Grad School: Passion, Terror and Failure

Contributor: Speak Coffee

I refer back to Poets & Writer’s magazine entirely too much, but it’s what I read and what I respect. It arrived in my mailbox on Tuesday and there was this article blasting workshops, or more precisely there was an article blasting workshop instructors that aren’t bastards. The theory being that a bastard running your workshop makes you work harder. You’ll either quit or grow up. The growing up will, of course, make you this though, crafty, hooks ‘em right off the bat, tough writer dude. It might also have something to do with the author of the article thinking himself a bastard to his writing students. He’s helping start a program at Butler if you’re interested in the bastard’s boot camp approach.

It goes on talking up and then talking down the MFA as a place for writing or not writing. And about the illusion workshop creates that someone will want to read your work. Workshop students are, after all, graded on participation not just their writing. And in the real world no one wants to read your writing. You have to make them want to read it.

To succeed in writing you need (according to this joe) to experience passion, failure and terror with your writing. That “talent” isn’t near enough. He’d rather you have “passion.”

For all the time he spends harping on how others don't define "talent" I'm not sure if he ever defines "passion." But I rather think it breaks down into desire and persistence. Aren't I persisting? Isn't my mad dash application push to all your lovely programs which I left law school in hopes of throwing myself into wholehearted proof of my mad desire and persistence?

I know people who, at this point, would want to call it quits. They would make proclamations like “I don’t have to prove myself to anyone,” and other phrases that would get them exactly no where. Okay, so this is the game I have to play. I’m putting on my tough face. This is my tough face: grr. Did ya like that? Because I could do it again. Grrr.

Why am I doing all this? Why am I subjecting myself to the cost and time of grad school? The low income level and high stress. Not to mention the waiting game and the rejection letters. (Got two on Thursday. Some--okay, lots of--rejection is to be expected on the MFA circuit.) Why do all of this? Because more than I want to work a crappy office job that will suck up a majority of my non-sleeping life while writing novels that may or may not make it, I want to spend my life writing and being part of the process of making. I can do that by teaching workshop. People will pay me to be part of the making. And that excites me beyond all other notions.

Yes, I enjoy writing. I enjoy the creation. The development. The pride in finished work. I enjoy moving people, touching them with something I have written. But more than other people liking it and finding value in it, I enjoy the making. I enjoy being inside my own head, pulling out all these stories and sewing them together. I am happy at my keyboard plodding away.

Besides, I’d make a pretty sweet professor. Hartley said so and I believe her.

Grad School: It's hard to be passionate about a man who doesn't call

Contributor: Speak Coffee

Between Thanksgiving and New Year's I applied to six schools. One MA program and five MFAs, all in fiction/prose/creative writing or whatever they chose to call it at that particular school. I've heard back with an acceptance to the MA program. Which is terribly exciting! Don't get me wrong, this means I'm going! My life is not stagnanting at a Starbucks job! I can go and get my degree(s) and go teach and be thrilled to be in my field. My field -- I'm going to have a field! But I haven't heard a thing from the five other programs, and while I've tried to be patient, knowing that you're a fish on the hook is bound to make you a little twitchy.

Grad School?

Why on earth would we ever want to inflict grad school on our selves?

Better yet, why would we ever want to go through the process of applying to grad school? Argh! Make it stop! Make it stop! ... and it hasn't even started yet.

Relationships after college: Sex and the City Girl

Contributor: City Girl

Since this entry is only supposed to cover the dating we have done since leaving the college scene, I will leave that large chunk of drama out of it. However, it is only fair that I touch briefly on my college boyfriend since he did have such a strong effect on my life and the choices I made when we split.

For identity protection purposes I have opted to change the names of those men to be mentioned in this entry. As stated, I will start with my college boy-toy. We'll call him...Latrick. Latrick and I met Freshman year of college, and soon after he flashed me his charismatic grin he was dating me in addition to rest of the females on the college campus (and probably in the tri-state area). He finally decided he was ready to commit, which of course meant things ended two and a half years later when I found out he cheated on me a week before I graduated.

As you can imagine this did not put me in the best place where men are concerned.

The summer after college I stayed in the same town for my first paid acting gigs, and briefly dated a couple of men in the immediate area. For example, a guy who was in one of my shows. And my next door neighbor. (Hey! Don't judge. Boy was fine!)

Then I moved to New York and the torture of trying to date in the big city commenced.

