Back to school (there will be a quiz at the end)

The date on the calendar may indicate that summer is still in full swing but those of us who are parents or professional students out there - we know better. It is back to school time. This time of the year means different things to different people. I know some of us would rather take out their kidneys with a dull knife than face the prospect of attending an academic institution again and there are others, myself included, who really looked forward to school. As I have gotten older, I have appreciated the idea that you can sit for 2-3 hours and have some wisdom bestowed upon you. I really, really appreciated school (and by school I mean University) about 2 months into my first job after receiving my Master's and officially becoming a full time civilian. I was working in a medical software company that some of you may know very well. I was already bored with the job (I had the worst job at the company at that time, it was fully acknowledged) and the fall was setting in. I just felt like I should be getting back to something new - a new agenda, a new schedule, a change of scene! Instead, I was faced with the prospect of the same desk, the same routine every day. Thank God the company bought a building and we moved offices - the distraction was the only reason I lasted through the winter - that and there was really good shopping right around the corner. I didn't last too much longer after that though. That started a habit of me having to change jobs on a yearly basis. I came a consultant so I could change jobs/projects and still work for the same company - saved the hassle of having to go and interview every 11 months.

A friend of mine identified my problem. "You still think that life should provide you with a new set of challenges every year. You are still a student" and she was right! I was! I am! I have been fighting the urge by continuing the job changing habit, taking night courses but nothing has the power of the real thing. That walking into a lecture hall, sizing up a professor, type casting your fellow students ("he's going to be the one that likes to hear himself talk", "she is going to be the curve buster that tells everyone she didn't study and she failed.") I like grabbing coffee (or in Ireland, pints) with the class and professor afterwards and the whole social life you gain from simply showing up at class. I admit it, I am a geek and I miss school.

So Pog decided to go back and fulfill a dream of not only becoming a student again but actually going to school for what she loves and wanted to study in the first place. Her first love ... challenged only by family and Fergus and JDP when he is being nice ... Pog is going back for a MFA in Creative Writing. Now, I have studied Literature for my whole academic career but I never had the nerve to study creative writing specifically because I figured - no one can teach that to you, it is a talent you either have or you don't, and I still think that is true. I also think that the writers that I admire all worked in, like, meat packing plants and flower shops. They didn't need a formal education to get their voice on paper, again, its a talent thing. I still believe this but I have found that over the years, as each year takes me down a path that was started at that medical software company and has continued, for good and bad (no regrets!), it is harder and harder for me to reach back to that original dream. I needed something drastic! I needed to surround myself with people who were not asking me about technology, return on investment or "oh my God, the project is in the red, what are we going to do!". I don't care - maybe I will find the appreciation that I need to continue with my present job if I am satifying the creative side on an intense and daily basis.

Also (and thank you all for indulging me with my justification of this choice which is what I am doing here if you haven't read in between the lines by now) the publishing world right now, sucks, frankly. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor - so many young writers were nutured by editors of literary magazines until they were the writers that they are. These magazines and these editors do not exist anymore. There is very little space for a writer of short fiction or poetry in the world now (If they want to see their words in print and not on a screen, which I do!) You have to be almost perfect out the door and even then there is a lot of luck involved. Also exists is a chicken and an egg scenario. You can't get published if you haven't been published. Riddle me that, won't you? You can't get published anywhere big if you don't have an agent, oh, and did I mention that you can't get an agent unless you've been published - and most agents don't want to talk to you if you don't have a novel under your belt. A portfolio of short fiction? Call us when you write the novel. Only novels sell, you see. I think that the academic door is one of the only doors left (slightly) opened.

That was quite a detour around the point of this post which is to tell you that I got my letter about the course, when it starts (I will be in the States) where it will meet, oh and by the way ... read the Rise of the Novel by someone or other. I have homework! I forgot about that part. I hate homework, primarly because Pog is stubborn and doesn't do what she doesn't like to do very easily, without someone prodding her with a hot poker. I was actually NOT a good student, despite my inherent love of school because I simply refused to do things I had no interest in doing. It wasn't so much of an issue in college where I got to the point where I just to english and history classes with the occassional 'science for airhead' classes like astronomy just to fulfill graduation requirements but in high school, I just didn't go to math. Who was it that was riffing on calculus, Dim? That was brilliant ... I am quoting him here (I am such a fan!)...

You see, NONE of us got Calculus. None. I avoided taking the class, to no avail, because I knew I would bomb it. It's not math. It's not algebra. It's not geometry. It's not trig. I got all that shit. But Calculus was a different beast all-together; we all tanked it. - DIM

I didn't get ANY of it, not calc, not trig, not geometry, not even algebra. I hated it all with a viceral hate I save for people who are cruel to animals. I just refused to open my mind to it. One geometry teacher I had, an older guy who had seen it all, kept me after one day to go over a test on proving that one line is parallel to another line or whatever that I flunked and said "you just make this stuff up". Yes. I am proud of that. I just make it up. So as you see, the fiction just needed to find a way out wherever I was. If it was on a geometry exam, so be it. Someday I will post about how I got my first job in technology after the medical software company by essentially reading the index of a Visual Basic book the night before the interview and bullshitting my way through the interview ... ok, well, there was the post.

Sorry, I am off on another tangent - will this post ever end, you say? I say, maybe, but I am so, so, so hungover right now (perhaps still a little drunk,even?) that I am having a hard time keeping on topic... So I have homework. To read this book. I don't want to read this book. And now I have to show up for classes two days a week. What if I want to do something else on those two days? It kinda eats into my time to go down to the cottage. And now people will be demanding things of me. I just got to a point in my life where I can just about handle what is being asked for from me, now I am going to upset this balance. Holy cow! What have I done!?! Did I really like school that much that I want to go back? Am I really up for a return to things that I liked but, now, come to think of it, things that I didn't? What if the professor is a pompeous ass or worse, what if I don't like his writing and he is the one judging mine? That is a nightmare situation.

The moral of the story is one of the following (choose one):

a) Return to what you love, even if you have left it for a long time
b) The olden days were better for everything, including literary publications
c) Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it
d) Don't blog whilst ridiculously dehydrated and slightly queezy
e) All of the above