Finished a biography on Virginia Woolf today.

I want to be her. Minus the drowning.

How beautiful a life, at once held to a mirror with her prose, the simple abstract lines of it re-arranging themselves in an elaborate Victorian manner, to act as an ambassador to her genius.

How I wish for that.

I was thinking today of the washed-out actress and widely-known pornstar who used to do those French in Action videos (which, due to her career, gave a satisfying double-meaning to the aptly-named workbook), and her red, pleated knee-length skirt and white blouse. I am wondering if she was also a language major at college. If so, I have a lot of pleasant interviews to look forward to once I've got my diploma in hand.

I'm thinking about what I want to do, and all the things I know about being able to do with my degree seem so unsatisfying. I've basically made up my mind to sign up to go and teach abroad two Septembers from now (so I'd be leaving to teach in February of 2010), but I'm not quite sure what I want to do in the interim.

I kind of want to use the time to be a bum. I want to do all those tiny jobs I meant to do in high school (work at a florist's, model for art classes, sing for weddings). Clearly if I live at home this will not be possible, as I will have my mother breathing angry fire at me for being a useless waste to society. I also want to use the time to write as much as I can, and clean up the drafts, and perhaps find something shiny and publishable, if I can manage to burnish off the word-rust and sleep with the right people.

I want to live in the city, and then when I come back from chilechinaspain, I want to live there and never leave. So first thing's first, I need a relatively cheap address or a clown-car's worth of roommates.

I bought an audio recorder today. I have 301 glorious hours ahead of me to interview total strangers on train rides, dying fathers, underage brides, suburban stoners, and whatever else I may come across. The best way to start to weave fiction is to pound and kneed reality into a malleable form. And the best way of kneeding word-clay is to beg, borrow, and steal real events and change them just enough so no one can sue you for libel. My shiny gem of recordings has added up to this, so far:

"Hey Brian, what would you recomend tonight?"
"A cappuchino, but I don't have any ice."
"You could recommend a coffee."
"Yes, but I'd rather recommend a cappuchino."

So now that I have my new toy, I'm really excited to use it, but no one seems to want to sit down with me and divulge the details of hot summer nights spent in airless tents when families went camping as far away from their hometown as a tank of gas in their station-wagon could take them, or how their first time was in a children's nursery in the basement of their church, as they stared into the dead eyes of a Furby and plowed away on top of their girlfriend, or how their father used to soak them in chunky-looking Aveeno baths when they got a bad case of poison ivy. I blame our country's Puritan roots, and Bush for further exposing how far into the mesas of New Mexico the Man's ears really stretch. But these are the stories I want to hear. And these are the stories I want to tell. The smells and sounds and sights of other people.

The fabulous thing about working at a hospital is that, as long as you are brave enough to sneak away from your tiny cubicle, you get to experience a wealth of information bigger than the palacial institute you are currently standing in.

I am far from loving my job this summer, but it isn't bad, and jobs, unlike relationships, are something in which I am okay settling for the mediocre. I'm doing a lot of interesting but unimportant research on topics I'll only broach ever again if I end up dating someone health-savvy and have had several glasses of chardonnay.

I work side-by-side with a very cute guy from Moravian, whose teeth amaze me, as they are commercial-white and perfectly straight. He golfs, which I've always thought is funny when you're under the age of 40, although I have no justification for the feeling (I think it has something to do with the image of plaid pants and off-kilter caps). He has no clue what he wants to do when he graduates, which makes me feel better about my own uncertain future. And he's an all-around nice guy, a people person, and I'm afraid he may think I'm cold because as much as I try to return his niceties, I'm not nearly as natural about it.

My boss is slowly coming to terms with not being a kid anymore, as she's just had one of her own. The redefinition process is a curious thing to observe, as she tends to straddle the invisible but marked lines between young adulthood and parenting, between her twenties and her thirties, between boss and colleague. Transitions are always a challenge.

The doctors I work with are a blast, and certainly some of the smartest people I know. They seem to have it all, an American dream packaged neatly in a white lab coat. Despite my envy, I still prefer my life to come with some assembly required.