See, it is HARD to meet people in New York. You wouldn't think so, but it is. Everyone is so absorbed in their own lives that they barely take the time to keep from hitting you in the head with their umbrella as they pass by on the street during the morning commute. But I did meet a man or two (decent or of moral ambiguity) and what follows is a brief summation of my dating history since my arrival in the big apple.

First there was the fireman. The fireman and I met waiting for a subway at the time square stop. We lasted about a month. Well, ok, six weeks. Then he went to Washington for an extended stay, told me he would call when he got back, and never did. I'm still convinced he had a wife and five children there, but whatever. I wasn't too involved.

Next there was the artist (not the one formally known as Prince). The artist employed me as his model back when I was still trying to find acting and modeling gigs. I will stand by my belief that he was very talented, and a genuinely sweet and caring guy. He called me his muse and fell for me hard. It was difficult to resist. He was so charming and smart. Plus he had a hot body and a nice apartment. Unfortunately, he was also going through a divorce. Obsession with me to an uncomfortable level soon ensued and I called things off. Then he accused me of using him. (???) Good times. As a side note we had dinner about six months later as "closure" and I feel like we ended things on good terms. Occasionally he still sends me a "how are you doing?" email which I answer with a curt reply and then go on pretending like that mistake never happened.

After that there was the politician's assistant. We'll call him...Mandrew. He's one of the reasons I ended things with the artist. Coincidentally, we also met waiting for a subway (at 4 in the morning I might add...I told you it's hard to meet people in New York!). You would think I had learned my lesson, but no. I'll try anything twice. Anyway, Mandrew gets a fake name because we actually lasted for about 9 months. Of course, we weren't very serious and he made sure it stayed that way. I did fall pretty hard for him though, so you can imagine how much I wanted to karate chop him in the balls after I returned from my three-month theatre training in another state and he told me we should stop seeing each other...because I wasn't the one and never would be. Yes, he said that. I really wanted to throw my drink in his face. Unfortunately, he ended things with me over three dollar beers which just wouldn't have had the same effect as a martini. Why he didn't call things off before I left and instead decided to continue to call and visit me for those three months I will never know.

My most recent mistake was the banker. Good-looking... Brazilian...rich as hell. On our second date he sprung for tickets to a very pricey Broadway show...and then revealed to me that the night we met he had sex with another woman after I left the bar. At the bar. As you can probably imagine, we didn't make it to date three.

So, in summation, I have kind of a bad dating history, especially since coming to New York. Biggest problem being that I am a relationship person trying to survive in an anti-relationship environment. (Although, I really think we are living in an anti-relationship world these days. Does anyone out there still believe in commitment and think that cheating isn't something that is just par for the course? Anyone? Bueller?) I tried to go along with it for a time, but it ended up making me completely miserable. Of course, mixed in with these outstanding entries are a few minor dating experiences such as my brief foray into J-Date. (I am of the strong belief that everyone will be meeting their spouses online within the next decade.)

My post-college dating experiences (which I largely attribute to my last boyfriend making me completely insecure) can probably be summed up in one of two catagories. Either, "it made for a good story," or, "it sounded like a good idea at the time." Dating is exhausting and rejection is painful. The city is a terrible place to try and meet potential partners, and it can often take a person a while to realize they deserve to be treated well, and that they shouldn't settle for casual dating and waiting for the phone to ring when they want so much more than that.

I decided I didn't want any more drama. I decided I wanted a dating experience that was positive and free of stress. I decided I wanted to be with someone I knew well, someone I have fun with, someone I'm comfortable with, someone I can trust.

So now I am dating a good friend of mine...who is also my best friend's ex-boyfriend.

Does this story have a happy ending? I know you are waiting to find out with bated breath.

So am I.

Relationsips after College: Work of a Different Kind

Contributor: Paralith

For me, there has been no dating after college, because I found my current man while I was in college. Unfortunately, I'm not exactly proud of the circumstances under which we met. A few months earlier I had broken up with my previous serious boyfriend, and had more or less been rebounding every since, with none of my escapades leading to good ends. In fact, the night I met my current boyfriend was the same night I started seeing one of his friends. Cringe-worthy, isn't it? Practically everything I did during that period was cringe-worthy, and like I said, I'm not proud of it.

