BRAVE STAR

448.

aichlee — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:51:21 +0000

good afternoon love bugs! don’t call this a come back. i’m just stopping by to say hello…

luv always,
aich

447.

aichlee — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:01:15 +0000

i think it’s almost time for brave star to be put to sleep officially. technology is ruining my writing process. time for some major changes involving more handwriting and holding reading material with my hands, and less instant publication of under-developed thoughts.

446.

aichlee — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:14:59 +0000

sigh, i miss writing. i need to get my act together.

445.

aichlee — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:25:41 +0000

Narrative Magazine has a new interview with my main man, Junot Díaz. Aside from admiring his work, I have the hugest nerd crush on this man. Whew!

See:

Junot Díaz
An Interview with Reese Kwon

Junot Díaz is home again, and everyone here seems to know it. From the moment we walk into Harlem’s Café Largo—all tea lights and exposed brick, chicken milanese jostling for menu space with chicharrones de pollo—people rush up to say hello. The hostess greets Díaz by name. The manager gets up from his bar stool and gives Díaz an emphatic handclasp and a how-do. The tall guys at the next table, the former student, the children from the birthday party, the man who leans in from the open window: they all know him, and they want to welcome him back.

“I haven’t been in here for six months,” Díaz explains. Since the publication in late 2007 of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, his acclaimed first novel, Díaz has been on the move. He was in California yesterday and will be upstate tomorrow. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he slept in the same bed for two consecutive nights.

His novel received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and klieg lights of critical praise have been trained on his chronicle of a fat, romantic, lonely Dominican-American nerd and his family. When asked what he’s happiest about, Díaz shakes his head and says he’s just glad to have finished the book. It took him eleven years, and he counts writing the novel as one of the hardest things he’s done.

The novel spans three generations and two countries and jumbles together genres and registers, the vernacular and the high literary, the fantastic and the realistic, swinging easily from Tolkien to former Dominican dictator Trujillo to the X-Men. “What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo?” the narrator asks. “What more fantasy than the Antilles?” Díaz, like his novel, contains multitudes. He was born in Santo Domingo, raised in an immigrant neighborhood in New Jersey, educated at Rutgers, then Cornell, and now teaches creative writing at MIT. His own Spanish is less than perfect; his mother will wait to read the Spanish translation of the novel. An author and a story at home in a number of places, and so, perhaps, at home nowhere: what more American?

REESE KWON

You’ve said that you’ve always been more of a reader than a writer. When did you start writing, and what did you first write?

JUNOT DÍAZ

Before there was any writing, there was an astonishing love of books and reading that appeared to me out of nowhere when I immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Reading was one of the greatest pleasures, one of the greatest comforts, one of the great mentors, and an engine of knowledge, of awareness, of fun. It was only in my late teenage years—I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—when for reasons that still elude me I began to think of writing as an extension of this part of my life. There’s an alchemy that I don’t quite understand that took me from being a deep lover of books to suddenly desiring to tell stories.

KWON

What do you think might have prompted that transformation?

DÍAZ

I can’t understand how that switch happened, but happen it did. Maybe it was that, in those years, my life became so incredibly hard that the hit, the drug, of reading wasn’t enough. There’s something about reading a wonderful book that transforms you and transports you and rehumanizes you. And maybe because I had gotten so many of those hits—two or three times a year I would find a book that would do that to me—there was a part of me that thought, oh, maybe if I tried writing I could have a more sustained hit. My life had become very difficult in those days—my family entered a stage of poverty that, to this day, I still have a lot of trouble remembering. And you know things are really tough when you conspire to forget. My older brother had been diagnosed with leukemia, and I think all the emotional bills began to become due simultaneously, all the hardships of my early immigration. Maybe writing was a response to that.

KWON

You mention that your immigration to the United States played a role in your interest in reading. Can you say more about that?

DÍAZ

Before I immigrated, I had no interest in books, no interest in newspapers, no interest in anything like that. There were plenty of little comics in the Dominican Republic, little pictorial books, penny dreadfuls: I had no interest in those whatsoever. But when I immigrated to the United States there was the crisis of being an immigrant who couldn’t speak the language very well, who didn’t understand the culture very well. I needed a way to express myself and a way to be engaged in the English language without it being a form of punishment. Speaking, during those early years, was a punishment. There was a lot of ridicule and a lot of cruelty, and instead of practicing aloud I could more safely read and practice language in my head.

KWON

Once you started writing, did you write continually? Did you become a writer?

