see karyn blog!

2009-10-11T18:24:00.001-05:00

happy birthday, adrienne. too nervous to call because it's been so long.

2009-09-13T03:27:00.000-05:00

I need my comforter to be more comforting. And why am I awake.

This just in:

2009-08-31T00:28:00.002-05:00

For the first time in a long time, I have fingernails long enough to justify nail polish!

Also toenail polish.

You can't see, but I'm victory-dancing.

2009-08-25T19:47:00.002-05:00

Yowzer. That's right--"Yowzer."

I've only had one day of classes and already I've got almost 200 pages of reading for Thursday. My schedule's pretty intense this semester: Tuesday/Thursday classes only, but they go from 9:30AM to 1:45PM without a break. I realize that this is much, much shorter a block of time than the standard workday, but something about classes make them feel so much longer. Maybe it's that we don't attend class at our own pace. Maybe it's that the professors keep mentioning how we're meant to be Fancy Scholars who Contribute to the Conversation.

Today I had an in-class writing meant to answer the question, "What is writing?" I had no idea how difficult that would be. My initial reaction was the Derridian notion of writing as identifying/creating differences in space and temporality. What a drag. The definition I still love, and the one considered the basest in critical theory, is simple markation--the written word on paper. Instead, I wrote about how everything is "written" and in this way everything is "legible"... is this really my education?

Biking to class isn't so bad, either, except that it's uphill to school, so I show up all tired and gross-looking (very scholarly word) and then get to coast back home and be normal-looking in front of my cat.

Ah, the great patterns of life.

2009-08-18T23:35:00.002-05:00

Today I had to take Marlow to an emergency vet appointment because he was vomiting blood. So far the bill on that is approaching $800, and he's still at the hospital. When I got home at the end of the day, I had a notice in the mail to renew my Colorado vehicle registration, which is $60, a bill from the toll roads when I had to go to the airport several times last month, which is $50, and my CSU statement of billing, which is in the thousands. When I sold Mary Kay, the term for this was "more month than money."

I really have no idea how I could possibly get by without my parents and my sister.

Whine, whine.

I just got an e-mail

2009-08-06T10:55:00.002-05:00

and I've been accepted to present a paper at the CCCC conference next year. That is the Conference on College Composition and Communication. That is the national conference for 'my field'.

I should be thrilled, but I'm paralyzed with fear.

2009-08-06T00:47:00.003-05:00

A boyfriend and a best friend should not be the same person, or else getting dumped is a bigger loss than it ought to be. Colorado is desolate.

Tonight I had to park across the street from my house because there's some truck in my usual spot. I can already see myself tomorrow morning walking out to my car and panicking because it's been 'stolen'.

I know the things people say about cat owners, but I would be so unhappy without Marlow waiting for me in my apartment when I get home.

Marlow and podcasts.

I've got nothing but time.

2009-08-03T21:41:00.002-05:00

In my limited experience as an instructor, I've managed to say a great deal of things about writing that have come back to haunt me.

Stuff like, Don't say that you don't have anything to write about. There is always something to write about!

I can see my students' faces, too, after I have said this to the class. You know the look. That don't-think-you're-John-Keating look.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am giving myself that look. I have nothing to write about.

Wait, I guess I do, since I've written this.

I was right all along!

That's a relief.

Landlocked Blues

2009-07-30T22:49:00.003-05:00

Today I went with my mother, the Executive Officer, and the driver (yes, the driver) to meet the USNS Comfort, a floating hospital, as it returned from a 4-month deployment. My father was deployed twice earlier in his career, but the first deployment predated me and for the second I was only four years old. I mostly wanted to go because I was curious what Dad's return from the Persian Gulf may have looked like.

For some reason, the families waiting on the pier had mostly daughters. Maybe that was because I'm a daughter and one looks for oneself, but the crowd seemed to be an ocean of little girls in their favorite dresses, their Sunday best. Hundreds of families, hundreds of daughters, and maybe five sons. All the world and only daughters, each with a homemade sign.

