Yearly Archives: 2010

You are browsing the site archives by year.

Swab talk

For my grandparents’ 90th birthdays, we got them Genographic Project kits, which analyze your DNA to determine where your earliest ancestors came from. In order for the science to work, they have to take two saliva samples eight hours apart with the provided swabs. Which brings me to my punchline. I now have the title for my grandparents’ future biopic: “Between Two Swabs.”

MFA writing programs: an exposé

In May I completed my first year of a two-year MFA fiction program, and so concluded the best and worst year of my life. If someone close to you has the nerve to die, I recommend surrounding yourself with sensitive writer-types. They will email you with words of comfort, they will hold your hand when you’re trembling, and most importantly, they will go out drinking with you any night of the week. I had heard that being part of a writing community was one of the main reasons to pursue an MFA, but the truth of this didn’t fully register until I was at a bar with members of my tribe, drinking and discussing workshop submissions. For nerds, it doesn’t get much better than arguing POV and authorial intent over cocktails. When you take away all the cigarettes and whiskey and general bad behavior, we were just little kids who had finally found simpatico playmates. For instance, I was not the only one who played “Library” and “Office” as a child.

But MFA programs have their ugly side as well. One’s ego is constantly being either battered or inflated. Competition, gossip, raging insecurity, and overweening ambition all form part of the MFA gauntlet. Our words often become fighting words, and our self doubt often mutates into criticism of other writers. It’s hard to maintain your sense of self worth when you feel like everyone else is more talented, more brilliant, and more published than you are. There are moments when you feel like a total fraud. There are moments when you feel that you were a much better writer before you joined the program. The burn of one bad workshop can undo the glory of three good workshops. Many of us have never had our skill, or lack of skill, tested and exposed to such an extent. It’s completely terrifying.

But it’s not life and death. Our egos are petty creatures, and learning to rein mine in this year, even just an inch or two, has been one of the most edifying lessons of the program. Huge egos aren’t equipped to deal with failure or with success; they’ll crash from both a scathing review and from an NYTimes bestseller. The writers I most admire in the program are those who remember where their values lie. Books are less important than people. Books are written by people, for people. Our books might outlive us, but they don’t define us. Unless you’re someone like Nora Roberts who seems to write books in lieu of eating and sleeping and updating her Facebook wall.

My dad was a writer, but he was never published. He was too busy being a doctor. But when he died, he left behind decades of handwritten journals, letters to his loved ones, and stories written on the backs of prescription pads. He never wrote so that he could see his name in print; he wrote because he was moved to record the stuff of life. That man could describe the rain in a million different ways. He could describe how much he adored you in a million and one. I don’t think he would’ve had much tolerance for an MFA program, but he would’ve been crazy for the after-hours conversation.

I remember my first day back at school after the funeral. I was sitting in one of my favorite literature classes, barely aware of my surroundings, and instead of scribbling notes I was writing down everything I could recall from the week before: every flower from a friend, every visitor to the house, every embrace from a fellow mourner. I had filled up three pages when my pen ran out of ink. My classmate saw me struggling, and she pulled an extra pen out of her backpack. She said I could keep it. Someone told me later that she hadn’t known what to do for me or what to say about my dad, so she was grateful that she could at least keep me writing.

Heartwarming story about bird shit

Birds have shit on me exactly three times since my dad died: once in my hair when I was on my way to bereavement therapy, once on my suitcase when I was traveling between New York and Virginia, and once simultaneously on me and my poet friend, who lost his father two weeks ago. Yesterday we were sitting together in the sunshine outside Dodge Hall, the building where we take all our classes. I showed my friend a photocopy of the turtle/frog/spider picture, because I’d just been staring into the creases in my dad’s hand, examining the pool water dripping from his skin, realizing that I’d always looked at the three animals instead of the disembodied hand that held them aloft. My friend showed me a photo of his family which he keeps in his wallet. In this way we were introduced to each others’ dads. Then I heard a sound like my friend had been hit by a falling acorn. His shoulder had been massively bird-bombed. While I tried to clean the poop off his red shirt, I realized that some of it had splattered onto my photocopy.

This led to a discussion about the cosmic meaning of rogue bird shit. Some people say it’s good luck, which it’s obviously not, because you have just been shat upon. But one thing bird poop makes you do is stop what you’re doing and look up for a second. So my friend and I, we both stopped being tearful and we looked up at the clear blue sky and we laughed to think that birds’ bowels might have a direct line to heaven. Maybe our dads wanted to send us a more palatable sign that all is well in the afterlife, but the only material that can navigate between Earth and the spiritual realm is bird shit. Maybe our dead loved ones have to debate every day whether they’re going to remain invisible or shower us in crap.

