Hello, Again

It's been quite some time since my last blog post, and even that one was a cop-out (merely pasting a link in a window and adding one or two sentences of explanation). I do think I have a pretty good excuse, though. My first Masters of Fine Arts application was due yesterday at midnight, and nearly all my free time in the past few months has been dedicated to working on my writing portfolio. When you spend all day writing in the office for work and all evening writing at home for school, there isn't a lot of mental energy left over to write for "fun." (Not that working on my portfolio hasn't been fun in its own way. It has been. But also stressful.)

Today is the first day in a long time I haven't felt an urgency to write and edit. My next application is due in two weeks, but most of the grunt work is done at this point and the hardest part is hopefully behind me. And yet, of course, here I am, writing. I guess I don't know what else to do with myself.

Applying for graduate schools---particularly MFA programs, where most schools boast an acceptance rate between one and ten percent---is an extremely exposing process. Rarely in my life have I felt more vulnerable than I do now. Writing is such a personal act, even when writing fiction, and to be judged solely on that standard, to be told either you are or you aren't good enough based on one collection of painfully birthed stories, feels kind of like someone is deciding whether or not to execute your kid. A slight exaggeration, maybe, but it's something close.

It's also scary for another reason. By deciding to apply to programs, I have drawn a line in the sand for myself and for all those who hear about it (aka you). "Here I have decided that writing is the passion to which I want to devote the rest of my life (or at least the next few years), and here is the way I plan to do that." Whenever you verbalize what you want and take steps to attain it, you make yourself vulnerable to disappointment. This is not a bad thing, obviously, but it does mean that the consequences of failure feel higher. The more you want something, the harder it is when you don't get it.

All of this means that I have to hold my plans and my goals loosely. I need to be ok with the idea of not getting into schools this time around and waiting another year or two if necessary. This could be, and I'm not just saying this to convince myself, a very good thing. But I also need to not let fear of failure keep me from trying my absolute best on the remaining eight applications. I need to remember, as has been my constant lesson this past year and half, that life happens and things usually work out ok in the end for those who are patient.

So I'm trying to be patient.

An Interesting Article

It speaks to themes I have addressed on and off in this blog. Potentially a little insulting for members of my generation, but, if nothing else, the graphics are highly entertaining. Recommended reading for anyone between the ages of 18 and 30.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y-unhappy_b_3930620.html

Patience, Portfolios, and Piles of Mush

I like quantifiable things. I like things that can be counted, recorded, and later analyzed. For example, the number of miles I have run or biked each day. My grocery reciepts. The times my athletes run in each cross country meet and their splits per mile. The balance of my bank account. My budgets on Mint. I make to-do lists for fun, even when I’m not busy---perhaps especially when I’m not busy---and checking them off brings me pleasure.

So why on earth, I’m beginning to ask myself---why did I chose to pursue writing, of all the fields available to me? Why did I pick the most unquantifiable of endeavors, the most elusive, the most resistant to to-do lists and check marks? Shouldn’t I have gone into statistics or accounting or engineering maybe, rather than this right-brain frustration?

I’m feeling this way because I’m in the process of applying to Master of Fine Arts programs, and, if you couldn’t tell, the portfolio-producing process has not been progressing as smoothly as I hoped. The plan is to produce two flawless and imaginative short stories by November. So far, after nearly three months of sincere effort, my brain has birthed only one pile of mush that may be breathing its last breath. I’m trying not to panic.

Unfortunately for me, when it comes to MFA programs in creative writing, numbers don’t matter. Most schools don’t require a GRE score. The ones that do just want to make sure you’re not stupid. Undergraduate GPAs… well, as long you passed everything, it shouldn’t be a problem. According to a book I have about the MFA application process, 90% of your application rests on the 35-40 page writing sample in your portfolio. In other words, it all comes down to whether or not some professor decides he or she likes my story. One person could dash my hopes on a whim, no matter what my GRE or GPA is.

This is not good news for a person who likes to quantify things.

