks me in every time. They are asking people what the top three things they learned at Columbia were. Mine are:

1. How to get a table in a crowded room where there are no empty tables.

2. That the whole bru-ha-ha about "original sin" comes from a dude who slept around a lot with a bunch of prostitutes and then sat under a pear tree and felt bad about it.

3. If there's a wet spot on the sidewalk, don't step in it because the odds that it contains human waste are high.

Yes, that's what my $120,000 got me. Maybe a few other things too. But those are big. Maybe one of my features for this summer should be other things I learned in college. Remember when there was the feature "Chain food of the day?" That was fun.

Someone at my Alma Mater Has a Sense of Humor

Brilliant (let's put "brilliant" in quotes, actually) quotes from "excerpts were culled from documents left on Columbia and Barnard lab computers."

Including my favorite, "evolution and the big bang theory are not falsifiable and, according to Popper, are about as scientific as, say, my personal theory that purple unicorns will descend from the sky when I die and bring me to heaven."

Right. What she WANTED to say was "and monkeys might fly out of my butt," but she thought that the professor might identify this as a fluffly popular culture refrerence. So, she astutely changed monkeys to unicorns, flying out of to descending from the sky and her butt to heaven...Jesus, kids these days are a mess, no?

This is ALMOST as good as when I post excerpts here from my workshop critiques...oh, I think highly of my sense of humor late at night, don't I? Don't drink and blog, that's what the t-shirt should say.

In Which I Begin to Lose My Mind

God. I have so much to do. And things haven't even hit the fan yet which they will do next week when the visiting writer gets here, when my students hand in their final fiction stories and I'll have two workshop pieces due within a week or two of each other. Thank goodness the girl that I was supposed to interview for Columbia never wrote back to me...I have to figure out what I was supposed to do in case of that happening...

Yeah, so the reading went really well on Friday. Someone even asked me on Sunday when I was reading again because she had heard it was so fun that she was sad she missed it. Wow. Just saying the word monkey a few times certainly gets you far. :) Why IS the word monkey so funny? I have no idea. But it is. Just typing the word monkey is making me smile.

The brisket came out well also. Yay! Oh, so on Saturday night, as we waited for the brisket to be reheated (because you have to cook it a few times before the true goodness of it all comes out), Matt and I watched disc 1 of season one of Fraggle Rock. Can we discuss what a BRILLIANT show that was/is? I would have watched more discs if I had gotten them from Netflix. But instead I had Pollock and The Aristocrats. Pollock was pretty good, if you like "it's hard to be an artist and it's even harder to live with one" movies, which I do. The Aristocrats was funny for a few minutes but then it got old. Fast. I can only take so many bodily fluid/incest jokes before I want to kill myself. Also, the contrast with Fraggle Rock was probably a bit much.

Now for the special feature where I post excerpts from my responses to the stories handed in in my workshop: 

"In the first chapter, my impression of Milton was that he was lonely and sad and mildly deranged.  But in this chapter, I think he is totally insane. He talks to inanimate objects, they talk back to him, and it goes a step further, he blames them for his memory or lack of it. Ok, so I wonder if Milton is insane and if we are supposed to think so."

And

"It obviously makes me think of Infinite Jest, which I threw away when I left New York because I knew that I would never, ever open it again. I kind of wish I had it now though to see how it opens. I do remember, though, despite the fact that I stopped reading on page 500 or so, that I was quite engaged with the plot at the beginning. I think that a certain amount of “sucking in” needs to happen in an experimental piece, especially in a long experimental piece, to entice the reader to do the work that is going to be required of them."

Now for the even more special feature where I go to workshop and try not to laugh.

Apparently, Being on Vacation Does Not Equal Being Relaxed (or sane)

That's probably because I'm not REALLY on vacation. In some ways, I've turned the heat up on myself to be productive writer girl while school is out. So, this week, I'm logging into the old office at 8AM, finishing at noon and writing for the rest of the day. Monday and Tuesday were total washes. But, I did get a few hours in yesterday which felt so good. When it's good, it's good, when it's bad, it's bad.