These are all Big Maybes. But you can’t deny that bird shit creates a moment. And our lives are made up of moments. And there’s a lot of shit in our lives, not all of it dive-bombing us, thank god, but omnipresent nonetheless.

My husband thinks it’s weird that my therapist was the one who first suggested to me that bird poop might carry a message. I was complaining to her about the slimy shit in my hair, and she said, “Didn’t your dad love birds?” Yes he did, and so do I.

Thank god I can’t get fired from the Internet

I’m only a part-time employee, but still.

Here’s what happened on Friday afternoon: I was waiting on the subway platform, and a wannabe rapper was freestyling a few trash cans down. For a while he maintained a decent flow, then he got stuck. He couldn’t come up with a verse to rhyme with “I’m unemployed right now. . .” I sympathized with him because I’m currently taking a poetry class and sometimes you just can’t match your inspired initial thought with a worthy follow-up thought.

Other things that rhyme with now: Mao. Sow. Dow. “And how!” Chow. Kung Pao. Rapping is not so hard.

Some links:

My cousin Alice Proujansky’s beautiful photos were published in the New York Times today. She interviewed adorable, newborn, Native American babies. . . with her camera, which they slobbered all over, in a cute way.

My artist friend Erin Crowe used to paint portraits of Alan Greenspan. Turns out that wealthy art collectors are fickle. I wish someone would pay top dollar for my flash fiction about Ben Bernanke.

This blind man can see without computing what he sees. If you’re not aware that you see, do you really see? It’s like when I eat trees alone in the woods, do the trees really make me fat?

Novelist Zach Galifianakis exploits comedian John Wray’s fame in his neverending quest to earn the love of binary code fanatics.

Wait, I have other links.

No, I don’t. I thought I did. Reviewing my bookmarks, I only came up with this (ponies singing show tunes). I really don’t care about the Internet anymore. When I try to freestyle a poem about the Internet, it goes like this: “I look at websites. . . . . . .”

Beforehand

I want to write about the hand I saw in the subway car, how I was sitting in the corner of the train and the five fingers crept around the mirrored surface of the car in an odd, backward way. I remember that the nails were wide and the fingers themselves were thick and sturdy and pale brown. The fingertips were almost near enough to touch my hair, which was still wet from an evening shower. I was drinking white wine out of a travel mug because I was on my way to my bereavement group at the university. I used to drink wine at a neighborhood bar before bereavement group, but lately I have started commuting with wine so I’ll be ready to talk about my dead relative the moment I arrive on campus.

When I boarded the train that evening with my mug of wine I had a feeling that I smelled like an actual wino, perhaps a homeless woman. I had done nothing to convince the other people on the train that I was not a homeless woman because I was sitting very still and sad in the corner and probably appeared spaced out to them. There was also a half-smoked cigarette in the pocket of my coat, which can tend to smell worse than any other thing, even if the cigarette is only five minutes stale.

Read More →

My Dinner at TGI Friday’s

A few weeks ago I went to Penn Station at 8pm to meet my mom’s midnight train from Virginia. I was excited about spending four hours under Madison Square Garden, exploring its subterranean wealth of eating and drinking options. I’ve been to some tasty restaurants in Manhattan, but you don’t truly know a city until you’ve dined in its train stations. I thought I could get some good writing done in the back of TGI Friday’s. I ordered wine and french fries. I noted in my journal that TGI Friday’s is exactly the opposite of the way it’s depicted in TV commercials. The waiter didn’t want me there. If I had ordered a $17 plate of buffalo wings, or if he’d been accustomed to Salman Rushdie drafting novels at one of his sticky tables, perhaps things would have been different. At a certain point I could no longer deny that both he and the waitress wrapping flatware in paper napkins were judging me harshly.

Read More →

My only job tonight is to write a blog post

That’s the first indication it will turn out badly. The second indication is that I have nothing to say. Here is what time is doing lately: inching, edging, creeping, lurking. It is twisting in my back. It doesn’t spare me, it doesn’t take pity on me. It doesn’t let me sit by the side of the road for a minute to rest my legs. It treads, it marches, it drags me along with it.

In class the other day, my professor quoted this poem by Bill Knott:

The only response

to a child’s grave is

to lie down before it and play dead

I have been trying. I have been motioning surrender with my hands and my feet. I have been telling time to stop, to reverse. I’ve been holding as still as I possibly can. I’ve breathed in nothing but dirt and November. I’ve frozen my mouth so it’s beyond words. And yet I will wake up tomorrow. Tomorrow I will wake up.

Playing the grief card

Acceptable ways to play the grief card:

1) Getting an extension on a due date at school.

2) Taking some time off work.

3) Cursing at the bank rep who keeps calling to harass you about a $5 fee the day after the service.

