Nuance. Pass it On.

Chances are, you made a new year's resolution about money. I didn't, mostly because I didn't make

resolutions, because I'm in a constant state of struggling with improvement. New Year's Day isn't going to magically make me want to go on a diet, nor is it going to make me suddenly realize that I need to exercise. It is going to shine a spotlight on spending, because coming out of the Christmas season, it's pretty clear when you have been spending too much.

I am always spending too much. None of it is lavish. What do I consider lavish? Shoes that are over $100, luxury hotels, wine that's more than $25 a bottle. Some of what I spend is necessity, groceries, household items. Some of it isn't. We all have iPhones. Is that lavish? Maybe. But I have a hard time going backward with technology.

What's bothering me about this is the notion of privilege. Because the word privilege gets tossed around a lot lately. And people get prickly about privilege. No one wants to be privileged. Everyone wants to believe they got what they have because only they worked harder than the person who doesn't have the same thing.

And then I read this blog post from The Feminist Breeder on understanding the nuances of privilege, where the author breaks down what forms privilege takes: beyond the binaries of white / non-white, rich / poor. Truth is, there are many things that might be working to your advantage: race, gender, language, citizenship, class. The trick is not to be a dick about them. To recognize what you've been given, and still, work hard and play fair.

I have advantages. I'm white. I'm not transgendered. I grew up speaking English. I also grew up under the poverty line, in a family where abuse -- physical, mental and substance -- was rampant, and where more than one member struggled, or continues to struggle, with mental illness. The expectations for what I should do with my life were painfully low: they didn't include college. They did include marriage and young motherhood. An hourly-wage job instead of a salaried one. There was a lot of settling. The view was narrow.

Some kids have the whole horizon. A lot of parents pride themselves on telling their children -- especially girls -- that you can be whatever you want to be. If you can dream it, you can be it. No restrictions. This was not my childhood. I was told early that I was not good at math, and that I should consider modest, feminine jobs, like nursing. It was much more important to have something to fall back on. To make a safe plan, and not in the way of making a better living, but in a way that was safe all around. Apply for a job you can get, even if you have shitty grades and a high school diploma. If you do go to school, go for something middle class and stable. Be a teacher, not a professor. Write a column, not a novel.

How did I get here?

Partially, I got lucky. We could have ended up elsewhere. We might have worked lesser jobs, or stayed in jobs where the pay was low. Of course we had advantages. Geoff went back to school for another bachelor's degree in computer science, a move that opened many doors. Are there setbacks? Of course. We spent so many years making just enough money to be approved for credit cards, but not pay them off, that we are still crushed under the weight of that debt. We still live paycheck to paycheck. In between, we dip below zero. We don't have a savings account. You read that right: no savings account. We have a moderate house that costs us too much because we've never had money to put down on a house, because we are always paying off credit card and student loan debt. It's a cycle.

Last spring, I decided to not teach again in the fall. At the time, I was teaching a 2/2 load at Utica College, on campus two days a week, and working, honestly, with prep and grading, four days a week. It earned me a whopping $11,000 for the entire academic year. So I quit. I have the privilege of quitting. Do I miss the little paychecks every two weeks? I do. Because when you're below zero, even a small check helps.

Here's the thing. Lately, I've been acutely aware of others' hardships. I can pay my mortgage. No one is disconnecting my utilities or repossessing my car. The bills are paid on time. There's food in the fridge.

What bothers me is the lack of nuance. The assumption that this is what money looks like. The notion

that I can (and will) spare $100. (When the truth of this is that I will spare the $100, because not sparing it is painful to me when someone needs it.) It's the casual way in which someone mentions, I want money, when they look at our house. Or the way someone refers to Geoff as Mr. Big Money.

None of this is binary.

As Gina Crossley-Corcoran points out, "recognizing privilege simply means being aware that some people have to work much harder just to experience the things you take for granted." In some ways, we are the people who had to work harder. In some ways, we're not. But in most ways, I'm not taking anything for granted. I get it. Both Geoff and I have experienced hardship first hand. Both of us spent time on food stamps or welfare. College was not a given for either one of us. And yes, it was easier for us to break out of the patterns of the working poor. In some cases, because of the advantages we were simply born with.

My point: no one is served by a binary system that simply categorizes people into classes of privileged or not. A nuanced version of it, what Crossley-Corcoran calls intersectionality -- where you might recognize someone as more than just one goddamn thing -- probably prevents anyone from being a dick about it. Maybe it's better if we see and acknowledge the struggles behind anyone's current situation. To recognize that even if you are privileged in one way, there are other ways in which you might not be. Maybe we shouldn't rely so much on a quick surface judgement.