DÍAZ

No, no, no, no. I just dabbled. It wasn’t until college that I became very disciplined.

KWON

In what way?

DÍAZ

About a week ago, I ran into somebody who knew me at Rutgers and had been a roommate of mine during my senior year. It was this South Asian kid who was a freshman when I was a senior. He said, “Man, I remember how incredibly fucking disciplined you were.” He added, “I remember two things about you: that you had these really worldly friends, that your best friend was from Japan, the other guy was from Colombia, that they were all artists, they were all activists, and to a freshman kid from New Jersey, it was like, holy shit.” And I didn’t think that at all, I thought I always had mundane friends. We were all working-class kids, man. Immigrants. “The other thing is that I would come home and you would sit in front of your computer and write three hours a day. . . . You had a girlfriend, you had a girlfriend on the side, and you loved to dance, you loved to go out, and you had a job, and you would go to the gym. And yet, no matter, you would put in three hours.”

During my college life, I understood that if I wanted to be a writer I had to be rigorous. But I was wrong.

KWON

What do you mean, you were wrong?

DÍAZ

The one thing I knew very well was my body. I knew how to train the body. I was surrounded by athletes, so they were the metaphor. I saw that nobody could just come off the street and fuck with somebody with five years of training. I assumed that writing was like that. Big mistake. In many ways, writing is nothing like that. It’s something of a mystery, why people get good at writing. With athletes, it’s never a mystery.

KWON

What caused you to change your assumptions about writing?

DÍAZ

Starting in ’97, something switched in my psychology, some wheel turned, and I found the actual process—creation, writing—to be unbearably painful. It went from being a great comfort to something horrific. It’s extraordinary, what one page takes out of me. Writing just reduces me. I think I’m probably the only person I know who is good at something that causes me tremendous distress.

KWON

There’s a Korean saying that my mother likes to tell me, that to write is to take a knife and cut out pieces of your arm.

DÍAZ

But that doesn’t seem to be the case for any writer I know. They all write a book every two years; they write essays whenever they need to be written; they write eight-hundred-word editorials.

KWON

Can you say more about the distress that writing causes you?

DÍAZ

For me, writing feels like rolling up my emotional sleeves and putting my hand into a fire. The funny part is that I know if I hold my hand in the fire for four, five, six years, something will come out. I wish I could figure out a way that didn’t necessitate this psychic anguish.

KWON

Given how much writing takes out of you, when you do sit down to write, how do you get yourself started? Do you have any conditions that are necessary for your working environment?

DÍAZ

Well, I just like to be surrounded by books. If I can’t read, then I can’t write. Probably the most important thing for me is that I need large chunks of time. I’m like some really big old-fashioned Spruce Goose. I need a lot of runway to take off.

KWON

Hard work is something you’re used to. You worked at a steel mill; you delivered pool tables; when you were a kid, you had an early-morning paper route. How does the labor of writing stack up to that kind of work?

DÍAZ

I like physical work. It calms me. But physical work depends only on willpower. I have enormous willpower. I can just power through. But you cannot power your way through writing. Willpower has no currency in the economy of writing.

KWON

Speaking of willpower, you worked on one novel for eleven years. What made you keep going?

DÍAZ

When my grandfather had to buy a horse for his farm, he’d look at the horses and pick one that he’d get a good deal on. Most people would not buy the horse that’s going to require a lot of work, the horse with four broken legs and a rare blood disorder. But that’s pretty much what I did with this novel. I chose to write a book that I knew was going to require an enormous amount of work. Then came the real problem: Did I have the strength and perseverance to keep doing it?

KWON

That must have taken a lot of faith.

DÍAZ

I think it’s got less to do with faith, though faith is involved, than with it being a test to see whether or not you’re a writer. I wonder how many writers would still be writers if they had been tested with an eleven-year marathon with no sign or evidence that it was going to work. It was my first novel. But what I discovered was that I knew there was something about the book, and that if I was patient enough with it, something would emerge.

KWON

Throughout those years, who were you writing for? Did you, or do you, have particular readers in mind?

DÍAZ

I write for a very specific set of friends I grew up with: Dominican kids, and there’s an Egyptian kid in there, and an African-American kid thrown in there—a very tiny group of friends. They help organize my work into what is said and what is not said. What needs to be described and what doesn’t need to be described. If this core group, this core audience, didn’t like what I was doing, I think I would feel like a tremendous failure.

