Things I'll Never Have

Yesterday, I read Erma Bombeck’s book A Marriage Made in Heaven, or, Too Tired for an Affair. It’s all about her 40+ years of marriage, her children, and how she survived it still loving and needing her husband. Not my usual fair, I know, but she’s a satirist. And it’s summer, so it's too hot to even consider tweed.

Don’t judge me.

Anyway, Erma got married at 22, and stayed that way forever. Her parents were married forever, too, at least until her father died.

This August will mark 6 years since my grandpa Faber died. He had colon cancer, which isn’t what killed him. Instead, he developed pneumonia after the chemo weakened his immune system. One night, that was it. He was suddenly reduced to a series of phone calls, a memorial service we all attended, and a series of memories we sometimes talk about.

There are very few things I remember about grandpa Faber. I remember he always smelled like scotch. He always had a polo shirt and some form of khakis on. He had the best puns ever. And his hugs were even better than his puns. But, in the great tradition of men from his generation, he wasn’t overly forthcoming with his feelings.

A year before he died, I happened to be visiting the Fabers in Pennsylvania—I think it was the summer before I went to college. I was brimming with all kinds of dreams about becoming a forensic pathologist, complete with medical school and a successful career as chief medical examiner in some exotic place like Maryland. My dad took me to my grandparents’ house for a visit, as per usual. My grandmother fed me a sandwich and something chocolatey, as per usual, and we sat in their living room for about an hour as I talked about school and they talked about people their age whom I’d never met. As per usual.

The crazy thing happened when my dad and I went to leave. Dad had gone outside with Grandma to talk about gardening or something, and Grandpa pulled me aside in the little foyer just inside the front door.

“Don’t tell anyone this,” he said, “but you’re sort of my favorite grandkid. I’m really proud of you.”

At the time, I had no idea what to say, so I think I told him I loved him, hugged him, and went on my merry way. And I’ve never actually told anyone that he said that (although now, I suppose you know).

Flash forward 9 or so months. I was a second-semester freshman in college, and I had just made the big decision to switch my major to English after nearly failing everything that even hinted at science. I think it was Spring break, but maybe it was summer. In any case, I had gone up to Pennsylvania for my annual Faber visit. And the man who had walked a mile every day with his wife of 50 some-odd years, played golf several times a week, and had better annual check-ups than any of his grandkids, was suddenly hospitalized and diagnosed with colon cancer. Instead of taking me to my grandparents’ house, my dad took me to the hospital to see my grandfather, lying there in a sterile metal bed, tubes coming out of everywhere, looking frail and helpless, like he had aged a million years since I’d seen him last.

I have no idea what we talked about. All I remember was the last thing I said to him, after everyone assured each other that he’d be up and healthy in no time:

“I’ll see you soon. We’ll go dancing.”

It’s a line I’d heard Margaret Houlihan say to a patient with a leg injury on an episode of M*A*S*H. I have no idea why I said it. It was just all I could get to come out of my mouth after staring at this shriveled up ghost of the man who had been my grandfather. And it made absolutely no sense. What does colon cancer have to do with dancing? Why would I even promise to go dancing with my 80-year-old grandfather? He probably thought my brain had turned to mush the second I gave up on going to medical school.

The day before class started my sophomore year, I got a call at 7:00 in the morning. It was my dad. Grandpa was gone.

A month later, my sister gave birth to her only, and amazing, son, Emerson. He was what everyone needed. Flash forward 6 years, and my brother and sister-in-law have just welcomed home two beautiful babies. They’re just what everyone wanted.

Oh, I’ve got one other memory of my grandfather. A few years before his death, I remember sitting in the TV room of his and Grandma’s house, watching golf. (If you wanted to watch TV there, there were two options—golf on NBC or golf on ABC. Anything else was unimportant.) There was something wrong with the sliding glass door, so my grandfather, whose alter ego was Mr. Fix-It, pulled out a screwdriver and had it sliding away again in 3.4 seconds flat. Then he turned to my grandmother and said, “Geez, you’ve got a great husband.” She smiled, nodded, and kissed him quickly on the lips. That was the first time it occurred to me that they were married. And they loved each other for 50-some-odd years. The day he died, my grandmother lost her best friend and the literal love of her life.