Meeting the ship mostly means waiting, waiting, waiting, that worst of human activities. When she came around the corner from the Eisenhower (another ship that'd pulled in that day), the Comfort eased slowly toward the pier and then backed in like a parking car. Sailors stood around the perimeter, some unlucky ones stuck on the side opposite the pier, for quite a long time before being able to leave the ship. With all the waiting, the experience wasn't initially as moving as I had hoped it would be--I'm such a tourist now--as the children became visibly uncomfortable and uninterested in the midst of the direct sunlight and suffocating humidity.

After the sailors were able to disembark, though, men and women poured out of the ship and slowly found their loved ones holding flowers and waving American flags on the hot concrete pier. I think what really got me were the spouses reuniting. I cried and wished I were in a position to get married; it looks pretty great from the outside, at least.

I'm concerned that in the next few years my Navy identity is going to slip away from me completely. Eventually I'll be so deep into my adulthood that I won't remember as clearly that there existed a time before I had a driver's license when my military identification card was always in my pocket to get me on base and home at night, when I attended a high school in a faroff island with other children of the Armed Forces, when for twentysomething years the first thing my father did after work was change from his uniform into his civilian clothes while the NPR played in my parents' bedroom. After ten thousand civilian grocery store visits, the commissary is bound to dissolve in my memory. These are only small components of life, I guess, but if I lose them then I'll have lost something important.

Honestly, turning twenty-three and losing my ID card and military dependency were a bigger deal to me than losing my healthcare, the best healthcare in the universe. I'm not able anymore to lay claim to something remarkable that I cannot explain to anybody I know now. Frankly, it's a whole different life than what I lead in landlocked, mile-high Colorado. I'm a sea-level girl at heart.

I think I haven't been posting recently because I don't really do anything. I'm happy to be visiting my parents and doing things.

2009-07-29T23:17:00.002-05:00

Facebook is so, so, soosososososooooo depressing. So depressing.

It's like this whole world of awful realizations right there hanging out in my web browser! People whose lives are ripe for comparison against my own. Do you know why people lost track of each other before Facebook came along? Because that's what's supposed to happen. It's healthy to wonder about old friends without having answers. Nice, even. You can imagine their lives according to your whim. As for me, I can only handle hearing about a limited number of people getting married at one time. It's like penguins on an iceberg. I am twenty-three.

But I can't resist her siren song. It's always because I'm bored. Why do I allow myself to become that bored when there's such work to be done in my life?

Maybe I'll tweet about it.

=(

2009-06-22T03:37:00.002-05:00

Day-to-day life has developed exciting certainties lately:

--> I will forget to buy at least one item at the grocery store, even when I have a detailed list.

--> My apartment will be untidy, regardless how few things I own.

--> I will miss people without stopping to call and let them know.

--> There will be a fox in my rearview mirror when I drive home late at night.

--> I will say something stupid to somebody I love.

--> I will think in poetry all day, then go home and go to sleep without writing anything down.

Actually, that last one isn't entirely fair. Plus, I calm my writing anxiety with the thought that I might have a child someday. I think if that happens then I won't worry anymore about making great art before I die.

The Prodigal Son

2009-06-14T15:24:00.004-05:00

(Side note: I just read Harold Bloom's 2000 review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and it was deliciously entertaining. Find it here.)

I was surprised when, in a recent conversation, my father mentioned the parable of the Lost Son. I've been thinking a great deal about this parable, about both how it speaks to my own life and how it exemplifies a conviction I have that the Bible contains enormous philosophical value even to those who believe neither in Yahweh nor in Jesus Christ.¹

I suppose I had always taken the parable to be a commentary on Jewish Christian attitudes toward Gentile Christians. However, like any half-decent literature, the story invites multiple interpretations.

