The Divinity Student and the Science Library: a Story of Mutual Bewilderment

So, just now I went to put a book on the book truck, and I saw another book that was already on the book truck.

This book, I thought, was called God. Huh, interesting, I thought, I like books called God. I went for a closer look.

Alas, it is not called God. It is called Cod. It is about the fish. According to the subtitle, Cod changed the world.

Well, so did God.

:) Happy finals!

Find the Treasure

Kind of like a treasure hunt!!
What is on the wall closest to you?:	A Peanuts character, a no smoking sign, and a notice about overdue fines.
When you turn to the right, what is the first thing you see?:	A black chair with five wheels and the security guard, who is now switching places with another security guard.
Name each thing you hear right now:	The new security guard talking to another man in a non-English language, my typing, a girl's flip-flops as she walks across the library, pleather furniture squishing
Name each thing you smell right now:	My nose is runny. The library has a smell, but I don't know how to describe it.
What is the title of the book nearest to you right now?:	History and Description of the Steam-Ship Great Britain Built at Bristol for the Great Western Steam-Ship Company; To Which are Added, Remarks on the Comparative Merits of
go to page 86.. go to line 12.. share the first 8 words:	(Title continued) Iron and Wood as Materials for Ship-Building. Ironically, there is no page 86. On page 8: "A A A A represents the outline of the boilers"
go to your nearest window, then list 3 things you saw when you looked out:	A big, bright orange handbag. A woman with a green shirt either arguing with or bidding enthusastic farewell to a young man, a tow-headed child in a baseball cap.
How many steps take you to your bathroom?:	The 75th step puts me over the threshold.
Describe your main light source at this moment:	Flourescent lights in long rectangular bars, with checkered plastic grating.
list each thing on your work space right now:	Book due and cancelled stamps, a scanner with stand, a demagnitizer, computer parenphenalia, Cabot bookmarks, book plates with empty space for due dates, oversized rubber
How many spoons in your kitchen drawer right now?:	bands (continuing from the last question because I have no idea about this one), yellow tape with "reserve" written on it, and generally more thing than I can fit in this spac
Describe everything on your body right now in the from of clothes or jewels:	Black flip-flops with jeweled straps, pink underwear, a skirt with a waterside town on it, a white bra, a yellow T-shirt, my Bryn Mawr ring, my snake ring
How many plants are in your house:	None?
Are they fake or real?:	Fake?
Where did you buy your computer?:	I don't recall, and I don't think it works anymore.
If you have a purse, describe it.:	A yellow Strand bag with green pockets sewn in and Spanish writing on it.
If you just carry a wallet, describe it:	Don't, at present.
grab a piece of paper in either one, and tell us what it is:	The Spare Change News
what was the last reciept you had in your hands for?:	Probably a bank receipt for the withdrawal I made.
What is the last thing you wrote on?:	Um... an old card from the card catalogue.
If you carry a purse, name 3 things in it right now:	A broken pen, a flyer from a place where I did not get my haircut, a small lock
what is sitting on the floor closest to you?:	A blue plastic garbage can that I am bending with my feet.
Name something you can see right now that you should throw away:	Probably the stupid labels I made for the CD Roms while Anne, one of the librarians, also made labels. Since now they are useless.
name something you can see right now that you couldnt bear to throw away:	See previous answer, since I spent so much time on them, though I'm sure I'll overcome this eventually.
when you say goodbye to a pal, what do you say?:	I like to make goodbyes wordless and inscrutable. Keep them guessing.
Take this survey | Find more surveys Bzoink - The Original Survey Site

Hell Hath No Fury...

... like me, right now. I was here in Lamont at 12:30 last night, happily using the last 15 minutes of library openness to put the finishing touches on the 8th page of my paper... why, then, was I here again before 9 AM, when the paper is not in any way due today? Let me tell you.

So, at 12:30, the computer abruptly stopped everything it was doing and told me it had gone into a "Deep Freeze" mode and that the keyboard and mouse were inaccessible. I got up to inquire as to why this had occurred, and discovered that all the student computers had, in fact, done this. I then was told that they do this EVERY SATURDAY at 12:30, but usually they are closed so it doesn't matter, and I guess they just didn't both to tell anyone that this was going to happen. If I had known even 5 minutes ahead of time, I could have saved my document and sent it to myself with NO TRAUMATIC EFFECTS whatsoever... but I didn't. A fairly nice young man came over and tinkered futilely with the computer, during which process an appallingly loud FIRE ALARM started going off literally in my ear for a minute and a half. This is apparently the way that Lamont informs its patrons that it is time to leave, and also permanently damages their hearing. My ear is still slightly achy/itchy this morning.

