A Slight Discrepancy

When I left Bryn Mawr without graduating in 1994, I intended to complete my degree some day. The longer I waited, though, the more daunting the task seemed, so I was surprised to discover how very little work I actually had to do to get my diploma, and I was shocked by how much easier college seemed the second time around. One lab science and a few semesters of Spanish after returning to school, and I was done.

Finally completing my degree was so easy, in fact, that I couldn’t quite believe that I had actually done it, and I went back to Bryn Mawr for commencement half expecting to be told that there was a mistake, that I wouldn’t be graduating after all. I went to pick up my regalia with the fear that my name wouldn’t be on the rolls for the class of 2007. The fact that I was able to pick up a gown, a cap, and a hood with no trouble simply meant that I showed up for rehearsal imagining that someone would soon be telling me, “There seems to be a problem. You need to go talk to your dean.” When that didn’t happen, I relaxed—a little.

The afternoon of commencement, I got to Merion Green a little early, procured a program, and looked myself up. There I was: Jessica Lee Jernigan of Ohio. When the time came, I got in line for the procession. There was no red flag next to my name on the marshal’s list, and I marched with the rest of the class of 2007 when the bagpipers started piping. It was really happening: I was really graduating.

I waited for my name and I walked across the stage. I shook the College president’s hand and I took my diploma. When I got back to my seat, I untied the yellow ribbon and unfurled the parchment, eager to see my name—finally—on a Bryn Mawr diploma. What I saw instead was, I feel, the cosmic joke variant of the disaster I had been expecting:

I Graduated

I received my Artium Baccalaureus from Bryn Mawr College on Sunday, May 20.

A Theocracy of the Mind

I had to take an oral exam for my Spanish class recently. One of the questions—designed to test my knowledge of the superlative—was “¿Cuál es la mejor revista de los Estados Unidos?” My answer was, “El New Yorker.”

I really do think it’s the best magazine in America—better than The Atlantic, better even than Us Weekly. Margaret Talbot’s piece on Kitzmiller v. Dover in the December 5 issue was just the kind of writing I have learned to expect from this fine periodical. For one thing, it was gorgeously written. Talbot is a great storyteller with a good eye for compelling characters. More importantly, though, she makes it very clear that the movement to teach intelligent design alongside or instead of evolution in schools is about more than teaching “both sides of the issue.”

One thing Talbot points out in her article is that, regardless of what some proponents of intelligent design might actually believe—and regardless of what they want the rest of us to believe they believe—intelligent design and creationism were fundamentally interchangeable for leading members of the Dover school board. Their objections to Darwin were religious, rather than scientific, and they regarded intelligent design as a way to get God—their own particular Christian God—into public schools. Talbot describes the situation in Talbot, and the birth of intelligent design, in this Q&A.

This underscores the basic problem with teaching intelligent design in science classes: Intelligent design is not science. This is not my judgment; this is a simple fact. Science is a naturalistic system, one fueled by observation and experimentation and guided by empirical reasoning. Intelligent design isn’t science because there’s no way to test its hypotheses. As Talbot reports, the defenders of intelligent design admit as much.

To teach intelligent design in a biology classroom requires a paradigm shift; basically, it requires the substitution of a system of belief for a system of knowledge. Many of the supporters of intelligent design know this, and they approve. Talbot’s story includes an anecdote about a Dover civics teacher who wrote to the school board asking, facetiously, if they had any advice for someone preparing to teach students about the Supreme Court. The head of the school board replied that they were planning to update the social studies curriculum next.

Obviously, the fight for intelligent design is about more than evolution. It’s about more than biology or the sciences in general. The New York Times recently ran a couple of articles about Christian high schools and their struggles to get their courses recognized by state universities. Basically, the universities are arguing that Christ-centered pedagogy might be good catechism, but it’s seldom good American history or English lit. One of these articles includes excerpts from some disputed textbooks, and it’s not too hard to see that the universities have a point. Consider, for example, this excerpt from Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, published by Bob Jones University:

Dickinson's year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary further shaped her "religious" views. During her stay at the school, she learned of Christ but wrote of her inability to make a decision for Him. She could not settle "the one thing needful." A thorough study of Dickinson's works indicates that she never did make that needful decision. Several of her poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.