What was crazy about yesterday was that I didn't leave my house until around 6:30 PM, other than to go running, but I ran in my neighborhood, so that doesn't really count. In New York this was not even close to possible, partially because I lived in a shoebox, partially because the only consumable items in my apartment were jam and vodka and partially because I just could not sit still there. I guess having more space and some food in the refrigerator can do wonders for what they call "spilkes" (is that how it is spelled?--ok, I just googled it and I found this ridiculous joke: " I'm afraid I'm not familiar with 'spilkes.' All I know is that if you spilkes something you better clean it up before your mom gets home." Oy vey.)

In other, less cheesy, news, my former coworker was in North Carolina yesterday, we didn't get to see each other as she was about 2 1/2 hours away from me, but we did exchange voicemails and she said that she detected a slight southern drawl in my voice. I think she's just being nice as that is totally impossible, there's just no way I could have picked up a drawl here as nobody else really has one. What she probably detected in my voice was how out of it I was yesterday afternoon.

Tonight is the department holiday party at the beach house. It is pot luck. As Matt and I discussed last night, pot luck is a ridiculous term. It must be abolished. I am going to bring some form of spinach dip, I know that they make a good one at the local grocery store and will put it in a bread bowl for you if you ask very nicely. On the other hand, I hear that it is very easy to make your own spinach dip. We shall see. I'll keep you posted on "pot luck gate."

On "Bigness" and Teaching

So, there's this professor here who is the sister of one of my most favorite writers. So, of course, I want her to be my friend. Luckily, it turned out that this semester I was the TA for her undergraduate fiction workshop. It's a crazy class, filled with 20 of the most rambunctious writing students I've ever seen. And last night, I had to lead the class, which basically is an exercise in crowd  control--how to keep the boys in the corner from talking to each other while the girl in the other corner tells what she thinks about the story and vice versa.

(This, by the way, is one of the many reasons that I have not been posting here this week. Preparing to teach that class has just taken it all out of me.)

I think it went well, almost all points were hit regarding the stories. In most cases if they weren't saying what I wanted them to say, I was able to kind of get them to say it by making suggestions. I think they respected me...although I still cannot get over how they get all quiet when you talk as the teacher. It's just too weird.

ANYWAY, so after class, the sister of my favorite writer who also happens to look exactly like me--we're the same height, have the same kind of wavy brown hair, same build, same glasses, says "Watching you teach was like stepping into a time warp, it was like looking back at my younger self. Isn't that awesome?! So, that totally made my day.

Her comments on my teaching were that I was good, but that I have to remember to be "big" in the classroom, which is so weird because when I had my story critiqued the other night, what my class said was that it was about a girl who wanted to be big. In the case of my story, it was a girl who wanted to be something, have her life have meaning. But in this case, of the teaching, it was literally, make yourself bigger in the classrom.

Very weird. Sometimes, I guess, you reveal more about yourself with fiction than you mean to or even know to.

Recruitment

So, A.'s friend from home (or maybe more precisely, someone from the town that she's from that she doesn't know super well) came here last night (with a girlfriend that he doesn't seem to know super well) to visit the program here to decide if he wants to apply.

We told him lots of nice things about the program and the town, which was weird because usually we complain about things here to each other and so it was odd to hear us saying things that were positive. But I think that we meant them. I mean, generally, I am happy here and think it is a good program. But, it still felt a little like lying...but maybe it was more like glossing.  I'll have to ask her what she thinks about all this.

I got home a little bit after 2, but I wasn't ready to go to bed yet, so, instead, I sat at this very computer, eating a whole pile of Wheat Thins and writing emails to the MFA Coordinator about how I wanted to take a poetry workshop next semester and also about how it is never too early to have breakfast--because she had just woken up and I hadn't gone to sleep yet.  Which is, I guess possible at around 2:45 AM, but is still odd. And I really wish I hadn't eaten all those Wheat Thins...I guess they are my breakfast because I am so not hungry now.

