Poem of the Week

To his Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell


Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run

Happy Valentines!

I need a GRE Literature study partner.

Oh boy. No matter how much you read about how this test, nothing really prepares you for taking it. That is except the practice test. I woke up at 7 am this past Sunday morning, as usual. It's funny to think how much I love to sleep and how late I used to sleep before the word j-o-b entered my life. I recently recounted my high school habits to a friend: wake up at 7 to be at school at 7 thirty, no breakfast, skip lunch, eat once school ended, usually around 3, run around from place to place, and go to bed between 1 and 2 am. And I was never really tired! Or sick! But now I am an old lady that has to eat breakfast or I shrivel up and I fall asleep before The Colbert Report even comes on (don't worry, that's what Hulu is for).

After ten minutes of lying awake and one attempt to adjust the blinds (which I am convinced my sleep-til-noon-no-matter-what boyfriend moved) I couldn't go on. Up and Adam, that's the way. I was struck, for the first time since we moved to this funny little apartment complex, to visit the apartment gym. I guess that Wii Fit was pretty strict with me that morning. This, of course was preceded by frantic decisions about what I would wear and eat in preparation. Egg whites on toast, my favorite hot breakfast, seemed an obvious choice. I had recently read the side oof one of those huge cans of protein powder. It was very convincing. I like to put the egs right on the "toast" (I just stick it in the oven for two minutes on warm) and eat it without a plate.

I tried on many outfits for my big gym premier. I settled on leggings, a wrinkled brown track jacket with Oxford embroidered on the front, and an old, bright orange racer back from Old Navy. I haven't shopped at Old Navy since my no-breakfast no-sleep regime, so I'm not joking when I ay that it was old. And it had a considerable toothpaste stain down the front. I stood grumpily at the mirror considering the light white stain that appeared three or four times in a neat line from my chest to my belly. I rubbed some water over it so I had massive water stains with little white centers. Finally, I zipped the track jacket over top of the racerback so that I could only see a litte orange at the top. Clearly I was intent on avoiding my actual preplanned morning activity, the GRE Literature practice exam.

I did like 18 minutes on the elliptical at the gym; couldn't make it to 20. I'm sure that I spent more time getting ready to go than I did actually there, but that's just the way it rolls. I wheezed up the stairs and came back to the apartment to find it waiting for me: the ETS practice test. I printed it out at work on Friday because no one was in the office, all 90 pages of it. I just stood at the printer and smiled when the admin walked by and no one knows the difference. Apparently ETS has only released one practice test in the past 10 year so I knew that I had to make this one count. I rummaged around for a pencil, sat down, and set the timer on my iphone.

Question one was about Don Quixote; something, something windmills, not a big deal. In fact the first half of the test didn't seem bad until I realized that I'd calculated the wrong pace. There are only 60 minutes in an hour, not 100. So then I was behind schedule, not ahead. Rapidly becoming more frustrated I raced through the rest of the test. I was just bubbling in the last question when Marimba rang on my phone (not that I answered them all, but I did get to the end). I wasn't feeling bad until I realized that Question 225 wasn't the last question and I'd missed the five easy Paradise Lost questions on the next page. Then I was pissed.

I sat down to grade the test. It was actually kind of amazing because I got the instant answer to the "How did I do?" question. I guess that I've never taken a practice test before... The answer was not so gratifying. I'd made a lot of educated guesses. And a lot of them were wrong. Not terribly wrong, but wrong enough to be wrong. That's how scantrons work. I felt awful - how could this be? I'd taken lots of extra literature classes at school and I'm always reading something. And then it hit me how much there was to learn.

I went to a feedback session at the end of my last semester of college to report on my thoughts about the English major. I had a lot of positive things to say about it It was only really in my final year that I began to realize how much I didn't know. I never took a course on Romantic poetry, or the Gothic novel. There were big gaps in my knowledge time line.

