Winter Break Reading Recommendations

I ask fellow literature majors for reading recommendations all the time, and usually I get responses like you have to read Middlemarch! you have to read The Faerie Queene! you have to read War and Peace! and I love long books, but here are some of my recs for things I am 100% sure you'll have time to finish over a three-week period amongst other holiday activities :) personal absolute favorites bolded. 

poetry

• DU FU: A Life in Poetry, Translated by David Young (ISBN 978-0-375-71160-2)
• Dearest Creature by Amy Gerstler (ISBN 978-0143116356)
• The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck (ISBN 978-0880013345)
  
• School of the Arts by Mark Doty (ISBN 978-0060752460)
• On the Other Side, Blue by Collier Nogues (ISBN 978-1935536079)
• Small Porcelain Head by Allison Benis White (ISBN 978-1935536277)
• Room Service by Ron Carlson (ISBN 978-1597092333)
• Dreams and Dust by Don Marquis (this one is difficult to find because he's largely out of print right now, but my copy's ISBN is 978-1409917991)
• Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson (ISBN 978-1936365807)
• The Light the World Appears in by James Kimble (this one is also difficult to find, my uni library had a copy! ISBN 978-0941179058) 
• The Light Around the Body by Robert Bly (ISBN 978-0060907860)
• Self-Portrait with Crayon by Allison Benis White (ISBN 978-1880834831)
• Odas a las cosas / Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda (highly encourage you to read these in Spanish if you can!! ISBN 978-0821220801)
• Cien sonetos de amor por Pablo Neruda (you actually need to read these in Spanish: translations often miss the mark. ISBN 978-9875803008)
• The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (you might not have time to finish this one, but I can't ever recommend poetry without including this poet's work. He's incredible, beautiful. ISBN 978-0811218818)

short fiction (i.e. "short stories" / compilations of short fiction)

• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas (ISBN 978-0811202077)
• Widow by Michelle Latiolais (ISBN 978-1934137307)
• "Milk" & "Blood" by Ron Carlson (+link to "Milk" & "Blood" is in The News of the World ISBN 978-0393331783)
• Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (ISBN 9780316767729) 
• "Dog Run Moon" by Callan Wink (in New Yorker, September 26, 2011, p.104-)
• "The Liar" by Tobias Wolff (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237) 
• "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "Weekend" by Ann Beatie (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "The Lover of Horses" by Tess Gallagher (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "A Poetics for Bullies" by Stanley Elkin (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237) 
• "Akhnilo" by James Salter (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (in Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 044037864)
• "The Open Window" by "Saki" (H.H. Munro) (in Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 044037864)
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (ISBN 978-0684822761)
• St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell (ISBN 978-0307276674)

fiction

• All Quiet on the Western Front by E.M. Remarque (ISBN 0899662927 preferred but any translation is fine)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (ISBN 978-0143039976)
• Tinkers by Paul Harding (ISBN 978-1934137123)
• Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout (ISBN  978-0553763065)

non-fiction / essay

• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (ISBN 978-0802724700)
• Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (ISBN 0803263325) 
• Quite Early One Morning by Dylan Thomas (I HAVEN'T READ THIS ONE YET BUT IT'S DYLAN THOMAS COME ON ISBN 9780811202084)
• Proofs and Theories by Louise Gluck (ISBN 9780880014427)
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (ISBN 978-0393310399)

non-fiction / autobiography

• The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka (ISBN 978-1555974268)
• Final Exam by Pauline W. Chen (ISBN 978-0307275370)

to find a way, we lose control

you are the night

you are the ocean

you are the light behind a cloud

late october

A career fair on campus yesterday. I walked by booths for UCLA graduate studies, for USC graduate studies, UCI graduate studies—came upon one for University of Glasgow graduate studies. A woman with a rag of blond hair sat alone on her iPhone at the table. Why is nobody at this table? I walked slow to look at the pictures of the Scottish Highlands on the flyers. Glasgow, of course, is not in the highlands. Glasgow is a dark city of rain and a hunching urban populace and old churches and buildings whose absolute upward force opposes the down-slope of tired shoulders. Glasgow is an old city, beautiful in its dank austerity. But I like the pictures of the grasses and shocks of small white flowers, the clouds and surreally blue sky. I walk past a table, also empty, of University of Dublin graduate studies. Do you know I wore this exact shirt in Dublin about a year ago? There’s a man standing alone with his hands behind his back. I offer him a small smile. Can you believe it either, there’s nobody by your table. 

