Interview Day

Juno left us with not that much snow and an unexpected day off.  So of course I did some diligent research to find an open coffee shop (though they are closing a few hours early, I’ll forgive them because it took me 4 tries to find one that was open at all) and traveled to Tribeca to “do homework.”  And instead I’m remembering the snowstorm that hit Providence right after I flew back for my final semester at Brown, and how I had to step in other people’s footprints on my way to the Coffee Exchange, because when I stepped in fresh snow I sank to my knees, and  how the snow that was piled by the side of the street easily reached my elbows. 

On Saturday, I got to be an interviewer for this year’s New York City area Brown applicants.  Saturday’s interview day was designated for residents of Long Island, Staten Island, and Queens, so probably 100 kids (and their parents) took the train into Manhattan so they could interview with an alumnus.  After the interview, we were to write an evaluation for the student for the admissions committee to read along with their applications.  

I have imagined myself doing a lot of far-fetched and preposterous things, but I had never imagined myself in a high-rise office building in the middle of Times Square introducing myself to a teenager who wore a blazer and tie, shook my hand, addressed me as ma’am, and handed me a resume (So not necessary, buddy.  I can’t admit you.).  I’m supposed to be the one trying not to let my hands shake when I hand someone my resume.  You’re too young for this, I kept thinking.  I was wearing jeans (It’s okay— so were the other interviewers), stood a foot shorter than the kids, and picked the raisins out of oatmeal raisin cookies in our break room when things got too intense.  Which these kids were.  

I interviewed 7 students, and even though I had to keep the interviews around 20-25 minutes, I could have kept going for hours.  Do you sleep, ever?  I wanted to ask.  (No.)  What do you mean exactly when you say you “conducted medical research?”  Yes, Brown will let you take 4 math classes at once if you want to.  I had free reign of what I asked, so I got creative.  Some of the kids were so nervous they sounded like robots, and some sounded like 30-something-year-old professionals.  I thought about my own Brown interview 7 years ago.  It was in a new gym complex in Biloxi (my interviewer was the owner), and he gave me a tour of the place once we were done talking.  What the heck did that man write about me?  When I got in, I called him to let him know and to thank him.  “I knew you’d get in,” he told me, but I know now, even more than I knew then, that that wasn’t true.  No one can know that.  All of those kids sat together waiting for their turn, knowing that of the 10 students sitting closest to them, only one might get in.  That of the 100 students in that room, maybe 8 will get in.  

Most of those students have spent the last 15 of their 18 years 100% devoted to this task— getting into an Ivy League school, and some of them Brown specifically.  Is it worth it? I wondered.  Is anything worth it if it dictates your life for 15 years, whether you get in or not?  Maybe.  But maybe not.  I wanted to apologize to every one of them.  To tell them, you all deserve this.  Some of you aren’t a good match for the school, some of you will be happier somewhere else, even though you don’t know it yet, and some of you will just not be quite as lucky as the person next to you.  But don’t let this decision make you think you don’t deserve this.  

I wrote my evaluations with the horror and awe that comes with knowing you might be directly impacting the rest of someone’s life.  I’m at a loss as to how admissions narrows over 30,000 applications to about 2,500.  Why would you put yourselves through this, I’d think for a second, and then I’d remember.  

I’m planning to visit Brown in a couple of weeks.  It’ll be the first time in nearly 3 years— since the day after graduation.  I wanted to tell those students that they’ll end up at the school where they belong, as cheesy and cliche as it sounds, and even if they don’t believe me right now.  It may be Brown, or it may be somewhere they didn’t even know they wanted to be.  What I thought was my first choice turned me down, I wanted to tell them, so that something better than I ever imagined could happen instead.  And one day you’ll buy a bus ticket back to that place just so you can see it and sit in a coffee shop and visit with old professors that you now call by their first names.  And you’ll get to interview students who you want to be able to reassure, too.  You’re gonna be fine— I’m sure of it.  

But I didn’t say that.  Instead, I wished them all the best of luck, ate more raisins, and thought about jobs that I’m waiting to hear back from and the essays I plan to submit for publication, and how the series of rejections and acceptances never really ends, and I’m not even sure they get much easier.  But I’m still pretty sure we’ll all be fine anyway.  