But (cliche as this sounds), things were different when I began to get to know my boyfriend (from this point I'll continue our current habit of referring to each other by screen name, and refer to my boyfriend via one of his typical screen names, Wablo). As is typical with rebounds, my previous flings were all more or less like my ex, except the newness of the relationship caused them to be free of the problems that ultimately caused my break up. Wablo, however, did not fit that pattern, and as I got to know him I realized that in many important ways he was very different from the rest of the cadre of boys that I hung out with.

That cadre is defined thusly: nerds, geeks, and gamer boys - my self declared dating pool after a brief and mind-numbingly boring stint with a frat boy (from a frat, no less, that had a reputation for being better than most typical ones). Unfortunately, this didn't help my rebound problem, because I was more or less surrounded by a large group of guys who would all be very, very happy to date me. I'm fairly good looking and quite nerdy enough in my own right. I like games, I'm happy to hang out at the campus arcade, and at the time I was even a proficient Magic Card player thanks to my ex's tutelage. I'm a rare breed and they all knew it.

The problem is that a lot of these kinds of guys, though in my opinion being far more interesting than your average sports-loving econ major, can be socially inept, have emotional baggage (oh yes, men have it too! And they try to lay all the blame on us.), and/or don't face a very promising future if their goal is to get a regular paying job at Best Buy and then spend their evenings and weekends playing World of Warcraft. Having my own set of emotional baggage (hey, I never said we don't deserve some of that blame), getting into a relationship with someone with similar problems is just asking for disaster. The kind of disaster that was my previous break up. Personality-wise, I could get along with almost all of these boys quite well - as I did with my ex. I'd learned the hard way that it simply wasn't enough.

But Wablo was very different. He wasn't just smart, he was razor smart. Nor was he socially inept - far from it, actually. He once told me that he would sometimes flirt with three girls at once just to show his friends that he could do it. He was confident, he knew what he wanted, and he had a bright future. He'd had jobs since he was 13, and jobs related to computers since he was 16. At the time I met him he was already working at a job that paid far more than being a desk clerk at the campus arcade - which, surprise surprise, was a favorite of the gamers.

Wablo was the first guy I had met that made me look forward to the future. I could see having a future with him - having a Real Life with him. Of course he was fun and funny (hilarious, really) and caring and loving - but he was also capable, practical, and excited about life. He was the only person who had ever made me feel that way, and he made me feel it long before we actually started dating.

Of course, most relationships feel like peaches and cream when they first begin, and after being together for over three and a half years, we have had our share of fights. Some of them, pretty bad. Some that even put that wonderful future of ours into question. And moments like those were some of the most difficult, most painful ones of my life. And the difficulties of my Lost Year played no small part in them.

It's a whole new world, learning to live in partnership with someone else. That's very different from just dating. That's very different from the experience I had with my ex, which itself was an obstacle we failed to overcome. Living in partnership means learning to overcome your unconscious selfishness, learning to accept the dark moods and moments of your partner's, learning what's worth getting upset over and what isn't, and learning how to just get over it sometimes. I know people everywhere say this all the time, that a relationship requires effort - but it does. What can I say. There's a reason that it's such a common sentiment.

But we have put in the time and effort to learn how to live with each other, and I have to say, I love the results. Everyday life with Wablo is one of my favorite things. Grocery shopping. Cleaning the apartment. Cooking dinner. Visiting friends. Watching movies together. Trying out new restaurants. Figuring out the directions to get to some new place. It might be more of my female domestic nature coming out as I get older (ha! 23, and I'm "older."), but I simply love it. I love working with him on our life together.

Relationships after college: say what?

Contributor: Speak Coffee

"Wait a second, you're how old? ... Nineteen?! ... And your birthday was when?"

Let me just state for the record, that when it suddenly matters to you when someone's birthday was, it doesn't actually matter anymore: he's just plain too young for you.

Since that little run in, I haven't really bothered much with dating since I got out of college. But what I have discovered is that the college dating scene was drastically different from the one I find myself confronted with now.

My college was small. 2,500 students give or take. My class graduated just under 700 students and we remain the largest class ever to attend. So when it came to relationships you didn't actually date. There was no awkward first date, no getting-to-know-you second date, no big hurdle third date. If you were interested in someone the truth of the matter was that you probably already knew them on some social level. Either through classes, clubs or frat parties - there was no 6 degrees of seperation, it was more like 3 degrees to connect everyone to everyone else on campus. So you didn't "date" you "hung out" and then one day you had "the talk" and then changed your Facebook status to "in a relationship with ..." and that was it, you were boyfriend/girlfriend. You were officially expected to be a staple at all of his fraternity's parties and he was a date to your formals and informal dances. You ate several meals together each week, and depending on the situation your sorority sisters stopped expecting to see you at the house after a certain time of night because they knew you'd be over at his place.