Somewhere between my grandparents and my siblings, marriage as a concept went horribly awry. This November will mark the 15-year anniversary of my parents’ divorce. Before that, they’d each had a spouse. After that, they each had one more. At some point in our childhood, I think my brother, sister, and I all must have figured that this was just what happened to grown-ups. Marriages just kind of suck, and then they end, and another one begins. Kind of like prime-time television. When your spouse jumps the shark, you hang on for another season or two, but eventually, you have to refuse to pick it up for next fall. It’s just good business sense, right?

But then, my siblings both went on to prove everyone wrong.

Two out of three children have successful, happy marriages and beautiful children to show for it. My brother got married at 23. My sister-in-law is basically a robot she’s so cool, and he unabashedly calls her “Best Wife Ever.” My sister got married at 27, and my brother-in-law is hands down the best nerd husband anyone could ask for. Even worse, my brother and sister are actually awesome people themselves. Seriously, you could frost beer mugs with their coolness.

I’m 25, and the odds are against me that I’ll ever get past my “This-is-the-last-thing-you’ll-ever-say-to-the-person-who’s-meant-so-much-to-you-so-be-sure-to-stick-your-foot-in-your-mouth" phase long enough to be in a stable relationship. Sure, in the actual world, I’ve got a good 15 years left before I hit official spinster-dom. And even in the Faber-kids world, if I became an amazingly cool person right now, I could just make it to happily ever after in time to avoid the “When I was your age, I gave our parents great-grand-children” speech from my siblings. But really, it’s astronomical! Two children of a series of failed marriages finding someone who looks at them after 3 months of dating like they’d just seen their first Trans Am—-and then continues to look at them the same way after years of marriage? Two of three, okay, maybe. But three for three? Impossible. The universe has to mail out that short stick with “Things You’ll See But Never Have” printed neatly on the side, and it’s looking like I’m the only one home to receive it. Some assembly required. Requited love, emotional stability for longer than a year, and title of “Best Anything Ever” not included.

And it’s arrived C.O.D.

But before you burst into tears or roll your eyes or potentially throw up at my list of things I haven’t got now and am likely to never have, here’s what I know I’ve got:

1) Fred Faber, my grandfather, was proud of me. Even if my last words to him were the dumbest things ever uttered in the history of ever, and even if I’m not becoming the right kind of doctor now, he was proud of me. In our family, that’s more than anyone has even thought to ask for.

2) I’ve got Erma, whose books make me laugh, then immediately make me dissolve into tears, and whose oldest son got married in his 30s. In response to his wedding, she wrote, “Maybe if I hadn’t panicked at twenty-two, I would have met someone with the sentiment of my son, who proposed to his bride on Valentine’s Day on a moonlit beach in Hawaii and was taking her to Venice for their honeymoon.”

3) And maybe, if I don’t panic at twenty-five, 10 years from now might just mark the day I beat the Faber-kids-finding-relationship-happiness odds.

I’ll see you then. We’ll go dancing.

Doubleyou...Tee...Eff...?

I'm back. I swear.

So it's been a rough semester. Let me explain...no, there is too much...let me sum up. Here are all the things that have happened so far in my life as a Ph.D. student:

1. I survived my first semester. Barely.
2. I became obsessed with Walter Benjamin. More on that later.
3. I earned my first B in a course since Sophomore year of college. My GPA hasn't been this low since I was a Forensics major.
4. I got into a relationship. I was thrown out of a relationship. This is what I look like now:



I'll let you figure out which one I am.

5. In happier news, my work is going well, despite the B. I'm co-authoring a paper with my research professor, which has been accepted into the Pop Culture Association conference in St. Louis this Spring. I'd post it here, but because I'm co-authoring, and my prof wants to publish after the conference, I can't. Sorry. I know you were so looking forward to it.
6. Other little things: I dressed up as a Star Trek officer again for Halloween; I went to New York for Christmas; I spent New Year's Eve with the coolest girls on the planet.