Past the fair now and headed up the stairs into the library, where I’ll sit for an hour to finish an essay, I think about turning around—heading back to the Dublin table, asking, so—what if I’m broke. What if I’m in debt. And what if I just have lost the plot. What if school doesn’t matter to me anymore. What if I’m looking to your school and your dirty dark urine-scented-cornered city to make something matter to me again, what if I’m looking to your school because I just don’t know where else to go; what if I’m broke and I don’t want to work, what if I want to be the world’s biggest dreamer and I think it’d be great to do it with you. What if University of Dublin can help me to not be tired. What if I tell you that I’m using this graduate program to be close to The Book of Kells, over which I teared up last fall, my breath misting the display case, obscuring my own reflection. What if I told you that that was one of the only moments in the whole of my life that I remember being surrounded by people but feeling totally, peacefully alone, just me and that illuminated manuscript and the cold city. What if I said—hey, about Irvine. I’m afraid to leave my home—I’m afraid to stay. Do you still want to see my resume. I bring you with reverent hands the books of my numberless dreams

Mid-October

I’ve meant to write about my classes in some detail; but as it happens the most salient thing I could tell you about any of them is that they are the reason I haven’t been able to write about them yet. So that’s sort of neat, in a stupid way.

(By the way—I’ve rediscovered the word “stupid” in an attempt to re-establish an elastic vocabulary—purely as a resource for the fiction I’m writing, obviously!—and, you know, it’s great to feel eight again. “Stupid” is a really elastic word. Everything can be stupid. Everything is in a varying, fluctuating state of stupidness. But the way that you employ the word can relay a precision in degree of insult. It’s great. The world is bright and once again full of possibility.

Actually, when I was eight, my third-grade teacher had to lecture the class about the impact of verbal slurs—it was a small private school and most of us had been together since Kindergarten, and you know, kids are kind of mean, and at this age just discovering that insults are a beautiful way to employ creative intelligence—think of “thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!,” that beautiful slur delivered by Queen Anne in Richard III— and I remember this teacher telling us that the definition of “stupid” was “worthless” and how could we call any of our classmates worthless? Honestly—pretty easily. We were eight. Also, this is the same lady who took me to the beach once and made me eat the crust on my packed turkey sandwich, claiming that little girls who ate the crust of the bread would have beautiful nails and hair. Naturally, anything she said should have been taken into extremely careful consideration, but I was eight. Now, I know better, by actual fact. Bread crust and nails/hair have nothing to do with each other and I was duped, shamelessly.)

I’ll just give you the bare bones:

• MWF: Logic & Philosophy of Science, 09:00
• TuTh: Asian American Autobiographies, 11:00 // Literature of True Crime, 12:30

Reading for my TuTh classes is heavy. My professor for True Crime is this sort of old guy who, when he looks at you and points vaguely in your direction if he’s calling on you to participate in class, is always maddeningly imprecise with his gaze—maybe it’s his glasses, but I can absolutely never tell when he’s calling on me because he’s looking two rows behind me. Also when he’s looking at other people, he’s never actually looking at them. Maybe it’s a side effect of having seen too many bodies or other horrible things during his years riding along with the LAPD Homicide unit. I just don’t know. But I bring him up because he makes the excuse for so much reading by saying that we’d want to read the books he assigns anyway, even if we weren’t in his class. Stupid! You don’t know anything about me!

