Spring Break Wrap-Up

I am using the last ounce of juice in my iPod to listen to Luna. Because it’s springtime in the city. Because the theme of the week is embracing ambivalence, and the happy/sad stylings of Mr Dean Wareham fit that steez pretty well.

Charlottesville last week was so beautiful. Virginia feels like home. I like C’ville because, naturally speaking, it’s like a lusher and more decadent version of the home I know. More magnolia trees, more of that good dirt smell.

Charlottesville is like Park Slope would be if Park Slope were a small town in the country. Talk about your baby fever. Sheeesh.

Seeing Alison & Andrew was amazing. Being able to mosey down the street and eat the best tapas I’ve ever had and be treated well by the chef and then mosey back down the street and be home was amazing. New York might have lost some points. Sorry, New York, I love you but you’ll have to start trying harder. Or making it easier for people, when all we want is to get along.

To tell the truth, I felt pretty high strung and clammy for a lot of the vacation (even as getting out of town on a train feels good—damn, it always feels good), but now that I’m back, stuff’s better. I feel like I’ve been reset. Ready for summer to begin. Ready for…something.

Vaycay!

Tomorrow’s my last day of work for ten whole days, and I am really excited about my vacation. What, in particular, am I excited about regarding my vacation, you ask? Well I’ll tell you.

I am tooootally psyched about

• Gardening!
• Taking some pictures with Meg’s camera
• Visiting my mom in DC for a night
• Visiting my sister in Charlottesville for a coupla nights
• Shopping for clothes, a bike helmet, a bike lock
• Writing a couple of short pieces on neat artists and makers for RM, and making a little extra cash-money

And then there were the bigger things. Like, taking 400 Words in hand. I have wanted some time to do some blogwhoring. To look into grants, for that matter. I think my project is grantable. I think it could be. And…I wanted to distill my thesis back down to regular-paper length and send it to some journals. In case I, you know, ever want to go to school again. So researching what journals I could send to, and how. And I wanted to do some writing of my own. And make a pitch to The Believer that I’ve been wanting to make for over a year now. Digging back into that stuff. A-and thinking about jobs. This one. Other ones. Maybe changing. Where the project fits into that. What I’m, like, trying to do overall.

“That’s way more than you can do in a week,” my mother said last week on the phone, as I was excitedly describing my plans for this vacation. She is right.

Well, at least the weather ought to be very nice. And I’m looking forward to a break from NY’s endless pavements, looking forward to new green leaves. It’s a really good time of year for Virginia.

KS & NYC Celebrate Paper Anniversary; KS Takes Stock

I wrote this on March 29. Just came back to it. Maybe I'll add more soon...

I have a pretty lousy memory for dates, but for some reason March 27, 2006 has become pretty indelible. It's the day I walked into the offices of S--- for my first day of work. I'd arrived in New York only a couple of days previous. During that first week of work, I was still sleeping on the not-quite-body-length couch at Small But Charming Apartment while Meg's roommate Jamie got ready to move out and vacate the room that was going to be mine. I had just the few bags of stuff I'd brought with me from California. Some boxes were on the way, and a few weeks later, my dad would make a hero of himself in my life yet again by driving up from Virginia with furniture including my bed.

So last week it occurred to me that it was both my one-year job anniversary and my one-year anniversary of being (back) in New York. My first calendar year in the Big Apple.

So, you know, I'm always introspective. Too introspective probably. But this anniversary has me feeling especially in a take-stock kind of mood.

It's been quite the year. (I mean, aren't they always. But still.) Such as:

• Carried on a long-distance relationship for basically a full year, with all the attendant ups and downs.

• Worked a 9-to-5-type job for a whole year, for the first time in my whole almost-28.

• Moved from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, into a place I reasonably expect to stay for a while.

• Put out the second issue of my zine—and there'd been times when I wasn't sure if that was going to happen.

• Went back and wrested a master's degree from my two years at Cornell.

• Had zine written about in Newsweek, which made me happy for an entire month.

