Monday
5:00 AM
It occurred to me as I was pouring my morning tea into a delicate teacup (as one does) that I may have taken on too much. The soft, coiling blues and peaches of the sunrise dribbled into the living room as I took my teacup to my desk. My mother and I have matching carts that we bought to hold our current reads, but I have taken to using mine as a list of daily tasks to sift through while I sip my tea. This morning, the cart was heavy with language. I had, stacked neatly against one another, books on Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, German, Spanish, French, and Turkish. R and Python. A stack of journal articles to read through in that feverish quest to craft a succinct, unassailable research statement.
I graduate from The Johns Hopkins University in December with my MA in Writing. A more appropriate translation indicates that I am in thesis preparation hell, as I scramble to put together a polished manuscript. While I swirl my half and half into my tea, a miniature maelstrom, I think about the fact that this book is truly coming to an end, that I am in its Edinburgh Draft, which is to say, its final draft before starting the querying process. But among the last sections to finish is the second chapter, which is probably going to end up at around thirty or so pages.
I always begin my days with a journal article, which I absentmindedly highlight as I slurp the rapidly-cooling tea. Monday calls for Kao, Ryan, Dye, and Ramscar’s work on word distributions in literary texts, followed by Abel’s piece on imaging 9/11 in Don DeLillo’s work. Parsing these articles takes longer than I anticipate, and I pause to play Wordle and down some cereal.
7:00 AM
A confession perches on my tongue like a fragile bird: I like studying for tests. This must be a good thing, as I am working towards a score of 165 or higher on the GRE this fall. I pick out my vocabulary and my mathematics flashcards — fifteen every morning, each — and have to quiz myself over and over on chicanery because the definition of that word slips by me like water off the back of a fish. The mathematics cards involve a bit more, but some part of me thrills when I realize that I somehow remember how to take the greatest common factor and simplify complex square root problems without the use of my handy calculator.
My GRE practice book is a real planet unto itself, one with a sort of gravity that knocks about the other books in my cart as though they were moons designed to come hither. Today I am learning all about the structure of the verbal section of the test. I flip back to my flashcard: Chicanery. Deception by means of craft or guile.
Why does that not stick? Why do some words echo around my brain like they are traipsing while others huddle in the corner, away from the light of comprehension? What happens in my mind when I spend all day fluttering about from topic to topic, gnawing away at the worries that I am wasting time by not achieving at all hours of the day? My thoughts are charcoal cast about on a white wall, aspiring to be cave art that will go on living even after me.
Maybe I like taking tests because I am competitive. Or maybe I just like the structure of it, the process by which I can accurately and discretely track my progress. I am greedy for knowledge, wild for new intellectual horizons.
12:00 PM
In 2011, as a college freshman, I did not plan for the Arabic language to take over my life the way it did, the way it opened the doors to fabulous friendships and connected me with people who, like myself, are driven to understand language itself as a holy machine. There were people out there who spoke language after language, and I still have a little bit of their light on my face, and I am trying to follow it.
My current Arabic grammar is aimed at more novice people. Though I have been slacking in my Arabic practice, I can still read a lot of it and sort of go through the motions of reviewing the alphabet. This brings on a smile: I remember having lunch with my good friend Liz at the University of New Mexico’s cafeteria as I told her all about the new sounds that I was learning in Arabic. There are these emphatic sounds that one can only match with equal euphoria. What a beautiful assemblage of words and expressions Arabic is.
2011. As I peeled away at this language, I became more and more obsessive about the Middle East, and did seriously entertain the thought of becoming a Middle Eastern Studies major. I took North African Literature with Dr. Ali and met Season of Migration to the North, which has been hugely important in my literary development. When one makes literature, as I hope to do, one has these fingerprints all over the world to guide her. I could not believe the beauty of what I was reading and the sublime translation of Denys Johnson-Davies (I have only felt one other translation so deeply, and that was Margaret Jull Costa’s rendition of The Book of Disquiet).
For a year, I have made some progress in Portuguese, a language I never had any interest in until I fell in love with Fernando Pessoa. It is almost a circular thing — I originally chose Arabic with a shrug and a “Why not?” That shrug fattened into a thousand and one loves. I think about that as I review my family members in Persian, as I study prepositions in Portuguese, as I plug in my headphones to begin a lesson in Spanish on Rosetta Stone.
3:00 PM
I was, briefly, a graduate student in linguistics at UNM. I had to leave the program for health reasons. Coming back into graduate school — and beginning my doctorate in my early thirties instead of twenties — is more exciting than dismaying. During my brief flirtation with a Master’s degree at UNM, I took a class all about cognitive grammar. I still have my book, and a copy of Harrison et al.’s Cognitive Grammar in Literature to spur me on.
I wonder if I can call myself a linguist. I call myself a cognitive scientist, especially when I am reading Langacker and planning an essay on analyzing cognitive grammar in poetry.
But an excitement: While I am reading, I start to think about my passion for experimental methods in literature and linguistics. I dwelt on this before, as I was reading the Kao et al. article. I love narratology. I love data science. Someday, I would like to do my doctorate in this field.
4:00 PM
Will I ever be a Real Writer? At this time, I am settling down to draft a short story for my upcoming workshop class. I am calling this piece “Head Games,” and it is based on a dream (a nightmare, really) that I had at the age of six. I am also staring at my Word document for chapter two of Canis Major. So much is coming together, but in another way, so much remains loose threads that slither through my outstretched fingers.
I will spend the rest of the evening working on Canis Major, “Head Games” and hopefully mathematics. I will make more tea — herbal, for the later hours — and I will stare into my delicate teacup (as one does). I have come quite far, but I have such great distances to go. I am okay.