My professor for Asian American Autobiographies is someone I’d like to be friends with outside of class. He seems like a plentiful resource for his subjects—English and Asian American Studies—and I trust his class discussions. I posted a homework assignment on our class site and he emailed me later to tell me I’d done a good job. He’s also always smiling at lame jokes that kids make in class as if it’s the first time he’d ever heard them, which is impossible because he’s way older than me and I’d heard of them….This is the main thing that makes me question my vague aspirations to be a professor, myself, one day—how do I make kids think they’re not being stupid when they are? Should I suffer fools? I just don’t know. Anyway, the reading for this class is really emotional for me—I have a sort of hypersensitivity to the memories that the writers relay, and I’m not sure why. Certainly I have lived a very wonderbread, white-American existence, not without awareness of and appreciation for other cultures as they brushed up against mine or infiltrated it briefly….It’d be a nightmare of mine to have to teach any class where your choices range from the pedantic and the politically-correct, to the absolute stereotype. Today’s language hasn’t adapted as quickly in terms of culture to the nuances of the Asian American experience—I think—so we, college students, daft and somewhat unimaginative, already have crude tools to work with. I come out of each class feeling like it’s a miracle that we’re not insulting each other left and right out of ignorance. Instead people just say really lame things. There are a couple people in the class whose opinions I find interesting, but other than that I’d rather have a permanent office-hour one-on-one with Jim (professor who won’t be called professor…) twice a week. I think. At least, at this point, that’s true. We’ll see how the rest of the quarter goes.

My professor for LPS is smart and enthusiastic and funny. He suffers no fools. When someone in the lecture—which is large, almost 200 students, but small for an LPS introductory course—asks a stupid question, he’ll point up to the lecture slide where the answer is stated plainly and he’ll say something like, “clearly, yes” or “clearly not.” He also wears the same outfit to class every day. It’s a black v-neck t-shirt and a pair of black trousers. Everything is sort of merged into what could be mistaken as a jumpsuit by a thick black belt under his belly. He has really short gray hair and a big curly dark beard. What’s weird about his clothes is not just that he’s always wearing the same thing, but that, once, I saw him before class and he was wearing tan cargo shorts and what I think was a bright purple t-shirt. In lecture that day he was in his lecture suit. I don’t know what’s going on. 

On top of classes, I’m also working on stories to compile, at the end of the year, my senior thesis for the Campuswide Honors Program. I’m working with Ron Carlson, who is a real character. If I was set on getting to be a really good writer I think I’d make him a permanent project and not quit at writing until I’d gotten him onto the page. 

I’ve been reading Verses on Bird: Selected Poems by Zhang Er—

Poetry, my future, the blurred future of you and me

Pitch black. You already can’t see the hand in front of your face

At daybreak, you catch up with you

I’m hoping a daybreak comes for me, soon.

Ah! There is good blood in that old city...

I let a day pass by about a week ago that would have marked the one-year anniversary of my having moved into dorm at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, where I studied for three months before returning to California and UCI. Others of my friends who went abroad with me posted Facebook statuses that caused me pause, and wonder if so few words and such simple sentiments could really package up and present any kind of respect to or memory of their trips abroad. I like to write...obviously..., and it seemed a good occasion to try to write of some of the experiences I had whilst abroad, but I second-guessed myself and ended up forgetting about it until I was awake at 1:45 AM and realized that it was the next morning, and the day had slipped by unnoticeably. I felt a sort of relief, a release from the pressure of performing to an expected, regular, standard ritual. A year ago today I moved into a place and that was the first day of like ninety days that I spent away from home and I met some good people and had some good times....etc.

I thought to myself later--well, it’s good you didn’t write about it on that day. It meant something to me in a way that pulled at me insistently when I realized that it was 19 September that day. And as is an annoying habit of writers, I began to retreat into the lucid imaginings that are located, for me, abroad....walking through autumn air so cold that I ceased to be able to locate my nose on my face without reaching up and wrapping gloved fingers around it and having that be a nice thing, the crowded streets of Paris near Christmas scented like hot wine and chestnuts. I thought to myself, well, it’s a good thing you didn’t go all the way in. It’s good to distance yourself. This is your life now. This hot, dry, Southern California, hot and dry well into autumn. You live here. You live here.

