The Once and Future English Major

Perhaps that will be the title of my personal statement for my inevitable application for reentry into the coterie of the literarily-inclined. Ahhhhh, J-School. How insistently you remind me that I don't want to be a journalist. I'm not sure that's what you're going for.

The coffee from the shop on my block is intense. I'm now a cup-a-day drinker, to the extent that I get headaches if I do not have my daily cup. So I would think, considering that I'm starting from a defecit each morning, that I could handle fairly intense intake of caffeine. But I consistently order a small cup, spend an hour drinking it, and spend the next eight hours opening and shutting everything in my apartment and discerning the shape of my heart by the impressions it's beating into my chest. It's unnerving. I've also discovered that there's a strong correlation between my being jazzed the eff up on caffeine and my stress level. When I'm in a normal state, my brain is also fairly chill. "Hey, everything's gonna be cool," it says. When my little blood cells get the souped-up drag racing upgrade from the coffeeshop, my brain follows suit. It gets all high-pitched and squeaky and tries to convince me that my workload is impossible and that I should just quit school. So, why do I drink the coffee? Because I neeeeeeeeed it.

I got my always-delayed buzz this evening listening to a panel called the "New Wave Fabulists," which consisted of Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, and Gary Wolfe. Sitting in the Orpheum theatre, I suddenly felt as if I had passed through an electric fence, which made me very restless and for some reason translated into me checking the time every four minutes. Which says nothing about the content of the discussion, because though it was a bit discursive and unorganized--as any unregulated discussion between authors rightly ought to be--they talked about some interesting things in regards to genre. And Neil Gaiman being my husband. Though this last part was not discussed explicitly, it was quite clearly on all their minds.

The room sort of came to the conclusion that "genre" is a nasty little word. I see where they're coming from, since they are extremely successful writers who bend, break, and otherwise defy genre-ization. But we can't really do without the term, can we? How else to describe a Danielle Steel or a Tony Hillerman? Or the works they create? I think more to the point, we should differentiate between genre-workers and writers. After all, a writer ought to defy genre, no? A writer is a creator. It's a shame that someone like Neil Gaiman is discussed as a reaction to uninspired form writing. "He's a genre-bender." No, he's a writer. Daniele Steel is just a genre whore, and her work does not deserve to be the springboard off of which we discuss the Neil Gaimans of the world.

Just you all wait until I'm in charge of the Language Department in Erinn's New World Domination.

I had to yell at my students this week for doing a shoddy job on their weekly turn-in-something-ANYTHING-related-to-our-discussion-and-earn-credit assignment. I really enjoyed it.

I have a tendency to get really into things for a short period of time until my interest burns out, and then I drop them like they're hot. And simultaneously around the world, a thousand chairs fall over from shock. Okay, no big revelation here. I know an awful little about an awful lot. My deep, deep hope, however, has always been that grad school would be my shot at becoming an expert in something. And now that I despise J-School, I'm worried that I'm just doing that grass-is-greener thing I've always done and that I'm going to turn into Lynn from Girlfriends, a show I am in no way embarrassed to love. Point being, she has like 8 master's degrees in just about all the major social sciences and humanities and lives off of her friends because, well, they're all pretty much worthless. The degrees, not her friends.

I think all I really want is to be in school forever. Oh my god, I am so dysfunctional.

Brian and I have been sporadically working on learning-up my web-building skills, so I'm hoping to have some idea of what I'm doing by the end of the semester and a website up and running by the start of the spring. Details TBA.

And now for one last non-sequitur. Some of my friends and I have noticed a trend in the Wisconsin service industry to answer requests with a tongue-in-cheek, "No, you can't have that, sorry." No, no, I'm sorry. It's obviously my fault for both failing to frame my request as a command and for presuming that you are in fact being paid to fulfill that request. It happened again the other night at Qdoba.

Scene: Qdoba.
Players: Me, hungry. Employee, un-funny.

"May I please have a queso burrito?"
"No."
"What can I have?"
"Nothing."
(tornado of teeth, hair, and tortilla shells)

Okay, so it was more like:

"May I please have a queso burrito?"
"No."
"What can I have?"
"Nothing."
".........."
"Of course you can! Hahahaha."
".........................."

During which silence I wondered what about Wisconsin--the cold, the snow, the cheese-heavy diet--destroys the sense of humor. I'm a nice person. I chat up the help. I spent the last ten years of my life being the help. But it's not a very good joke to begin with, and after hearing it six or eight times, my somewhat convincing titter of amusement has turned into a painfully forced "Ha. ....Ha. Give me the emeffing burrito." The same joke in every local establishment has really lost some luster for me, and besides... you do not get between a girl and her burrito. End of story.

For real.