• Threw launch party for zine, had it attended by 30 or 40 people, looked out across lagoon of faces, thought 'wow, I sort of do have a community here. Awesome!'

• Put some thought into parlaying what I've learned through job into other areas—could I use it to do something for myself? Do I want to work for the man for the rest of my life? What do I want, anyway?

• Got a real, major distributor interested in zine.

• Re-connected with a few old friends. Observed, like many before me, that socializing here is hard, or at least different.

• Got a bit of writing done. Not a ton, not even a fair amount, but a little.

• Just recently, got to feeling kind of sad. Not fatally sad, just maybe, after the thesis got done, a little bit flushed with the 'what am I doing?' questions, a bit overwhelmed.

And oh yeah:

• Had a brief and not entirely resolved brush w/ chronic disease!

Man, yeah, all right. That's a year. A full year. I'd say.

So I'm sitting here thinking of all that, and thinking of what I want this next year to be 'about.'

So, uh, here are some reflections on the year that just passed. Maybe they'll help light the way forward. Maybe they'll simply help pass the time before I get to get up and leave this chair and office, and commence with the evening's friend-meeting and beer-drinking.

The long-distance relationship. It was hard! Leaving California was hard, wondering what was going to happen to us was hard. Staying in touch and maintaining that feeling of closeness when not in the same place was really hard, leading to this emotional sine curve with peaks during visits and troughs at the mid-point in between them. What can you say? Connecting was good, visiting was good, parting was hard, deciding to say goodbye was really hard—and a long time coming, a very long slow thing. Somewhere along the way, I made a commitment to being in New York for the foreseeable. I still fantasize about Portland and about smaller towns, more manageable cities, nature, land, a small house. But having a hub feels important to me. And even though it's a hell of a place to try and feel 'at home' in, sometimes, I am glad to be here.

Potentially Depressed or Depressing Blogging of the Month, Part 1.

This is a post in response to a friend who wrote to me today and said he'd been reading TMK and was dying to know how the thesis defense turned out. Flattering. So I thought I'd write something. I've had a lot of thoughts lately. They're not all very pleasant or friendly—and once again it seems silly that I'm saying this on a blog, to be delivered into the clutches of the Way Way Back Machine forever, but what do you want. I still think that confession is a powerful concept. (Hi, Masha.)

The good news is that the thesis defense was successful! Historic blizzards didn't impede my progress to Ithaca. I did not die of nerves. I did not fail to produce the One True Form, and made it through the Cornell bureaucracy all right. The main event itself took place in the office of my committee member who's on leave – it was mid-afternoon sunny in there when I met with the two remaining members of my committee, and the one who was nice enough to step in to fill the breach. No Pynchon scholars in the bunch, so our conversation was a little bit disjointed at times. But fun, in a weird way. Actually fun. Maybe that's how much I like having attention paid to me. So much that I don't even care if that attention takes the form of being grilled about a 700-plus-page novel.

But seriously.

Afterwards, they sent me out in the hall, to this little lounge area they have out there. I sat for what seemed like a long time. A graduate student in my department, who started a year or two before me, was sitting out there, having a paper conference with a student. She seemed sweet, eager to please. He gave her some advice about writing. She left, and I said hi to the other grad student. We proceeded to have that awkward conversation: So, you're still in school. So, you're not. Yeah. So you're living in New York now. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Editor. Yeah. Yeah.

The professors called me back in. They smiled. They told me I'd passed. One of them (the youngest one and the one who's not in the English department, and has also seemed to be the most intellectually/emotionally involved in this process, natch) wants to see a couple of revisions regarding my treatment of chemistry in the paper. But nothing big. She thinks it's a day's reading about polymers, and some minor tweaks. I have six weeks to get it done.

Ultimately, they were really nice about the paper. They asked me what I want to do with it. I told them how my old advisor, when I wrote an earlier version of it as a seminar paper, told me that it deserved to be published. I sent it off to Novel and got a really nice rejection note; they thought it was pretty good, too, but not the kind of thing they print. I kept meaning to send it around to other places. They told me that would probably be worth doing, especially if I'm ever thinking of going back to graduate school again. They suggested some things they'd change if I were going to prepare it to submit for publication. There was an awkward pause. A pause that said "yeah Katherine…what are you doing?"