There is no way to quantify a story. There is no way to know for sure how I stack up against the hundreds of other applicants, each jostling for just a few spots. No average LSAT score, no comparable GPA or recommended extracurriculars. I can’t objectively rate my writing on a scale of 1 to 10 and use that to decide which programs to apply to. I also can’t force my writing to get better, to become more creative, to shape itself into something beautiful and poignant. Time spent does not necessarily translate into quality achieved.

That’s just how writing is, and I better get used to it because I haven’t exactly left myself room for other pursuits. Writing requires a lot of patience---also not one of my natural strengths. “Have patience with the process,” I typed on a sticky note on my laptop desktop after reading it in Story, Robert McKee’s famous book on writing and plot. I have to remind myself of this frequently. Patience. Patience. Patience.

Patience with the process is not an easy thing, in writing or in any other area of life. I like quick results and check marks, and now that I’m a year out of college, I feel like the clock is ticking for me to start producing great things. After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise when he was only 23 and W.H. Auden had his first book of poetry published at the same age! It’s a bit ridiculous to be comparing myself to these luminaries, I know, and to be feeling the pressures of time when I’m still a baby in the eyes of a lot of people, but it’s hard not to be frustrated with the slow progression of my writing. It’s hard not to wish for an easy way to quantify my skill level and detail the exact steps I need to take in order to increase it and produce something amazing.

I guess that’s why I’m attempting to go back to school, ultimately. To get better and to find out how to do that. But first I need to get in, and that may very well be the hardest part.

Cooking for One

I improvised a pear crisp today out of three pears, some oatmeal, butter, brown sugar, and a bit of cinnamon. It was pretty good, despite the fact that I didn’t use a recipe or measure anything. Good enough that I decided to make it my dinner.

Cooking for one is a rather motley and scattershot activity. When no one else is eating your meals, you can feel free to eat whatever strange (or easy) food strikes your fancy. Like pear crisp for dinner. Or beans from a can heated in the microwave. Or the egg and broccoli and black beans and tomato scramble thing I made yesterday because that was what I had in the fridge (the eggs turned kind of gray from the black beans, but it actually tasted fine).

It’s not that I don’t know how to cook. I do. At least, well enough not to totally embarrass myself in the kitchen. But sometimes I don’t always feel like putting in much effort or buying those non-essential things at the grocery store that would afford me a little more creativity. Maybe I’m just being lazy. Or cheap. I’ve definitely been accused of that one.

Living on my own again, I feel a little like I’m back in my college days, when I was on a ten-meal-a-week plan at the cafeteria and had about 15 additional dollars to spend on food. I was pretty good then at tracking down free meals---being on a sports team helped. But my non-cafeteria diet still consisted mainly of oatmeal, cheap wheat bread, peanut butter, and whatever cereal I stole from my parents’ house when I was home on break. I have a little more money than that to spend now, thank God, because I’ve only recently been able to bring myself to eat oatmeal again.

Still, it’s hard to summon up the motivation to make anything fancy when I know I’m the only one who is going to be eating it. And I sort of like having the freedom to make weird things and not have to subject anyone else to the risk or the malnutrition. Like improvised pear crisp for dinner.

On Changing the World

I read an article recently on theatlantic.com by Ron Fornier about the difference between my generation, the Millennials, and my parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers. The article focused mainly on the attitude of each generation toward politics and Washington, but a side comment caught my attention.

Fornier noted that Millennials---while often labeled as self-absorbed, egotistical, and entitled (and I’m not saying this isn’t true)---are actually more willing than previous generations to desire careers that further their community rather than their bank account. Millennials are more likely to volunteer, study abroad, and look beyond themselves when envisioning the ideal job. Growing up in a world that is more interconnected than ever, we are more likely to see global problems as our own.

As someone immersed in the culture of the Millennials, I have to say that I find this to be true, at least in my own circles of friends and acquaintances. I have no evidence to support that this desire to be world changers is more pronounced in my generation than in previous ones, as I have only been a 23-year-old in the year 2013 and not in 1973, but the words of my peers certainly suggest a longing for meaning and purpose in their career path.