What the Bible doesn't get to here (at least explicitly) is the emotional struggle of the elder son after being told by the father that he doesn't understand. What is his understanding supposed to look like? What is he meant to do next? How does he get past being so intensely indignant, and what becomes of the material relationship between the two brothers?

That is the prevailing emotion for me in my own life--"indignant." Having displeasure at perceived injustice. Of course the grace of my spiritual and physical parents is inherently unjust. That's the point. I just wish the parable came with simple instructions on repairing weathered emotional fortitude and reclaiming absent compassion and understanding.

Really, I'm amending my life goals:
1) Become a better friend/daughter/sister/employee/human
2) Stop pretending to know things I do not or cannot know
3) Devise a way to consistently beat 10-year-old Adrian at racquetball even though he has an insane baseball-arm serve that physically frightens me

¹ Though I am hesitant to share this with my classmates and professors, I am continually amazed at how much of the instruction I've received and the theories I've read on teaching could have been lifted verbatim from Scripture. For instance, I read a very interesting article by Julie Lindquist on how teachers should strategically listen to their students to find out who their students need them to be that had a palpable "become all things to all men" feel about it. Interestingly, I might be able to meet her next year at the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) should I be presenting, and I'm curious to ask her to what extent she thinks it's fair to draw that connection.²

² My proposed project is entitled "Feeling Oriental: Teaching Postcolonial Theory Through Student Empathy" and will deal with how to delicately inspire certain emotions in students that can be instructive in student understandings of "othering." For instance, imagine if a teacher openly "offered" extra credit only to students who had brown eyes. Perhaps students' visceral reactions to arbitrary injustice would help them understand the historical relationship between the West and the East and the East's subsequently internalized oppression. Cool stuff.

Oh, Ally McBeal. You are so wise.

2009-06-03T15:43:00.002-05:00

(Of course I think that guys worth marrying do exist in the world, but this is still a pretty helpful little exercise.)

Ally: Listen to me. Here's a little game I play when I get lonely. Close your eyes.

Whipper: Why, Ally?

Ally: Just close 'em! Okay. Think of a guy, the perfect guy. Even on your wedding day, maybe, the suit, the smile, the night back at the hotel, and now make a little sound that goes with it.

[Whipper moans.]

Ally: Okay, now think of that man in his entirety. His habits, his hobbies, his friends, the things he thinks are funny, the things he thinks are important. And now think of having to live with him every single day for the rest of your life.

[Whipper shrieks.]

Ally: Exactly. We're not only wired to want what we can't have, but we're wired to want what we really don't want!

2009-06-03T01:50:00.003-05:00

I've been told by many people that I have poor taste in television, specifically concerning my ongoing interest in VH1 reality television. I've stopped explaining this affection in detail to my friends, simply saying that those shows are "genius," and I do believe they are.

What is television supposed to do for the viewer? Certainly there are programs designed to challenge the viewer, to give the viewer an opportunity to confront his or her prejudices and preconceptions, to shake the viewer's, uh, view. Of course VH1 is not trying to do that. VH1 is trying to sell advertising space. (I'll bet they're making a killing, too, and I'm very alright with helping them.)

Why, after having my worldview challenged all day every day would I want to include that as my leisure activity? I guess you could call that a Marxist false consciousness, but the very fact that I immediately look for some sort of theory connection is evidence that I need some VH1 at the end of the day. I'm only human. Of course, that assumes an essential 'humanity'... See?!

I wouldn't call Rock of Love Bus or Charm School with Ricki Lake or Daisy of Love a guilty pleasure because, frankly, I don't feel guilty. My real guilty pleasure is Twilight. So there. Bella 'is' a clear interpellation of weak and wispy 'female' 'subjects'.

I'm being strangled by scare quotes.

Save me, Bret Michaels. Let's drive off into the sunset in your bus full of shapely, alcoholic strippers and likely transvestites.

2009-06-01T01:15:00.003-05:00

Last night I drove home from Alaina's house at about 2:30 a.m. after a marathon viewing of Ally McBeal. We're midway through the third season, which means Billy is about to drop deal in the middle of a trial.

