Step 1: Panic, Step 2: Achieve Greatness

I'm currently having a mini-panic attack in the library here at Unviersity of Cincinnati about applying to PhD programs. So stressful! So many things to do! Such low chances that I'll get acceptances!

This is your brain on stress.

I have been agonizing for weeks about which programs to apply to, trying to balance rankings, funding, GRE requirements, faculty, location,and likelihood that I'll get in. Each is an impossible problem to solve, not only because I'm terrible about math. I never could quite get the hang of probability: (If you reach into your sock drawer in the dark, and you have six blue socks, eight red socks, and fifteen mismatched socks, what color sock will you most likely get? The answer is I have no freaking idea. Just turn on the lights).

And no, I don't want to know the answer, smarty pants. It was just a metaphor.

But the problem is also impossible because several of the factors are unknowable: I won't know if I get in until it happens. I don't know who else is applying. I don't know what budget problems the departments are facing this year. I don't know who will read my materials. I've tried to be thorough, but I can't research every program in the United States. What if I ignore the only school I'm "meant" to be at?

I was thinking, "man, I don't remember being this overwhelmed when I applied to MA programs!" And then I remembered, that's cause Dad had died a few weeks before. I barely remember most of that time, and I certainly don't remember if I was worried about my applications as I was pulling them together. Though I definitely wanted to go to graduate school, it was low on my list of daily hopes:

1. That this will all turn out to be a crazy dream.

2. If it isn't a dream, that I manage to get out of bed.

3. Get into a good MA program, I guess?

But I guess having much worse and upsetting things on your mind isn't exactly the best advice for not being stressed about something. Probably not a good idea to invite that sort of thing. So maybe it's about keeping the right perspective: I can do this. I've survived worse. I've done it before, sort of. It'll all work out somehow.

Okay, self: here is your mantra for today:

One year, ten months, ten days

I think I’m going to keep on declaring, every few months or years, that I’ve stepped into a new phase of grief after losing Dad. That I didn’t understand all the previous stages until now. I think I’m okay with this. 

Hope you don’t mind.

Someone was recently telling me about a distant mutual acquaintance, and how this woman’s husband had died suddenly last year. The friend admitted it had been especially sad because it had been so sudden. Then she said, motioning to me, “Well. You know.”

I nodded yes. I do know. But somehow…I think I meant it in the past tense: I once lost someone suddenly. It was a very painful, jarring experience.

Less than two years ago. I was lost in the haze of shock; nothing added up. Understanding what exactly had happened to me was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle on the edge of a black hole. The bits that I did tentatively fit together—I am still me, I still have my family. I’m going to grad school—scattered, often as not. Teetering on the edge of the darkness, I told myself to just focus on getting the edges in line. Just wait ‘til you get to episode seven. I bet that’s gonna be even better than episode six. I lost some bits entirely, I think. I’ve forgotten much of what it was like in high school, and even college. I remember what happened, but I have a hard time recapturing how I felt at 17, or 20. Sometimes I struggle to connect with my old friends, who knew me before.

I’ll never stop missing Dad. I’ll always have painful memories to conjure on my worst days, if I’m feeling masochistic. (And sometimes, I am.) I’ll never stop half-hoping that he might come back. But I’ve said this before, and I still mean it: I don’t wish my life to have gone any differently. I am stronger. I have more empathy. I try to be more open, more loving. I think I am a bit wiser.  

I see that day as a defining moment in my life. A crease in the page.

Everything before.

But here’s the best part: everything after.  

the perished

"There is so little to remember of anyone--an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long." 

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Formosa, Argentina - Summer 2000

My Semester, in Under a Minute

Normally I like to write really long-winded, overly-earnest musing about my life. I like to take some small event, like walking up a hill or missing my exit on the interstate, to frame a heartfelt confession about how hard it is to live without Dad around. Or how hard it is to be an adult. Or how hard it is to be a teacher.

But today, I don't have the time. Today, I realized I'm slightly (read: extremelyveryalot) behind on work. I need to save my words and actually write that paper for my Teaching College Writing class that I've been procrastinating for ages. (I do appreciate the irony!) So here's how I've been feeling this semester, composed in Youtube videos under one minute. Enjoy.

How I felt at the beginning of the semester:

But a week later:

When it hit Week 6, I lost my mind:

And I had to resort to some pretty desperate measures:

And when I tried to look at my students research papers:

But then I saw this:

And watched this:

Now I feel like this:

And now, it's back to work. Hope you're all surviving whatever you've got going on. Never give up!

I'm...not even on the right highway.

The other day, I was driving home from dinner with some friends and a funny thing happened.
.
Here's a little context. For those of you who don't live here, Cincinnati has two main North-South interstates, I-71 and I-75. They shape a V around the inner part of the city--the two meet downtown at the Ohio River, and they spread out from one another as you go north into the suburbs.