So I left, with no knowledge of how much paper I had lost, and no copy of the paper on anything but this machine. It was, of course, dark and rainy, though thankfully I had an umbrella. I started stomping home, and as I got to the science center, I caught sight of a very drunk young man in something like a slightly oversized suit jacket. And other clothes too, but not a whole suit. He was walking along, swerving all over the path like I've never seen, totally alone. So at first when I saw him I was nervous, not certain of what he was doing or what was going on, but as he got past me I realized, as he stumbled over to the rope that bounds off the grass and then confusedly to a bush, that he was probably totally disoriented and trying to go home. But in this state who knew if he even knew where his home was. I really didn't know what to do. I didn't want to approach him in case he was agitated or scary, and even if I had I wouldn't have known where to take him if he told me he lived in X dorm, but I also didn't want him to keep wandering around and get hypothermia, or stumble into the road, or just fall asleep with alcohol poisoning or something.

So I followed him. It was a bit awkward, since he kept stopping and drifting off in different directions, or just standing there for a long time, but I tailed him all the way back to the other end of the yard. At one point there was a hopeful moment when he seemed to be veering towards the door of what I hoped was a dorm, but it was short-lived, and the next thing I know he was, in fact, stumbling into the road across from the Au Bon Pain, heading on out into Harvard Square. Now I really didn't know what to do. It didn't make sense to follow him all the hell over Cambridge, but it was stupid to leave him now after all that, and when he was potentially in a more dangerous situation.

I was hestitating on my side of the road, when a shadow figure sort of loomed up toward me out of the darkness... and it turned out to be a nice, sweet-looking young man in a big bulky coat who wanted to know when the buses stopped running. For no reason I understand except that I wanted to give him hope or something, I said that I thought they were still running (I actually didn't have the slightest idea) but that I knew the subway had stopped, or stopped around now, or something. When I looked up again I saw that I had lost the drunk boy, and so I decided to go over to the ABP, which apparently is open very late, and ask them if they had seen him, and also if they would call the police. I should interject that my phone had run out of batteries in the early afternoon. As I made it over there, I saw there was a policeman standing in the doorway! I went over to him and explained the situation. He said he had seen the drunk guy and wasn't sure what was going on with him, but, after ascertaining that I didn't know him or where he was supposed to be, he told me that he would check up on him and help him get home, and disappeared purposefully around the corner.

So I continued walking home. At this point my feet and the bottoms of my pants were extraordinarily wet, and I was extraoridinarilly agitated. Being outside in the middle of the night by myself was NOT AT ALL acceptable, and now I had an even longer walk ahead of me than I normally would. At one point I gave up and hailed a cab, only to find that the cab driver didn't know where Beacon St. was. Now, under normal circumstances I could have told him how to get there, most likely, but at this point I was so at the end of my rope that I wasn't sure I could think that clearly, and I also wasn't sure that I wanted to get in a cab with a driver who didn't know where Beacon St. was. It's an enormous street! It's the main street in Somerville, which is so much enveloped by Cambridge that there is NO REASON, at the proximity we were, for this man who navigates streets for a living not to have a clue where Beacon St. was. So I walked on. My shoelaces on one shoe were permanenetly untied at this point, and they and my umbrella made all sorts of unpleasant flapping and slapping noises that I tried not to attribute to frightening attacker people sneaking up behind me.

I finally made it home, called Charlotte and Rachel for some support, and got to bed probably a little before 3. I set my alarm for 7. I got out of bed around 8 and made it in the door here by 9. I came right over to the computer I was working on, and found that it had automatically saved a draft of my paper... that had nothing but gibberish on the very top line, a disgruntled arrangement of the words "Harvard College Libraries." It also had the most recent copy I had saved... about 2 pages short of what I had left with. Two fairly hard-won pages in a paper that is not going at all the way I want it to at this point.

So I went up to the circulation desk and asked the guy working there if there was someone I could speak with who dealt with the computers.

"Uhhhh..." he said with a little chuckle. "Well, there's no one who deals with the computers exactly, but there might be someone who could help..." "

Well," I began, "I was here last night at about 12:30..." And that's as far as I got.