I was heading east on Prospect when "American Pie" by Don McLean came on the radio. He was well into the second or third chorus when I turned onto Whedbee.

I shut off my engine on the curb outside my house to wait for the song to finish, but it had put me in such a good mood that I didn't want to think of it as ending. So I just turned the key and took it out in the middle of a long note.

That note was playing in my head all day, in a good way.

I've done a lot of emoting to my friends and family about some of the sad things in my life in the past year, and I think I'm actually ready to move forward from these things. That nothing is permanent in this life is sad, yeah, but it sure is happy, too.

If God is real, He is preparing me for something wonderful. I just hope I've listened well enough for His voice through these long, crappy months.

2009-05-26T22:48:00.003-05:00

Today is the most successful I've ever felt as an instructor in a classroom. The professor put me in charge of Deconstruction, Differance (intentional misspelling), and Jacques Derrida. For those of you not familiar with Derrida, my being in charge of teaching Poststructuralism is sort of a big deal. A Ron Burgundy kind of big deal. Leather-bound books and mahogany and all that.

My response to enormous challenges in academia is to over-prepare. I took the three-day weekend to read and re-read "Differance" and I took meticulous notes on what I might say and what examples I might use. Before my office hours this morning, I was on campus very early and teaching to an empty classroom for practice. I even wrote on the board, asked questions, made jokes, everything, all to empty chairs. I suspect that teaching is a lot like stand-up comedy in that a good teacher really needs to hit certain cues to be effective.

And man, I was in the zone! I'm going to ride this wave of success all the way to Postcolonialism, the strand of theory that this professor has also put me in charge of teaching. If I have a specialty in this Masters program, it is Postcolonial Studies. That's a funny thought, that I would have a "specialty."

The class that I am "co-teaching" (the professor insists that I am not a teaching assistant--TA--but that I am a co-teacher) is a beginner's course on Literary Theory. English majors have pretty varied responses to literary theory, which was an elective at Harding but is required at CSU. For some, theory is at best vaguely interesting and at worst an irritating hoop to jump through before graduation. Some students take the required class and then forget that Saussure, Derrida, Nietzsche, or Foucault ever happened. I can understand this. Western metaphysics is a cozy place, and I'm cradled by that tradition about 99.9% of the time. For some students, this theory drastically changes how they think about the trajectory of their degree and life plans. I suppose I waver between these two things, teetering on the brink of being a Serious Student of Theory.

The main deterrent is that theory is challenging. The main challenge is not even that the concepts are difficult--and boy is some of that stuff difficult!--but that theory forces a student to examine his or her life. These theorists demand consideration and a long, hard look at the limitations of traditional thought, the impossibility of self-contained meaning in language, the ideologies competing within our bodies. It's difficult to be an instructor in a class like that, almost akin to being the serpent in the Garden of Eden ushering in a frightening new self-awareness. For some of them, you can see on their faces that the apple is, well, kind of mealy. And just not worth it.

To be honest, re-reading Derrida made me nostalgic. This is a shameful admission, because nostalgia is a dirty word for Derrida, evidence of my preoccupation with origins. Who cares what I was doing when I first read "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences"? Literature just has this power over me. I see traces of my life history in every book I've read. For good or ill (usually ill), re-reading takes me back.

I must have read "Heart of Darkness" twenty times when Austin and I were dating. Joseph Conrad is that relationship for me. As if Conrad isn't hopeless enough already, I've got it all bundled up with the happiest and saddest moments of my life thus far. Derrida is the same way. I remember struggling through that material while I was getting to know Austin. I remember talking to him about Derrida as I was trying to work Deconstruction into my senior capstone paper on "Heart of Darkness." I'm very afraid that I'll never be free of these associations.

