By Corinne Flax

September 8, 2005

Scraps Of Thought Tied Together With A String

I don't think I'll ever feel about teaching the way I do about writing. This has bugged me a lot up until this point but now I'm beginning to see what I can do with this anxiety; I'm going to write a college application essay about it. I'm sure that in the long run I'll find teaching to be fulfilling and interesting. Teaching is a difficult job and it's enough to keep anyone on their toes. I intend to be an excellent teacher and that takes a lot. Writing is something different, something special to me. When I write I do it for myself, not for anyone else. Of course I want to be read by other people, but the actual act of writing is just for me.

This duality of feeling bothered me a lot at first. I thought, how can I be a teacher if I want to be a writer? Then I resigned myself to not being a writer. For some reason I decided it was impossible, that I'd never be a writer, and that teaching was out of reach as well. I pretended to be looking at grad schools, but instead I just looked for secretarial jobs. In the end I found out I hate working as a secretary far more then anything else I've done so far. It's just so mind numbingly boring, and filing things accurately is tedious.

Then I decided I had to be a teacher, that teaching was the only option for someone like me. It made my skin crawl to think of being 'just' a teacher. It was as if I had built myself a coffin and was forcing myself to lie down in it. I railed against this self made future, but finally gave in. In my 'defeat' I have found something more important to me then most of what I learned in college. I've learned that you can actually have it all.

I'm going to be a good teacher, and I'm going to be a great writer. I'm not entirely sure how yet, but I know that it will become apparent eventually. All I have to do is keep on writing and keep on trying and one day I will be where I want to be. It's going to take persistence, fortitude, and probably some attitude adjustment. Learning how to hide my 'edge' is going to be important. By edge I refer to something that my manager at work and my advisor at college have both pointed out to me, and something which I see in my dealings with people who have power over me all the time.

I don't like it when other people get to make decisions for me, and I don't like feeling like I don't know something. It's stupid to pretend that you know everything, or that you have to know everything. Nobody can know everything, nobody is perfect, and I know this. For some reason there are some people who just bring out this nasty dark side of me that wants to sort of grind down on people who I perceive as being 'over' me. This is probably why I got a 1 in interpersonal dynamics at work, because I kept on being nasty to my boss. I've been trying to get better, but sometimes it's so hard. Ah well, someday when I'm a 'great' writer I won't have to listen to anybody, right?

Check this out: I'm getting some stories put into a little booklet that accompanies this art show. If you want to, you should come. This makes me unbelievably happy. lecastlevania.com

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September 2, 2005

The Good Times Are Killing Me

There was this whole portion of my life where there weren't really any other people other then my family who I knew how to spend time with. My attempts at making friends were in general rebuffed, and as a friend's older sister has told me, I was an angry little girl. At some point I started taking that anger and refining it into sarcasm. Later on that sarcasm became what I passed/pass off as a sense of humor. So suddenly I was able to make friends, and that has been one of the nicest things ever. Friends introduce you to new ideas, foods, books, and people. When you are down they come and pick you up, and when you're up they fly with you.

That said, friends take up so much time. In order to make friends you have to go out and meet people. To keep friends you have to hang out and spend time together. I've had to get progressively bigger and bigger phone plans because of all the phone time I spend with friends who live far away. Every day I say to myself "I'm going to go home, clean my room, organize my papers, write essays, write for myself, and watch a movie alone." and it never happens. Someone always calls or I end up calling someone. You say you're just getting together for a little chat and possibly a drink. Then all of a sudden it's 1:30am, and you've got to go to bed or else you won't be any good at work the next morning. I may not be the best at time management, but I swear it's all my damn friend's fault, and I love them for it.

I'm supposed to be writing this wall text for an art show. An art show about animals, or at least nominally about animals. All of the pieces in the show have animals in them, but that doesn't really make them about animals at all. I don't know anything about the artists or the pieces, or anything really at all. In fact you could say that all I know is that I don't know nothing. At any rate I have no idea how to link all the pieces together, no idea what is so special about the relationship between artists and animals, and less than no idea how to link it all together in two paragraphs. Two paragraphs in which to try and pretend I can say something definitive. I'm supposed to have this done by Sunday.

So when will I be writing? Let's see...right now I'm writing this, then I'm going for a walk, then maybe out to dinner, then over to a friend's house to watch movies and drink wine. Tomorrow I'm giving Christian and Elise a tour of Norwalk on their last day here, and then it's into the city for...movies and wine! Gee-whiz, I must really like wine, or movies. On Sunday I'll wake up and brunch with T, then its back to CT for work. Work ends at 1045 and I know someone will try and get me to go out to Karaoke. My room will still be a dump, the wall blurb will still be unwritten, and my life will still be messy and unorganized.

I'm not implying I'm going to really get anything done tomorrow, but if I could wake up here at home instead of in the City then I could do lots of stuff on Sunday morning, especially if I didn't stay out too late the night before. The decisions that need to be made in this life are myriad, like the stars in the sky. It seems ridiculous that I would go into the city just to watch movies on a friend's couch, but that's what I'm accustomed to doing. I can't move soon enough.

