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.

late may

Today, talking with a friend, I said, “I don’t know who I am right now.” I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I spent abroad--it’s been six months that I’ve been home, and realizing it aches. It hurts. I’m glad to be with people who matter to me. I’m glad to be at school. I’m glad to be where I am, in intense bursts. I’m glad I’ve met who I’ve met. I’ve been reintroduced to beauty, to goodness, to just enough reality to paralyze me out of choosing. Where will you go? I don’t know. What will you do? I don’t know. What will you write? ... I don’t know.

When I was in Paris, it was near Christmas, and walking down the Champs-Elysees in cold, wet shoes, after having gotten rained on heavily, mercilessly, after having gotten lost for two hours in the city looking for the Eiffel Tower, I felt like the light reflecting off water caught in gutters after the downpour. I loved the smell of wine in the air, warm, earthy, spiced for the season. I felt like things could grow out of the air, drop from the sky. Appear out of stars. Things could rearrange around me, air could be a cocoon for me. I felt comfortable; myself. I felt as though, walking the old streets, naive and moon-faced, I could slouch my way to heaven. There is a contentedness that beats deep in the heart, and for one night in Paris, it was mine. 

Sometimes I am suffocated by the force of my own want, what will not stop. That every small thing I do on purpose might be done to be known more. I returned home from school after having a poem workshopped the other day, and exited the car, stood in the middle of the street. I couldn’t tell if I was disappointed in myself or my writing. If I was confused in myself or my writing. Have I lost hope in myself, or in my writing? Do I not see myself going anywhere, or do I not see my writing going anywhere? I don’t know. But I know I’m willing to stare into darkness. Something is always emerging in it, of it, folding it into something, someone is always good to show me what’s in it.  The secret to islands, I wrote while in England, is that there’s an ocean floor.

I think I am the one who feels too much, who admires aimlessly, selfishly, who revisits and revisits life after it has happened out of some need to rearrange, to steep, to arrive at an undeserved peace. 

I’m sorry I haven’t written in so long. I’m revisiting London in stories. I graduate in a year. A year to cure my skin, so I can do something new, so I can take real steps to a real place and maybe become somebody, if only to myself. It’s been six months since I was abroad but I am abroad every day. I think I’m going to be abroad forever, at least a little bit. 

early march

I’d love to be the first to admit that it’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything here, but I can’t claim to be the first to admit to that, as it’s really my dad who brings it up with admirable regularity. There are a lot of things I should write about. I should write about Paris, or London. I should write another list about words that the British pronounce alarmingly differently from us, or about the flight home, about my making it all the way to Heathrow before breaking my Stanford-upon-Avon coffee pot bought for three quid at an antique store in Norwich. 

But instead I’m going to write about home. I’ve been home since just before Christmas. I’ve learned the word mansuetude lately. It describes Irvine well--a sort of planned gentleness, some unsatisfying prettiness--but not my feelings for the city. I’ve been commuting for over a year now almost forty miles a day. Irvine feels close to San Juan, now, almost like I’ve never travelled. But the hours spent in the car are as much a part of me as the hours spent in class, or at work. I remember nights after eighth period my last year of high school turning onto San Juan Creek Road in the dark, staring up at a heavy yellow moon, writing poetry. I wrote poems line by line and spoke the lines aloud until I had them memorized. When I got home I’d write them down. During the last two years of high school I wrote over five hundred poems. I look back at them sometimes, mostly to remind myself that I’ve changed incredibly since then and so (thankfully) has my writing. I couldn’t ever look back and pinpoint a moment of change, perhaps. Or change doesn’t happen in moments, but stretched out over time and slowly. I think I’ve had to work for some growth. Other of it has been God-given. Some of it’s by luck, or my own determination. 

My parents had some old friends over the other night. They asked me about England and I found it exhausting to talk about. Maybe because I find it difficult to tell a story whilst being consistently and boisterously interrupted, or having portions of the story told for me. But mostly I think it’s because something happened to me while I was there that I can’t say out loud, and not just because I’m selfishly choosy with whom I choose to share the most precious details: but because I don’t know how to say it. But that’s not the point of this post.

