Summer jobs

To comment on Gazelle's last essay more than her blog post, I would like to co-sign on the fact I think it's ridiculous that teachers outside lives should be subject to professional scrutiny. I'm currently looking for teaching jobs for the summer and fall, so I deleted just about all my online profiles, in the oft chance a prospective employer might look at it. I've never been one to be really open about my life on social networks--posting stupid Alexandra Wallacesque stuff--but the idea that anything outside my professional qualifications matters is strange and off-putting. I don't think any other profession--outside of career politician--is subject to the same microscopic lens.

What are you guys planning to do this summer for writerly work? Perhaps we can share resources--I definitely have interesting places to recommend.

(dis)taste

For years, my friend Michelle refused to eat coconut.   I always forgot if it was her or my other Hawaii friend, but I knew it was someone close to me. When a group of us were at a lunch buffet a few months ago, Michelle returned to the table with a slice of coconut chiffon cake. I expected her to at least scrape the shreds off the frosting, but no, she dug right in.

"For some reason, I thought you didn't like coconut." I had already assumed I was thinking of the wrong friend. I mean, clearly, here she was, eating it by choice.

"I didn't used to."

I knew it! She spent all of junior high, high school, and the vast majority of college crinkling her nose at the very mention of coconut. Part of me always suspected it was an intentionally ironic gimmick--a Hawaii resident disliking a signature tropical fruit (nut?), much like our vegetarian classmate whose favorite food was steak. Go figure.

But the formerly anti-coconut friend said she forced herself to get used to the flavor and has now decided that she likes it. I'm not sure it works that way, which makes me that much more suspicious of her initial distaste. She used to hate coconut as much as I hate blueberries, and I puked blueberries out my nose when I was five, so that's saying something.

I don't know why it bothers me so much that my friend apparently willed her taste to change. Maybe because I lost a partner in despising a random fruit. Maybe because it makes me wonder if she was lying about coconut all along. Or maybe because it implies that she, a squealing fan of Taylor Swift, is more mature than me.

Did I say any of this to her? Of course not. If it makes her happy, let her eat (coconut) cake.

Death By Coconut

One of the things I love about the internet is that it provides outlets to people with a lot of free time on their hands. Some create you tube videos, others constantly twitter. Most of the effort is wasted on making useless data, but occasionally something pops up that took someone hours upon hours to make that is actually really worthwhile which would have never been read by millions had the internet not been invented? discovered? created?

A while back, ABC news reported that you are more likely to die from a falling coconut then get eaten by a shark. They claimed 150 people a year die from falling coconuts. SPF lathered tourists around the world stepped more cautiously. Someone with a lot of time on their hands didn't believe it and did some pretty extensive research to show the public how ABC arrived at this ridiculous claim.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2405/are-150-people-killed-each-year-by-falling-coconuts

I'm still impressed at the fact that I can benefit from their hours of time spent on a relatively meaningless (but due to Gazelle's post, now poignant) topic, free of cost. My personal favorite "wayyyy to much time" internet creation is a analysis of what really happened during the Soprano's finale. If your not a fan of the show, you might still be able to appreciate the rediculous amount of time that went into this breakdown. Enjoy

http://masterofsopranos.wordpress.com/the-sopranos-definitive-explanation-of-the-end/

There's this thing that happens to girls around the age of thirteen, wherein life starts to hurt. Noises are too loud (especially your mother's laugh, especially in public), lights are too bright (especially at school, where they make it easier for everyone to see your red, exploding forehead), and silences seem too deep ("where is everyone? why isn't the phone ringing? are all my friends somewhere without me? yes."). This phase hit me particularly hard right around seventh grade, and I spent the next two years walking around like some sort of person-sized open wound, having screaming fights with my friends and my mother (especially my mother) over mostly imagined slights. When I think of this period now, I associate it mostly with slammed doors and missed meals. Up to that point, I'd never been a picky kid. I ate everything, as much of it as I could, as often as I could. Suddenly I could taste food in parts, first as its texture-fatty, dry, salty, grainy, slimy or cakey--then temperature, then flavor. I felt assaulted by everything I ate, so I limited by diet to pancakes, scrambled eggs and breakfast potatoes for far longer than was probably healthy. Although most of this chaos is behind me now, two of the foods I'd liked perfectly well until I was in middle school remain my mortal enemies to this day. One is mayonnaise--I can't even type the word without choking a little bit--and the other is shredded coconut. Something about those dangling strands, and their affiliation with oozy, sticky wedges of German Chocolate Cake.... A few years ago I found out that my mom feels the same way. "I can eat fresh coconut fine," she told me. "And the flavor's not the problem. It's just...the way it feels." I hadn't known this about her, and finding it out thrilled me a little bit. It seems fated, somehow, that even in those years when I was trying to get as far away from my mother as I could, I was still drawing her close.

Food Safety

You're not really supposed to eat in foreign countries. At least not in 'real' foreign countries where there aren't any product labels or FDAs or USDAs or recall alerts. You're told to be pretty wary anytime you're in a place where they don't require the health inspector's grade to be prominently displayed in the window.

You can't eat raw fruits or vegetables, even if you're in a country that sources its produce to your local grocery store. There could be bugs or bacteria or god-knows-what. Cooking is the only safe way to go, and even then, you have to make sure everything has hit a certain temperature to ensure proper sanitation. Do I need to say don't drink the water? Of course I don't. But I may need to warn you not to drink anything that doesn't come directly from a sealed bottle. The ice. The ice in that Coke Light you just got served is made of water that hasn't been properly boiled.

