near wild heaven

This is now, this is here, this is me, this is what I wanted you to see.

Now that I'm leaving, everybody wants to come for a visit. My girlfriend is here, has been here for nearly two weeks. On Thursday, my eldest sister is coming to town--we're taking her to the beguiling Sequoia National Park. Just the other day my father and I found a flight that meets his specifications--afternoon departures on both ends, flying out of Dayton, Ohio with a terminus in Los Angeles. He and I will drive up the coast, check out Yosemite. From the car, probably. My father enjoys looking at the pretty things, but isn't terribly keen about (or able to) get out and do much in the way of walking. And just a few days before I depart this end of the country for the now-unfamiliar breadbasket of the midwest, my old pal, the venerable Michael, whose blog is linked at left, will cross the country and help me pack up and move, closing time. He and I will wind our way throughout the American west, circling our way to some prime spots--San Francisco, Redwoods, Crater Lake, Portland, Yellowstone, perhaps more, and find ourselves (after a brief visit to my old stomping grounds in Ames, Iowa) at my new home, in Minneapolis. Two months from now, I will find myself firmly installed there, in a two-bedroom apartment. Probably I will visit friends and family in Ohio during that time, unless I happen to have a job waiting.

My visit home, and the trip from California to Minnesota--part and parcel of my reduced stress about the cost of moving--is made possible by a nice little fellowship award I learned I received yesterday, from the good directors of my program here. The award is money, and a little prestige: it's not the biggest award given (one guy got 10G), but the biggest I could have hoped for given that I am graduating, and the larger awards are typically reserved for those who are staying put for another year. It's a little bit more money to smooth my transition. It's another nice note to end on. Now if I can only get a story published...

posted by: zithereen at May 28, 2004 12:48 | link | comments (3) |

Thesis finished. Collection successfully brought into adolesence. This means, of course, that there are other battles ahead--quite frankly, some of the stories still need major work. Others are nearly as good as I can make them. But I'm on track with my ambition to have this thing brought to full maturity by June '05, hopefully sooner (the kids today, they grow up so soon), and ready for the world.

That's another battle, though. For tonight, my baby weighs in at 195 happy, healthy pages.

posted by: zithereen at May 17, 2004 00:06 | link | comments (10) |

On Monday, come hell or high water--and probably it will be both--thesis madness will officially come to a close. Fortunately for you, tickets are still available for weekend showings. Come watch me sweat. Come watch me cry. Come watch me assemble the adolescent version of my short story collection. See, I've come to see this little beast as my baby. I think about it all the time. Often I'm thinking about it as I'm falling asleep, staring at my dark ceiling, consciousness fading away. I'll think about it again over my first cup of coffee. I care about my stories. I want them to be everything they can be, and for that to happen I need to raise them right. And right now, I'm helping them mature into adolescence--it's there, the core of them, the core of what they collectively accomplish. That's my only goal right now--to bring them to the cusp of maturity. It's what I'll be doing this weekend, one more gauntlet of hunched-over typing. When that finishes, when thesis madness draws to a close, I'll be released from my stories for awhile. They will go into their bedrooms to sulk, and I will ride out the final month of my graduate carerr with my girlfriend here visiting. Then, when I move to Minneapolis in July, when all that motion has stopped and I have again landed somewhere, we will reconvene, my stories and me. I'll nudge it along by bringing into this world a most intimidating sibling--a novel--but the collection will have its due attention. I will finish it within a year; it will be ready for the agents. It may join the recent line of books produced from my program, under the magificent tutelage of Geoffrey and Michelle, both of whom are in states of recovery at the moment. They're the grandparents of these stories, and I want to show them what work I can produce. I want to do them proud as if they were my own parents, which, in the realm of this program, they are.

Wish me luck. For this weekend and beyond. Gosh, I hope this doesn't sound too terribly melodramatic.  

posted by: zithereen at May 13, 2004 23:05 | link | comments (8) |

The story of yesterday's blog finishes like this. Girlfriend returns from end of the year MFA party and calls me. She can do this, and have full confidence that I'll be awake, because I am two hours behind her. Of course, I'm still pretty steamed about the gift debacle, but we get to talking as we always do. I wanted to let her know about the gesture behind the gift--which is again mentioned in yesterday's blog--and also how my intentionality is something about which I am insecure. Or, rather, I worry about what hidden intentions might be perceived in the act of gift-giving, and I'm always worried that my gifts, to whomever, will be in some ways inadequate. This might be the part where the exhume Mr. Freud, prop his skleleton in a chair, and have him scribble notes as I lay on a nearby, ergonomically-correct couch, and pout about the strangeness of gift-giving in my family. My mother thanks me when I give her gifts, but I can never tell if I've been thoughtful enough to actually please her, and if she is in some way not pleased, I blame myself. My father is generally unhappy about giving and receiving gifts: for the past several years, his gifts have been money (aside from the grooming devices he sent me in January). And money's great, but hey, how about a little thought and effort? Over Christmas, I purchased for my father a brand-new Brita filtration system, because my father is somewhat obsessed with having plenty of clean drinking water around the house. I made the mistake of getting excited about giving him this gift, because he was feeling depressed when I gave it to him (Christmas depresses him). He opened the gift, looked at it without expression, and put it on the floor of my sister's house, where we were all knee-deep in her wedding reception party. And then he forgot to take it home with him, which meant that I had to give him this gift again, and had to relive his disappointment again. I seriously considered throwing it in the trash. Merry Christmas. Anyway, I worry that I am a congenitally inadequate gift-giver, that I do not know how to make the right gestures at the right times, that I fail to be even appropriate, that I am not as thoughtful a person as I might hope I am.