4) Eating apple pie for breakfast with impunity.

5) Refusing to change out of your pajamas/holey sweater/union suit for a month.

6) Requesting first dibs on holding puppies and babies if one is going around.

Unacceptable ways to play the grief card:

1) Demanding to hold strangers’ puppies or babies.

2) Cutting in line at Chipotle.

3) Taking fine jewelry, cashmere scarves, or North Face jackets off other peoples’ bodies because “they remind you of your loved one.”

4) Spending all the life insurance money over the course of a long weekend in Vegas because “that’s what your loved one would have wanted.”

5) Becoming addicted to opium.

6) Blogging childishly about death in a transparent effort to keep people close through humor. Coming up next: “1001 Reasons I Miss My Dad!” and “A Top Ten List of Ways My Life Will Never Be the Same!”

Eff you, grief handbooks

It seems that I am directing my normal, healthy anger toward the grief handbooks which are trying to teach me that my anger is normal and healthy.

On the death of my father

My dad liked to read my blog. In fact, the last time I saw him he bragged to my mom that he had “made it onto Wistar’s blog!” (I’d recently written a post about our mutual glee regarding the Dictionary.com snafu.) Dad also played a crucial role in the One Star Watt Turtle/Frog/Spider Saga of 2008. After a woman wrote a letter to the Charlottesville Daily Progress chastising pool owners for letting innocent creatures drown, my guilt-ridden father fashioned wooden rafts for the pool filters. He envisioned that the tiny ladders he attached would enable mice or frogs to climb to safety until they could be rescued. But Dad said the rafts hadn’t worked as well as he’d hoped so he was devising another system when he, himself, drowned.

You can imagine that I have a lot of feelings about my father’s recent, unanticipated, unfathomable death, and many of them are on the verge of being unbearable, and others are too private to express here, but there are a few things I would like to share with my people on the other side of this immortal Internet.

1) When the worst happens, it is okay to cope by picturing your loved one working really late at the office. If a week goes by and he or she is still not home, then start thinking California or New Zealand. I bet the weather is great there this time of year. I hope Dad remembered his hiking boots!

2) Diet Coke is the official bereavement beverage. My friend Mary and I decided the company should launch a new marketing campaign. Maybe the ads could show a glass of Diet Coke on ice beside a glass of fizzy tears on ice. “Can you taste the difference? No. Unfortunately I can’t taste anything right now.” That slogan needs some work.

3) When close friends fly in to be with your distraught siblings, it is probably not okay to fuck with them by yelling, “Dad’s favorite coffee mug!” when they accidentally knock one from the kitchen cabinet to the floor.

4) Online registries have provided many newlywed couples with china and silver, but a bereavement registry has even more potential. “Toilet paper, plastic cups, cheap white wine, whiskey, we’re good on Kleenex.” We also considered an iPhone app that would photograph and take notes on flower arrangements so you won’t get in trouble with your mother by just writing “flowers” in the little book. The app would be called iMsad.

5) Bringing babies to a household in mourning is always a good idea. Just make sure you dress them in their cutest outfits, or let them get into something beforehand like one greasy, adorable, unsalted visitor whom we were forced to nickname “Butter Baby.” Kids rubbed in food make good conversation starters. If you truly feel sympathetic toward the grieving family, you will sacrifice your child’s dignity to make us laugh. Puppies are also good accessories.

6) For at least the first few weeks (also known as that endless day) after you’ve lost someone (Where is he? When is he coming home? He forgot all his stuff!), don’t try to drive. Don’t try to leave the mourning compound. Don’t try to return phone calls. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to say. There’s no focus, there’s no agency. Find the safest, most loving place and just be there quietly until your legs and arms and lungs work properly again.

7) Count your blessings if you have a mother who allows you to joke about “Dad’s other family” that might show up at any minute asking for money and heirlooms.

8 ) Recall the Buddhist saying: “Before enlightenment, tote water, chop wood. After enlightenment, tote water, chop wood.” Lugging around compost buckets, trash bags, vacuum cleaners, and frozen lasagna can be pretty Zen too.

9) Speaking of toting, don’t come over unless you come bearing soup, alcohol, a Virginia ham, or pie. Exceptions can be made for people who give really good hugs or for those who possess a sick sense of humor.

10) Every email, card, text, Facebook comment, and phone call matters, even if you don’t get a response right away. Don’t be a stranger. If you feel uncomfortable getting in touch or you don’t know what to say, just remember that no one knows how to navigate death*, least of all the people who just had their hearts ripped out. And if you want to come over and be awkward or accidentally have your fly undone when you do the hugging rounds, all the better. We will find comfort in laughing at you later. Again, sacrifice.

Dad, you made the blog. I love you.

Latham Murray
1951-2009

* WTF