This critique of Emily Dickinson looks a lot like the critique of Mark Twain included in the same text, and they both resemble criticism of Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressives found in United States History for Christian Schools, also from Bob Jones University.

The educational worldview presented by these textbooks is one in which God is the right answer—the only right answer—to every possible question. There is nothing here to foster real critical thinking or problem-solving. There’s no room for creativity or indepent ideas. Faith, in the form of received wisdom, takes the place of actual thought. It’s chilling to imagine public schools in which this might be the educational norm, and it’s heartening to know that all the Dover school board members who voted for the anti-evolution speech were voted out of office in the last election.

School Days at Night: Three Subconscious Scenes

I.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on an oral presentation for Spanish class. It’s been stressing me out a little, and, last night, I dreamt that I got to campus on the day of the presentation only to discover that I had forgotten to bring an important component of my presentation—the batch of Aztec cocoa I made to demonstrate the difference between contemporary chocolates and ancient Mesoamerican chocolate. I woke up nervous, but then I thought to myself, “Well, at least the shock of that dream will make me extra-vigilant when I’m getting my things together for the presentation.”

Today was the day of the presentation. I was a few feet away from my Spanish classroom when I realized that I had forgotten my bottle of Aztec cocoa.

I only live a few blocks from campus, but still, this was a pain in my ass. It would have been nice if—just once—a stress dream worked for me instead of against me.

II.

I dream about school a lot. Bryn Mawr is the venue for my most interesting, evocative dreams, and, occasionally, my unconscious mind stages some primal scenes at Woodland Elementary. Stow High is, by far, the most popular setting for stress dreams. Thus, it is the most popular setting overall in the theater that is my brain at night.

Most of the time, in dreams, I am both illiterate and innumerate. Thus, forgetting my locker combination is a common trope. For the first time in a long time, I actually have a locker. It’s outside the studio where I’m taking a printmaking class, and I keep my tools and supplies in it. I don’t seem to be having any trouble with the combination, but, because my only locker-related experiences of the past several years have been in dreams, using my locker makes me existentially woozy—like I’m not sure whether or not I am, in fact, using my locker. At those moments, I’m not sure whether or not I am, in fact, existing.

III.

Often, in my dreams of high school, I find that I have arrived at school naked. Or, at least, half-naked: Sometimes I have a shirt, but this has always seemed more naked than naked to me (as a child, I was always a little disturbed by Porky Pig), so it’s actually worse than just being naked.

Anyway, I’ve been back in school for a semester and a half now, and, so far, this hasn’t actually occurred.

So, I’ve got that going for me.

Report Card

ENG 435 STUDIES IN TEXTS	A
SPN 101 ELEMENTARY SPANISH I	A-
CHM 101 ARMCHAIR CHEMISTRY	A

James Joyce and the Nature of Collage

BLOGGER’S NOTE I’ve taken my chem final and my Spanish exam. I think I did all right on both. I just handed in my James Joyce term paper—entitled “Stephen’s Vampire and the Ghost of Mrs Dedalus: Revenants in Ulysses”—and I am ready for a nap. While I am thus occupied, I leave you with on of the many Joycean meditations I composed this past semester.

How does collage work? I’m pondering this question because of Wolfgang Iser’s very helpful suggestion [in “Patterns of Communication in Joyce’s Ulysses”] that Joyce uses a kind of verbal cut-and-paste in Ulysses. It’s true that one generally thinks of collage as a visual technique, but the real Dubliners and snippets of newspaper stories Joyce inserts in his text are really no different from the advertising images appropriated by Hannah Höch or the comic strips détourned by the Situationist International.

Iser argues that, in most realist novels, verifiable details support the (implicit) stylistic claim of authenticity—they help create a world that the reader recognizes—but, in Ulysses, “realistic” details are decontextualized—they refer only to themselves, and they “revoke the normal assumption that a novel represents a given reality”.