"I don't know if I'm ever going back to graduate school," I said. It was one of those statements that sounds true when you say it—that you say and then realize, while it's coming out of your mouth, that it's true. That's about the size of it. I don't know if I'm ever trying to go back or not. "But I'd like to do anything that would help it to remain an option." That's true too.

We all stood up. They shook my hands. The youngest, non-English-department one reiterated our plans to meet up for a drink the next day. I ran yet more forms around campus for a while, and then it was done.

The sky had cleared, the sun was out. It wasn't bitterly cold. In fact, it was about as nice as it gets in Ithaca in the winter. I headed over to Mann Library to surf the internet, and bought an Americano from the silver airstream that sells Gimme! Coffee in the agriculture quad. I talked to my parents on the phone. They were happy. I was happy. A little weird, maybe, but happy.

So. Once I make those changes and submit them to that one committee member and she signs off on them, I'll be a master of arts! Yay!

You might think that all this would have me feeling really happy. And in a way it does. Nine or so months ago I told my mother (another one of those things that comes out of your mouth and shocks you with its true-ness) that whatever else happened, I was now certain that I wasn't going to continue my studies at Cornell. Get your master's degree, she told me. "I can feel your master's degree slipping out from between your fingers," were I think her exact words. I felt it too, and now I all but have it. It took a lot of work on my part, on top of my normal, everyday work, but I got it done. And that feels pretty great. It's the "whatever else happens" that is causing the problem. Instead of feeling happy all over, perhaps not unsurprisingly, I feel the weight of these un-answered questions: what am I going to do now?

Jason was here from Philly over the weekend, and we got to talking about the humoral theory of personality. I've been thinking about humoral theory a bit lately—I can't remember why—maybe Jason actually mentioned it first—but I've been appreciating its usefulness. I've also been trying on the theory that, as a person of melancholic temperament, I may be attracted to phlegmatic dudes. Because I dig on their seemingly-calm exteriors, wanting to understand what makes them that way, wanting to co-opt a little piece of it for myself. Anyway, that's a digression. The point is that, for some reason, it's more comforting for me to think of myself as a melancholic than a depressive. I've also been thinking about how I've been dealing with this whole thing, this transition, in a typically dyed-in-the-wool melancholic way. It's great how these clusters of personality traits first noticed in the middle ages can hang together so much that they're still recognizable now. Humoral theory makes me think that my way of looking at things isn't straight-up diseased or disordered; it's a recognized human perspective, damnit. A hard perspective. Hard on the person who holds it. But worthwhile, in that 'it takes all kinds' sort of way.

Melancholic is the personality of an individual characterized by black bile; hence a person who was a thoughtful ponderer had a melancholic disposition. Often very kind and considerate, melancholics can be highly creative—as in poets and artists—but also can become overly obsessed on the tragedy and cruelty in the world, thus becoming depressed. It also indicates the season of autumn (dry and cold) and the element of earth. A melancholy is also often a perfectionist, being very particular about what they want and how they want it in some cases. This often results in being unsatisfied with one's own artistic or creative works, always pointing out to themselves what could and should be improved. This temperament describes the depressed phase of a bipolar disorder.

That's as good a description as any of where I find myself now. Grinding between being my creative, sensitive self, and being the other version of myself who's obsessed and overwhelmed by suffering—my own and others'—and being shut down by it. Oh, and the perfectionist thing. That rings a bell, or several. A whole carillon. It makes me cringe, because it makes me think about the attitude with which I went into, judged, and then left grad school. And now I'm thinking: wanting what's right is good. But being such a hold-out for awesomeness that one has a hard time settling on or being happy with anything is…problematic.

Anyway, I should go soon, but I'm not done with this either. Tune in next time for (a) anecdotes about my new therapist, (b) tales of New York, and (c) my quack-doctor-ly pronouncements about the soul-sickness of our times. Woo!