Gosh, I can't even begin to explain how bad this last year has been for my heart. My mother says that I take too many emotions on, and I know she's right. I don't know how to tell people what it has done to me to watch my sister's marriage fall apart. It's there, this union, and then, with the filing of a legal document, it's just gone. One day I have a brother, and then all of the sudden I don't? There doesn't even seem to be any reason. Just happened. I was in love, too, really in love, and then--poof--gone, vanished. Why did that love happen in the first place? What was it for?

I used to want to get married and have children. I thought that marriage was the best way to become the person God wanted me to be. Frankly, at this point, that seems impossible. Disgusting, even. A stupid, stupid goal.

Now I just want to get this degree. I'm lucky to have another year left to marinade before getting thrown back onto the work force grill.

Anyway, yeah, Derrida. I did pretty well today.

2009-05-18T15:33:00.001-05:00

I don't know what that down there is happening, or how to fix it.

2009-05-18T15:11:00.004-05:00

I think I'm going to be posting on here with regularity over the summer, because I'm going to have a whole lot to say. I acutely understand how clichéd the term "finding yourself" really is, but I'm going to have to embrace that cliché. I used to think that was what my teens were for, then my early twenties, and I'm 23 now and have very little to show in the way "finding myself." I'm determined now in a belief that an entire lifetime is required for this effort, and I've comforted myself that, instead of trying to find something, I can just try to position myself as being a little less lost. Those are two different things. Really, they are.

I just emerged from the class I'm assistant teaching--E341: Principles of Literary Criticism. I am excited at the opportunity to teach this subject--so much of theory is learning how to think differently, learning to un-think what one has always thought, learning how to conceive of an alternate reality.

The professor I'm working with is letting me count this as a teaching internship, a course that can be billed to me in the fall after I qualify for in-state tuition. This favor is saving me nearly $2,000 in tuition, which is comforting in light of the fact that a used copy of the required textbook cost me $52.82.

What can I say? Knowledge comes at a great cost in absolutely every area of life.

For instance, part of learning is necessarily learning that one constantly teeters on being irretrievably lost. Said the teetering-on-being-irretrievably-lost 23-year-old blogger.

This year has really done a number on my heart and mind, even removing that binary altogether. "Think" and "feel" are the same verb, and I (verb) bad, folks. Young. Despondent. Lost. Blech. Bad.

I think teaching will perk me up.

2009-05-17T21:36:00.005-05:00

Well, I finished my first year of school, an activity that apparently precludes blogging.

My life in the past few months has been a sort of unraveling and then coming together and then unraveling and coming together again. I think that may just be how everybody experiences life. If it is, I think we ought to be telling children about it. Really, people should know. Ellen and Josh filed divorce papers, Ellen's moving to Florida, and I'm continuing to work here in Fort Collins and finish up this degree program and just try to make sense of life.

I've been continuing writing about Joseph Conrad and Postcolonialism. That has included two papers about Battlestar Galactica, which is pretty fun. I met Edward James Olmos , the actor who played Admiral Adama on BSG. That was pretty exciting.

I'm a teaching assistant in an undergraduate literary criticism course that starts tomorrow.

I don't have the energy required to use clever language to describe these things, but I hope I will later in the summer.

2009-01-01T20:38:00.002-06:00

Today I had this conversation with my sister Katie via text message:

Katie> What's the best Proust work you know? And what's the correct way to pronounce his name?

Karyn> The only Proust work anybody knows is La recherche du temps perdu. It's pronounced like roost, but with a p in front.

Katie> Is it worth reading? I always hear his name bandied about, but never in direct reference to something he's written.

Karyn> I'd say he's the French D. H. Lawrence, but mostly because he's also cornered the market on eerie mommy attachment. The book is in at least five volumes, so I would not suggest it.

Katie> Ah, a mommy attachment. I would suggest you do a paper on daddy attachment, but it's too creepy.

Karyn> I should add that I have read part of it, an included short story, but in French, and I have no idea how a translation would read.

Karyn> Also, that is the most pretentious thing I've ever had the occasion to say, and I appreciate the opportunity.

