At the archives, breathing on Kate Chopin’s manuscripts. They’re handwritten, hard to read. I say something about an upcoming book on handwriting, how the author hypothesizes that at some point in the future people won’t be able to read anything but type. She nods and says she’d believe it, that in recent years there’ve been interns unable to ( Read more... )

silence is so accurate

Do Not Fear Tomorrow

We R Here 4 U

In the largest room on the top floor of the art museum I sit with a notepad and pen and Richter’s November, December and January. There are so many students roaming around, their eyes rolling against the walls with this bewildered look like they’re surrounded by books written in a language they don’t know. Skinny girls with long hair and clothes ( Read more... )

It’s like anything else I guess, some moments (days) it doesn’t take any real work to feel focused and hopeful, and others times there’s a black mood that stretches on and on and seems incurable. I am, like some character in a movie I wouldn’t like one bit, entirely sure of what I don’t want to do and not so sure of what I do want to do. So far the ( Read more... )

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I quit. I had been thinking about writing about the details, listing all the awful things about this job or this place or what the head said to me during the conversation but there's no point in trying to convince an imagined or real audience of anything, and there's definitely no need to worry about recording it for myself in case I were to forget

Only two weeks in and things are pretty much a mess, it feels like there's almost no such thing as spare time, reading four novels simultaneously and preparing four daily lesson plans and I can’t imagine how I would keep going, I can’t imagine how long I could keep this up without having some sort of nervous breakdown or something. Why did they ( Read more... )

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I don’t know, it’s kind of too awful or hilarious to say, but the truth is that the fantasies about leaving already have started to become plans, possibilities. There are a lot of reasons this school doesn’t seem like a place I should be, but the most glaring is the implausibility of 6 classes and 5 preps, a workload that seems difficult even for ( Read more... )