I’ve written before that I’m not sure I do live here, but acceptance of that idea has, frankly, gotten me into a lot of trouble. So I’ve been working on it--getting better at living here. Going out with friends, wearing shorts more, not putting sunscreen on my face every day. I haven’t been to the beach in ages, though. I’m sure my re-immersion into my Southern California won’t be complete until I’ve put my feet in the sand of the coast where I spent so many of my childhood summers. I’m trying to get better at remembering that these memories--of watching the rip tide float half-way into the horizon, of finding sand in my underpants and hair for days after a beach visit, of jogging to the coast for P.E. a few days a week in junior high, of invading tide pools and catching sand crabs and bodyboarding ferociously--these are real. And they count for a lot. My mom’s old mini-van, in which we took trips to the ocean frequently, should be as real to me and as important to me in memory as the double-decker busses that I took six of seven times a week for three months while I was in Norwich--it should be more important. Or--I don’t know. 

A big trouble about living so much inside my head is that I forget that what’s not in my head is important. Some people tell me that what’s not inside my head is actually more important. I’m poison to myself; I’ve known that for a long time, now. But people like me who are poison to ourselves are also poison to ourselves because we’re okay with that. Me--I’m so afraid to lose any of the things that I feel like I have sometimes, and I use this occasionally to justify my frequent trips into non-reality. Except it’s real for me. So there probably needs to be another term for that. My dad always taught us and still insists that there’s only one actual reality. This makes perfect sense to me, but still, there’s something I’m living in a lot, whether or not this is harmful to myself and difficult for others, that’s on some sort of parallel plane, and I’d like a name for it. Maybe I’ll work on that. I don’t much like “delusions” or “la la land,” etc. Let’s think of something that notes at its devastation and doesn’t sound like an errant sound escaping from a three-year-old’s mouth. 

I meant to write a really different blog. I’ve just had the first two days of classes of my last year at UCI. Right now, I’m just going through the motions--gathering school supplies, battling lines at the bookstore--you would not BELIEVE how long they are, it’s astounding--sitting in class, struggling to raise my voice to speak from the back of crowded lecture halls. 

One thing I will say before working on another post to describe some things about classes in detail, is that, with the beginning of each new school year or quarter or whatever, I incur a fresh, acute fear of being run over by a bicyclist. I have been walking around looking over my shoulder so often that people are probably going to think that I’ve developed a compulsion. But, it’s like, bicyclists have some sort of record to set on the first few days of classes or something and have to hit a certain number of students before their crazy-bicyclist-on-the-way-to-class reputation is thoroughly installed. 

I’ve actually only seen two people toppled before, but that’s two more than I should have seen. I used to find it just crazy, but let’s think about it--who needs to ride a bike to class? What kind of person is that? When 90% of us can make it there on time fine on our own two feet, why are bicyclists in such a hurry that they need to run people over? After careful consideration, I’ve found that I think they’re probably people with a different set of priorities. Actually--that’s obvious, right? Most people probably have “not running people over on my bike” pretty high up on their unspoken list of things that are important to them. 

*title taken from George Borrow's Lavengro, in reference to Norwich

"And in that vale of light / the city drifts / anchorless upon the ocean"

I feel I should spend some time thinking about, or writing about, the time I spent in the Bay Area last week. It’s difficult for me to think back on the week with any coherence; what is important to me about the last week is not something I find I can easily verbalise. A couple people have asked me what I did and I’ve told them about the food I ate, a couple places I went....Cities make me feel odd; there’s this instantaneous and irresistible impulse to at once dissolve into the crowd and to stand apart from it....what’s true is that I look at this world and want everything, but I am just one person; and the prayer I have is that I will never become insensate, no matter how frustrating it is to want all things all at once, or at times to be so content as to almost become want, and being want, to satisfy that insistence at the same time. I don’t know--part of me wants to make sense of what I’m thinking to other people and some of me is resigned to the idea that I am a complete singular, and there are some things of my own experience that can only ever belong to me. 