Now that I live in Clifton, which is a couple miles north of downtown, I'm only a few minutes' drive from either interstate. But my apartment is slightly closer to I-75, and when I drive home from the East Side I like to take this short connector called "The Norwood Lateral" to 75 so I can get off at Exit 3, Hopple Street. Left onto Martin Luther King; left onto Dixmyth; left onto Whitfield. Cross Terrace, Howell, and Ludlow, and then it's the fourth house on the left. Easy Peasy.

Anyways, so there I was, driving south on I-71. I'm getting ready to get off on the Norwood Lateral, like normal, and I was thinking about the work I needed to get done.

I gotta try to read a good chunk of "Beloved."

And I need to do some more work on that stupid Writing Autobiography that's due Tuesday.

Oh shoot, and I should read some submissions for the Cincinnati Review.

I also need to start the reading for Teaching College Writing but that's totally not happen.

Suddenly I thought, "Wait, did I get on the Norwood Lateral??" I looked around and saw the lights of a strip mall up on a hill to the left and though, yeah, okay, that's the Target. It must be such a habit I didn't even notice taking the exit! So I continued driving. Ten minutes later, I started wondering why I hadn't hit I-75 yet and then realized I had never gotten off I-71 South in the first place. Um...oops! What I find funniest about this isn't that I missed my exit. It's that I thought I missed my exit, looked around, and completely and utterly misread everything. I didn't notice how everything looked different than it was supposed to. I didn't see the signs, the exits. I just blithely kept on driving.

This story isn't really that impressive, I know. I recently read something on the internet about a woman from Belgium who left her house intending to drive 50 miles west to pick her friend up from a train station, and accidentally drove east for two days. She ended up in Croatia.

But it got me thinking, and not just about faulty GPS systems or the dangers of absent-minded driving. And I'm not trying to make some cliche parallel to "not knowing what direction I'm going in" because I'm...fill in the blank: twenty-something, single, in grad school, the girl with the Dead Dad.

Instead, I was thinking about how sometimes it's all just so much. I feel like for every thing I do successfully--writing a paper, finishing a novel, teaching a good class or even having a drink with new friends--I drop three more things. The image that comes to mind is that guy at the circus who balances the spinning plates while riding a unicycle. Except that in this circus, he's shedding plates. The stage is littered with ceramic shards. The audience stares blankly at him; the wheel jerks unexpectedly as it rolls over the broken plates. This is the image I have of myself this semester.

Hermione, you lucky girl.

I saw a friend at a party recently who, when I told her I was "doing great!," just gave me that look. The yeah, right look.

But when the S hits the fan, my response is to deny, deny, deny. I think, if I just had that one thing! A boyfriend to make me feel special. Four more hours each day. A time-turner like Hermione Granger's. But this is never true. There is no magic wand you can wave to shorten your to-do list. You can't hire someone to do your reading. But you also can't stay chained to your desk.

(I'd end up like that lady in Kansas who had a phobia of not being able to get to the bathroom in time, so she sat on the toilet for two years. When they tried to help her out of there, she was stuck to the seat. Do not Google this.)

Sometimes I lose track of where I began. It's a symptom. Sorry.


Two years ago, I was in a similar place. My senior year of college sort of spun out of control. At one point, I tried to balance six classes (two of which happened at the same time), finish my 70-page honors thesis, work as a TA for the English department, be in the orchestra, do activities for the English Honors Organization, go to a conference, and spend time with my friends. C'est impossible!

I ended up quitting orchestra and taking time off after graduation--a great decision. After everything I have learned in the past year, though, I don't want to just start cutting things out. I don't want to simply shut down and retreat to my bedroom, like before. You have to bear up under what's really important. You have to keep moving forward, despite everything. You have to figure out a strategy, like Bradley Cooper's character in Silver Linings Playbook. (The acting was great, but the composition, weird, no?)

I feel very young, writing this. I know my older readers are either A) annoyed with my complaints or B) smiling and thinking, adorable. Either way. Have mercy on my young, misdirected soul. To bring back the navigation metaphor at the end of the piece: I'm doing my best to just stay on the damn highway. Wish me luck.