"Oh. That sounds like... I don't think I can help you." He went and got some kind of administrator, telling him there was a "lady" here who needed help. (Am I a lady to college undergrads now? Not that I would necessarily want to be a girl, but it was weird. I've also noticed that in this post I've taken to using 'young man' for men younger than me, meaning they are younger than me but I'm not sure how much. Bizarre quarter-century-ness.) Anyway, the administrator came over--he looked uncannily like Ben from lost--and listened to my tale of woe, expressed doubt that anything would help, but came over to look at the computer. At least he told me that he had told the powers that be to stop the deep freeze during exams, but somehow it had not worked. Which is slightly better than if no one did anything at all and just decided it didn't matter. So Ben looked through my files, and poked through some other files, and came to the conclusion there was nothing to be done, unless I waited til Monday and talked to some computer expert folks at Widener. I said this would not be helpful, and explained fairly calmly that I lived off-campus, that due to this problem I had not gotten to sleep until 3 AM, and that I had to wake up again at 7 in order to get back here, so it really was a major inconvenience. He was not unsympathetic, but seemed more concerned with expressing his own innocence than actually listening to what I had to say, which I find a lamentable human trait. If I am ever in a customer service position again, please remind me that it is more important to hear people than to excuse yourself.

So that's it. Now I'm here, I'm starving, I'm exhausted, and I have to re-write 2 pages of an already plodding, idiotic paper.

Fuck you, Lamont library. If I knew how to dismantle this alarm behind my head, I completely would, and take it as a goddamn trophy to hang up on my wall. If I could dismantle this computer without causing further harm to my paper, I would be sorely tempted. I don't have anything more to say, but I have not exhausted my rage and disappointment. I want my two pages, my breakfast, and my equanimity. Fuck you.

The World Smells Good Today!

Every time I go outside I have a wonderful olfactory experience! I have also received ice cream, free books (2 "legitimate literature," 2 thrilling-looking adventures, 1 complete smut), and an HDS Exam survival kit. I know that the HDS Alumni/ae think that I am a smartie, not a dum-dum, and they have given me play-doh and bubbles.

I have a lot of writing to do, a frightening amount actually... but I am happy.

And Never the Twain Shall Meet

But they have!

Just an excited post to reiterate to or inform everyone that they have picked a new president for Harvard... and she's a woman... and a Mawrtyr! Class of '68. I'm soooooooooo thrilled and proud! Also, her name is Faust.

Check this out for more info: www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/02.15/99-president.html

I can't wait to have the opportunity to annass her. How is that spelled?

Anyway... hooray!!

Dropping from the Eaves

So, you have to imagine that you are walking across Harvard's campus to Lamont, the big undergraduate library. It's a beautiful night, almost-black sky studded with clouds, a big gibbous moon... and then you hear a man speaking on his cell phone, in a perfect English accent, and a very agitated tone of voice.


"Caroline! I live two blocks away! His house is right next to mine!"

Pause.

"Well, I'm frightened for him!"

Pause.

"Because he seems to have gone stark raving mad!"

Pause.

"You said he attacked you, shoving you about and all that..."

Pause. He lowers his voice.

"Well, I'm not going to talk about it here."

Sadly, he is telling the truth. But I think you will see that this is nonetheless a singular experience.

Questions from Harvard

So, before I got sick forever and ever, I made a list of questions that Harvard asked me, on just one side of a little poster posting post. I thought it would clarify why this place is both fascinating and overwhelming:

Need some wheels?
Do I like her... or just admire her?
Does God exist?
How can God allow pain?
Why is religion full of hypocrites?
What is HPV?
What is democratic socialism?
Christianity: Boring, untrue, irrelevant?
Why did Jesus die?
How and why should I pray?
Are you interested in applying your analytical, financial, and programming expertise to a challenging and rewarding career as a Quantitative Equity Analyst?

Pretend it's a survey if you want... maybe I will try to answer one of these questions at a time. I'll start with the last one. The answer to the last one is no.

A Month in Review

Wow, it's truly been far too long since I posted last, as some faithful readers have pointed out. My apologies!

I'm not sure where to start, but in the past month I have:

*Visited Harvard Divinity School and accepted their offer of admission for the fall. (Yikes!)
*Entertained various guests, including Liz.
*Turned 24 (that yesterday)!
*Read lots of books, including A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again by Daisy Fried (my former poetry teacher, who recognized me when I went to her reading!), A Woman Like That by lots of people, The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia (one of the weirdest books ever, in terms of structure and layout, and in lots of other ways too. Interesting, though), and I know I am missing some in the middle here... or I think I am... but more recently, Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx (including Brokeback Mountain, a really interesting but sometimes overwhelmingly bleak collection) and The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi, who graduates from college this year.
*Thought about many things, tried to worry less and do more, wrote a bunch of poems, some better than others.
*Cleaned about half my room.
*Celebrated Easter at home with my family.