Anyway, as I said, I'm currently obsessed with Walter Benjamin, who wrote, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility." Up until November or so, I'd heard of him, but I'd never actually read that essay. After November, he kind of became what was missing from my life.



So the paper I'm working on utilizing Benjamin's ideas involves poetry performance in film, particularly the film So I Married an Axe Murderer. Poetry, especially in performance, is considered high art, right? Most people feel like they just don't "get it." Well, according to Benjamin, this is because poetry has an "aura." It's blue. No, not that kind of aura. Here, an aura is that sense of history, awe, time-space, etc. that we consider a piece of work to have. So when you look, say, at Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet 43" from Sonnets from the Portuguese, you think, "Oh, isn't this beautiful? People can't write like this anymore! Oh, to be able to hear her read it!" That reverence for a work of art is the aura. It maintains a place, a time, and a tradition.

Okay, Benjamin says this is bad. When we contemplate a work of art that has an aura, we get sucked into it. We stare at it (if it's a painting or a poem in a book), or we listen intently like we're supposed to. But we don't actually experience anything inside of ourselves. We experience standing there looking at a painting or sitting there listening to a poem or piece of music. And we feel what we're supposed to feel.

Film--and, in fact, any mechanically or digitally reproduced artwork--does the opposite. Film lets us absorb the work. It does this by degrading the aura of art. When we watch a movie, we get a whole new perspective on things, provided to us by tricks of the camera, editing, etc., and we receive a vastly different audio-visual experience. That seems complicated. So picture yourself standing in a museum admiring a painting of a girl screaming. You might feel something very powerful. But you probably also feel like you need to think really hard to get it. Or maybe that you're just not high class enough to understand it. Now picture yourself in a movie theatre. You're eating popcorn, drinking soda, and screaming at that stupid girl to run out the door instead of going upstairs because she's about to be slaughtered by the ghost of some dude with a chainsaw for a face. You're into it. It's absurd, but you feel the terror and the anxiety anyway. That's the magic of film.

Now, I'm not saying art isn't awesome. It totally is. I like art, and I like going to museums. And I'm also not saying that film can't be a form of art. It totally can, especially if it's an art film. All I'm saying is that film can allow us to experience art in a new way. This is where So I Married an Axe Murderer comes in. It's a pretty cheesey film, and it totally makes fun of the aura of poetry performance. But that's not all it does. Because it's a film, it allows the audience to experience poetry in a way that they couldn't if they were actually in a smoky coffee shop in the mid '90s. You don't have to be Beat-Chic to get the film. You just have to show up and follow the story. And, voila! You get to experience art/poetry in a way that's accessible.

There are, of course, people who totally disagree. Two such people are Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, of the Frankfurt School, who wrote, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." They argued that everything in popular culture is repetitive, and that we're all just cogs in the culture industry, and that, in fact, we ask for it. This is all true. Mass culture is about money. And we keep buying shit. And they keep producing shit. And everything in pop culture tends to be cyclical and repetitive. Basically, we're stuck in auto-tune land. But why exactly is that bad? Sure, pop culture can be used for the axis of evil (Hello, Mr. Murdoch), but really wonderful social and political changes can occur through pop culture. And to go back to my original point, sure, mass media does set up a clear upper class of people who own everything. But messages still get through to those of us who don't have 80 gajillion dollars or can see Russia from our porches. Just look at Avatar, which is clearly an anti-war, anti-big-business, pro-environment, pro-intercultural-relations film. It was released by 20th Century Fox. NewsCorporation owns 20th Century Fox. And guess who owns NewsCorp? Yep, that's right. And yet, we got the message. Now we just need to do something with it. Like not kill blue people...or something.