Page Break

I started this blog almost a year ago with the obligatory New Year’s Reflection post.  It’s strange that it’s already time for another one.  

2014 wasn’t easy on us.  There were empty spaces around our holiday tables, more stress than we felt like we could handle, and days we’d rather forget.  But there were good things, too— new houses and puppies, new friends and reunions with old ones.  I spent the summer at Duke assistant teaching two of the best classes I could have ever hoped for.  I still missed Rome and Segovia.  I finished my third semester of grad school.  I learned that New York is not the place for me.  I still missed Providence.  I saw a lot of doctor’s looking for answers that I never got.  I lost count of the number of jobs I applied for, and the number of rejections.  I had three different jobs that I loved.  I flew on 12 planes (my 73rd-85th), spent 2 weeks in hotels and other people’s houses, 50 nights in a dorm room in Durham, and 7 months in my apartment in Manhattan.  I hosted 6 visitors and crossed some things off my NYC To-Do list.  I survived the polar vortex.  I got a nice email from John Green.  The film based on the short story I wrote premiered at several film festivals.  I saw my friends get published and act in plays and make movies.  I read 75 books.  I wrote some things.  

I like New Year’s Day— the concept of it.  I like how it’s a shared starting point, a much needed page break.  I like how everyone feels a little refreshed, a little more optimistic.  

I hope 2015 is a beautiful one for all of us.  

25 and Familiar Things

No one rides the buses in New York City unless they have to.  The subway takes a quarter of the time and is generally more reliable.  But I kind of love the buses.  I like the back right corner seat the most, especially when the back half of the bus is elevated so I can see out the window.  I like that it never makes me feel claustrophobic and no one’s ever yelling on the loud speaker to “stand clear of the closing doors.”  I like that the people who take the bus aren’t in such a hurry.  I’m on the 104 bus, heading south, because the train isn’t stopping at my station this weekend.  But we passed the next train station, and I’m still on the bus.  I think the 104 goes all the way to Times Square.  I guess we’ll see.  

I turned 25 a couple of weeks ago.  25 doesn’t seem like a possible age to associate myself with, and I’m sure it’ll take the next ten or eleven months before I get used to saying it.  25 means the last year I can be on my mom’s insurance, the year I’ll find a real job (hopefully one that gives me my own insurance), and when I’ll have to start paying back student loans.  But all of those only make 25 feel daunting.  It’s better to think that 25 is the year I’ll graduate, the year I’ll finish my thesis, the year that I’ll leave New York for somewhere new, or somewhere warm, or somewhere familiar.  

I’ve been craving familiar things.  I went to DC a few weekends ago to visit my best friend from college who I hadn’t seen in too long.  The best friendships are the ones where you can eat Thai curry on the couch in sweat pants while watching X-Men, and it doesn’t matter that you haven’t seen each other in a year and a half.  I visited a couple of museums while I was in DC, but I couldn’t make myself care about them.  I only cared about coffee shop conversations and visiting my friend and his family.  And I was reminded again that I’ve put myself in a position to always be far away from people I care about.  

On the bus back to NYC, I saw a horrific wreck that put me in a weird mood.  There was an incessant beeping noise that persisted for all 5 hours, and I tried to sleep in a position that set my whole spine and rib cage on fire.  I got home to my empty apartment, my Halloween pumpkin on the table with mold in his smile, and I wanted to turn around and get right back on the bus.  

I saw my favorite poet read a few nights later, and he made me miss home and New Orleans and possums and pancakes.  

One of my oldest friends came to visit last week.  He arrived in the evening and had to catch his bus back just after midnight, but it was nice to see an old friend even thought it was only for a few hours.  I brought him to get his first slice of New York pizza and a Magnolia Bakery cupcake, then took him to see the new World Trade Center, even though it was too rainy to see the top.  He kept offering his seat to women and children on the subway, kept running to open doors for people, kept saying ma’am and sir, and it made me feel far away from home and glad that I have some life-long friendships that distance doesn’t diminish. 