I'm finding that I'm not nearly as type-A as I've pinned myself to be in the past; many of my peers seem to be running as A-pluses, planning and pining and worrying and studying and hoping. I've got my biography on Virginia Woolf, my four-day-old rice and beans in the fridge, and time to nap, and it all suits me fine.

Clearly I still freak out too much about small things. There are still things I want, and that's why. I'm in the process of pursuing, and it's tiring. I'd like a few things to be figured out. Like where I'm going to live and work between May of next year and February of the following (when I'll be going to Spain, Chile, or China to teach English). Or what I'm going to eat for dinner tonight (the rice is really getting skanky).

But it's all somewhat enjoyable, and I guess for now I can't ask for much more.

My second time of the month

I still have at least four days a month where I feel a burning hatred over my longest and most intense relationship in my life. I keep it like a used tissue at the bottom of my purse, and on these days, when obsessive-Kate rears her ugly head at having to face, soberly, a reality that is more than less than functional, I take out that dirty tissue and wave it disgustingly in someone's face.

Although I have become less of a psychopath about giving my heart a good thrashing with love's cat-o'-nine-tails, it doesn't seem that I have yet been able to throw away this nasty bit of pain. I make excuses to myself and to others about why healing is taking so long - I have had many difficult 'becoming an adult' moments lately, and haven't had time to isolate this one and overthink myself into numbing the nerves my breakup excited; it's impossible to avoid him on such a small campus, and with us sharing so many friends, there is no other solution but to remain friendly even though seeing him is like chewing on bits of glass and trying to smile without showing the blood; I heard from a friend of a friend that it takes at least a third of the time you spent in a relationship to 'get over' a person - the list of excuses goes on and on.

In reality, I am ashamed and embarrassed that I am still affected by something I should have been able to close the door on months ago. My pride roars on these painful four days, leaving me crying about my many inadequacies, idiosyncrasies, and instabilities.

What should I do? I should have said, "fuck you, you don't know what you're missing and perhaps eight years from now when you're still single and I am a successful writer-geisha-newyorkian-self-actualized-serene-sex-goddess-with-a-husband-ten-thousand-times smarter- funnier-and-more-gorgeous-than-you, you'll realize what an earth-shattering mistake you made. Too bad God can't just come down and smack you around a little bit now. Pity." But after such an intense rejection, I crave some sign of acceptance.

The worst part is no matter how hard I try, I can't hate him.

So I go on dates. I hate dates. I only went on one pre-relationship date in my entire life up until March, and that one sucked, too. I don't know who came up with dating as a ritual, but it's basically a tidy business transaction for otherwise taboo and untidy mating habits. Although I'd love to do away with this crazy and ineffective ritual, social anthropology holds trump.

One, cut a hole in the box...

And the worst part is I am currently surrounded by Pips, and have great expectations for success, but apparently this Estella lost her candle and the moths no longer flock to the flame. (I felt like a grossly overexaggerated reference to Dickens was post-appropriate. Hey, you'd find no worse in Cosmopolitan. At least here you don't have to pay $4.50 for shitty witticisms.) Everyone seems to be at a point in their life where they don't want to start something new because they're about to leave.

And to admit, that includes me. I think part of my not having any success is because I'm only half-heartedly trying. I know in a year I may be 99 miles away, or 3,571 miles away. I might be in grad school, I might be teaching little Japanese children. I won't have any money, that's for certain. So why should I try and shove a love-life into the mix?

So, I keep half-heartedly going on dates. I half-heartedly show an interest in half-interesting individuals. I half-heartedly maintain a friendship that is rapidly descending into a vapid hole of failure and rejection.

So I promise my next post will be slightly more enlightening. For now, I'm just having my second time of the month.

"That was it simply, and you had set your face the other way from it, towards the bauble. you were heading out into an uncertain life, sacrificing the certainty of a life based on death; for what you didn't know, windblown excitements and imaginings that in the humdrum of their actuality might soon get stripped of their sensual marvel." -The Dark, John McGahern

"If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn't really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time. I could watch John Cleese or Anthony Hopkins do dishes for about an hour without needing much else to happen." - Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

I saw a girl die yesterday.

I guess I didn't think it was going to happen. Yeah, she was in bad shape, real bad shape. But she was crying when she came in, and although the crying was out of pain and fear, something in it reminded me of the cry of a healthy baby, of someone who was meant to survive. She was in good hands. People were trained for situations exactly like this.