I guess keeping a blog and updating irregularly resists what I’ve just written; but I always do have a hope that somewhere someone knows or can know. I don’t want to become closed off to possibility. I’m afraid of becoming too comfortable--I have spent a lot of time, I have spent a lot of energy attempting to arrive at a certain peace with myself. But whenever I begin to think in larger terms, whenever I think to myself--this is my life, is this what I want?--I become intensely desirous that the best of what my life will come to, that the best of what I can offer this world, has not yet manifested itself. “I’d like to think the best of me is still hiding up my sleeve.” 

I like being alone. Sometimes I step back from my own dissatisfaction and realize that even if I had the choice I wouldn’t change my life. I feel very unfinished. I’m floundering in depths that might swallow me. This world is very hungry. I feel unarmed. So I turn, again and again, to the only things I know I’ve been born to do--to write and to love. I worry for the people I will meet at times. I am not easy to be friends with. I know. I know, too, that I write this blog just to get out of my own head. I don’t believe with any conviction that anyone is reading this; I’m okay with it; I like being alone. But I, too, recognize, that I was probably born to be part of something larger.

Time passes very slowly; life is very regular, discontent to be cherished. I’ve been wondering a lot, especially spending so much time under the thicket of wires in SF, if anything can truly be mine, if I can hold anything close to my heart, or if some things happen to intercept with me, and move on in their own time, without regard to me. Still, I am that way, I suppose, to others. Sometimes, too, I think I am only full of love or admiration and, being so full of it, I, without discretion or politeness, choose a target for it, just to let it out, just to express it. I wonder if anything I’ve ever loved has anything to do with the thing itself. I’m not very comfortable with myself right now. I’m wondering too much, I have too little to hold onto. I think later I may look back and wonder at myself in the same way that others would wonder at me now if they read my writing; if they could inhabit my head....There is a type of person who waits for someone to discover her sadness or her unhappiness and to drop into her life and open up other doors, to help her “out” of that sadness, to make her happy or to rescue her from herself. I am not waiting for anyone but myself. I recognize that if anything is to be slayed I’ll have to hold my own sword. I’m always, looking, though, to others for directions, feeling at the same time so alienated from them that I question whether or not I can take their example at all. I do believe that I share a lot with people; I have met a few kindred spirits in my lifetime; but at times the distance is so overwhelming, and strips me of so much, and though I wish to be alone, I have the impulse to reach out to someone. When there is no easy answer, I know it’s my fault. I know I have made my life much more difficult than it needs to be. I know I worry needlessly, annoyingly. I know that when I am sad it has little to do with anything that is actually happening. That my longings could be answered if I would change myself to meet them. But my stubbornness is stubborn even in that--its stubbornness and I feel sick without wanting to be cured. Still, I recognize that there is one. 

I spent a lot of time alone in San Francisco, and I spent a lot of time with friends. Somehow what I remember most is always the time I spend in my own head. I love public transportation; I love sitting in the back of a bus and watching what passes outside without having to worry about where to go, about traffic, about all the things that clutter my regular life; I love the wails of the underground, the eerie shaking and the way it bends around curves, enters in and out of darkness without warning; I love sighting the sides of people’s faces from behind other faces, I love the smells of hot metal and lint, takeout grease, the smell of air that hasn’t seen the other side of buildings for a long time. I like the separate weather systems of the subway stations. I think I knew this would happen to me; I had some presentiments of it even while I was abroad of it in a way that I often glimpse my own future, because I do, for all the wondering, know myself quite well....but all the time I used BART I think I was really on the tube, I think I was really in London and still full of hope for myself. I’m sure this resignation will pass, just like other periods. But also, I think I will always be nostalgic for those months I spent apart from all responsibility besides keeping myself alive and safe. 