KWON

You’re experiencing what many writers would think of as a very successful writing career, what with the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and more. Do you attribute your success to anything in particular? And when you were starting out, were there rejections, and if so, how did you handle them?

DÍAZ

There’s no understanding why good stuff happens and sometimes doesn’t happen. There’s no understanding. But there’s a stubbornness I’ve always possessed, whether in the face of rejection or of being an angry, socially screwed-up Dominican kid in the Jersey Heights. I’ve been persistent.

KWON

I was just reading an interview with T. S. Eliot—this took place when he was in his seventies—and the interviewer asked him, You’ve said that a poet never knows if his work will last; do you think your work will last? And Eliot said, I have no idea. I’ll never know.

DÍAZ

But he was a guy who just kept going. Man, I keep telling everyone that if I can finish four books, I’ll call it a tie. Look: two days ago, on the eve of Obama’s election—Obama!—Michael Crichton died at age sixty-six. Michael Crichton has twenty fucking books. And none of it matters. We’re not going to read him in a couple of years. So something keeps telling me that whether I write two, three, or four or thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty books—it all seems to go down the same memory hole of forgetting.

KWON

Can we talk about Obama? Do you think our country is heading in a better direction?

DÍAZ

No president is a messiah, but Obama’s my man. As a person, there are very few people as exceptional as Barack Obama. As a phenomenon, it is finally, finally the triumph of the utopian strand in American society, the one that gave us civil rights, the one that is the best part of ourselves. Of course, this is as opposed to the evil strand of our Americanness: the racist, the nativist, the phobic, the diabolically violent capitalist strand. The thing about Obama, though, is that this narrative is a narrative that is going to live forever in every part of the world. South Korea knows that it will never elect a Japanese person. Japan knows that it will not elect a person of Korean descent to their top office any time soon. France knows that it will not elect a North African to their top office. England knows that it will not elect a South Asian to their top office. And I think that not only is this a vindication of that civil rights strand within the United States, but it is what makes the States particular and exceptional in the world. What made Obama possible is found nowhere else in the world.

KWON

The mixture of people and cultures in America is a salient aspect of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. You mixed things up even further in the voice—mingling the highs and lows, the scholarly and colloquial, the comic, the tragic. Even in your epigraphs, you juxtaposed Derek Walcott with the Fantastic Four. This voice felt like a big departure from that of Drown; could you talk about what went into that?

DÍAZ

I was perplexed and saddened by the various shorthands for America that I had been exposed to. The country that I grew up in didn’t seem to resemble 99 percent of the books that were claiming to mirror even one fragment or one cell of this new America. A part of me thought that a lot of what I had been reading felt like a myth of America, the same myth that John McCain said is the real America. I thought that the only way I could approach the multivoiced, million-cultured scramble that I was familiar with, that I had grown up with and wrestled with, was by attempting to forge a voice that had in it as many linguistic registers and idioms as I could fit. My God, Whitman spoke in Leaves of Grass of containing multitudes, but he had never met a Caribbean immigrant. Imagine the multitudes we contain. I’d seen it in a number of writers; I’m not the only one. I’d seen it in Melville—I love Moby-Dick—in his incredible explosion of voices and languages. I’d seen it in Chamoiseau, in Texaco. But part of me felt that we don’t have enough of it, and so I wanted to play on that level.

KWON

Did you feel as though you were in conversation with these writers?

DÍAZ

Definitely. I have to be. Reading and books are so deeply in my head. Even if I tried to, I couldn’t avoid being in conversation. This, in some ways, is the book that expresses best my deep love for reading and what I’ve read. It’s a book where, on every page, there is a paean to some text, to some writer or another. It is a rough-hewn genealogy of who I am as a writer and who made me a writer.

KWON

Who else besides Melville and Chamoiseau would you include among your influences?

DÍAZ

We could just start flipping through the pages. In my novel’s title, I refer to three writers: indirectly to Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and directly to Oscar Wilde, and also to Hemingway—“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

KWON

You speak of your own literary dialogue. There was something of a brouhaha not long ago over the comment that one of last year’s judges of the Nobel Prize, Horace Engdahl, made about American literature, that the United States is “too isolated, too insular,” that “we don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” and that we are restrained by our ignorance. What do you think about that?

DÍAZ

If this guy had read every book in American literature, I would say, Wow, really? Well done. Your knowledge of U. S. literature must be just profound. Look, clearly this was a comment of bigotry and generalization. But even though the guy’s comment revealed a kind of ignorance, I would agree with some of it, if in a different register. I guess my question is: Do you think that Americans read a lot of books in translation?