When she passed away I didn't realize it happened, not right away at least. I stood there and I heard the flatline somewhere floating in the distance of sound, but it seemed so far away, more like the monotonous buzzing of a fly than a death knell. And then there was silence. And the removing of gloves. We were escorted out of the room by a man in a mask and gown. I held my notepaper weakly in my hands. My feet seemed intensely interesting. They moved, I followed. They moved some more, I thought I was going to puke and ruin the little marvel that is feet in motion, body working correctly, ticking ticking, everything well oiled and functioning and oh god someone died.

I had options on this paper, little boxes I was supposed to check off. None of these boxes were things I felt like I could fill out.

She was young. And she cried when she came in, a healthy baby cry.

The doctor made sure we were okay. And what was I supposed to say but yes, and walk away? I didn't want to touch another person ever again, and I couldn't understand why I felt like that. I just knew I had to get far away from that room and that silence and that sickening heavy feeling.

I didn't puke until I got home. It was long and satisfying, emitting from somewhere deep in my gut, so happy to get out of me. I felt tired. I felt the backs of my hands. I looked at the wrinkles on my knuckles, the brown dot near my wrist. Then I ran back to the toilet and puked again.

I thought about home. I thought about my friends. I thought about being alone in the apartment. But mostly I gave deep consideration to how the backs of my hands felt. Slightly dry skin, I'd have to get on that, to go and buy some lotion at Bath & Body or Origins or somewhere.

That night I went on a date. I had fun. I came home and fell into a deep and drug-induced sleep.
I was happy to see the sunlight when I woke up.

I spent a lovely 32 hours at home this weekend, after getting stuck in traffic for five hours and driving through Greenwich, Connecticut, which I had never done previous to that point, and seeing all these mansions (or rather, not seeing them, because they're all gated and far back from the road and the only thing you can really see is their huge tracts of land and apple orchards and stables and tennis courts), and feeling grossly out of place driving my dented Honda Civic along the road with Lexuses and BMWs and Audis surrounding me on every side.

That's certainly not the Connecticut I live in.

After spending several months high and dry in terms of a love life, minus a few blips, I'm finding how physically-driven I've become. I find myself searching for rings on left hands when I meet guys at work. I turn on the charm at parties with guys who I don't even find attractive, and I feign attentiveness and laugh heartily at their inane jokes. And I fantasize about being a more uninhibited woman, who has guiltless one-night stands, who picks up strangers in downtown coffee shops, who is gloriously sexy in her sexual independence, who has no emotional cares or qualms or conservative feelings about exacting pleasure for pleasure's sake.

And so then I sit alone in my apartment and eat chocolate cake and return to being me, who is very much the opposite of all these things, and wouldn't know how to initiate a purely sexual confrontation even if she was given written instructions.

And really, that's not what I want, and that's why I'd feel guilty about getting it. It's not like I don't have opportunities - I can count at least two that I have in the bag, I'd just have to linger in a hug or tilt my head a certain way or turn playfulness into prowess, and I'd be taken and ravaged and left afterwards feeling empty and abused.

I can't fully fathom why I pay such attention to the rules.

So, I should be working right now, but as today has turned out to be complete crap, from the weather on up, I am here instead.

I started work on Monday. Positives? Don't have to be in the office too much. Negatives? Within fifteen minutes of starting, I found out my boss had volunteered me to be a guinea pig for Resident central line training sessions. (If you're wondering, this involves sticking very large needles in very uncomfortable places.) But it's far from being the worst job in the world, and it's always nice to be able to remind myself that it only lasts eight weeks.

It only lasts eight weeks.

I have, however, found out many important life lessons. Numero uno is that I never want to live alone ever again. I hate coming home to an empty apartment. I hate eating alone. I hate watching late-night t.v. alone and falling asleep alone and waking up alone. Being alone sucks.
Numero dos is that I am in fact capable of living on a budget. This was a pleasant discovery. Added bonus? I'm not making enough money to feed myself three times a day, so losing weight seems to be in the forecast. And finally, I will never work an office job ever again.

I tried setting up a date tonight. I think I failed. I am seriously doubting my attractiveness.

Eck, back to work...