I spent the rest of the day online reading about studying for this monster-test (well after a three-hour depression nap). It turns out that this seems to happen to everyone. No one has ead the entire 'canon' by the time they're 22, there just isn't time. Apparently it is, despite my natural instincts, a test you can study for. So I went out on my lunch break this week and bought two packages on big index cards. I carefully wrote "Daniel Defoe" on the front of one as I ate a haphazard salad in my cubicle. I'm going to try to keep my momentum up and I still have the Princeton Review's practice exam to help me out. But I need a study partner. Someone who is also taking this bitch of an exam. So if you're interested, hit me up. I'm pretty tough and I could totally help you, but I need someone to stay on me force me to learn whatever it is that Caxton did. LET'S DO IT.

Come Sail Away With Me

"I'm done. I'm moving to Argentina," she said, her eyes red with tears.

For the next three days eurofly is running $399 round-trip flights to Italy and I just spent the last fifteen minutes trying to convince my boyfriend that we have to go. Keeping in mind that I currently boast a checking account settled at $600 and a credit card bill of $250 (must remember to pay that btw), I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when his response was a terse "We can't afford it."

Actually, my surprise was pretty minimal and after a moment’s thought I realized that I wasn't really asking to go. No, I was asking to talk about going. Like so many others before me, I was fortunate enough to spend the now ubiquitous semester abroad. http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/22/72-study-abroad/ I visited Italy twice during that time and am always looking for the chance to work the experience into a conversation.

But I'm not snooty about it, though I have been called that. I'm not trying to brag. I just want to talk about it. To confirm its place in my history before it becomes a mere collection of digital photos that my faulty processor could delete at any moment. I've seen this behaviour (London was my home those days) in many collegians that have traveled there and back again. The dog days of graduation (which seems to be my biggest trope) have brought about even more of this talk as we suddenly become free from obligation and face the opportunity to return to Firenze, New South Wales, Seville, or venture on to Buenos Ares.

I think, though, that, like my conversation with the boyfriend, this impulse is more about the possibility than the execution. Travel abroad had become our American dream. We can imagine ourselves anywhere, doing anything, with the freedom to move on whenever we please. And with an understanding family in tow (that you like but not enough to continue living with them), we could come home at anytime, postponing the process of entering the s0-called real world.

Leaving for Italy with $-50 in my pocket and only marginal language skills is an invigorating contrast to the steady job with excellent benefits I might be offered next week. During a recent interview I started to get nervous as I began to really picture myself at a committed position. What if this isn't what I want? I thought, in spite of the fact that this job description includes everything that I am looking for.

College was an amazing time of personal growth, learning from others, and freedom. I think that I am terrified of losing that; of becoming dull and lazy. The promise of going abroad makes me feel like it is possible to continue that growth forever until I become the jetsetter I always imagined myself to be.

But stagnation, like growth, is a lifestyle choice. What I need to focus on is pursuing what I really want. While travel promises many of these things, they can also be found anywhere in my life. If I choose to learn, grow, and live, then I will always feel alive, no matter where I am. So that's what I'm choosing. I don't need to run away to find it and I don't need to just dream about it either. I can make it happen every day by employing the same wonderment and love that I did in school.

So I’m not saying that going abroad is a mistake, I’m only saying that staying here doesn’t mean that we will become boring or, worse yet, our parents. If this is my American Dream, to live with adventure, then I'm going to do that right here. I know that the challenges I embark on now are not forever and that I may just find myself on the Danube in two years time. For now I intend to master a field and stabilize my relationship. It's not that I'm giving up going away, it's that I've realized that staying here is not the kiss of death. Life is a long and twisted path and I know that I will find myself in many places during it. I'm taking responsibility for my own happiness and not relocating it to Aix en Provence. I am, however, going to brush up on my French. Just in case.

Living Fat

Oh help me,

If there is any power in the rivers.

Change and destroy the body which has given

Too much delight!

Those were Daphne's final words before she gently transformed into a laurel tree. Afraid of Apollo chasing her, she begs Nature to neutralize the flesh that has overpowered her. Daphne had the restraint to will her skin to bark and settle deep into the forest floor. The body was her enemy and pleasure the ultimate taboo.

I’m not into that.

I recently picked up Michael Flocker’s The Hedonism Handbook at a used bookstore on a lark. The design was retro and the writing seemed clever enough so I spent a few hours with it out by the pool sucking the juice from nectarines. The main point was this: Daphne may have escaped, but then she had to spend the rest of her existence as a tree.