Just me, shopping on a regular Tuesday.

I spend a lot of time jokingly playing into the binaries. Agreeing that yes, since I'm not teaching a dead-end, low-paying adjunct job anymore, all I do is lie around and eat chocolates. That I'm driving a luxury car, and not simply a mid-range sedan. It all goes down easier than me being defensive. 

But I'm tired of it. I'm tired of apologizing for having a husband with a high-skill job that pays well, just like I'm tired of always running out of money. I'm tired of paying off credit card debt from fifteen years ago, and still paying on student loans. I'm tired of assumptions.

Probably, a lack of nuanced understanding is everything that's wrong with how we treat each other as people. No one wants to be pigeon-holed as one thing: old, poor, fat, or even white, middle class, or educated. And if that's all you're willing to see about me, then as my dad used to say, You don't know who I really am.

Straight out of My Own Bones: Some Thoughts on The Bell Jar

It's the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Here, in honor, is an essay I posted at the Downtown Writer's Center's blog a couple of years ago.

 

A few years ago, I outlived Sylvia Plath. And somehow, despite an aborted attempt at a PhD in American Studies, and a robust American poetry course as an undergrad, I'd read a lot of Plath's poems, but I'd never read The Bell Jar. Until this week. I read the whole thing on Monday. I haven't read an entire book in a day since high school, when I read all of The Great Gatsby in one sitting.

Why didn't I read it before? I think because no one takes it seriously. It's sort of that memoir-disguised-as-novel written specifically for college girls who cut their wrists for attention. Right?

In her introduction to the 1997 edition, Frances McCullough writes that if Sylvia Plath had lived, “it's hard to say whether … the novel would ever have been published in this country.” McCullough goes on to question what might have happened if Plath had written more novels, better novels. Would she have returned to her first novel, The Bell Jar, and thought differently? Would she have self-censored? Told less of the truth? Crafted the truth into something less raw? Something dulled at the edges, or as Wordsworth says, recollected in traquility?

We'll never know. As McCullough says, “of course Plath did die a tragic death at the age of thirty, and the book's subsequent history has everything to do with that fact.” By which she means that Plath's suicide makes the book a cult favorite, but she also means that if Plath didn't die, the book might never have seen the light of day – because it's not very good. Right?

I was surprised. It's not the best book I've ever read. The plot – maybe because it's so true – feels predictable. The ending feels a little like a a Lifetime Movie. But, as McCullough points out, “her voice has such intensity, such a direct edge to it,” it forgives the structural flaws.
  

Take the opening lines:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive along all your nerves.

And she never lets you go. It's a close, tunnel-vision narrative, right out of the eye-sockets of Esther Greenwood. And that voice never waivers.

It's not The Kite Runner. It's not a globally significant narrative. In fact, it doesn't stray very far from the geography, class or political background that it knows. So why does it matter? Why did it ever matter? Because one college educated white girl from New England was depressed one year and wanted to get it off her chest? Wanted to drag you into the eye of the storm?

This is why: because in her marriage negotiations with Buddy Willard, Esther Greenwood stumbles upon this observation:

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. 

That's why.  Because more than anything, this book struggles with the notion of either / or. Esther can be a poet or a mother. She can be an editor or a wife. You can pick one fruit off the fig tree, she says, and once you pick one, the rest of them wither and die.
   
What makes it so hard? Why are women prone to second guessing? Can't you do both? Be a mother and a writer? Tell the truth, and tell it hard, unfiltered, like a holy scream*, and do it well? I'm asking you. I've second-guessed my own answer.

You can debate Plath's answer – the suicide answer – the answer No, you can't. And if you try, you won't get out alive. But what you can't ignore here are the questions that Plath asks – about agency, about identity, and about telling the truth without apologizing. Or that what she asks has resonance, regardless of her own solution: Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones. 

*from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry – the really old, 1972 version I have, which was given to me by poet Barbara Moore. In it, Anne Sexton is listed as still living. In the intro to Sylvia Plath, the editors write “Sylvia Plath's poetry is a document of extremity. Her sensitivity is inordinate, but so is her ability to express it. The result is a holy scream, a splendid agony – beyond sex, beyond delicacy, beyond all but art.”

Hello Universe

The universe woke me up this morning. This is markedly different than the way I've woken up the last few mornings, gripped with panic, shaky and exhausted from not sleeping.

Yesterday, I saw a job posting that spoke directly to me. It was a two-year position, with the possibility of tenure track, for a 20th century Americanist, literature and theory heavy, a 2 / 3 load, at a small, prestigious college that just happens to be right up the street.