Now then, that's not my dissertation, but it's still something with which I'm currently obsessed. I think mass media is good. I like it. And I think it can do good things for people's awareness of their surroundings. I'm also trying to figure out how to link afterlife films to sci-fi starship voices (I think there's something about life's traumas in there...sex, death, and...religion, maybe?). And I'm working on fixing up my paper on lighting in the film Se7en. And I'm taking 4 classes. And I'm assisting on 2 research projects. And I'm writing a conference paper. And I need more coffee.

No One Puts Baby in the Pro Sem

Well, it's been three weeks since I began my Ph.D. program, and I've so far learned two things (that don't involve heavy mass communication theory).

1. I am the youngest person on the planet.

Of the 11 new Ph.D. students who comprise my three classes, I am apparently the only one who went straight from high school to college to grad school without stopping to do something productive with my life like write a screenplay or work for a TV network. But it doesn't just stop with the Ph.D.s. On Thursday, I met a second year M.A. student who's THREE years older than I am!! Sooo, I was 23 when I was doing what he's doing as a 27-year-old.

Okay, so here's the stupid thing about all of this. Somehow, this doesn't make me a child prodigy. It just makes me a purely theoretical academic who has no basis in the "real" world of mass media production. Granted, I (and everyone who knows me) have always known that I live on my own planet--what Molly, my Sophomore roommate, called "Liz World, lalalalala!"--that's generally comprised of knowing more about the Korean War as a direct result of watching M*A*S*H than the current War in Iraq. But still...am I missing something by never having made anything and instead only having thought about things?

In short, maybe nobody puts Baby in the corner, but apparently she puts herself into a theoretical one.


2. As soon as you earn a Ph.D. in Mass Media or some related field, you turn into this:



There's this thing called a Professional Seminar that many humanities Ph.D. programs make their students take. At WVU, it wasn't for credit, and only involved writing a 30 page paper on a topic that was entirely arbitrary and assigned by the higher ups. If they didn't like the ensuing paper, you got kicked out.

So when I found out that I was going to have to take a Pro Sem my first TWO semesters at SIUC, I almost lost my mind. Having just finished a Master's Thesis, the thought of spending two more semesters right away writing papers that were going to destroy my brain and quite possibly my life all over again kind of made we want, at the very least, to die.

ACK!!!

Fortunately, as I found out a few weeks ago, SIUC's MCMA program is full of fluffy kittens, all of whom also happen to be professors. Essentially, every Thursday evening, two professors from the college come talk to us about their research so we can see what the academics are up to these days and decide whom we want on our various committees. So far, I want to work with everyone. Now I just have to get someone to approve having 50 professors on my dissertation committee instead of just 5. Hmmm.


So the thing I already knew before starting here, but no one else really understands, is what I'm doing with my life/research. I'm interested in psychoanalytic film theory.

Let me put that in English.

You know that dude Sigmund Freud (pronounced Frood for you excellent people out there)? Well, he's the granddaddy of psychoanalysis, which is the study of the subconscious, psychological workings of humans. Now, Freud said some really stupid things, like how all women suffer from penis envy, but he also said some brilliant things about the subconscious, pathological ritualization, and latency, among many, many others. And then there was this guy Jacques Lacan (pronounced Jack-Kwees for those of you who are into Shakespeare's angilicization of names) who picked up where Freud left off and said that the penis, or phallus, is really a symbol of power, and doesn't necessarily mean the literal penis. So when we suffer from penis envy (a phenomenon that was later amended to include everyone, not just women), we're really just thirsting for power. Groovy. I like power, too. But Lacan also talked about this phase of childhood called The Mirror Stage, in which a mother or nanny or hip, progressive, stay-at-home dad holds an infant up in front of a mirror and says, "This is you." This traumatizes the child, because s/he realizes that s/he is an individual separate from the rest of the world. This makes us desire a sense of wholeness, which is unreachable, because, basically, I'm not You. You're You, and I'm Me, and even if you were me, then I'd be you, and I'd use your body to get to build a sense of separate "I"ness. You can't stop me from being traumatized, no matter who you are! So anyway, this sense of Self (I) vs. Other (You) leads to desire that manifests itself in other ways, like dreams, or dating the same (and wrong) kind of person over and over and over again, or like the drive to buy things in our capitalist society that will "complete" me. (Really, those Minolo Blahniks totally ARE going to complete me.)