This idea—which I find inspired and inspiring—seems to negate the purpose of a lot of Joyce scholarship, the kind that is concerned with tracking down each and every butcher, milliner, and casual acquaintance mentioned in Joyce’s work. Myself, I haven’t found the encyclopedic references to the Dublin phonebook (or whatever the equivalent would have been) all that enlightening, just as my feelings about L.H.O.O.Q. would probably not be changed were someone to discover the newsstand where Marcel Duchamp bought his Mona Lisa postcard. Indeed, this approach seems a little obsessive-compulsive to me, and maybe a little desperatre—as if Ulysses can be fixed, as if its single, true, objective meaning will be revealed as soon as the precise location of Stephen Dedalus’s dentist’s office is identified. Iser argues that following such leads is a dead-end. I can understand how it might be fun and occasionally even interesting, but I’m inclined to agree with Iser.

So, collage. Nebeneinander. What happens when an image or a word is removed from a familiar context and placed in a strange, new one? Does it acquire new meaning or meaninglessness? If the former, does the new meaning contain vestiges of the old one? With some collage—and I would include Joyce’s use of real Dublin places and personages—the content of the appropriated material doesn’t matter so much as its form. Here he seems allied with other modernists—even postmodernists—in his willingness to use ostensibly worthless artifacts in the service of art, a move which offers an implicit critique of existing modes of art and art production. Joyce’s literary quotations and references seem like a different kind of collage, one in which old material retains its old meaning and acquires new ones, and this differs from a more straightforward kind of allusion, one in which existing literary material is cited without irony.

I think I’m wandering into the woods now, and it’s almost time for class, so I close with these words from Raoul Hausmann, which may or may not be relevant—I can’t tell anymore:

Seeing is a social process—we banalize things through visual allegory which takes from them their multiplicity of meaning… Our perception appears to be blind to the background, the space between things—and it is precisely this that the photomonteur lets us perceive and recognize. He creates his photomontage out of the insignificant inbetween-parts and uses the unperceived optics.

May 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

“Cosmetic Chemistry: A Brief Historical Survey”

BLOGGER’S NOTE It’s finals week at CMU, and I am busy studying for exams and working on my James Joyce term paper. While I am thus occupied, I leave you with excerpts from my education. Today’s offering is a passage from my Chem 101 project.

Elizabethan England

Egyptians were not unique in using lead as a cosmetic ingredient. Ancient Greek women used lead-based face paints, and similar products were used to create the lustrous white complexion seen in portraits from 16th-century England. It’s not altogether clear what the chemical compositions of these cosmetics were, but powdered cerussite (lead carbonate, PbCO₃) is one suggestion—certainly there was a product called "ceruse" in use at this time—while a cream created when lead is reacted with vinegar (impure dilute acetic acid, C₂H₄O₂) has also been proposed. Many Elizabethan pictures also show hair-loss characteristic of lead poisoning. In fact, court ladies were forced to shave their own foreheads to match the queen’s receding hairline, since the monarch set the fashion. This toxic compound also took a toll on the very face it was meant to beautify: ceruse ate pits into the queen’s complexion, and these blemishes inspired her to slather the mixture on even more thickly—which, of course, only made matters worse. The effects of lead poisoning continued to erode the queen’s beauty to the point that stylish ladies had to blacken their teeth as well as shave their foreheads. Ultimately, Elizabeth banned all mirrors from her palaces.

May 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

“Mi Diario”

BLOGGER’S NOTE It’s finals week at CMU, and I am busy studying for exams and working on my James Joyce term paper. While I am thus occupied, I leave you with excerpts from my education. Today’s offering is an excerpt from the “Mi Diario” exercise that accompanies Capítulo 4 of Puntos de Partida (7th edition). ¡Olé!

En Español
Son nueve cuartos en mi casa. La cocina es mi cuarto favorito porque me gusta mucho preparar la comida. La cocina es muy grande y muy bonita. Las paredes son amarillas y verdes. Mi oficina—un escritorio, una silla, dos estantes, y mi computadora—es en la cocina tambien.

Babel Fish Translation
They are nine quarters in my house. The kitchen is my room favorite because I like much to prepare the food. The kitchen is very great and very pretty. The walls are yellow and green. My office—a writing-desk, a chair, two shelves, and my computer—is in the kitchen also.

May 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Spring Break with James Joyce: Day 5

BLOGGER’S NOTE I’m on Spring Break this week, so I’m taking a vacation from schooling and blogging. Since most of my creative energy over the past several weeks has been academically oriented, I’m leaving you with a half-semester’s worth of my thoughts on James Joyce. Seriously: I really am. Have fun with it!