Speaking of moving, Christian has moved his blog.

Read it here: www.christianstella.com

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August 31st, 2005

Dreaming and Dusting

According to the last screen I saw on the GREs I scored well, of course that's a raw score, but it did seem that I did better then I'd ever imagined possible. Without study drugs, without expensive courses, without taking a math class for the last seven years, I scored very well. Wa-hoo. Now all I have to do is get my applications together and hopefully I'll be in the graduate program of my dreams. Except that in my dreams I don't ever have to go to class, and there's no hard work involved, and I live in a pink mansion that floats on a cloud of lemonade. So it's doubtful that I will find a school with a program anything like that.

It seems crazy but I have to try and get everything together in the next two months. I've started calling my advisors from college, asking them to give me recommendations. So far, no calls back, but I'm not going to take that too seriously, yet. There's about four or five different essays that I have to write, and I've actually started one of them. I'm just not sure who to get to look at them and tell me if they're good or not...wait a minute! This blog is on a website for a company that helps people write college admission essays...I wonder....could it be possible for me to turn to Evan Bailyn for help or guidance?

Before anything really gets done I have to go through my whole room. Sad to say I'm one of those people who can't seem to keep their rooms tidy. Papers start piling up, dirty and clean clothing lives on chairs instead of in the closet, and shoes are forever underfoot. Even worse are the tiny slips of paper taken from my pockets at the end of each day. Receipts, gum wrappers, notes to myself from myself, every now and then a phone number: these tiny papers drift around like low lying clouds. Books are particularly insidious in my room, they seem to end up in every corner and are perpetually under foot. What I need is a shop vacuum to suck everything up and just get rid of it, of course without all my stuff I'd be so sad.

So in the next couple of days I'm going to do a whole fall cleaning of my room. I'm going to get rid of clothes I will never wear, socks that I've worn to much, at least two pounds of random paper and an acre's worth of dust. After my room I'll move onto my car which is filled with sand. On a random inspection of the trunk of my car I found a snow shovel, a kerosene lantern, an electric lantern, a snow hat, an inflatable mattress, a book on increasing your psychic abilities, and half a bag of charcoal. This needs to be addressed. Also in need of help is the big mark on the trunk fo the car from the electrical tape. The electrical tape was on the car because the trunk lock broke and I couldn't think of any other way to keep the trunk shut as I drove up from Maryland. I'd do all of this today but I'm taking the kid I babysit into the city. Really I shouldn't even be writing this, I have to leave in five minutes to go pick him up, but sometimes practicality has to be thrown to the dogs.

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August 29th, 2005

My Head Is Hurting

Well, the GRE is in only 12 hours. Yuck. I've really got to figure out where I'm taking the test. I mean I sort of know, its in Norwalk, but I haven't actually looked at the confirmation email with the address since I signed up a month or so ago. Am I nervous...oh no, not at all, I mean I've been studying like crazy and there's nothing to worry about right? I'll just waltz in there with my thermos of Tazo Awake Tea and my lucky t-shirt on and rock this lame ass standardized thing.

Alright so that was a big lie. I am more than a bit nervous, and more then that I am tired. I am tired, and my head hurts, and my eyes are crunchy, but every time I put my head down on the pillow ten million little thoughts pop into my head like 'why didn't you ever memorize the formula for finding the area of a trapezoid?' and 'are you sure you know what the word limpid means?' Then I have to hoist this carcass I call home out of bed, and over to my flash-card pile.

I've written motivational things on all of my flash cards. Example: Hey there sugar beet, what's the formula for distance? As I shuffle through the deck of cards these cheery messages seem almost ghoulish, although when I wrote them I thought they'd be motivational. Despite my many trips in and out of bed I still can't sleep. I've tried reading, and I'm now half way done with "The Bookseller of Kabul" which I started only an hour and a half ago. I might watch "Dial M for Murder" but I really just want to go to bed. I've called all my friends, and no one is answering their phone. I just sent my sister an email, but she's in Tokyo, so I probably won't hear back from her for a few days.

So I sit here, adrift on the internet wishing that sleep would overtake me so that tomorrow I will feel rested. Even worse then the lack of sleep is the piercing headache I've had for over four hours now. I believe it is what people call a tension headache, although it beats me what I could possibly be feeling tense about (that was a joke). I've tried water, chocolate, food, fresh air, caffeine, and advil but nothing seems capable of convincing my head it's not stuck in a vice somewhere ten leagues under the sea. Have I mentioned I'm not exactly in a good mood?

At work tonight it was all I could do to not scream at the high school students I was working with. Of course tomorrow is my first day off in a week, and I'm going to spend it taking a computerized test. Which, by the way, I'm not thrilled about. Reading comprehension is incomprehensible enough without my having to actively scroll through the passages. The good news? Starbucks wants to reimburse me for part of my tuition, provided they approve of my chosen major, and (of course) I get into a school or two. Other good news, I got a raise.

Final Good News: GREs are taken, and according the screen I did really well, 740 English, 670 Math. Who knew hard work paid off?

Send comments to: corinne@college-admission-essay.com

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