Okay, here's the complicated part. This process of desire also happens when we watch movies. We can't ever really BE in the movie we're watching or experience what's going on in the film, but it sure tries to make us feel like we are. And in the process of making us feel "whole" within the story, a whole host of psychological and technical things go on, like framing that hides the fact that it's a film to start with.

Okay, those are the quick and dirty basics of my work. But the big question I know you're burning to ask is, "What the hell does this have to do with reality or anything that goes on in the actual world?"

Ummmmmmmm.

In theory, my works serves two purposes. First, if we can fully understand the ways in which cinematic representations function in relationship to our culture and our brains, then we can make movies more effectively, i.e. filmmakers can screw with our minds better. And second, the whole point of psychoanalysis is to understand the long-repressed moment of trauma that influences our subconscious decisions as our desires drive us through life, then learn how to better cope with that traumatic moment. So one way that we can do this is by figuring out how the experience of watching a film works in relationship to that process. Thus, film theory is really a part of a larger process of becoming healthier, better-functioning people.

Well, here's the problem: there are like 6 psychoanalytic film theorists on the planet right now, one of whom is my advisor. Soooooo, that also means that, with the way academia works, only like 6 people are ever going to read my writing on this subject. You see, academics tend to be stuck in their own little worlds (Liz World, lalalalala!), writing only to each other in language that only other people with advanced degrees and research can understand. So even if I should happen to discover exactly how to reach and cope with the moment of trauma through the cinematic experience, no one's going to know.

Here's where it gets cool.

I've decided to start a revolution.

I think the problem with academics is not just that we're snooty. We are, and we know it, and the outside world contributes to it. (I just can't tell you how many people are supremely impressed by the fact that I'm in a Ph.D. program, while it just kind of feels normal to me. Seriously, it's no big deal. Unless I get to be a child prodigy. Then I'm going to have business cards printed up with that a my job description.) So what's the one thing we do that could, conceivably, reach a larger audience? We write! Hello! But the problem is that our writing style is cold, impersonal, and overly technical. So instead of just distancing ourselves, why not write so we become PEOPLE who are accessible to OTHER PEOPLE!?

Seriously, I can write a blog that all of you normal (if horribly traumatized) people can read, yeah? And we can teach esoteric bullshit to 18-year-olds in our classrooms. And a lot of us function in society, with our spouses and children and so forth. So why can't we just write a paper that a normal human could read?

Okay, we can. And some of us have. But other academics look down on us for doing it. But why? Because they can't write like that? No, clearly not. Because we're giving all our little academic secrets away to the planet is why. But I'm in Mass Communications and Media Arts, for crying out loud! We study people and the way they get their information! Soooooo why can't we use that to talk to actual people about what we've found out?

Okay, that's my rant. And my job. And, really, my whole bloody life. I swear I'm totally a lot of fun at parties.

It's Wild...It's Wonderful...It's...Carbondale?

Today, I saw some things. I think the absurdity speaks for itself.

1. A real live road runner running across the field by my house.
2. The first live woodchuck I've ever seen, running under a dumpster.
3. My 11th grade boyfriend.
4. My 12th grade English teacher.
5. An insert in a book I checked out of the SIUC library thanking the university for loaning the book to their college. The insert was from Judson College, the place my mother went for finishing school in the late '60s.

Dr. F, or How I Learned to Stop Teaching and Love the Undergrad

Today was my first day of class, v2.0: the TA Edition. That's right, I'm a Teaching Assistant.

Here's what that used to mean to me as a WVU English grad student: serving as the instructor of record for two sections of basic writing; crafting a syllabus; lecturing and leading activities for 3 class sessions per week; grading all assignments, from quizzes to one-page essays, to 10-page research papers; putting cute stickers on said assignments; looking fabulously professional.

Well, now I'm a SIUC MCMA grad student. Oy. Remember that guy I wanted to use to beat everyone over the head with about a week ago? Me neither. But he was there. I checked the records. And he kept calling us "graders."