San Francisco...for a reason I don’t know, I miss you. I miss your city-hardened people, the grey dankness of your streets, and the thickets of cable intersecting the sky; I miss your row houses,  I miss looking out over the water, I miss the benevolent fog rolling in and out. Mostly, I think, I miss your otherness, that you remind me of being abroad because you will not be home; I miss your foreignness. I wish I could love you for yourself. But there is a charm, too, to the semi-rural and green of San Juan that will always feel like home to me. There is a part of me, too, that I left abroad, which I will not recover. It is lucky, then, that I can love with my heart cut into many pieces, so that even what I cannot have or what I cannot keep may remain dear to me....

title from The Changing Light by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

late july

This morning I went to help the Campuswide Honors Program register new freshmen into SPOP (Student Parent Orientation Program). When I told my dad last night that I was going to go to campus early enough to get there by 7 AM he asked me, Why do you always sign up for those things? I told him I didn’t know....I don’t actually know. I always feel compelled to. And then I told him, this is my last time helping out at one. I don’t think it convinced him that I am any more justified in the escapade. 

I think, out of all the forces that guide me throughout my day, one that I am quite sensitive to is that of possibility--I think I have found myself, over the past three years, returning to campus on early mornings to help with these events because of moments like what I experienced yesterday, cleaning the mirror in my bathroom--I found it necessary to ask myself, sternly, wiping over my reflection in circles, what I expected out of the next morning, and all I could answer to myself was that I never knew who I might meet, who might meet me, who might be changed. I am not, by a very long shot, the brightest or the friendliest student that the CHP has to offer. I am probably not even properly qualified to serve as a “face” of CHP, because I have never felt very at home within its community. But I’m drawn back to it, again and again, drawn back to volunteer opportunities that involve greeting and meeting new students, because I think there is a possibility that somewhere amongst all of them there is someone like me. Awkward, strange, discontent and all. 

Mostly--I envy them. I look at them all, new-faced, excited, innocent, willing, eager, and I think to myself, Lily, didn’t you have good hopes for yourself when you were in their shoes, didn’t you wish to be somebody really great, didn’t you have this reluscent vision of all that UCI had to offer you....didn’t you wish to become a good person, to meet other good people, to fall in love, to find a niche....? I did. I know I did. And I’m looking back at my last three years and thinking, did it really happen? Am I anyone at all? If, somehow, I could have known who it was I would have become when I was new-faced and willing, would I have still chosen to move forward, in this direction? I really don’t know. I think there are a lot of things that I could have done better. I could have been more graceful. I regret a lot of things--friends often, encouragingly, but somewhat misguidedly, tell me that it’s the things that I won’t do that I’m going to regret someday, and that might be true, but I regret a lot of of the things I’ve done, too--the people I’ve lost or pushed away, some of the clumsier things I’ve done, some of the choices I’ve made....I don’t regret being shy, and having a hard time making friends. Because the people I’ve met are beautiful, and I need them. I couldn’t have met better people. So if I had to have been me, this is one of the best things that could have happened--that I didn’t know who I’d be, so I’d make the same choices, and so that I’d meet the people who would help me become better....I’m a very shy person, and I’m a late bloomer--socially, I’m immature, shy, clumsy, and when I do reach out I am upon entirely fresh, petrifying ground, and though I have been unsuccessful in a few attempts somehow I am stubborn enough to pursue the people who interest me anyway....