I tried to read Portrait once, several years ago. I was working in a used bookstore in North Carolina, and a lovely paperback edition from the ‘60s came in (wonderful cover; echoes of Soviet poster art). I bought it, and, as I said, I tried to read it, but I had to stop. I couldn’t get past the sermon on hell.

I’m a heathen, and the child of heathens. My grandma did take my dad to tent meetings and revivals, but only because they were free entertainment. And my great-great-grandfather did preach Jesus to trees and to animals (given his Pentecostal background and scanty education, it’s highly unlikely that Grandpa Jordan knew that St. Francis got to the animals first), which turned my great-grandmother into a weird-but-sincere kind of Baptist, but her faith just gave me the creeps—much like her maudlin alcoholism and fondness for organ meats. My point is that I was not raised to believe in any particular god—and hell has never had any power over me. It’s the priest’s repeated invocations of eternity that get me; and, once he has me staring into that abyss, I find myself strangely receptive to the idea of gnawing worms and unimaginable stench. Hell’s dark fire makes me particularly woozy, as it reminds me of Paracelsus’s light-in-darkness, an image that had a profoundly disorienting effect on me when I first encountered it, and which I still can’t contemplate for long without starting to sweat.

I don’t often “identify” with characters in novels, but I felt an intense pang of sympathy when poor little Baby Tuckoo’s noggin was troubled by thoughts of infinity, because my own infant mind was blown by similar contemplation. While I’m sure that analysis would show that my unconscious depths are roiling with all kinds of unresolved traumas, the first angst I remember is the problem of infinity and my place in it. I would go so far as to say that is my ur-angst, the one that lies at the root of all my other persistent worries.

I decided to take a class on James Joyce because, having tried to read Portrait, having tried to read Ulysses, I was pretty sure I was never going to actually grapple with Joyce if I didn’t have an expert guide and a grade attached. The sermon on hell still makes my hair stand on end, and I’m quite confident I would have tossed Portrait aside and picked up a nicely diverting historical novel or even retreated to the comfortable pleasures of an old favorite if I hadn’t felt externally compelled to get through the sermon and onto the rest of the story. All I can say is, it had better be worth it.

SPRING BREAK WITH JAMES JOYCE
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March 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spring Break with James Joyce: Day 4

BLOGGER’S NOTE I’m on Spring Break this week, so I’m taking a vacation from schooling and blogging. Since most of my creative energy over the past several weeks has been academically oriented, I’m leaving you with a half-semester’s worth of my thoughts on James Joyce. Seriously: I really am. Have fun with it!

When I read an early draft of “The Sisters”, I was amazed: It’s so inflated and precious, and it bears so little resemblance to the published work. Comparing passages like the following

As I went home I wondered was that square of window lighted as before or did it reveal the ceremonious candles in the light of which the Christian must take his last sleep.

…and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles in the darkened window for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse.

offers dramatic demonstration of James Joyce’s evolution as a writer. The first is a rather stuffed euphemism—it offends me like bad aftershave offends me. The second is elegantly direct—you really can’t beat the word “corpse” for provoking an direct confrontation with death—and it is a more faithful reproduction of thoughts a young boy might actually have.

My reaction to his essay, “A Portrait of the Artist”, was like my reaction to the proto-“The Sisters”, but more violent. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was unreadable; indeed, it reads as if the author assumes I have no business reading it. The style—Romantic, sentimental, grossly overblown (like the self-important, self-indulgent ranting of practically every 20-year-old beta male I have ever known)—is not only off-putting: It seems antithetical to Joyce’s project as an instrument of modernity, of aesthetic honesty and social revolution.

The rejection of this essay was an altogether predictable miracle—predictable because it’s dreck; miraculous because it turned into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

SPRING BREAK WITH JAMES JOYCE
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March 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spring Break with James Joyce: Day 3

BLOGGER’S NOTE I’m on Spring Break this week, so I’m taking a vacation from schooling and blogging. Since most of my creative energy over the past several weeks has been academically oriented, I’m leaving you with a half-semester’s worth of my thoughts on James Joyce. Seriously: I really am. Have fun with it!

I spent most of 1993 struggling with Jesus. I was writing my undergraduate thesis, an attempt to explicate the difference between divine and human language in the Gospel of Mark.