My best friend from college came to visit the next night.  We got bagels and coffee in the morning, like we have a thousand other mornings in settings that weren’t this one, and even though I no longer eat bagels or drink coffee, it felt right.  We went to the Museum of Modern Art, which I’d never been to, and I had the experience I’ve had in museums in New York, Rome, Florence, and Madrid— the experience of having to remind myself that even though I’ve seen these paintings hundreds of times in my life, this time it’s real.  This is the time it counts.  

That night my Columbia friends came over to celebrate my birthday.  My roommate baked a cake and everyone brought snacks and drinks.  The last birthday party I had was my 18th— it was small, with a few high school friends, and we ate pizza, drank Powerade slushes, and watched Aladdin.  Seven years later, I’m in a city I never though I’d live in with an apartment full of people I’ve only met in the last year and a half, people that have made me happy to be here even when NYC has tried its hardest not to let me be.  

I like finding familiar things in the new ones, and I like letting what’s familiar be new again.  

Autumn

Somehow, October happened.

They turned on the heat in my apartment building, and it sounded like someone trying to break in with a corkscrew.  The colors bled out of the leaves upstate and are still trickling down the East Coast.

I kept meaning to write about things.  Like riding the camel in the Bronx Zoo, and visiting Coney Island.  I meant to write about apple picking-- how I couldn't let a 6th year of living in the northeast go buy without picking an apple.  So I gathered six friends and we rented a car and drove to Warwick,  and the road turned into a two-lane trail up the mountains, and I'm not sure I'd ever seen autumn so beautiful.  We picked Empire and Macintosh at the orchard, then went downtown to the annual Apple Festival, which was like a cross between the Franklinton Fair and the Picayune Street Fair, and it made me happy to be here and miss home at the same time.

I meant to write about thesis semester.  And how half the time if feels like a battle through the doubt that plants itself firmly in my head and asks questions like, "Why bother writing this?  Who really cares?  How many people are you in danger of hurting/offending if they ever see it?  How conceited do you have to be to write a memoir?  Oh, and also, do you even think your writing will ever be any good?"  And I respond with a lot of quiet blinking, because doubt is reasonable and full of excellent questions.  But I've got only a few months to go and a book-length manuscript to finish, and so I try to ignore him.

Last night was Halloween.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a more fascinating thing than the NYC subway on Halloween night.  I rode to 72nd street to buy a couple of the best cookies ever created by human hands, and when I emerged from the subway, I saw fireworks through the buildings in the direction of Central Park.  They were because of the NYC marathon, apparently, but I didn't know that at the time.  Never, in the year and a half I've lived here, have I ever seen everyone look so happy.  The kids were screaming, clapping, like it was a firework show at Disney World instead of barely glimpsed lights through building gaps.  The adults stopped on the sidewalk and took pictures with their cellphones, awe on their faces, as if they'd never seen fireworks before.

I joined the herd of trick-or-treaters and walked to the park to see the end of the show, passing dozens of shops and restaurants giving out candy from their doorsteps.  Entire families were dressed up instead of just the kids.  And I kept thinking, maybe somehow I've missed this before.  Maybe this is part of what people love about this city, and I couldn't see it until now.  Or maybe it's just that mysterious and magical things happen on Halloween.

The magic was gone in the morning.  The subway was closed at my stop, and I had to wait in the rain to take a shuttle full of angry and belligerent people who were offended that my suitcase took up floor space.  The trains were delayed, so I had to pay to take a taxi to the bus, which I was 4 minutes from missing.  But I wonder if the magic is still somewhere here, hidden for the people who know how to find it.

I'm on the bus now, to see a friend I haven't seen in too long.  Below the Mason Dixon, the trees are still bleeding.

A letter to John Green

Dear John, 

A little over 9 years ago, you received an email from a 15-year-old girl who’d happened upon Looking for Alaska on the new release shelf of the YA section in Barnes and Noble.  The book had been published a month or two earlier. There was no Michael L. Printz award sticker on the cover yet, and no one knew your name.  But she liked the candle picture, and the jacket summary said it was about students at a boarding school (for which she had something of an obsession), so she bought it.  She read the book, then wanted simultaneously to share it with everyone in the world, and to hide it.  For a long time she hoarded it, feeling like it was a secret that belonged only to her.  She wrote you an email - a nervous 15-year-old’s attempt at telling you what your book meant to her.  (She will spare the the details of said email now, as it’s rather humiliating and probably should have been discarded immediately.)  You didn’t discard it.  You graciously wrote her back, telling her that she made your day.  She treasures the response, still. 