While in college, we dream of working for non-profits and NGOs. We want to bring social justice to the red light districts of Bangkok, end hunger in Somalia, bring peace to Palestine, fight AIDS in South Africa. We want to be doctors, teachers, child-huggers, social workers, advocates for change. Our goals are lofty. So are our expectations.

The reason so many of us---us post-grad Millennials---are so frustrated, I think, is because there is almost always a lag after college graduation between intense passion and practical capacity. We want so badly to be doing something important and meaningful. But then we realize, to our dismay, that we aren’t actually helpful to anyone yet. We have a college degree but we have no skills, no experience.

We have only student loans and monotonous entry-level jobs (if we’re lucky). As we organize mind-numbing spreadsheets, file back-log data, and make coffee for our superiors, we wonder, how am I going to change the world doing this?

It is after this thought that many decide to go to grad school.

I don’t blame them.

Changing the world is a heck of a lot harder in practice than in theory, particularly, as I’m discovering, when you went to a liberal arts college and got a degree in English writing. I firmly believe that writing can change the world. I have less confidence now that my writing can do that. But I hold onto my passion to make a difference, to be a piece of the change, proudly, fiercely almost, because there is a part of me that worries I am one short step from apathy. One quick slide away from settling for something significantly less than my dreams.

It happens to people. I’ve seen it.

Somewhere along the way, life becomes about survival. We just need to put food in our mouths and a roof over our heads. We need an income. And let’s face it, most of us don’t have the luxury of being too picky about where that comes from. After a while, our dreams or passions fade. At first this bothers us. Then we don’t really care.

Somehow I---we, post-grads, everyone---need to find a new way of looking at what it means to “change the world” and how we can be a part of that. I purposefully won’t use the words “realistic middle ground” because all of them suggest to me compromise and an easy way out. But a little bit of reality and redefinition is required to prevent the majority of people from succombing to disappointment and defeat, I think. Me being one of them.

It is important to hold in tension a healthy fear of apathy and a passion for change with the humble understanding that I am just one person on this earth of 7 billion, living in a tiny window of time that will soon pass and be forgotten. As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his little book Leaf by Niggle, I’ll be lucky to paint even a single leaf in this giant tree of God’s.

That being said, I still want my one leaf to look amazing.

Life's a Canvas

The walls of my new basement bedroom are the whitest white. I don’t mind the color, given that my overhead lights have less wattage than a candle and my one window looks out at a recessed wood wall. White keeps the room from looking too dim. Or, at least less dim than it might otherwise.

But my room is big, the walls long, and I do not have adequate furniture or decor to prevent a certain blankness from affecting the overall feeling of the place. My few sparse pictures and posters seem more to call attention to the vast white spaces than to fill them. There is a particularly large, particularly empty stretch on the wall opposite my bed. I look at it at night before turning off my lamp and it yawns back at me.

When I moved, I brought a big blank canvas from my house and my box of paints to help fill this void. I haven’t done anything with them yet or decided what colors to use. I’m waiting for a sudden rush of inspiration.

I do that a lot in life, I think. Wait for the inspiration, the motivation, the right opportunity, to find me. I tend to put off decisions with the assumption that the right choice will somehow just creep into my mind when I’m not paying attention. A lot of the time, this works out ok for me. I’m good at being patient when it means not interrupting the status quo.

But I'm realizing that like my wall, my hopes for the future will remain a blank and unfulfilled reality unless I do something to invigorate them. Sometimes great opportunities fall into your lap with little or no effort on your part, but mostly that just happens in movies. Passivity gets me and my canvas nowhere. I can’t produce a work of art unless I actually pick up my brush and dip it in the paint.

Can you tell I’m feeling guilty about not spending very much time on my writing this month?

Leaving the Nest

A week and a half ago I moved out of my bedroom at my parents’ house for probably the last time. It sounds funny now to say that---“my parents’ house.” It’s no longer really mine. Now when I say “my house” I mean a different one, one in a quaint little neighborhood about 20 minutes west, occupied by myself and 3 other girls. Of course, this house doesn’t quite feel like home either yet. It feels more like being back in college.