Where were you five years ago? This is the question I plan to ask my students today, with the follow up of where they will be five years from now. Five years ago, in 2007, I was still thinking of myself as a 20th century Americanist, still working through the coursework of a PhD. I was writing on Baudrillard, jazz and the Cold War, the birth and death of the American suburbs.

And then I stopped. I was unfunded. I was driving an average of 300 miles a week back and forth to Binghamton. My reason was simple and practical. Even if I did finish the PhD, I wasn't going on a national job market. It wasn't enough for me just to have it -- especially when I was paying for it. I didn't see the sense in having a PhD -- in hand, as they say -- only to sit around and wait for a job to open up at a local college. What are the chances of that happening?

Apparently, pretty good. There it is. The job. Within walking distance.

And me, without a PhD in hand, or even in progress.

What's the message in that, universe? The job that I never though possible is right in front of me, and it's not mine to have. Why?

Because it's not mine to have.

I talked with a friend, whose opinion and insight I trust, about the position, and about that fact that with the choices I'd made -- despite some really crazy coincidences -- it wasn't possible anymore.

Instead, he said, Work on your novel.

All panic aside, I'm going to try not to forget that. Sometimes the signs from the universe are subtle. Sometimes you miss them. And sometimes, they wake you up in the morning, after letting you sleep in, and rock your shoulder, reminding you to get to work.

Someday this will be a movie starring Drew Barrymore

I have work quitting or at least work flipping out fantasies. Among the best of these: Tom Cruise's flip out in Jerry Maguire . . .

and my favorite, Jim Carrey's back to you, fuckers, from Bruce Almighty . . .

Last week, I gave up $10,000. And while I didn't exactly flip out, or flip anyone off, I did sort of come to a screeching halt.

Last spring I was contacted to offer a couple of creative writing courses at Syracuse University: a lucky break for me. It was part-time work (aka adjuncting) but it paid well, and . .  well, it was SU. While I may have misgivings on the prestige of the big school for a lot of things (especially having gone to Le Moyne) I was not about to argue with the reputation of the creative writing program. Also, I could be teaching the next Lou Reed.

It went well. By which I mean to say, I liked it, but what I liked most about it was teaching creatively. I was also teaching a writing intensive on the interpretation of fiction: which is just what you think it is: a lot of interpreting, snow = death, inscribing pens = penises kind of thing.

In the fall, two sections of gender and lit opened up for the spring. Another writing intensive with even more pens, but with the added inscripted body, queer theory,  and performativity too.

It was a lot of work. And a good opportunity to show my mettle: gender / queer theory would have been one of my field exams, had I finished my Ph.D.

Ok: I have a problem with quitting.

I did this once before, my first time around in graduate school, in 1996. I had lost my funding. My first year, I was fully funded, working as an editorial assistant for Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies (MRTS). When it closed, and moved from Binghamton, I was shit outta luck. In fact, that might be the official language of the English department. I remember a shrug, and a I dunno coming from the chair when I went in to ask where else they could place me.

So my second year, I took a full time job as a proofreader / styles editor at Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing. When I thought I was going to get to read all of the Norton Anthologies (and get paid $7/ hour) I instead got to read an entire textbook on bovine venereal diseases. Seriously, inflamed cow vulva is nothing to laugh at.

I was studying full-time, working full-time and by October, I was pregnant. By December, I had to quit something, and the only thing I couldn't quit was being pregnant. (Yes, I know I could have. The baby was planned. I know. Who plans a baby in grad school? I do.)

So I left everything. School (leave of absence). Work. Binghamton. I found I could do one thing right then and that was have this baby.

Now, fifteen years later, I'm in the same boat. After struggling through the middle school years and watching my brilliant, (yes, I said brilliant) under-motivated son go from top of his class in Liverpool to bottom of his class in Clinton,* I decided something radical needed to be done. In the midst of a whole lot of bullshit sometimes you need to focus on one thing.

I pulled him out of school.

No one at the school district knows what to do with him. When I say this, I mean I haven't gotten any idea or solution from them that says "lets try this" that isn't just punishment. He doesn't need punishment. He needs inspiration.

We're in the midst of liberating here. We're homeschooling. And unschooling. And for the time being, following our curiosity towards doing whatever the fuck we want. To facilitate this, I quit my two writing intensives for spring. My move was deemed "unprecedented" by the department.

Unprecedented because I pulled out so close to the start of classes. Also, I expect, because in a highly competitive academic milieu, leaving for family issues just makes you a mom, when they thought you were a professional. Unprecedented because how could you give up $10,000 to stop everything and figure out how to teach your most important student? If I were a legit, full-time employee I might have been able to finagle a leave of absence, but when you operate as a satellite, they just kind of cut you loose.**

As always, I second-guess myself. I asked for a lot of advice. I got a lot of advice. A lot of it was super helpful. And I'm still getting lots of advice. I expect it will continue. Everyone (but the school, apparently) has ideas about how to raise and teach a child.

