Tuesday
Coffee shop days.
12:30 PM.
On this Tuesday, I packed up my satchel. I had bought the satchel shortly before my first adventure abroad, and its resolute gray frame became a source of somewhat bulky reassurance as I wandered over cobblestoned streets and under sheets of rain. I loaded up my computer, my guide to the GRE, my journal, and a copy of chapter thirty-eight of Canis Major to tackle over a pot of English breakfast.
I am beginning to see a pattern in my days preparing for my PhD applications, and that pattern involves staring at a screen and trying to balance all the things that need to be done if I want to get into graduate school. I am applying to eleven programs around the country. As I said in my Monday post, I have languages that I want to grow into, languages I want to take upon myself like a second skin to walk about the world with newer eyes to see all that there is to see. I want to expound upon the wry beauty of The Flowers of Evil in French, and I want to read Rumi in Persian. In the midst of the stress, I cope by curling up with more tea (what an addiction) and my Portuguese copy of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. Though I am tucked into the couch, it feels like a step forward through all of this insanity.
Up until recently, my life has been a disordered thing, listing towards chaos like an obdurate pebble that refused to be dislodged by the deeper rivers of life. Ambition of an organized flavor is new to my palate. I have spent many an hour with my wayward daydreams, pacing about the house, writing poetry in my head. The idea that I must corset myself into a plan for graduate school is almost akin to having a heavy cage plopped down on my head. Embrace it, yes, but flounder a little.
1:00 PM
The day’s activities at the coffee shop:
While I listen to Law and Order in the background (I need noise to work), I learn all about the verbal section of the GRE. For the life of me, I am still struggling with that blasted word chicanery, which will inevitably appear on the test just to punch me in the face.
The GRE has three components — a verbal section, a mathematics section, and an essay section. I have the (perhaps impossible) goal of getting above a 164 on the verbal and mathematical bits and above a 5.0 on the essay part, which is considered “highly competitive.” Taking it step by step, I think I will finish this practice book in a few weeks and will move onto practice tests. I try to write the words that I encounter into my own stories and essays as though I were embroidering them onto a hoop. I also have the strategy of working with the tastes and colors of each word to help implant them in my brain. Pugnacious, for example, has a goldenrod color and a sour taste, and the definition of the word — quick to fight, belligerent — corresponds to this. With each word having a different sense and texture, I am able to fill my little toolbox of new vocabulary, and look down upon it with its bouquet of vivid hues.
A few months ago, I purchased an old, used box of GRE mathematics flashcards. Each card has that soft, limp quality to its corners. To my great surprise — and glee — I am able to answer about half of the them without needing the study guide on the back, mostly because I have been inching my way through a study of all the math I wish I had learned growing up. My mathematics education is a different topic for a different day, but I try to treat rules and equations like a language, complete with its own set of colors and tiny, trilling pieces grinding together in a symphony of exquisite meaning. The word mathematics itself is a bright, rubbery yellow, and mixing the numbers together into that swirl known as numeracy is like telling a story.
It’s always like telling a story.
2:00 PM
After I put the GRE away, I am going to try and revise that unruly chapter from my novel, chapter two. I am close to hitting the minimum page requirements for my thesis. Canis Major has been extensively workshopped, but I like to pick at it because nothing is ever good enough to live up to that lofty image in my mind of what this book should be. I have that arrogant perspective that, if only I can make this book the project that is in my imagination, it would be a masterpiece.
I may have said this yesterday, but I am a tad disappointed that there will be no essay component to my thesis. I love writing essays. I love the research, the hunt through libraries and across the Johns Hopkins databases. Sometimes, I spend my Saturday nights on JSTOR or ScienceDirect, looking up all the literary studies and cognitive science that I could ever want. Post WWII French literature. Computational approaches to language processing and child development. Reverse engineering the brain to figure out how to program a computer, blessing it with knowledge and life and a soul.
But the novel: Recently, I decided that Canis Major needed to be broken up into three acts, and I feel like I can breathe again with this structure. My thesis will be made up primarily of the first act, though chunks of the third are ready and willing to get grafted into the final product if necessary. My idea is that the first and third acts are a linear narrative, while the middle act, which contains the most chapters, will take a modular approach. I also corralled the omniscient narrator into his own chapters such that he can no longer traipse about the page, stealing the reader’s attention. In fact, my wee omniscient narrator has been the focus of intense scrutiny and criticism in my workshops throughout my program. Getting a grip on him felt like grabbing a child by the elbow and redirecting them to a corner until they behave, but I think that the story is better served this way.
It’s always like telling a story.
3:00 PM
Somehow, I became interested in scrapbooking. I keep foreign language journals, small spaces where I am free to riddle my paper with grammatical mistakes in the privacy of my own mind.
I bought stickers and washi tape shaped like strips of film awhile ago, but I hesitate before putting anything down in the journal, afraid that I will mar it and it will look ugly. I have watched so much content on YouTube where people have perfect journals, and I can only chew the inside of my mouth and prepare myself to giggle, “Nailed it.”
The hardest language I have ever studied is Russian. I am not sure that I will give it the time it needs before my graduate school application is due, so it may not end up on my curriculum vitae, but that is freeing in some way. Today, I can look over my childlike handwriting in Cyrillic and feel a sort of hope. Language learning is like relaxing with a glass of wine at the end of the day. Learning a language never feels like a job, but rather something fun.
I still study Icelandic, even though I have no one to practice with, so my “skills” are fledgling still. That is fine. Someday, I will take my Icelandic journal with me to Reykjavik. Today, I am going over declension, something Icelandic shares with Russian. What a dense way of structuring a language.
It’s always like telling a story.