At 15-years-old, she’d read many books that had impacted her, a handful of which even changed the way she thought about the world.  She’d read books that even now, at 24-years-old, are still the works of literature that influenced her the most.  But when she read Looking for Alaska, she didn’t know how to articulate that this was the first time she’d ever read a book that made her feel desperate to have written it herself, a book that said all of the things she hadn’t even realized she wanted to say.  Because she was 15, and she didn’t write words for strangers to read, and she didn’t know that wanting to be a writer was even a valid aspiration. 

She gradually started sharing the book with her closest friends, but only the ones she felt deserved it, still selfishly hoarding it while she could, until her friends started recommending it to their friends, and they recommended it to their friends, and all of a sudden, there were a handful of students at her high school who had read the book without her having been the one to recommend it.  And you wrote other books, and then you started the vlog with your brother, and your words started to no longer feel like they belonged to her.  

During her senior year of high school, she applied to many colleges she knew would not accept her.  In her personal statement, she used the Rabelais quote she first read in your book, “I go to seek a great perhaps,” and wrote about how she knew every reason the universities would have for not admitting her, and how she dared them to take a chance on her anyway.  One of them did.  She went to Brown University in the fall - the school she’d dreamed of going to, a dream that you indirectly helped come true.  She wanted to tell you that when she traveled to Boston to meet you at a release signing for your third book that October, but she felt too awkward and nervous.  She wants to tell you that, still. 

Nine years after I sent you that email, I’m a teaching assistant for a writing class at Duke TIP, where the students are obsessed with the fact that you were once a Tipster yourself.  Over the past nine years, you’ve become their most famous alumni, their role model, their hero.  When I asked my students on the first day of class to name their favorite author or book, 9 of the 18 named you.  Looking for Alaska is no longer the book of yours that everyone’s read.  The movie version of your latest book was released a couple of days before the student arrived, and it’s all they talked about for two weeks.  They wear t-shirt with quotes from your books and use acronyms to refer to them.  They obsessively follow you on all social media and quote you whenever possible.  Even my co-workers joined the hype, excited for the movie whether they’d read your books or not.  All of a sudden, you’re on all of the talk shows, a household name, the author whose books people know even if they haven’t read a book in years.  You’ve achieved this nearly mythological status in contemporary literature - a celebrity writer.  

I finally saw the movie this week.  It was sweet and too giggly and underwhelming, as I expected, and I couldn’t help but feel sad that now people may only know your novel in a diluted movie form.  I thought I would hate it when your books inevitably started becoming movies.  Part of me still does, but at the same time, I can’t help but be excited for you.  I’m not so selfish anymore.  Everyone deserves your words, and you deserve every ounce of praise you’re getting.  

Nine years after I wrote that email, 6 and 1/2 years after I wrote that personal statement, I graduated from Brown with honors in Literary Arts, with a concentration in fiction writing and a second major in English literature.  I’m about to start the last year of my MFA in creative writing at Columbia University.  It’s time you know that I have you, in part, to thank for it.  

Emergency Rooms, Surprise Visits, and One Year Down

            After battling through the last few weeks, I’m finally home in Mississippi.  I’d originally planned to spend the last couple of weeks of the semester finishing all of my classes and finals, celebrating the end of the year with my classmates, and spending the free days between my last final on the 9^th and my flight on the 13^th to take advantage of the (finally) warm(er) weather to check some things off of my Must-Do in New York List (the top of which was to visit the Bronx zoo and ride the camels).  But alas, things don’t always go quite as we plan. 