Unemployment leaves a lot of time on your hands. There are a lot of negative emotions that go along with that. We feel useless, lost, and a little like failures. But we’re not. We’re free. Recent grads are about to spend nearly fifty years in the workforce waiting. That stark reality shades this unemployment period in a new light. It’s not a tragedy, it’s an interim; simply a break between two things.

We’re familiar with breaks: they divide the first and second half of the semester fitting in a convenient little space for either the slopes or the tropics. I spent the first few weeks of this break getting serious and feeling down on myself. What is the point of that?
There are only so many jobs out there and it’s great to apply to each one you might be interested in. Follow-up calls, research, and resume-boosting activities are all great ideas, but they don’t make up a life. Too many grads spend a little time looking and the rest of it feeling like crap. Lying by the TV, trying to forget the reality of our situations, we forget ourselves.

Flocker says that the key is to be sure that you’re spending your time enjoying your life and not anybody else’s. We all have time to be a little hedonistic. Unscheduled travel, spontaneous cocktails, and luxurious outings can be fit into even our tiny budgets, especially if we cut the greasy fast fare out of the picture and save up for the petit filet.

But on a day to day basis, there’s so much to do and enjoy. Long walks in the park, incredible literature, deep French kisses, and great conversation come cheap. When a job comes along (and don’t worry, it will), I know I’m going to spend my time trying to pencil all that in. Right now I’m letting it come easily. Cheap wine, good books, and hot friends could keep me going forever. I think we forget that we had just about as much free time in school as we do now. The difference is that then we felt great and now we feel lousy. So I’m going to give up the drear and dive into bliss. From now on, I’m sticking to Ovid’s cheeriest yarns accompanied by raspberries and double vodka Red Bulls. Classic.

Aw, Thanks

While browsing imdb this week, I noticed that Alexis Bledel has filmed something called 'The Graduate Survival Guide." Where might that be now?

Resumes go out by the dozen but very few calls come in. Things have changed and the college degree is not what it used to be. Still, you'd think there might be something out there for smart creative gals. Careerbuilder is totally the new facebook. Funny how jobseeking websites become more and more user-friendly as the job's face turns cold.

Out of the thrity or so recent grads I'm keeping track of, about seven have found jobs. These are smart people, too. It feels like we were told such lies about how all this works. We've preened ourselves to academic distinction but instead of the hungry employers we signed up for, there are virtual resume-readers and unfriendly voicemail systems.

And yet, as I look at last year's graduates, they seem to be doing something. Do opportunities really float into our lives like the gradual transition of summer into fall? One day you wake up and there's a questionable leaf on your tree and the next thing you know, you can't remember when it got to be so comfortable outside.

Someone told me about an article that claimed that this generation is more assertive than the job market can handle. We expect more responsibility on the job and offer to do more. In the fourth grade, I was told that I should really have transitioned my casual writing to cursive, as we'd not be allowed to print in the real world of middle school. I floated into each new year and the demand was never made. No exam was thrust back in my face by an angry poindexter who couldn't understand non-joined-up writing.

While I never expected to be quized on koans, calculus, or Quixote, I did expect that the complex analytical thinking and detail-orientation seen in every job description might actually be expected. The world does not seem to be demanding much. I've unveiled so much only to watch it get dusty and that mystical chain of events called education lives in my heart alondside 'the nights we'll never remember and the friends we'll never forget.'

I'm sure that next year I'll be wondering, like I have so many times before, how did I get here? But until then I guess I'll just have to pretend to figure out where I am while waiting for the next phase to creep slowly into my life.

Away We Go

The first Harold Pinter play I ever read was The Dumbwaiter. The plot of this play is actually very simple: two gangsters, Gus and Ben, stake out a hit that turns out to be Gus himself. Underneath their chatty dialogue lies a political struggle that pushes and pulls all the way to the mortality line.

Here, I'll wander from literature to politics and cover issues both local and pervasive. I'll post articles I've written for a local paper and some [veryshort] creative pieces, maybe even some free responses to what I'm reading. For the most part, it'll probably be a lot of thoughts on my daily life.

Hopefully, though, like Gus and Ben's argument about lighting either the gas or the kettle, my simple ideas will reveal something more (to you and to me). Thanks for your interest.