Obviously, you shouldn't eat street food. It's prepared by poor people who are trying to poison you. (Maybe. You never know.) This was a hard rule to follow on my 4th hour into a 7 hour train trip in Ecuador. I was riding from Riobamba to Alousi on top of a train, and the supply of Oreos I'd bought at breakfast had run out. I could smell the empanadas as we pulled into the station. A few of the other starving train travelers bought them and gorged away happily. They looked sensational. I fingered the bottle of Cipro in my bag and passed.

But no one got sick, which almost pissed me off. I missed out on delicious empanadas for no good reason.

Years later, I was in Thailand, and I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. They don't serve street empanadas in Thailand, but they do sell freshly caught shrimp off random shrimping canoes to vacationing sailors. It's a boat-to-boat transaction. There's no way the government can be involved. I purchased live shrimp from a man in a loincloth, and I ate them, and they were delicious.

Cracking the Coconut

One of my students had her mother bring me back a coconut from El Salvador.

She told me that they are the sweetest coconuts, that they bring her back to her childhood.

I awoke Monday morning dreaming of coconuts, a craving deep in my psyche, spreading to my stomach. I wanted sweet coconut milk!

I had my coconut ready to open, but when I took it out of the bag, I noticed it was a bit moist and cracked from when I dropped it on the ground Friday as I was leaving school.

But this crack could work in my favor. I had tried to get my student to open it for me. She had talked me through opening the coconut when she first told me she had ordered her mother to bring me back a coconut. I had tried to convince her to bring it to me straw ready. No such luck. Apparently, she didn’t have time that morning.

So there I sat, cracked coconut and knife in hand. But try as I might, I could not cut that coconut. They are harder than they look. I brought out the hammer and screwdriver. I admit, I worried about rust diseases, so I sterilized the metal with alcohol and told myself penicillin is made from mold, so a little mold never hurt anyone.

My neighbors must have thought construction was going on next door because I was hammering away for quite some time. Appreciative and loved as I felt that my student had brought me a coconut, I wondered why she didn’t bring a single, white woman the coconut already cut in Tupperware. Where were my native roots? I remember eating coconuts as a child, but it seemed like we had special tools to open them with and that Grandpa did the dirty work. Determined not to need a man, I was determined to open this coconut on my own. If I could close escrow as a single woman, I should be able to crack a coconut open.

Those coconuts have a lot of milk. I filled up two mugs with that sweet juice. I kept at it with the hammer, prying at the crack until at long last I had split the coconut in two.

The juice was all the sweeter, being from El Salvador, a gift from one of my top students, traveling all this way. I felt like Ginger from Gilligan’s Island. As I was telling the story to a friend that night, she said there were probably coconut opening instructions on YouTube. Next time.

The Writing Life

The writing life, combined with graduate school life, can get a bit maddening and discouraging at times. I think this line from David Foster Wallace sums it up best: “He has…an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face I’ve seen outside a graduate creative-writing program.” Unlike other people, as in non-writers, I think the best way to deal with the stress and setbacks is to bottle it all up and lie to yourself: I will have one more draft to do for this piece before I can place it in a literary magazine. I will get this book published someday to critical acclaim and commercial success. I will get a fantastic and lucrative job related to writing, where my talents will be appreciated on a daily basis. Thus, the hard part is not the writing itself, for which we have plenty of resources in learning how to improve, but the lying part. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—the scores of rejection slips from literary magazines, the silence from the gatekeepers of publishing, the dearth of any jobs remotely related to a creative writing degree—you have to believe in whatever delusions will keep you writing and rewriting. To date, I have had great success at the lying part. The other part need not ever come, just provide me a reason to keep going.

Writing Spirals Down

I should be careful falling in to these existential thought spirals about writing.

Why write? Why spend all this time formulating thoughts, shaping them into a whole, editing it, taking out even the parts I like because they don't work or don't fit, rewriting the whole thing then hating it because it's not as good as it could be.

I'll publish it - if I'm lucky - or just post it on Facebook or maybe one of the websites that pays you a penny when someone reads it... like that's what a real writer does.

Eventually, someone might read it. They probably won't like it. (That's my first thought). Ok, they might like it but then what? It's not like they're going to print it and keep it. All this work for, what, a couple minutes of distraction for someone I don't know?

Even good writers, they slave their whole lives to produce one or two works that might be read for 100 or so years after they die... unless you're Shakespeare or something.

The joy is the process, right? Yeah, that sounds like fun. Writing's really hard! The "process" sucks. I agonize over everything, wondering if it even makes sense. Even this "stream-of-consciousness" blog post... I'm working it over, tweaking things, making things sound better - more writerly - than when I first puke-typed them out.

I like photography because at the very least you have a finished product every time. But that's too easy, I feel like I'm not a real artist - is that even the right word? - um, a real creative person when I take photos. It's all already there, all I'm doing is putting it all on a digital sensor. Whatever I've written is always incomplete in my mind, even if it's good, it's still that far from being something perfect. Besides, I'm sure someone else out there can write the same thing way better.

This tweet just popped up on my desktop:

@Quotes4Writers: “You don’t need confidence. Just write.” Paula Fox (Born 1923) Novelist

Whatever, Paula, you may not need confidence but you do need talent. "Just write?" Yeah, sure, sounds like a plan.

I mean, why even write this? So 6 people can skim it? No offense, of course, guys. But really what's the point?

It goes on like that...I'd better stop.