Reading the Mark made me feel like my head was on fire. My friend Kate took a much more rational, analytical approach to her thesis (she’s a doctor now, and she’s always tended in that direction). She wrote something quite brilliant, elegantly structured, and seemingly quite dispassionate on Bakhtin and Paul, and she won the thesis prize for our year. Kate has always felt like the plodding member of our dyad, and, in my youth, I adored her for her other virtues, but I secretly agreed with her. As an adult, though, I have acquired a sincere admiration for her ability to get things done (nothing will knock the mad genius out of you quite like several years in middle management). I’ve also realized that, just because she’s organized doesn’t mean she’s not creative—and, in fact, her outward calm and cool presentation almost discourage the observer from noticing the astonishing originality of her thoughts.

So, I’ve been reflecting on all this as I try to pull together my first paper for class. I considered several ideas, looked for places where Joyce’s project and my interests overlapped. I thought it might be fun to pull together a clever, but tidy, little paper on the uncanny—as in, unheimliche—in Dubliners. I quickly realized that this was a bit ambitious, so I decided to focus on one story instead. Why not work with “The Sisters”? It’s the first story in the collection, it anticipates the rest of the collection in a variety of thematic ways, and it has a corpse and a ghost. Perfect!

Now I feel like my head is on fire.

When I was reading Mark, each reading led to another reading. I believed that the story contained powerful secrets—secret truths—that I could unlock if I just found the key, and the key could only be found in the text. I have realized that, in order to write my wee paper, I have to stop reading, and, in fact, I have to winnow my questions and commentary in order to pull together a coherent short paper. Following are just a few extracts from my potentially infinite notes:

Why is a priest who left his parish—a priest who dropped an empty chalice, a priest who laughed, alone and in the dark, in the confessional—discussing theology with a boy? Does he believe what he teaches? He know longer practices what he preaches.

What does his ghost confess to the boy? How is he a “simoniac”? There is no indication that his sins—or his disappointments—are financial. The priest has his beef tea and his High Toast and his warm fire, but not much more, nor does he seem to need or want much more. He does have a pupil, an acolyte, a disciple, though. Is this his simony: the exchange of spiritual wisdom for worship? “I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true” (9); “an idle chalice on his breast” (18): idle = unmoving, pointless, worthless = idol: an invalid object of worship?

How does the boy feel about the priest? The first half of the story—up until he visits the “house of mourning”—is suffused with an uneasy feeling. He certainly shows an interest in the priest, and his uncle suggests that he will be saddened to learn of his death, but the boy himself displays only a slightly obsessed ambivalence. His vision of the priest’s ghostly head is ghastly and frightening. It’s only on being convinced that the priest is dead, and when he wonders at his sense of freedom, that the boy seems to care for the priest—but this is an ambivalent moment, too.

As the children say, wtf?

SPRING BREAK WITH JAMES JOYCE
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March 9, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Spring Break with James Joyce: Day 2

BLOGGER’S NOTE I’m on Spring Break this week, so I’m taking a vacation from schooling and blogging. Since most of my creative energy over the past several weeks has been academically oriented, I’m leaving you with a half-semester’s worth of my thoughts on James Joyce. Seriously: I really am. Have fun with it!

I think Lenehan is my favorite character in Dubliners, and, if “The Dead” isn’t my favorite story, “Two Gallants” is. The paragraph in which Lenehan reflects on his life (57-58) is a comic masterpiece, a perfect parody of the wayward hero’s cathartic resolution to change his ways. Rather than seek a solution to his despair in himself, Lenehan decides that he still has a chance of finding himself “a simple-minded girl with a bit of the ready” and goes back to his drink-seeking perambulations fortified by essentially unchanged. Indeed, even as he dreams of an easily manipulated woman to supply him with some cash, he gives away his own few coins to another in a presumably long series of “slatternly” girls.

It’s funny, but it’s also tragic—I would call it “American tragedy” as opposed to classical if that wasn’t an anachronism. Consider the context: Lenehan is exhausted, worn out by walking and by the sometimes thankless work of being charming. And what gives him the psychic energy to find hope? A plate of peas in a cheap restaurant. Lenehan is impoverished—financially, physically, spiritually—and Joyce gives us little reason to believe that a change of circumstances is truly possible for Lenehan. He is paralyzed not just by laziness or alcohol, but by his surroundings. We don’t know everything about Lenehan—we don’t know all the details of his story—but we do know a lot about Dublin, and what we know doesn’t give us much cause for hope. It may be hard to imagine Lenehan enthusiastically engaged in gainful employment, but it’s also difficult to imagine that any such employment is available to him. And alcohol may be that became part of his disease, rather than its cause, even as alcohol makes escape increasingly less possible.