In the same way I suppose, I keep going back to volunteer at the CHP events. I remember two years ago at the “Experience Honors Day,” a day in which prospective CHP students and their parents come to tour the schools, a very small-statured Chinese girl and her parents kept pointing at my nametag, which said “English Major with an Emphasis in Creative Writing”--and I remember that the girl was nearly crying with excitement, because she wanted to be a writer, she had written and illustrated some manga before....I told her about the opportunities I had already had to work with the faculty and to take classes doing something that a lot of people told you, no, wasn’t going to get you a job and wasn’t going to put you into a very liquid job market, either, and I told her about the ways that I found it worth my time, maybe even more so because of that, because, what they don’t tell you is that having to live with question, with darkness, with the strangeness of one’s own compulsions as they oppose reason or security--that’s all preparation for life after college, too. Perhaps it’s even more valuable preparation than all the “job-prep” major tracks. Having to be at peace with yourself when you know you are not doing something that makes sense according to the majority of your peer’s concerns is a skill that you have to learn like any other. I told her this in softer terms. I told her that as uncertain as my future was, I was sure that right now, I was going the right way, that I was doing the right thing for that day. I remember that she was still too moved to speak, but her parents both thanked me extensively. I ran into them later that day while I was walking through the park and they waved to me and thanked me again. I think, really, the moment didn’t have much to do with me. I still wonder how that girl is doing--if she decided that UCI was worth it, and if she did, where she was, and if I’ll run into her in fiction classes, ever.

Today my job was to stamp the hands of all the students waiting in line with a little anteater. It’d be their lunch pass. The day could have easily been a success without me, and for a couple minutes toward the start I was self-conscious of this fact, but I started asking kids where they were from and a few of them opened up to me and I was touched by how gracious they were, and  I became excited for them, for their futures. When most of the students had gone through the registration line and had entered the seminar, a third year nursing major approached me and introduced herself as Beatrice. She saw that I was a fourth-year by my name tag and said something like “how exciting!” and I must have not looked excited because she said quickly, “and scary....” I said I was sure I’d be excited closer to when school started.

And I’ve struggled with it, and I realize that it’s selfish and pointless to worry, and I know in my heart that I am doing the right thing and I have the rest of my life to decide what to do with myself, but I don’t feel very useful on this earth, and I am scared, I am so scared, for what I don’t know. I am probably more scared for my future than I have ever been scared for anything in my life. I try to take the advice of my elders, people who care about me the most--do not worry, it is useless to worry, do what you can with today. And for a large extent, I am able to live day-to-day. But this--this is a beautiful world. This is a world of consistent beginnings, of peering into darkness, entering that darkness, and emerging from it, which is a victory itself, whether or not we plunge straight into another darkness....this is a world of forever-possible renewal, but with that comes the strangeness of unfamiliarity. Every day I am made stranger to myself, every day I’m getting to know myself more. And I am happy, at times. Sometimes I am overwhelmingly content. And sometimes I feel this need for the future like the need that arises out of a presentiment of loss; the preciousness of things being magnified, prismatic. We say, precious, and what we mean are jewels, which absorb and throw the light in short witty glints. But what I mean are the small things held in the hand, recognized as vital, with heartbeats of their own, and held close to the heart. The things felt against the palm and the heart at once. Bird in the hand. Bird in my hand! 

I left today with my hands covered in the ink from the re-filler bottle for the ink pad. Sometimes moments in my life feel entirely mimetic, as if they speak not for themselves but for a larger idea, and for that idea only. But today I’m just going to be a girl who has ink all over her hands. 

I try to be content with what I have...but this is a beautiful world. With all the good there is out in the world, available, willing to be had--with all the futures out there, ready to be had, existing to be had--with all the air in the world to breathe, knowing this, seeing these things, how can I not want it all? 

mid-july

I recently discovered a small Taiwanese restaurant/café called Class 302 close to the university’s campus. I’ve been working late (until the library closes at 8 PM) and visiting the campus gym after this, but usually we’re hungry or too awake after working out to go home and sleep. I introduced one of my friends from the library to another friend from a different circle of my life, and they took me to Class 302 a couple weeks ago. I accidentally ordered dim sum with shredded dried pork as a garnish, and wondered why it tasted so strange to me until Megan pointed out what it was. I’m not sure if it was this small amount of animal protein after years of abstinence or all the sugar in the shaved ice we ordered that gave me a stomach ache later. But it probably wasn’t the pound of sugar.