Hmmm. That's boring. I've decided list posts are not too fun! I will be more descriptive, and hopefully more prolific, now that I have resumed posting!

;)

NO MORE!!!!!! LAST ONE GONE!

Goodbye, Harvard Divinity School Application!

I think you are the best one yet... please prove me write and come back with a yes! I like you a lot.

And you're the last........................................................... so strange!!!!

I will probably have to talk more about this later. For now............... GOOD LUCK to ALL!

Two Down (finally!), Two to Go!

Goodbye, Yale Application!

Goodbye, Harvard Application!

Extra-special good luck to both of you, with all your prestige and everything. :) I hope they like my brain, where you live. And Harvard Application, please inform your writers that it is not necessary to be so damn complicated and specific about everything.

Just two more left...

On Graduate School and the Research Process Thereof

It's been such a long time since I said anything here. I realized that, while I may not have hoards of readers, nonetheless they may grow bored with continued silence and seek other forms of entertainment.

That, and I sort of want to bitch about grad school.

Grad school is weird. I don't understand it. I feel a little slighted because I am not receiving the volumes of mail I did for undergrad, but beyond that, it is simply difficult for me to sort through the many, many programs that exist without something physical to look at, read over, and judge from. I don't know if I'm doing this for the right reasons, but to be honest I feel rather trapped. I certainly don't want to wake up ten years from now and find that I've climbed some sort of theater management ladder and am doing more of the same in a more high-powered way. Which, when I put it that way, doesn't sound too horrible. But it's not what I want... If school is weird, offices are ten times weirder. I find myself saying my new job (Marketing and Public Relations Assistant) with pride because I think it's a cool title and because I expect that people will be impressed, not because I think it's a fantastic thing to do. So, it's clear that continuing a long time on this path is not for me.

Of course, arguably this whole Merriam thing is just my day job, and nobody's day job is her passion, right? Arguably, I have Uncut Pages to fuel me and satiate my creative appetite. Another tricky question... because no one else in Uncut Pages is, in fact, solely working a day job and biding time until the next project. Which means I must either cut my strings and go it alone, or twiddle my thumbs while everyone else engages in stimulating activities. The question of what I would do if that were not the case looms large, but I truly don't know how to answer it. If everyone else in the group was totally gung ho about working as they needed to keep body and soul together, but otherwise devoting the majority of free time and energy to Uncut Pages, would that be enough for me, too? Not that I'm expecting or truly wanting anyone to do that... but would I be satisfied then without school in my life? Sometimes it seems that way... and it's easy to get caught up in confusion and the illusion that others can control the way I live my life. If they would just answer their surveys, I would know what to do... right? And the idea of losing the enterprise, of letting it drift slowly to an end before it's really begun... well, it fills me with a painful sort of panic, and I'm not even entirely sure where it's coming from. Perhaps I feel that this is my last chance to create my great adventure. But, if it comes right down to that, there's something in me that says I would still want to do this, even if Uncut Pages full time was a totally viable option. I hope that something is right and true. It seems very important to me. I'm quite afraid that I'm going to school as a sort of "everyone else is doing it/better than the other options" measure. And that seems... wrong. It seems like, if that is really the case, then I should not go. But not going... feels wrong, too.

When I first left college, I felt a sort of compulsive desire to return to school. Partially because school was familiar and I knew what to expect. After all, the vast majority of my life has been spent in school. At that time, just a few months after leaving, it felt extremely urgent. I needed to be studying, reading scholastic things, doing research, etc. Yet somehow I didn't need it enough to apply, not then anyway. Now it feels less urgent, somehow. I've seen that it's perfectly possible to survive without school, and have an interesting (and in some ways more relaxed!) time. I still think, I still read, I still have exciting ideas. But this time, maybe because it is less necessary, I am taking more concrete steps toward application. In the form of serious sustained research of schools, and signing up for the bitch of an English subject GRE. As stupid, insane, uneccessary, stiltified, prejuicidal, gratuitously expensive, and plain ridiculous as the thing is, I am in some ways clinging to the fact that I've registered and to my preparations for it... because it's concrete and clear, and it is something I have accomplished and can continue to accomplish in definite ways. You would think the applications might feel that way too... but in truth the applications just feel scary as hell.