We had a meeting with the principal and the guidance counselor last week. A meeting where I expected to be offered some insight, some proposal, but what I got instead was a version of them telling on him, and what the told me was what I already knew. What I was prepared to say, instead, and what we did say, in a longer, more formal way was I got this.

You know what, I got this. Thanks anyway. And for the time being, I have to let go and not feel bad about my unprecedented decision to stop teaching 60 students in favor of teaching one.



*I'm not pitching some east cost / west coast Liverpool / Clinton thing here. Chances are, he would have done the same thing in Liverpool. But the reality is that he never got the chance to shine at Clinton. He was tracked into mediocrity and stayed there, and partially, my gut tells me that's because no one tried very hard to get to know him or notice his particular understated sparkle. That's right. I said sparkle.


** Also, yes, I know I am privileged to be able to make this decision at all. In another household, mommy would just keep working, and junior would just keep failing. Losing 10k is hard for us, but it's not the end. I'm not the sole or even the main breadwinner. And I'm still teaching one class: the fiction workshop.

What are you doing New Year's Eve?

Somewhere in the world, someone is already drinking champagne. Like, in New Jersey.

New Year's is fraught. All the commercials right now are for quitting smoking and losing weight, making more money and finally meeting that special someone. You should be thinner, and richer and younger, and adored. People make ridiculous resolutions and fail to keep them. And they should, because if everything was tempered by a cold dose of reality, then no one would ever try anything.

In middle school, my Italian pen pal, Valentina, told me that in Italy they believe if you do something on the first, you'll do that all year. It's a good idea to do something you love. Be with family. Eat good food. Read. Be in love. Wouldn't you believe anything a girl named Valentina told you? I would.

In my nervous brain I have translated that to whatever I do on New Year's Day I will end up doing all year: arguing? check. Worrying? check. Not writing? check. Being too fat? check. Wrestling a giant pile of laundry? check.

I'm going to make ridiculous resolutions. I'm going to do everything I want on New Year's Day.

I will wrestle a giant pile of language.
I will get married.
I am going to write another novel.
I will sell the other novel.
I will be a rock star.
Better yet, I will marry a rock star. We will both be rock stars.
I'm going to do better in school.
I'm going to have children.
I will lose 30 pounds.
I will quit drinking.
I will start drinking with more purpose and gusto.
Eat more chocolate.
Kiss more people. Really? Let's bring back the social kiss, and replace the stupid handshake.
I'm going to exercise more and go to bed earlier and breathe more and be outside and look at clouds and stars and trees and plant flowers and walk the dog.
I'm going to stay up later and love the darkness and write poems at midnight and sleep til noon.
I will spend less time worrying.
I will worry about the right things.
I'll get a job.
I'll quit my job.
I'll get organized and then learn to love and value chaos, the chaos that is every day no matter who you are. Everyone has it. Everyone's is different, which makes them all the same. You are not a unique snowflake of chaos. You are just human.
Have something to fall back on.
And then burn the bridge to that thing you can fall back on.

In the meantime, I'll worry about every step I take tomorrow, every word I read and write and every sip of wine or bite of chocolate. I'm going to kiss one more person than I did the day before. I will make snowflakes out of people. And catch them on my tongue.

Plan B

Amanda Palmer has been leading an ongoing Twitter conversation called "Fuck Plan B." If you use Twitter, think about following her. She's smart and funny; she answers tweets, and she doesn't spend all her time talking about herself.

That said, I'm going to talk about myself, and my own decision to Fuck Plan B.

As Tina Fey said, I don't have a Plan B. I do have a Plan G -- in the form of a working spouse. Still, my decision not to work makes things tight. Would it be better to work full time, or even seriously part time and have more money for stuff? For cable? For a car that doesn't have a detached exhaust system? Maybe, but probably not.

I realize that not having a Plan B is different when you're single, when you're the only breadwinner to begin with, but not having a Plan B isn't necessarily about not working. It's about not compromising. It's about knowing what you want, and then making that possible, however you have to.

I've had Plan B's: advertising, publishing, teaching. And not having a Plan B is scary. When I think about my kids going forward I want them to be safe and comfortable, and not having a Plan B is neither. They could be miserable cubicle workers. Or, they could find something they really love and go for it, fly in the face of fear or convention and step out in faith that things will work out.

They do. As Annie Dillard says, Right now you are flying. Right now, your job is to hold your breath.