Now? I'm expected to make an awkward connection with someone I don't know just so that I can go on an equally awkward date with them. One of my girlfriends recently went on her first "real date." Yes, she'd been taken out places by her college boyfriend but she'd never been taken out to a semi-fancy dinner by a guy who wasn't her boyfriend. This was a guy who was just "interested." She was flabbergasted. She couldn't get her mind around the fact that he wanted to do something this fancy with this much planning involved when they weren't even in a relationship. She was also floored as to what to wear, so three hours prior to pick up I zoomed over to her place for a much needed second opinion. This is what I'm good at; remember, I'm sorority trained.

For the most part, my life since college has been up in the air. I've bounced from one thing to the next and rarely felt stable enough to even bother with introducing another person into the mix. Various people at law school thought it their mission to get me a boyfriend, to which I answered "When? When on earth would I have time for a guy? I don't even have time to finish my torts reading!" Although, somewhere in there I managed to accidentally pick up a guy I didn't mean to, which I found odd because I know my demeanor was very much "don't mess with me I don't have time and I'm a sarcastic bitch so you'll only get burned anyway." My demeanor was, as always, up front, thorough, and suscinct.

As a senior in college I was well aware of the wave of engagements, and the promise rings or fraternity pins being exchanged across campus. It happened like clockwork: the snow melted, graduation grew near, and chicks started getting lavaliers. So it wasn't without a certain amount of guile that I dated guys younger than myself in order to avoid the "getting serious" thing that happened right before graduation.

In the past few years I've briefly wandered into the world of an online dating/match making site under the theory that if I get my news, my music, my books, clothes and everything else from the internet, why not buy my men there too? And honestly, it is more personal than the bar scene. At least it's conversations sparked by personality not just a hot ass. I've also been told that Generation Y is embracing the whole internet dating thing and discarding the stigma other generations associate with it. We're the people that embraced Facebook and MySpace (okay I have not embraced MySpace because it's stalker-central), we're used to social networking via the internet. But I've yet to really get into it and have become quickly bored with the situation. I never did end up meeting anyone I'd been talking to or emailing.

I really think I'm waiting for my life to settle down. Or at least develope some level of stability. I've always been very firm on the notion that you should know yourself before you get involved with someone, otherwise you'll use the relationship to define yourself and that almost always spirals down into bad juju. Not to mention those people who define themselves or their life by their siginificant other and then suddenly find themselves without said person. Those people don't know who they are when they're single and rush right into the arms of Miss Wrong or Mr. Next without giving thought to why.

I have no issues attending weddings by myself. I see them as great opportunities to catch up with my college friends. Actually, my friends who are in relationships frequently leave the guy at home for those weddings because they know he'll just be bored and she'll feel she needs to entertain him when she'd rather be hanging with the group.

I frequently sputter when I hear that various people have gotten married -- normally because I think they've gotten married too young. If I were my mother, I would be celebrating my fourth wedding anniversary this Spring. My parents are very pleased that I am doing no such thing. They know, if anyone does, that the theory of getting married young and finishing raising each other doesn't translate well into practice.

Because of my frequent soap box speeches on the stupidity of people in relationships (which I have already described today just without the ferver) many people seem to think I'm against marriage or uninterested in relationships. Really, I just think you have to be at ease with yourself and who you are, that you have to be able to live alone and be happy that way, that you have to know yourself before you know you've found the one. It's all the people who don't bother with anything other than the ring and the wedding that bother me.

Relationships: after college

So in a very unscientific way (read: quick google search) I came up with these numbers on current college relationships. Some 13% of recent grads say that college helped them find their spouse.1 However some 63% of female students said that they believed they would find their future spouse while at college.2 There's obviously some discrepency here, but the real truth is that women aren't going to universities to get their M.R.S. (Thankgod!)

Sometimes it feels like there's a "senior scramble" as graduation nears where people who've been dating suddenly get engaged, or people who were casual feel the need to get serious and job hunt in the same market so they can move in together. But as you go to all these weddings you're still sitting with your girlfriends and the truth is that most of you are dating or not dating out in the real world. And it's a helluva lot more different than dating in college was.