KWON

I’m probably drawing from the wrong crowd of people, because I do know a lot of people who read books in translation.

DÍAZ

So why do works in translation make up only 1 percent of the books sold in America? When those numbers go above 1 percent, call me. I think it’s a cause for alarm. We don’t read enough, and we certainly don’t read, in general, with a global viewpoint.

KWON

To return to Oscar Wao: I was fascinated by the extent to which strong women dominate Oscar’s family. In this context, it’s striking that Oscar is, in a lot of ways, the loneliest character and the outcast of the novel.

DÍAZ

Immigration is a process that tends to self-select certain kinds of people, which is a way of saying that immigrants tend to be superhuman already. To leave everything behind takes a superhuman act of will, even for those who did it accidentally or flippantly. Part of the strength in Oscar’s family, especially in the women, comes from the force that is required to build a new life in a new place.

As for loneliness, Oscar’s loneliness is emblematic of his family’s. They have been atomized. All of them are stuck in a story in which there’s no solidarity, no feeling of companionship, no feeling that anyone else has passed through this story before. Being a victim—living in silence and in secrets—guarantees that you’re always going to feel alone. But the book is the place where they come together and share their stories.

KWON

I found myself wondering why you chose Yunior to narrate the story. He is, in many ways, the opposite of Oscar, the tougher Casanova character.

DÍAZ

Yunior is perfect for narrating the story because he is so tragic. Oscar and Yunior kind of circle each other in the novel. They each see in the other something that they lack and secretly wish that they had. Yunior looks at Oscar and sees a person who can expose himself, be himself, be vulnerable, often too vulnerable. Yunior doesn’t have any of that. He always wears a mask and is incapable of taking it off. Oscar looks at someone like Yunior and sees a person who has learned that there are strategic uses of masks. I think that it’s fascinating that Yunior, a person who victimizes and could be saved by a family, ends up writing a story about the family. While Yunior can never be himself, ever, that gift of wearing many masks makes him the perfect narrator.

KWON

And of course there are masks aplenty in the narration itself.

DÍAZ

Sure, the most basic one being that he wears the mask of each character he pretends to be.

KWON

Before it becomes clear that the novel’s being narrated by Yunior, it seems that you’re using a traditional third-person omniscient narrator. Why did you reveal Yunior to be the narrator as gradually as you did?

DÍAZ

That question is linked to why Yunior tells the story. What does the story argue about the power of storytelling? What does it say about the Oz syndrome?

KWON

The Oz syndrome?

DÍAZ

In The Wizard of Oz, a narrative comes to you from behind a mask. We’re happy recipients of the narrative, but we don’t look behind the mask to see where it came from. Most of what we call third-person narration creates an unchallenged sense that, oh, a narrative comes out of nowhere and we’ll just enjoy it. But a narrative always has a point and a motive. Part of what’s interesting about unmasking a narrator is that the rupture perhaps prompts a reader to think about what masks a narrator wears and why.

I think that Yunior goes out of his way to make clear that there’s a tyranny in narration. We just accept that a voice out of nowhere is going to start telling us a story. That’s a given. We don’t question our narratives and where they come from, especially if we like them.

KWON

You were actively undermining that tyranny of narration with your footnotes, for one. The footnotes often contradicted events in the narrative by questioning or correcting previous statements.

DÍAZ

Yes. My question is, though, no matter how much the book attempts to undermine the paradigm of a single voice, isn’t it still just a single voice? The book wrestles with how hard it is to shake off the power of a coherent narrative, of a persuasive narrative, of a seductive narrative. And many bad, bad things prey on the intimate desire we have to be in contact with a one-on-one narrative.

KWON

Do you mean in a political and religious sense?

DÍAZ

In many senses, yes. Dictators ride the same wavelength that writers use to convince you to stay in a novel. As a writer, I am deeply troubled by my craft. Deeply troubled. It’s no accident that, in Heart of Darkness, Conrad employs the idea that the person most receptive to inhuman narratives of power, racism, and predatory behavior is the one who loves novels. The novel can deliver many messages that increase our compassion and encourage imagination, but the form is very controlling, very authoritative. So there are gifts, but there are also dangers.

KWON

Joseph Conrad said, and I paraphrase, that even when one writes realistically about the world, one inevitably writes a fantastic story, because the world itself is fantastic and mysterious.

DÍAZ

I think Conrad is right to point out that genre distinctions between realism and the fantastic and science fiction are there to provide comfort and to console. The reality is, as he says, that the world is every genre at once.