Lenehan is ridiculous, but Joyce makes it impossible for the reader to see him as anything less than human.

SPRING BREAK WITH JAMES JOYCE
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March 8, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spring Break with James Joyce: Day 1

BLOGGER’S NOTE I’m on Spring Break this week, so I’m taking a vacation from schooling and blogging. Since most of my creative energy over the past several weeks has been academically oriented, I’m leaving you with a half-semester’s worth of my thoughts on James Joyce. Seriously: I really am. Have fun with it!

When I was teaching high school students, I found that they generally had little use for literary criticism. They would tolerate it and sometimes even appreciate it if they felt that the external material I was introducing to their study of a book or story illuminated some element in the text, but they were incredibly resistant when they felt that I was imposing meaning on the text. It was as if they experienced criticism as a hostile force.

I kind of understood how they felt when I read Harry Stone’s “‘Araby’ and the Writings of James Joyce.” While I found the background material he provided interesting and useful, I found much of his analysis less than convincing—not simply because I disagreed with him, but because I thought he occasionally abandoned Joyce’s story to create readings that really are not supported by the text.

My main complaint is in his analysis of the girl, and of the narrator’s final revelation. Stone suggests that, when he encounters the vapid and possibly mendacious English salesgirl, the boy realizes that his own beloved is equally false—that is, that she is just a girl. Stone musters an encyclopedic amount of information to buttress this conclusion, but I just don’t see it. The boy’s discovery, as I see it, is not about the girl, but about himself.

I think the text supports this reading, without any appeals to other women in Joyce or well-known Irish poems or controversies surrounding the florin. Joyce writes, “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” [emphasis added].

The girl isn’t mentioned here—the boy’s new self-knowledge—and, to me, the particular excruciation Joyce describes is a specifically adolescent kind of torment. In his moment of clarity—when the shabby reality of Araby dismantles his romantic dreams—he is poised between a childish dream and adult knowledge. He is, at this moment, old enough to recognize his silliness, and young enough to feel mortified by it.

I realize that my own reading makes external appeals—not to history or religion but to my own keen recollections of adolescent embarrassment. It is, then, reader-response criticism. In class, we touched on the potential and the limits of this kind of criticism (although one might argue that all literary analysis boils down to reader-response criticism), but I do feel that it’s a valid approach to Joyce. Dubliners is full of stories without conventional endings. Joyce doesn’t explain the meaning of his stories. He concludes not with resolution, but with the moment of crisis. Joyce intended Dubliners to be a mirror in which the Irish can see themselves; thus, he rouses the reader, and compels her to find meaning in her own experience.

SPRING BREAK WITH JAMES JOYCE
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March 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

School Supplies

A number of factors figured into my decision to go back to school: my desire to finally finish my bachelor’s degree, my dream of teaching, my husband’s encouragement, free tuition, and—last, but certainly not least—my deep and abiding fondness for school supplies.

The supply closet was one of the only things I liked about office life, although the quality of pens available was usually pretty abysmal. When I was getting ready to go back to school, I checked out a whole lot of rollerballs before I found the #2 Pen by Acme Writing Tools. It looks like a pencil, it writes like a dream, and I adore it.

I use my snazzy new implement to jot down chemical equations and thoughts on James Joyce and then I slide my notes inside my stylish and sturdy Russell + Hazel binder. This very handsome 3-ring wonder is made with grown-ups in mind: its cardboard cover is embellished with nothing more than a strip of elegant color (I chose lime), and it doesn’t smell like PVC.

I carry my nifty new supplies in my totally hot new bookbag. It’s a messenger bag by L.A.M.B. for Le Sportsac. I adore it because it’s punk rock, but with an preppy-utilitarian, Francophile edge. Also, it has a lot of pockets.