So thanks to that guy, here were my expectations of being a TA: grading 60 papers, quizzes, exams, etc. per week. Period. No brain or cute heels necessary, just a red pen. And not a sticker in sight.

And then...there was Dr. F.

The coolest professor/faculty adviser ever.

Yeah. I said it.

Let me explain my duties as a grader for CP 360: Film Analysis. No. There is too much. Let me sum up: no frantic syllabus creation; grading only half the papers, as Dr. F prefers to share the work; answering e-mails; creating powerpoints based on the chapter that week; watching one film per week in class; participating in weekly class discussions; potentially lecturing for one chapter's lesson; tutoring one-on-one any students having trouble with the writing assignments; torturing and/or horribly embarrassing the students who are talking, texting, or otherwise not paying attention in class.

Bad news: No stickers. And undergrads are still undergrads. They still whisper during lecture, laugh at all the wrong moments in a film, and actually stand up to leave while Dr. Fis still lecturing in the last 5 minutes.

Good news: I still get to wear heels, despite the fact that Dr. Felleman seems worried that I'm going to fall, I'm going to get to lecture in a film class, and I have full permission to torture rowdy students. Oh, yeah.

Still, why do students do these things? They're paying for the services of a professor, and yet they don't want to be there. Any other service, and they'd want to get every last ounce of their money's worth. Some days, I think that we should start calling professors hookers. All the job descriptions could secretly stay the same, but maybe kids would stick around just to see whether the new name matched the performance.

New ideas in pedagogy. Clearly not my field.

In any case, this week, we watched Martin Scorcese's "Life Lessons," one of three segments in a collective film called New York Stories. Let me just say, Nick Nolte is never not creepy. Ever.

Still, the film was amazing and chock full of SUPER overt symbolism. I mean SUPER. I'm fairly certain you'd have to be an amoeba not to get it. Just maybe some of the students will be able to articulate something coherent about it. If they're infested with amoebas.

R.I.P., MLA

After 3 days of Graduate Assistant Orientation, in which I learned how not to sexually harass someone or drive a student to suicide, I finally got to go to something useful: the Mass Communications and Media Arts Graduate Orientation. I got all gorgeous in a sort of secretary look (blue pencil skirt, black turtleneck, blue bobby socks, black patent oxford heels, and my little telephone earrings), and made my way over there. The day was going to be awesome, I just knew it.

I didn't melt from the heat the instant I stepped outside my door, so I decided to try a shortcut. And it worked! I made it there in 15 minutes, unlike the 30 minutes it was taking me to go the long way. Yeah, efficiency.

Once I was there, the day at the college of MCMA went stupendously well. (For those of you wondering, MCMA is, in fact, a college in and of itself, kind of like Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. Within it, there are 3 departments--Cinema and Photography, Radio and Television, and Journalism.) I met all 10 of the other doctoral students, immediately forgot most of their names, but was still welcomed into their circle of smokers for chatting/bitching purposes. It's so nice to finally have a bitch group. I missed that.

Anyway, long story short, I got all orientated as to what I have to do as a doctoral student. And along the way, I got some wonderful, stupendous, marvelous, couldn't-possibly-make-me-happier news, and then I got the news that may devastate me for the rest of my life.

First, the good news. No math. Yep. That's right. All the former Ph.D. students had to take quantitative research methods and inferential statistics. No longer. What this means for me is that if I want to just sit in a room and think about Freud and the sociology of death while I write my dissertation, I can!

HOORAY!!

Okay, now on to the bad news. According to the Ph.D. handbook, the college of MCMA uses only Chicago or APA styles of citation. Let me rephrase that, because I'm still having difficulty wrapping my head around this.

According to the college of MCMA, Ph.D. students should NOT use MLA format.

NO MLA!?!?