            It all started three weeks ago when I had the always pleasant experience of waking up unable to breath through my nose.  For the past 3 ½ months, ever since I returned to New York after winter break in January, I’ve had mysterious and ongoing sinus problems that no doctor has yet been able to explain (my current best guess is that I’m allergic to something in my apartment… but that’s a tale for another day), but I could tell this was different than the usual sinus issues.  What I believed to be a cold progressed from my nose to my ears, then throat, then a cough, and then a few days later, I woke up in the middle of the night shaking with chills so strong that even a 2:00 AM scalding shower didn’t stop them.  I had suspected my recently purchased thermometer was unreliable for several weeks since it kept telling me my temperature was in the low 97s, and my suspicions were confirmed earlier that week when I took my temperature three times in a row and got three different temperatures.  I gave it a try regardless – 98.6 – the highest the thermometer had ever measured, leaving me to believe that I probably didn’t want to know how high my fever actually was.  With the help of some Advil, the fever finally broke, but I had shaken so hard for so long that my entire torso felt like a truck had hit me squarely in the left side, and trying to take deep breaths felt a little like torture.  I visited Columbia’s health services the next morning, and the nurse told me he thought I had a viral respiratory infection, which meant no medicine for me.  Then followed several days of a lovely combination of fever, body aches, headaches, a strange sharp pain bellow my left collar bone, and stomach virus-type symptoms that resulted in me subsisting mainly off of frozen apple juice, blue Gatorade, Van’s crackers, and cinnamon raisin toast. 

By the end of the week, things were finally looking up.  I went a day or two without fever, the soreness in my back, ribs, and under my collarbone was feeling better, and I started craving the brown rice bowls from Community Food and Juice.  I even managed to go to one of my final classes on Thursday.  And then, that night, everything took a dramatic plummet. 

I went to bed on Thursday night and woke up just before 6:00 on Friday morning with a pain low on my left side and back worse than any pain I can ever remember experiencing in my life.  I sat up and immediately felt like I was being repeatedly stabbed.  Inhaling made it even more unbearable.  So, of course, I called my mother. 

“Something really bad’s happening!  It can’t be a muscle; it’s gotta be an organ or something,” I gasped at her, probably sending her blood pressure to dangerous levels.  “Which side is the appendix on!? Where’s the spleen!?” (We will look back on this conversation and laugh, though this will probably happen much sooner for me than for my mother.)  I then forced her to let me hang up so I could call the 24-hour clinician on duty at Columbia and ask what I should do. 

You might expect one of the best research universities in the world with one of the top medical programs in the country to have top-notch health services for its students.  You would be sadly mistaken.  After waiting on hold for twenty minutes, I finally spoke to a clinician who gave me the enlightening revelation that I was “experiencing severe symptoms” and should go to the emergency room. 

“Might you give me a hint as to what you think could be happening?” I asked him.

“I could only speculate,” he replied gravely. 

I called my mom and woke up one of my roommates to let them know I was going, then I set off for the ER, where the doctor told me she suspected it was a kidney stone.  By that point, the pain was nearly gone, and a kidney stone sounded like an obvious explanation that I should have thought of in the first place.  But after looking at the results of the urinalysis, she changed her mind, told me that there was no sign of a kidney stone, that it may have just been a strong muscle spasm, and instead focused on the fact that I was extremely dehydrated.  Both of my roommates, who had loyally arrived at the hospital shortly after I did, waited with me for the next three hours, during which the doctor gave me a mini-cup of apple juice and a graham cracker for the dehydration (the source of my craving for graham crackers which continued for the rest of the week), a “prescription” for ibuprofen, and discharged me with the diagnosis “lower back pain.”  By the time I’d walked the half block back to my apartment, the pain was already returning, this time in both my side and the spot bellow my collar bone, and my mom, who’d secretly been on her way to the airport since I told her I was going to the hospital, said, “Alright, I’m coming up there.”

My attempt to take a nap made it immediately apparent that lying down was impossible, so I made another visit to health services hoping to get something more useful than Advil.  The nurse practitioner I saw listened to the whole story, told me that she wouldn’t rule out a kidney stone even without anything showing up in the lab work, but that her first guess was something called costochondritis, which can happen after a viral infection and attacks the muscles and cartilage between the ribs.  (Further research still doesn’t have me quite convinced, but it was certainly a better explanation than a “muscle spasm.”)  She gave me a muscle relaxer that did basically nothing for the pain, but made me so tired that my eyes would cross when I tried to read, which tripled my misery.  My mom arrived only a few hours later, and I spent the rest of the day in a drugged stupor, eating graham crackers and frozen apple juice with a spoon, and unable to lie down or lean back without feeling like someone was ripping bones from my body.  I slept with about 6 pillows propping me completely upright. 