But anyway, the resolution of that is that I now have that one last credit that I needed--a week-long poetry workshop in April--that will be freaky. A. says she will write my poems for me. I am not opposed to this idea, by the way. I would call it collaborating.

I am having short, individual conferences with my students today which I think will be good. The only problem is that I wanted to give out all that extra Halloween candy in class today, but I think it would be weird to have candy at our little conferences, it would be sort of a creepy teacher thing to do, like, "Here little girl, have some candy and your one-page writing assignment back. And also, do you want to come back to my van?" So, I will have to hold on to the candy until next week, I guess. Candy doesn't go bad. Does it?

Inspired by Spam

So, I'm having one of those days. Where when I finish one thing, I'm like, wow, the list of things I still have to do is totally overwhelming. And I know that there must be a way to handle all these things better. But I haven't figured it out yet. And THAT is stressful too.

And then I get this Spam email:

Hey,

It`s Finally no.w poss ible to e arn an accredited degree on the ways of work and life experience you already have

and rece ive your deg.ree in just 11 Days!

+No work

+No Listening

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Dial - 1 209 396 8415 f0r m0re details

No work, quizes OR costy books?! (If anyone knows exactly what a costy book is, by the way, feel free to explain in the comments area.) And I don't even have to LISTEN?! This is like heaven on earth!!! It MUST BE REAL!!!!  SIGN ME UP!

Dramatic Registration Update

Ok, so I got the workshop I wanted, which is great. Yay. Writing-wise, next semester is going to be cool because of the teachers I get to have.

Now if only I would write something decent!!! No, that is angst for another day.

I did have a little drama because one class that I thought was going to be three credits is actually only two, so I need to figure out how to get that last credit in...because I have to take 9 credits in order to teach my own classes next year--you have to have a total of 18 credits to be listed as a teacher, or something.

So, now either I need to get someone to grant me one credit of independent study OR I am going to have to take this Literature and Psychology class where we read Jean Rhys. I really don't like Jean Rhys, at least I didn't in college, mostly because of an incident with Good Morning Midnight, inovlving a dead baby in the text that I didn't know existed even though I had totally READ the book. I get to class: all of a sudden, there's a dead baby. I did NOT KNOW about the dead baby. Stream of consciousness my ass, that's what I think about that. But we also read Fight Club. So...that might be cool. Anyway, to be determined. Stay tuned. There will be, I'm sure, more installments in the exciting world of Pre-Registration. (For some reason, I'm imagining saying that the way they said PIGS IN SPAAAACE on the Muppet Show....just in case you were curious.)

Your Future Semester: Set in Stone

Today is "pre-registration." It is the day that MFA students here sit in front of their computers, anxiously waiting to log into the system at exactly 10:00AM so that they can get the classes that they want.

The problem with this place is that there aren't that many classes that are decent, so if you don't get your first choice, basically, you're totally screwed.

Like, if I don't get the workshop I want, I'm going to have to take a class on Nature Writing. I'm not kidding. Can you imagine me writing about nature? Exactly. Ridiculous.

So, I am frantically writing down call numbers and inhaling coffee and getting my pin numbers and registration numbers ready. One of the 2nd years even suggested PRACTICING before 10:00AM to make sure I know how the system works.

What a mess. Stay tuned to find out what happens on the next episode...of Pre-Registration. (Play ominious music here.)

Idyllic Grad School Life

So, clearly, everything here is not always idyllic. I am stressed, I have too much to do, I eat badly late at night. This place has no good movies (I'm going to have to drive to Durham to see Capote, I just know it) and no good bookstore. These are all things to complain about. And I do.

And yet, I just thought I'd capture the fact that I am sitting in a softly-lit coffee shop, one that has free refills, in a comfortable chair, with my laptop on my lap.  I've just read a few pages of Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which is very good, and am looking at a fireplace, with a real fire in it (it's a gas fireplace, but let's not pick at details). I am about to go back and work on some stories. Lovely.