KWON

That blending of genre applies to what you were doing in Oscar Wao with history, Dominican history in particular—you were so playful with history, as though you were undermining the authority of the historical narrative.

DÍAZ

Part of my desire is to show that the victims of history and the participants were a part of life. And life is complex and contradictory, and it curses and it takes a shit and it has bad sex and it lies. My idea in writing about history was to remind people, and maybe even remind myself, that even though this is the past, this was once life. And it had tremendous energy.

The dead are as much a part of my community as the living. My presence here is predicated on the dead. The present has a habit of capturing history and casting it into holy terms, as a lecture or a lesson. Why can’t history just be there to talk shit? Why is talking shit only the province of the living? Why do we expect of history a level of gravity that we don’t expect from life? History farts and history talks shit.

KWON

Francisco Goldman invited you to stay with him in Mexico City when you were feeling uninspired about your novel. What did being in Mexico City do for you?

DÍAZ

I was just dying in New York City and up in Syracuse where I was teaching. And then in Mexico City I came into contact with one of the most important, vibrant, interesting, troubled, and largest Latino cultures in the world. And I’d never heard anything about it. It was a wonderful moment of exploration, discovery, surprise, and astonishment. I fell in love with Mexico City. I’ve never been an expat type; I already have a country I hold incredibly close to my heart, the Dominican Republic, so falling in love with Mexico City was a surprise. I didn’t think I had the capacity in my heart to love someplace new so fiercely.

But in the Dominican Republic I lived in shadows and silences. There, all the indigenous people are gone. All the pre-Columbian structures and civilizations have been smashed and scattered to the winds. Mexico experienced similar devastation with the conquests and enslavement by the Spanish, and by the other forces that converged on the New World, but in Mexico there are remarkable remnants of the original culture. There’s a large, vibrant indigenous community. There are pyramids, Aztec structures, and signs of the ancients. I’d never known how much I was missing, how much had been taken. For me, Mexico catalyzed a very deep awareness of what a historical ground zero the Dominican Republic really is.

Also, in Mexico City the hours went further. There was a lot less distraction: I wasn’t getting any phone calls, I didn’t have to deal with family or any friends. Getting something to eat didn’t take anywhere near as long as it takes in the United States. I just had much more time.

KWON

You mention teaching in Syracuse; nowadays, you teach at MIT. In one of the reviews I was reading of Oscar Wao, in the online comments section, someone posted that you were “the best teacher ever.” What role does teaching play in your life?

DÍAZ

Teaching writing is just an excuse to teach, at a pragmatic level, critical-mindedness. I’m not teaching writing because I’m trying to make great writers. I don’t give a damn if you’re going to be the next Salman Rushdie or if you’re going to use writing simply because it is a momentary distraction from your other classes. The Salman Rushdies of the world who are taking a class are going to be fine whether or not they take a class. They’re going to find their path.

The one thing you can do for students in a thirteen-week semester is to increase that critical muscle. And to teach them to be compassionate. One of the most important human capacities is compassion: learning how to feel someone’s condition, their pain or their sorrow, and wanting to do something about it.

Reading and writing and learning how to critique other people—these are wonderful areas where students can practice compassion. It’s hard to understand characters unless you’re compassionate. Most young people are not very compassionate with themselves. They’ve been taught that way. And what’s kind of fun and wild is encouraging students to be compassionate, first, to themselves. Compassion begins at home, baby!

KWON

A lot of people write, or want to write. I’ve been reading lately about the death of reading and the death of publishing, and what surprised me about last year’s National Endowment for the Arts study is not that fewer people are reading, but that there’s actually a significant increase in the number of people who are writing. It seems that people are reading less but writing more. Have you come across that trend?

DÍAZ

I come across it every time I meet young writers who don’t give a shit about reading; all they give a shit about is their own work. I think that in the same way we’ve had a huge market crash, there’s a quiet market crash going on every year with writers, but we don’t get to see it as openly because there’s no way for it to be dramatized. But every year there is a huge body of young writers that there’s no room for, there’s no place for, there’s no readership for. If we were really smart, if we really cared about reading and writing, we wouldn’t be having MFA programs for writers, we would have MFA programs for readers.

KWON

Unlike some other writers, you seem to have kept away from writing reviews and criticism. What is your opinion of literary criticism today?

DÍAZ

I read it, but I don’t have a holistic sense of it. I don’t participate in the world of reviews and criticism because it would be a conflict of interest.