            Last night we went again and, when considering what to order, my friend turned to me and said “why don’t you get pig like you did last time?” I turned to her and said “are you happy that I ate pig? Does that make you happy?” We were joking; and I don’t even remember what the stuff tasted like, but there’s been a weird concatenation of events in my life recently that have been asking me to consider the choices that I’ve made and the things that are important to me. Sometimes, looking over a menu, I’ll whine, I’ll say something like “I wish I could eat fish!” and then someone with me will say, “why don’t you? We could go to a lot more places,” or, “you should, then we can go get sushi.” Someone at work the other day was really surprised to learn that I don’t even eat/drink animal broth, not even with the “bouillon cubes, you know, for flavor?” I said something to the effect of “if I couldn’t live without that flavor in my life I’d have a different set priorities.” And it’s true. It’s sort of a tautological statement, so it doesn’t even matter that I said it, but at the time it seemed appropriate. I’m wondering now how much of what I say is white noise.

            I wonder—I suppose if you don’t know, if you haven’t made this kind of sacrifice—you couldn’t know what it’s like. My body still wants animal products. I smell meat and it is food to my nose and I want to eat it, I feel drawn to it, I know it would be good to me, for me. I know that it’d be a lot easier for friends to take me out or take care of me, it’d be easier for my family, it’d be easier for me, too, to shop, not to have to read the ingredients on every single pre-packaged thing I buy to make sure I know what I’m putting into my body, that it doesn’t violate what I hold to be right for my life. Sometimes I want to ask, when people say things like “we could go more places”—I want to say—do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know what I’m giving up? Do you think that every day, I’m unaware of the sacrifices I’m making and asking you to make if you want to go somewhere with me? I resist the impulse to withdraw; I’m loathe to be a burden. But I also feel, I don’t have a choice in this matter. I fully believe that the right thing for me to do is to abstain from eating animal products. And, believing this to be the right thing to do, do I have the option not to do it? To live the way I feel is right, this is what I have to do. And I am used to explaining this to people, but I’m sure it’s one of those things that you don’t understand until you give up something like it; until you are, multiple times each day, fighting against your natural impulses to do what you think is right.

            I used to sort of think that people were born innocent and good and this dissipated as they grew older and violated their own purity, or goodness. But what I’m learning more and more is that you have to earn goodness. I’m not talking about spiritual righteousness or goodness—that’s a whole other discussion. I mean, you have to earn the type of self that puts good into the world. You don’t have that from birth and then lose it. When I got home from England I realized the simple validation, person-to-person, of receiving a smile from someone on the street or in passing. You don’t find a lot of that in the UK—they’re famously reserved—so when I returned to California after three months of solitude, after three months of fighting to preserve my sense of self and worth amidst a world that did not know or care I was walking its streets, and I found that people, strangers, smiled at me in passing, I felt incredibly…human. I felt acknowledged as a person, as a human being with a heart and a brain and something beyond the body. And that doesn’t just happen—people aren’t born smiling! I was touched, I think, by the fact that someone would take time out of their own minds or own concerns to reach out to me, even if it was in a small way. And I began to understand that my reservations are not protecting me from a world that doesn’t understand me and does not wish me well, but are stifling these opportunities in my life and other people’s lives. I think now about all the people who have changed my life, who have made an impact on the way I look at God or the world and everything is illuminated in a certain fatedness, and I realize that every small thing they did for me has gotten me to where I am, has gotten me through some intense difficulties, has, at times, saved me from myself….This is a small example. But I believe that doing what you feel to be right, even if it’s hard, is something you must preserve. Despite what is easy, or what appears to you, or what would please the people around you most. People often wish to be better. I think there are endless opportunities to be better. People sometimes say that you get back what you put into the world, but I think that’s missing the point—your job is to put goodness into the world. What you get out of it is that you’re better able to put good into the world.

I look up to people in a magnetic sort of way who are natural lights, who can make anyone feel better, who can brighten anyone’s day without trying, with ease and grace and something akin to beauty, a tangible spirituality and peace. I am not that person. But there are still things I can do.