Equal Rights

sunrise from McMicken Hall

According to my page view statistics, there's at least one person who checks regularly to see if I've posted anything new. And to that one person, sorry for not writing often. It's just that--

"“The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.”
--Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

I'm happy to say that most of the time, my present life occupies my mind, rather than the past. I still miss Dad like crazy. I'm still occasionally caught off guard by moments of piercing grief. In late November, I was walking home after one of the most encouraging teaching moments of my life. I'd given a teaching demonstration in front of my Practicum class, my professor had used the phrase "the mark of a good teacher" to describe something I'd done instinctively, and I was just soaring down Clifton Ave afterwards. Then, all of the sudden, I felt such an ache because I wanted to call Dad. I wanted to call him and gush about finding a way that I can actually help people, I can connect to them and influence their lives--that I've looked up from the books and I can make the world a little better place. I know he'd say, "Well, honey, I'm not surprised." And I'd be so gratified. It's like, it's not an actual success until Dad tells me he's proud.

That's a hard thing.

But this isn't going to be a sad post. Because I'm not in a sad place; I'm in such a good place now. School is challenging and exciting, teaching is challenging and sometimes rewarding. The people here are wonderful. I love my neighborhood. In fact, I've been thinking lately about how passing the one year mark has given me a lot of perspective.

The first thing I see more clearly now is just how lost I was a year ago. Maybe everyone saw it except me. I used to think I was good at hiding how I really felt about stuff. But I've come to understand that I have the most obvious face, ever. Every single thought or emotion I have is telegraphed on my face; I can't help it! To everyone I've ever met: sorry I looked so annoyed that one time. I probably didn't mean for you to know.

Over the Christmas holiday this year, I decided to go back to Walmart to make a little extra money. While I was there, I ran into my favorite, favorite old lady named Marion. She's at least 83 and we were totally Walmart Besties. We were talking about school and she said something that really struck me: "You look so much happier!" At first I thought...Um, I look happy to be wearing these awful khaki pants, while I'm answering the phone at Walmart one day after finishing a 20 page paper? I didn't exactly feel spectacular, but then I realized she had known me during a very dark, very difficult time in my life. When--even as I laughed at a stupid customer or gleefully gossiped about some cashier we didn't like--the sadness was always right there, below the surface.

I really was adrift in my grief. But: working at Walmart is not one of the signs of how lost I was. Oddly enough, it was what kept me going. In the early days, the work was just enough to keep my mind occupied, so I wouldn't dwell on my Dad all day. It filled my time and wore me out, so I could actually sleep at night. And there are actually some incredibly wonderful people stuck working at places at Walmart. At first I got sympathy, and then afterwards, they left it alone unless I mentioned it. And I'm surprisingly grateful. It's hard to bear those looks of pity for very long.

And Walmart was exactly the right thing because I could clock out and not think about work until I walked in the next day. I know now I could not have managed school. I'm one of those students who becomes my classes. I eat, sleep, and breathe the assignments, my responsibilities, my work. Writing papers, even when they're just scholarly and not creative, requires a huge emotional and energetic commitment from me. I could not have focused last year. I struggled to simply fill out my grad school applications. One day when I thought my GRE scores hadn't gotten to Ohio State (ugh) in time, I broke down sobbing hysterically, out of the blue, because it was all just SO hard. I wonder now if my personal statements were exceptionally terrible. All I remember about that process was each time, I would write some thing about how Dad just died three weeks before and then I'd cut it out. My biggest goal was to not mention my dead Dad, so I couldn't really focus on my personal branding as a potential scholar and teacher. I was simply trying to survive. I see this now.

Everyone says, it's never okay, but it gets easier. And I think I finally know that to be true. I am grateful for everything that has happened in the past year. I'm grateful for understanding managers, for loving friends. I'm grateful that misery loves company, rather than isolation. I'm grateful for my siblings. I'm grateful that life provides the kind of relationships where you can sit crying on the kitchen floor with someone, as sad as it may seem. I'm grateful for kind words from students.

I'm grateful that life keeps on fighting for equal rights, despite everything.

The Joys of Teaching

So I don't really think I've written much--if anything--about my Master's program or my job as a Graduate Assistant teaching Freshman Composition at UC. It's the beginning of November, and things are going pretty well. My workload this semester isn't too intense. I'm not claiming to be some kind of genius...grad school is definitely a challenge. But two of my classes are sort of "introductory" and though my third class, English Renaissance Drama, is really interesting and challenging, the reading load is fairly light.

Despite this, I'm still busy most of the time. And it's all Teaching's fault.

Ah, teaching. It wearies my soul and gets me out of bed in the morning and makes me tear my hair out. Some days I really love it. I feel comfortable, they're engaged and learning. Last week I did a lesson on Genre and Audience using examples from the Harry Potter universe and they loved it. I do like my students. They're all remarkably hardworking and committed to the class, and their work is decent. They call me Professor Brown and they seem to respect me. I really like getting to know them individually. I want to invest in them, as much as I can, the way my professors invested in me in college.