KWON

A conflict of interest?

DÍAZ

I’m a striving writer, so am I going to give a good review to someone whose work undermines mine or makes mine look stupid? I could pretend to be incredibly noble and objective, but that would seem like a conflict of interest. I’m suspicious of my ulterior motives. I can’t read my unconscious so I’m almost afraid that, without even knowing it, I’d be biased in ways that would not be useful for a young writer or even an established writer. I only want to promote reading. I’m as critical as the next motherfucker; I guess I just don’t want to put it on paper.

Writers bring an enormous amount of discipline, rigor, training, and intellect to the work. But what’s really providing the energy is the unconscious. Ordinarily, we arm ourselves against that power with the shields of our intelligence and the spheres of our training. But in the end, it’s the unconscious that animates and makes what we do possible.

444.

aichlee — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:59:18 +0000

i suppose yesterday was the low i needed to hit in order to feel better today. things just may work out after all. fé em deus.

443.

aichlee — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:31:37 +0000

hi y’all. if it isn’t obvious, i’ve been gone for a while. this summer has been a rollercoaster ride that has been dipping lower and lower as the days go on. i’m trying my best to stay positive despite a general feeling of disappointment and disenchantment. ugh. i am in a horrible mood.

442.

aichlee — Tue, 19 May 2009 04:15:44 +0000

the graduation mayhem has finally ended and i’m exhausted. after a lovely sunday morning farewell at kwh, i realized how much i was tripping a couple days ago when i said i was gonna go to law school. some virtual hand should have just reached out of the computer and smacked me for that. i guess it is nice to have a solid back-up, though. the graduation and commencement ceremonies were typical fanfare, but fun. john legend (!), our graduation speaker and fellow alum, told us we had soul power and reminded us to speak against injustice. i haven’t felt such a sense of camaraderie or accomplishment in a very long time. it still seems a bit unreal. anyway, when i got home this afternoon, i found two important e-mails waiting for me, evidence of the universe’s blessings unfolding. i should have been more patient. i should have realized that in order for these two days to have been as wonderful as they were i needed something equally as awful to compare them to. i had been taking my good days for granted before. but now i’m glad to have them back. everything is looking up and i am looking forward.

hurrah for the red and the blue =)

441.

aichlee — Sun, 17 May 2009 02:37:35 +0000

today we had yet another graduation event. i actually got there too late to have enjoyed it, but i did get to see an old amigo, which was nice. afterwards i went over to my godmother’s house and had maybe the best conversation of this year. we talked about love and poetry and travelling and angels, and she fed me cake and sweet tea, and just made me laugh and feel good in general. i’ve been kinda bogged down for a lil while, but those couple hours sitting in her kitchen, really gave me back to myself and put me in a mood to enjoy my final two days of college, and not worry or regret, or completely check-out. it’s like she knew just when to call. tomorrow is my bachalaureate and monday is my commencement and i can say now that i am in good place to make the most of them. here’s looking forward.

440.

aichlee — Fri, 15 May 2009 07:32:16 +0000

i know i said i wouldn’t be writing here but i’ve just been having the weirdest experiences lately. i found out today that i didn’t get this awesome job that i wanted, and after a couple of other rejections related to stuff that i’m passionate about, i’ve really started to reconsider what i’m pursuing in life to the point where i have contemplated studying law instead of poetry. i never thought i would feel like this. it is really freaking me out. i wanted to be a lawyer from the ages of eight til about fourteen, but since then i’ve been all about being a writer. i suppose i could do both, but the problem is that that would entail going to law school and probably not getting an MFA. since i’m pretty much all set to start my poetry program in the fall, i dunno if i’m just having cold feet or if i’m having some kind of weird intuition. ugh i need some kind of calmant in my life. i am a friggin ball of anxiety these days…just needed to release that thought somewhere. thanks for listening. i’m going to have a cup o’ tea.

439.

aichlee — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:56:01 +0000

this week has probably been one of the worst in a while. despite finishing my last undergrad exam on tuesday, i have been more stressed out this week than i have in a long time. i’m supposed to be happy and excited and sentimental about graduating, but really i’m worried, annoyed, and feeling in a rut in general. i feel unhealthy, out of shape, and just plain uninspired. i feel like i’ve been swirling in an abyss of negative energy. ugh. apparently mercury is in retrograde til may 30, so hopefully june will be better. that said, i’m probably gonna end up taking a break from writing here. i need to get where i want to be.