Ok. Time to break it down a bit. Why do I want to go to grad school and in what? Last year, I was really gung-ho about the Comp Lit, despite the fact that I do not have a third language, let alone a fourth as many schools require. I felt that Comp Lit was my home, I understood it, I was fucking good at it, it narrowed the list of schools a bit, and, most importantly, I could continue to float around in interdisciplinary land; I could retain my precious transgressive flexibility. Maud's email on the subject confused me (in positive and negative ways) to the point where I stopped looking at schools for almost a year. Well, to be fair, I'm sure it was not entirely Maud's email that did this, but let's use it as a talking point. Maud said she did not recommend grad school in comp lit, because it was difficult, the resources were scattered, and you came out less employable. Also, I was not yet qualified for "any comp lit program worth its salt," because I do not have a second foreign language... whereas, in an English program, my Spanish would serve as a powerful asset. She suggested doing English or "something else altogether," like this gender studies thing her friend was running. I feel like I should have taken into consideration the fact that Maud did her degree some time ago at an institution I was not really considering, but in the long run... I basically took it on faith, abandoned (though not immediately) my Comp Lit search, and began to look at the English programs at schools she recommened for me-- Harvard, Yale, Duke, Princeton, UCLA, UVA... all completely big-shot, top of the top sorts of places... the other part that floored me. She seemed to take it for granted that I was qualified for such schools, that such schools would be the natural places for me to consider continuing my education. I hadn't quite grasped that...that my undergraduate education and performance has, in fact, made me more attractive academically than I was when applying to college. It makes sense... it just hadn't quite occured to me. So it took me awhile to deal with that. And now... well, I'm excited. :) I want to be the best. I just hope these schools are actually, also, the best for me. I hope I end up doing this, all of it, for the right reasons.

And there are so many reasons... I want to be cool, I want people to talk about me and say, wow, she's going to ______, I knew she was smart, but I didn't know she was that smart. I want to be the first one in my family to get a PhD. I want to show my parents, and my uncles, and my cousins, and my teachers, and my friends... and my not-friends... that I, in fact, am the smartest bitch they're likely to know, and that is enough to excuse all the awkward moments, all the lack of boyfriends or a driver's license, the derth of knowledge on feminine arts of beauty... because there was always something greater in me, because I am, perhaps, an excuseable genius. Hmm. It's not them I want to show, really, is it? It's me. I have these problems with myself and I have this need to enhance my own opinion. And that's there. That's totally there, right beside my applications and my study book and my number two pencils (which I don't have yet but should buy before the exam). If I can't be the absolute 100% best, I at least have to show that I'm as good as anybody else out there. All right, so... let's not call it a bad reason, per se, let's just say it's an unachievable one. As long as that frosty drive is inside of me, it will never, never, never be satisfied. I could graduate from all of those institutions at the same time, and it would say that there was something left undone.

Writing that paragraph left me very nervous. Autumn cleaning? I hope so.

So... as of now, the list stands at Harvard (both for English, which boasts an impressive list of names and less exciting courses and for their Divinity School, which I stumbled on by chance, and which is so impractical and so enchanting--Amy Hollywood from my thesis, and tons of classes I want to take. Also Lilah.), Duke (for English. The friendliest, most complete and helpful website ever, and apparently they're very highly ranked for gender studies within the English field. And the classes sound wonderful.), Cornell (for MFA in Creative Writing leading into PhD in English--nifty little program, also very close to Syracuse-home. I think I found a couple of classes I like), NYU (for Comparative Lit, I think, one of the first programs I looked at, and the last Comp Lit holdout... it's beautifully funded, I like the organization of the program, and I promised Charlotte), Yale (for English, mostly because Rachel's into it... like Harvard, lovely professors, less exciting class descriptions. Also, in earlier years for some reason I always liked the idea of Yale better than Harvard, so it seems odd to just apply to the latter.) Not a bad list, you say, and it isn't. It just feels so... random. I'm entertaining a casual flirtation with Drew University, too, and I still want to look up Chicago, and Princeton one last time, because I remember being so impressed with them as an undergrad. Might want to take a gander at the D.C. options too, just because I still would love to get a chance to live and work there. I feel like a safety school or two wouldn't hurt, either. And there was that program in Madrid.... Any input would be lovely.

I was supposed to decide by today, and email my potential recommenders. I know I have to, but the idea of it is so nervewracking. But I can't let it get much later. I don't want this to slip by me again.

What is it I need? Is it patience and faith, that it will all work out somehow? Or perhaps a more decisive and dilligent approach? I try to remind myself that college was once this uncertain, and I agonized over my choices. I only hope something like Bryn Mawr, or the Bryn Mawr-esque experience (in terms of personal fit and importance) emerges now.

I feel like there is endlessly more to say, but this has gone on long enough, and should be posted. More on this and other topics soon, especially if it continues to be this slow at work.