For the uninitiated, let me explain. When scholars do research and write about it, we're required to note exactly what source which information came from in order to avoid plagiarism and give proper credit where it's due. So let's say I quote a book in a paper I've written. In MLA format, after the quote, I would need to put in parentheses the last name of the author of the book the quote came from and the page number it was on. Then, at the end of the essay, I would need a list of citations for all the sources I'd used, properly formatted according to the standards of the Modern Language Association.

That seems complicated and scholarly, so let me be clear.

MLA is my best friend. I've used it, I've taught it, I've loved it like a long-lost child. I've spent so many long nights with it, trying to figure out how to properly cite all the ridiculous things my students and I work with, like a poem entirely encapsulated within a film, or lyrics to a song that was never released on CD, or a fake marriage license with a picture of Elvis on it.

And now it's gone.

And Chicago style has come to replace it, like an evil step-citation.

Sigh.

Goodbye, MLA, my dear friend. I'll always have a special place in my heart for you and think fondly of our nights together. And I'm going to bury you in my backyard with a bucket of salt to keep the slugs away.

My First Day of School...sort of...ish.

Today was the first day of what I'm technically counting as school. Let me put that in English. Today was the first day of Graduate Orientation at SIUC. It's official. I'm a saluki. And the day totally matched the feeling I get when I attempt to say aloud, "I'm a saluki."

Here's how my day went down.

First of all, I woke up from dreaming that Janie (my kitten) had gone out to a party, drank too much, and called me on her cell phone to come get her. So, I went outside, and there she was in the field across the street from my house, laying in the grass with a squirrel and crying. I picked her up, took her home, put her to bed, and sat on the floor crying over the fact that she had somehow gotten out of the house without my knowledge. Needless to say, I woke up actually crying and immediately went to find my kitten. Instead, what I found was another slug in my bathtub and little pile of kitten vomit on the bathroom floor. It is my considered opinion that Janie figured licking the slime off a slug was just as good as drinking water from the bathtub tap. At least she wasn't partying with squirrels.

After this, I discovered that I only had 3 cigarettes left to my name. So I smoked all three while drinking my coffee and decided not to buy any more. Then I got dressed. I looked fabulous in a black lace a-line skirt, a black shell top with lace trim, hot pink open-toe heels, and earrings with black lace detail. No tweed yet, but then, it's too bloody hot to even think the word tweed.

In any case, I was all spiffied up and ready to go by 11:00 am. The orientation didn't start until 1:00 pm. It takes half an hour to get there. Sigh.

So I bought cigarettes.

And chain smoked.

For an hour.

Then I dutifully left my cigarettes on the kitchen table and walked to campus, where I discovered that there were actually two orientations going on at the same time: one for Teaching Assistants, and one for Research Assistants. I'm both. And I'd left my time turner in my other bag. So I went to the Teaching session, since I had already gotten in that room, sat down, and begun reading the packet they gave us before I realized that there was a slim possibility that I needed to be in the other room in the next 14 seconds if I wanted to be there in time for the lecture to begin. At this point, I figured I was technically a TA, so they couldn't fault me for being there. (They probably can. They probably already have. This is probably why they haven't processed my tuition waver yet. This is also probably why I hate university red tape.)

That was at 1:00. By 4:30, I had chewed 6 pieces of gum, drank 3 bottles of water, nearly exploded several times, and felt the overwhelming urge to beat everyone over the head with the guy who was lecturing, since he kept referring to TAs as "Graders." Finally, the guy stopped talking, we were let out into the world, and I practically sprint-walked across campus, where I stopped briefly to change my shoes before continuing the 3 blocks to my house.

After 3 cigarettes back to back, I almost passed out. And then I looked for dinner. The food in my house officially consisted of half a head of cabbage, a bottle of Italian dressing, a bottle of maple syrup, and a packet of kool-aid.

So I scraped all my cash together and went to the store, where I bought everything that $16.43 could buy, including more cabbage, milk, spanish rice mix, peanut butter, jelly, bread, and tonight's special meal: chocolate pudding and graham crackers.

It's now 7:00, and I am feeling fat and sassy.

And I have to do it all over again tomorrow at 9:00 am.

Ugh.