Gradually, things got better.  I had another fever spike the next day and the pain traveled farther up my rib cage and back, but that night, I was able to (mostly) lie down for the first time (though in only one very strategic position on my right side), and my appetite came back.  Then I started coughing again, which felt like ribs were being wrenched from my body, so I went back to health services for round three, and was told that in addition to the virus and costochondritis, I might have a “touch of” pneumonia or a sinus infection and given antibiotics. 

My mom valiantly spent the whole week with me, making me soup, helping me buy groceries, opening all the heavy doors, doing laundry, helping me pack up my room for the summer, and pretty much every task that required lifting things that weighed more than a pound and/or excessive movement.  Once I’d recovered enough to travel, she bought a return flight for the weekend and we changed my ticket to the same day so she could help me carry all of my luggage. 

After the weather delayed our flight so that we missed our connection and had to stay at a hotel in Houston, we finally made it home on Sunday morning.  Just a couple of nights ago, I was finally able to lie on my left side for the first time (though not comfortably and not for long), and coughing finally doesn’t feel like I’m horribly injuring myself.  I’ve become much more appreciative of lying down and deep breaths.  I’m thankful to my lovely roommates, who made me jello, bought me flowers, and made sure I had a constant supply of apple juice and Gatorade.  And I will be forever grateful to my mother for coming to the rescue. 

And so, I’ve completed half of grad school, though perhaps in a more dramatic and less celebratory fashion than I’d hoped.  Now I can at least look forward to riding the camels in August.  

Tourist Time

I’ve fallen short in my blogging efforts these last few weeks due largely to A) work, B) pre-spring break busyness, and C) spring break computer avoidance.  The week before spring break, my lovely friend Deenene came to stay with me.  For the final semester of her graduate program next spring, she’ll get to do an internship wherever she wants, and since she’d never been to New York, she decided to spend her spring break visiting to see if she wanted to apply for internships here.  You remember just how massive New York City is when you sit down with someone who’s never been here and try to come up with a 7 day itinerary to cram it all in.

It was also a reminder of all I still haven’t done, having bypassed most tourist attractions for the routine of school, work, cooking, and coffee shops.  Which isn’t to say I don’t like my routine.  I love cooking, and have no desire to eat out every meal.  But it’s a misfortune that I live in a city with some of the best restaurants in the country and have eaten at hardly any of them.  I love wandering aimlessly without an itinerary, but it means I’ve missed some of the best museums and exhibits in the world.  I save all the money I can, but as a result, I’ve seen exactly 1 Broadway show, and only 2 shows total (if you count Sleep No More as a show), and both of those were when visitors were staying with me and coerced me into splurging.  I haven’t been to the top of the Empire State Building or gone to the Statue of Liberty or been to all the museums.  I feel like those are things for visitors to do, and that maybe I’ll do them eventually. 

Deenene was the best kind of visitor, because she was excited about everything.  Everything.  She was as excited about a bargain skirt, the candy store, window shopping, and her mango and avocado yogurt at Chobani Soho as she was about the MET, the new Aladdin musical, the Empire State Building, and Times Square.  I was busy with work and school, so I experienced most of her New York exploration vicariously through texts filled with exclamation marks and pictures.  But I was free on Tuesday afternoon, when the temperature reached 60 for the first time this year.  The two of us met downtown to join the masses walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, after which we sat down for the traditional post-bridge-pizza at Grimaldi’s, neither of which I’d ever done before.  And though the bridge was so crowded that I kept almost getting hit by bicycles, and we agreed that Grimaldi's was far from the so-called “best pizza in New York” (or anywhere), it was well worth the experience.  Deenene’s inexhaustible enthusiasm reminded me that it’s worth the occasional splurge (of time and money) to make the most of being here.

 She left a few hours before I did on Thursday, with a bag of bagels to bring back to her family in Georgia, and the desire to come back to the city because she didn’t get enough of it in one visit.  I’m spoiled, because I have plenty of time left here, and maybe also deceived in believing that any amount of time here is plenty.