My sensitivity in this situation is exacerbated by certain life and death matters around here. Michelle lost her husband in January in most tragic fashion. My program's other director, who has a heart condition, had a bypass on Thursday, his second open-heart surgery (he wrote with candor and humor about his first one in an essay I am assigning youall to read). Until I knew that he'd come through it okay, I had difficulty concentrating on much else. And I was worried about a student of mine, who had had his fair share of tragedy lately, and who showed up in class last week with cuts all over his forearms and a bandage over the middle of his left forearm. I talked to him on Thursday, and our talk made me feel better that he has some fight left in him. This talk happened a couple hours before I got the news that Geoffrey had come through his surgery with flying colors. On Thursday night, I was exhausted, surprisingly. I guess I hadn't known that I was that concerned about those two, but I was: it wore me down a little bit, made it hard for me to accept that I had made a wrong gesture in my gift-giving. No--it made me shamefully sad that I had made the wrong gesture to my girlfriend. I wanted to do the right thing, but it seems as if I didn't.

posted by: zithereen at May 08, 2004 14:06 | link | comments (7) |

Unpleasantries with girlfriend. It goes like this. Her birthday was last week, and I got her some door beads for the apartment within which we will dwell together beginning sometime in the first week of July. I'm fond of door beads. I think they're kind of funky, cute, neat. I have expressed to her before that I like door beads and wouldn't mind having some for myself. So I get them for her, not necessarily because I like them, but because I was trying to think of a gift she might like that would also be useful to us both when we start living together again. It's a big deal, living together again. I've been in California these past two years, bering a graduate student, and she's been in Minneapolis, doing the same. So I was thinking that a living-together-again-themed gift might be nice. I also try to buy things for people I know well that they haven't specifically asked for. My thinking on this is that I know the person, and I should be able to find something that would suit her, that she would like, without having to get a list of things the person wants. I hate that; it takes all the fun out of gift giving and gift receiving. This can be an imperfect process, but I believe it's a thoughtful one. So anyway, I get her these door beads and she received them in the mail today, and she calls and tells me she thinks I actually got the gift for myself and not for her--that I only purchased it under the guise of it being a gift for her. I even included a note saying that I thought it would be a neat gift for our place that we both would like; I was trying to theme the gift along those lines because it will be exciting to live together again after all this time. Well, anyway, that backfired. I wasn't very happy about it. I was, you could say, angry about it. You could say I let her know that I was upset that she thought I had thought of myself, and not her, and not us, in regards to this gift. I kind of let her know that I was upset about that. No cussing, but some frankness. My feelings are hurt by this. I guess I'm surprised that she would immediately construe my gesture as self-serving. I mean, door beads are $20. I could have afforded that, even in my graduate student poverty, had I really wanted them. I was trying to get a gift for us, but I suppose I missed the mark. I told her I'd call her back "later," which right now means tomorrow. I was pretty steamed about this. I hate it when a gesture creates a result opposite of the intent. I could keep bitching, but I won't. If you've read this far, thank you.

posted by: zithereen at May 07, 2004 21:17 | link | comments (6) |

Okay, peoples, I should be asleep by now. Instead I am here. Readership has remained constant despite my flagging participation in my own blog. But forgive me, please--it's all thesis madness around here. The days are pretty much the same, even when they're different, but not in a depressing way. I have approximately eight days until I submit my thesis to the good people at UCI, and, what do you know, the last several days I have not worked on my thesis. Instead I have worked on a lengthy artcle on British writer Redmond O'Hanlon, which adds acceptable stress to my life because it pays insanely well. I mean, I thought freelance work paid all crappy, but I was wrong. My piece on Mr. O'Hanlon will makes it possible for me to afford to move myself across the country in a couple months.

But I'm in something like the fifth dimension of hell at the moment. Only it's not hellish, not really. I've been writing a lot, and isn't that what I always wanted? It can leave me drained, but I feel myself undergoing a major (extreme?) makeover as a writer. My daily attention to words has meant something; I feel stronger and sharper. But I'm excited about submitting this fucking monster and having some space from it, and approaching it again after a needed cool-off period. I've never asked so much of myself before; it's a liberating and lonely experience.

Back to it. After sleep.   

posted by: zithereen at May 04, 2004 01:38 | link | comments |