Katie> Such is the joy of pursuing an advanced degree.

Grad school is pretty great in that respect.

2008-12-26T21:05:00.002-06:00

Well, getting into the swing of things with graduate studies took me a while, but I think next semester will be a lot easier in regards to balancing my time properly. I was never sure whether hanging out on the Internet was a waste of time for me, and I didn't get around to getting an Internet connection at my apartment for various reasons, not the least of which being that I never thought it was worth the money.

One of my few resolutions is to use this at least once a week, because in truth this has been a very difficult semester and it would have been nice to have had the opportunity to write about everything that has happened. Honestly, I'm not even sure about what I'm allowed to say on a blog.

An unexpected transvaluation occurred in my life. Very little that mattered to me matters very much anymore.

Here's the necessary news:
1. My family shifted a great deal.
2. I enjoy both the program at CSU and my job as a "Childcare Provider."
3. My poor cat has to suffer through my talking to him all the time.
4. I went to a rally to hear Sarah Palin speak.
5. I got all A's.
6. Life in Fort Collins is fundamentally good.

As soon as I get them, pictures to come.

2008-10-31T16:33:00.004-05:00

Colorado is not like Arkansas. In Colorado, if you use an elevator and you clearly don't need to, people stare at you. Mean, cold stares that lead to mean, cold stairs.

Grad school is busy busy busy. I'm in the middle of midterms.

More later, someday. Maybe after I get this degree.

2008-10-08T12:28:00.003-05:00

During my Research Methods class the other day, I sat in my place in the circle we form with our desks, one of fourteen students discussing the ways in which we can learn to ask better questions.

In the stunning poem "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, the speaker laments that he has been only a minor player in his own life:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I've been thinking of this poem frequently because of the feelings I get when I'm in class, sitting in my place in the circle as in Research Methods. The seating arrangements in all of my classes, actually, places each of us as equals. No single person in Prince Hamlet. (As a matter of fact, we seem to trade off being the Fool.)

I don't know that J. Alfred Prufrock has anything to be upset about. I catch myself looking at my fellow students and thinking of them as props in my, Karyn's, education. From their perspective, I am probably a prop.

This attitude isn't right. Human beings aren't props, regardless of how little I know them. Every person in the circle probably has a mother who proudly says, "My child is studying literature at CSU!" After class, every person goes someplace and experiences a day that is no less real than my day.

Pretty much I just want to love people. What a shame that I see these particular people only for a couple of hours a week, that we all judge each other based on small, forced comments we make during classes.

2008-09-18T15:15:00.002-05:00

My favorite thing about Graduate School lately is bearing witness to the other students in the program. there is one guy in a few of my classes (how old will I be before I call males "men" instead of "guys"?) who always musters a question for the professor. His face takes on an expression of intense pain, as if he were a woman in labor giving birth to brilliant insights. Each of his sentences, whether questions or statements, ends in rising intonation, and his hands constantly move in apologetic gestures. I am excited to be surrounded by living, breathing caricatures, and I am humbled in the knowledge that I, too, am a caricature in many ways.

I don't know, man, but I'm starting to think that 90% of human behavior is borne of profound insecurity. Fear and love are incompatible. That may be what this whole Christ thing is meant to change.

I'm beginning looking into three research questions for the start of my studies. Yeah, I'm insecure, but I'm happy anyway.

I have much more to say, but I don't have the time.

2008-09-11T16:16:00.003-05:00

I had a realization today that changes my career goals.

I only care about literature because of how it discusses and relates to human beings. Really, I only love studying literature because I love people, not paper.

Because of this, I don't know if I should be an academic. (I define "academic" as pursuing anything beyond a Masters.) I'm learning more and more that there is incredible pressure for a constant output of conference presentations, book reviews, articles, and books, and I don't think I have the personality that would thrive in that sort of competitive environment. I think I need more direct contact with people.

I... think I might teach high school.