Irvine is a luminous place in the first months of Summer. The sun is still white, sifting through low clouds. The grey hills and light grasses are soft. The air smells like grass, sweet, nutty. People start to smell like suntan lotion or tropical scent. The old spice wearers bear their armpits to the breeze. I invest in a gas mask. I love Irvine like home. Not because the city’s straight lines and clean pavements suggest to me the capacity of mankind, or the hills off the highway remind me of a childhood spent hiking neighborhood hills and playing with the cat in the woodsy backyard.  I love Irvine because I’ve felt so trapped amongst its yuppie streets and shopping centers that I couldn’t do anything but turn to literature, to poetry, to writing stories. I’ve felt so strange, so out of place, like I’m restricted from the knowledge that would allow me to fit in, to be friendlier, more graceful, more beautiful, better accomplished. Resistance to Irvine’s corporate, business-casual charm, has caused me to emerge from some sort of social cemetery victorious, pages and pages of prose and verse clutched in my closed fists. The writing’s getting better. I’m learning to love it more. I’m learning to listen. To tell a story. To write something that matters. Something that lasts. The act of writing puts something down on paper irrevocably, or maybe onto a computer screen. I can’t untype anything. I can’t unsay anything. But what makes literature immortal is that other people read it and become it. I’ve written to friends about this idea I’ve had, that there’s a way to read something so deeply and intensely that you become what you read. That you write what you read. I can’t make it make sense yet; I don’t have the language. But I think it’s true, and I think that’s why the authors everyone knows have written stories that matter timelessly. What’s true, remains. 

I’ve always turned to poetry. My parents had friends over the other night: I mentioned this already. I told them about England. I felt uncomfortable about it. I felt a pressure to tell the story in a way that I thought could matter to someone else. I spend a lot of time alone; I have some difficulty understanding where the boundaries lie between what I find meaningful and what other people do. With some difficulty I told my story. We came to talking about my writing: I was deeply embarrassed when Mom pulled out a poem I’d illustrated and given to her for Christmas one year to show her friends as an example of what I write, because it’s two years old, and I’m so wildly different now--my writing is so wildly different now--that I don’t feel what they read is a good representative of my writing or who I am. But I think they understood that it was old, and I couldn’t tell them they couldn’t read it. I didn’t know if my embarrassment was appropriate, or allowed. I tried to swallow it down. It dissipated. They were gracious. I think they actually did appreciate the poem. I think when you reach a certain maturity you’re probably able to genuinely appreciate things much less than masterpieces.

We talked about what I write. I told them, I write fiction for school and poetry privately. One of the two writes songs and asked me if I ever did. I said, yes, and he asked if I also wrote the melody, and I told him, not at the same time that I write the words. The words first and then the melody. That mattered to me, to make that distinction. I thought that made it clear that I’m not a songwriter. I think in music, the melody is inextricable from the words. The way the song sounds and works musically isn’t separate from the way that the words work. The words and melody both work in the same listening moment, they both tell a story, and work together. So I thought, songwriters must write them both, words and melody, with some thought as to the other. And I said, I’ve written songs, but I’m not a songwriter.

He said, if you’ve written songs, you’re a songwriter.

I didn’t agree. I don’t think I do now, either. That’s a gracious point of view.  I am not a songwriter. I am not a fiction writer. I do not even think I am a poet. I think I’m an intense journaler. I’m an aspiring poet, yes. But not one now. I suppose I abide by the Platonic ideal: you can do one thing really well, and many things sort of well. Plato says, many things badly, but I think most people are multi-talented. I also think that both normal people (of which I’m one) and gifted people are born, or can choose, but they are something. You’re a doctor or a mathemetician or a musician or a soccer player, and you can do other things, but at your core, you’re something. Maybe I misunderstood what he meant. Maybe he meant it literally. A songwriter is someone who writes songs. But I was talking spiritual, maybe out of place. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for the last few days, and it’s made me think about where I am now. It’s more specific than the US, than California, than Irvine. I’m at UCI and I’m in the creative writing program and it’s frustrating, it’s trying, it’s exhausting, but it’s thrilling and rewarding and it’s gotten me to, and through, the best and worst moments of the last two and a half years of my life. I’m a creative writer inhabiting a creative writing program. As stifling as Irvine is to me at times, it’s also the only place I’ve ever had the experience of feeling truly at home, in my own right.