But some days they drive me crazy. It can be difficult to get college students motivated about English at 8 in the morning. Sometimes their blank stares are so frustrating. Come on guys!, I enthuse, if you talk it'll be easier for all of us. And then we'll be done and you can leave. Don't you want to leave? It's like that scene in the classic 90s movie "Mrs. Doubtfire." Robin Williams tells the lady at the hiring agency that he "does voices." He then launches into a bunch of really funny impressions, but she never cracks a smile. She asks, "Mr. Hillard, do you consider yourself humorous?" And he calmly replies, "I used to. There was a time when I found myself funny. But today, you have proven me wrong."

My students.

Me.

Just kidding. It's never quite that bad. Most of the time when my students are quiet or turn in atrocious work, it just makes me laugh. They're so adorably clueless sometimes. There's one kid who's a great student. But whenever I ask the class if I need to explain an assignment further, he just gives the slowest, saddest, most world-weary shake of his head. hahaha...Please.

A friend in my Practicum class recently described our role when we grade papers as similar to an Emergency Room doctor's: we assess the injuries and try to patch up the most critical ones first. We look at their bloody papers and make instant judgement calls, we shout at the nurses to BRING MORE GAUZE!:

 White male, 18 years old. Okay: we gotta fix this organization or he'll bleed out on the table.  And we've got a gaping hole in the logic here caused by a single gun shot wound to the body paragraphs. Let's sew up the conclusion now or else it'll infect the rest of the essay from the bottom up. Get some transitions in here, stat! We can deal with the surface abrasions caused by faulty grammar when he's out of the woods.

But I've got this one student. If we extend the Emergency Room metaphor...he is DOA. He seems completely lost in college. Even in the first weeks, he didn't seem to grasp the concepts, or even the fact that his actions have consequences. He didn't turn things in, and what he did submit was absolutely unacceptable compared to his peers' work and the expectations for the Composition Program. When I talked to him personally, he always offered really off-the-wall excuses. But he seemed to be genuinely struggling, so I made a conscious effort to talk to him, to offer extensions, to give encouragement.

At UC, like many other colleges, undergraduate students have to pass English 1001 to graduate. If they earn below a C-, we give them an "NP," or "Not Proficient," and they have to take it again until they pass. And unfortunately, there's a point at which you  just can't recover from the poor work you've done. There's no way to get that C-. This student massively failed the first major paper, despite the suggestions I gave on the first draft. When I discussed it with the head of the Comp Program, she agreed with me--he can't recover. He should drop my course and register for the class below it, English 1000, in the spring. So then I was faced with a dilemma. How do I tell this student that he's failed already? It wasn't even October yet! Do you just say, YO, DROP MY CLASS? Maybe give him one of these?

NP for effort!

That week, I had planned to schedule individual meetings with my students. I knew it would be maybe my only opportunity to talk frankly with this student, to help him see the severity of the situation.

The conference day arrived, a Wednesday. As I walked to campus, I was still pondering how I should break the news gently to this student. This poor, fragile guy. And finally it came to me: an apt metaphor for what I'm doing is like when a doctor breaks bad news to a patient. I thought about my dad. He was fantastic with his patients--everyone always says he was an amazing listener. He really listened to their concerns, to how they were feeling. He never tried to rush people out of the office. He was kind and patient and understanding. He always explained everything and answered any questions. He invested in them.

So I'm walking up the hill and repeating to myself, good bedside manner, good bedside manner. Be kind, be kind, be gentle. When, a few minutes later, the student approached my table at Starbucks, I reminded myself to channel Dr. Brown. It...it went as well as I could have hoped. He was upset to hear he was failing so badly, but seemed to understand me. I apologized for having to give him such bad news. But I tried to balance the bad news with encouragement and advice: even if you drop now, you will be more prepared for next time. You just have to take advantage of the resources on campus. You have some nice ideas in your papers, but your writing just isn't quite there yet. (Okay, that one was sort of a lie.)

Maybe I did a better job being nice than convincing the student of the hopelessness of his grade, because he didn't drop. He stayed. He even raised his hand and answered a question last Thursday! He turned in a couple more assignments, but not the draft of the 8-page research paper. With anyone else, this would turn me into Red-Alert-Oh-Boy-You're-Screwed professor, but with this guy...it doesn't exactly matter. The last day to drop has passed, so he's officially getting an NP...no matter what.

I guess my job should be some combination of the kindly, helpful family practice doctor--who has the time and heart to explain things, to listen as they stumble towards a vaguely workable research topic--and an ER doctor, who's just trying to keep the patient alive, at all costs.

I don't know. Every time I'm harsh, I feel bad; every time I let something slide, I regret it. I'm still trying to work out the right mix of nice and tough. Ultimately, though, I'm just really hoping that this guy doesn't show up on my roster next semester! I'm not as good a person as my Dad was.