The bedroom at my parents’ looks strange now that I’ve removed most of my things. All that made it homey and mine has been transported or packed away, leaving behind barren shelves and stretches of blank carpet. The blue walls are conspicuously bare and cold, studded with nails that hold no picture frames or posters. If I were my parents, I’d keep that bedroom door closed. It’s empty yet not totally clean, its existence speaking loudly of an absence.

Adult children are really not meant to live with their parents. This is what I’ve decided over the last 15 months, even though my experience at home was largely positive. It happens and sometimes it’s the right decision but only because other plans fall through or things don’t work out quite as we’d like them to. The return to the high school bedroom is rarely Option A. And yet so many of my peers are in this situation, happy or not happy, trying or not trying, to make the best of it. We lack money. We possess debt. We haven’t a clue where or when the next job will appear. We grit our teeth and bare it.

In this situation, parents and children who under normal circumstance get along fine often find themselves unable to connect. Possibly they fight. Not infrequently they live in an undercurrent of passive aggressive tension. Nobody is quite sure how this is supposed to work, how they’re supposed to act.

What role does the adult child play in the machine of the family? How entitled is she to her own schedule? Completely entitled, the parent might say. And yet the mother’s feelings are hurt when her daughter rarely comes home for dinner. Can the child freely make his own life choices? Of course, everyone agrees, and yet the son feels a latent guilt living under his father’s watchful eye. This guilt may later grow to resentment, though no one is at fault.
 

It’s not that we children don’t appreciate the free rent, the food, the minimal expenses, and I apologize that we often act as though we don’t. It’s that we regret that we need them. It’s that we are ashamed we cannot provide these things for ourselves. Or perhaps we can provide them, but then we feel ashamed that we can but still are not. We do not like having to tell people, “Yeah, I live with my parents.” There is usually a slight embarrassed silence after this statement, which we hurry to fill with some justification. “I’m just trying to save money to pay off loans,” or “I’m hoping to move within 6 months so I didn’t want to sign a lease,” or “I’m looking for a job.” The recipients of these statements nod respectfully. We hate this as well.

We acutely feel our lack of independence and so we compensate, asserting independence in whatever other way we can. Absenting the house for long periods of time. Spending time with friends in other apartments, other cities. Withholding information, perhaps not consciously, to keep some illusion of privacy and a separate life. Rebellion, thought to have run its course in high school, may return with an immature, embarrassed edge. We are not proud of ourselves.

It is difficult to move from the autonomy of college life back to the psuedo-autonomy of life at home. It is difficult to return to a state that has not been our reality since we were 17 or 18 and know how to incorporate 4+ years of independence into that routine. Cut us a little slack if it seems that our maturity level has dropped a few notches. We struggle to adjust. Restless, straining, and off-kilter, we feel at odds with our circumstances in some fundamental way.

Of course, despite all this, despite the fact that I know I am meant to grow up and grow out, despite my readiness to have a place of my own, it’s still a little hard to make that final break. That’s the paradox of this strange time of life. There cannot be a moving forward without a leaving behind.

My departure marks the first time my parents have less than three kids living at home since their third child was born in 1994. Two seems so empty, so quiet, compared to the chaos of five. It’s sad to realize that all the members of my family will never live under the same roof again. The nucleus is breaking up, the bedrooms emptying out. It’s a good thing---I enjoy seeing the different directions my siblings lives are taking---but it’s also a kind of loss.

“But you’ll have a bathroom all to yourself now!” I told my 13-year-old sister when she expressed some dismay that I would be leaving her to the unbuffered mercy of her older brother.

“Yeah,” she admitted, not looking me in the eye, “but you were the one who cleaned it.” This is as close as she’ll come to saying she’ll miss me. I’ll take what I can get. I’ll miss her too.

Today after cross country practice I returned to my parents’ house to welcome my younger brother home from a summer in California. While there, I sent a text to my older brother: “I’m at home.” “Which home?” he texted back. It’s a fair question; home is an ambiguous word now.

I guess this is just one more step into the real world, that harsh and exhilarating place that beckons us to partake of its tragedy and adventure. I’ve been living there already, of course. It just feels more official now.