February 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Back to School

Perhaps because I am so erudite and accomplished, no one ever suspects that I am a college dropout. Nevertheless, it’s true: When I left Bryn Mawr in 1994, I was a few credits shy of a bachelor’s degree. I assumed I’d get my diploma eventually, but I never would have believed that more than a decade would pass before I went back to school.

Well, I’m back now. As of spring semester, 2005, I am enrolled as an undergraduate at Central Michigan University. I’m taking Spanish and chemistry—which I need to finish my Bryn Mawr degree—and a James Joyce class—which is just for fun. So far, I’m having a swell time.

I took a look at my Bryn Mawr transcript when I was applying to CMU. My grades pretty much reflected my recollections of college: the same ecstatic highs and abysmal lows, the same juxtaposition of feverishly creative productivity and fearful catatonia. Probably because my mind is so large and so complex—and also because psychotropic medicine was not, in the early ‘90s, what it is today—I had some brain-related problems in my youth, problems that impacted negatively on my ability to get shit done. I was a superstar in the classes that I loved. However, I tended to avoid unappealing-but-required subjects like math and science—even when I was ostensibly taking classes in those subjects. Hence my failure to graduate.

I loved Bryn Mawr. I still love Bryn Mawr. Most of my favorite people are from there, and—even though my life there was often kind of freaked-out and miserable—it remains my model for paradise. Bryn Mawr is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religion, and my dropout status was a source of spiritual despair for a long time.

When people ask me if not having a college diploma has been a problem for me, I know they’re talking about jobs and such, and, as far as that goes, it really hasn’t been—not much of a problem, anyway. What I don’t bother trying to explain is the way it has felt like failure on a cosmic scale, and how it cast a small but real shadow over my relationships with alums—people who are among my best friends in the world. I felt like I had belonged to something amazing and beautiful, and that I no longer did because I was a dropout. This existential anguish gave the idea of going back to school a desperate appeal, but it was also absolutely paralyzing.

It took my friend Griffin—my roommate in the co-ed dorm senior year—to help me get over the outcast feeling. A few years ago, he was talking about going to a Bryn Mawr reunion, and he wanted to know if I would go, too. I couldn’t even believe he was asking me. “Dude,” I said, “I can’t go to reunion.”

“Why not?” He was genuinely perplexed.

“Because I didn’t graduate.”

“Jessica,” he replied, kind but exasperated, “You have got to stop mentioning that. Nobody remembers that you didn’t graduate, and nobody cares.”

He was right, of course. I had never really believed that my college friends considered me a second-class citizen or anything; it was just that I felt slightly unworthy of their love. Once Griff pointed out that this was ridiculous, I was able to see going back to school as a practical problem rather than a spiritual one. But, by this time, I was far away from Bryn Mawr, working a full-time job, and on my way to something like a career. Lacking any immediately compelling reason to finish my degree, I figured I would do it when an immediately compelling reason presented itself.

Ultimately, it did—actually, two immediately compelling reasons presented themselves. First, I fell in love with a professor; as someone who takes education seriously, and, as someone who has absolute—bordering on ridiculous—faith in my abilities, Ted found it absurd that I didn’t have a college degree. It was more or less a condition of our marriage that I go back to school sooner rather than later.

The other reason was that I had finally encountered a need for a degree. After several very satisfying semesters of teaching (as a volunteer) at Community High in Ann Arbor, I realized that I want to be a teacher.

I was still a little nervous about going back to school. I was worried that I would, once again, fail the classes I failed back in the day. I was explaining this to Sarah Hand a couple of months ago and she assured me that college is awesomely easy the second time around. She has explained this to me many times, but, this time, I finally got it. I realized that I’m a grown-up now. I’ve had jobs. I know how to work hard, how to concentrate, how to get shit done. I also realized that I am living the secure and generally serene life of a happily married lady, rather than the somewhat more volatile existence of the post-adolescent. And, finally, I realized that, since I am currently childless, basically unemployed, and able to take classes for free at my husband’s university, I really have no practical excuse for not going to school. Upon arriving at this liberating set of revelations, I rushed to register for this semester.

That, then, is the inspirational story of how I dropped out of college and dropped back in again. I hope you learned a little something from it, something about never giving up, the triumph of the human spirit, etc. Now, I have to go—there’s a chemistry test tomorrow, and I need to study.

January 31, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack