Big Mouth Hungry! EAT SMURFS!

You are sitting in your office waiting for one of your students to come to her conference with you. She's the only no show so far - well, you could count the student who told you yesterday that conferences would not be conveneint for him as he was going to the cities and could you please log on to D2L so that you can meet with him online to discuss his paper that he'll probably send as a microsoftworks document, so you can't read it anyway, but wait, he never sent it to begin with, and he wasn't terribly disturbed by the low grade on his first paper, so you don't even consider him. You are glad she didn't show up because it means you can work on your thesis revision and that chapter you haven't finished on your thesis. You are still a little anxious after the meeting you had with your advisor yesterday - you know you are behind and it bothers you; you just don't want her to call that to your attention. You want to be done with the damned thing, but that bout of chronic fatigue syndrome hits you every time you sit down to your computer to work. You can talk forever about CGR. You love to talk forever about CGR. "Goblin Market" is probably the one poem you really get. But when you sit down to your thesis, all the interest and energy flows out of you. You forget how to write a paper. No. Forget about forgetting how to write a paper; you forget how to write. You are still scarred (you almost wrote scared, but either works) after your experience writing papers for American lit last semester. You can still string together words, but suddenly people tell you you are illogical, that you make no sense. You know what you mean, but that counts for shit.

You remember reading the first part of a biography on Leonard Bernstein (you never got past the first six chapters because you have trouble finishing things). You remember how he attended some latin school for brilliant children of brilliant parents. You remember the story of how he wrote a brilliant paper the night before it was due, and how his teachers gushed at how innovative he was and how he took such an unorthodox approach to the assignment, that he received high marks. You wish you could sit at the piano and play the way he was playing at 10.

You think of your friend in New York who seems to live some sort of charmed life. Who can live on three hours of sleep a night and accomplishes more in five hours than you do in two weeks. Who writes cookbooks and caters meals for Oprah, and had a lion and a peacock for a pet when he was a child.

You are always tired. You don't get any exercise. You don't always get your work done. You always have an excuse. You fall asleep at your computer. You get a sore throat (You make sure to cough and sniffle when you tell your advisor this to add verisimilitude to your story. The story IS true, but you still feel bad for using the excuse). You had much more fun writing your paper for world novel this week. You parodied Jamaica Kincaid's writing style, writing in second person. As you write in the same mode now, you feel like a counterfeit. You enjoy this mode more, because it feels lazy. When you read your paper in class two nights ago, one person applauded you for it. Another said "funny." You were proud. You felt deflated when the professor questioned your emotional response to the book you parodied. You felt suddenly like you got the answer wrong, that your sense of well-being hinged on getting the right response. But you've always felt that way. You get tired of that, and always resolve not to care so much, but you still do. You feel more that your thesis is being written for your advisor's benefit than for yours. You realize of course that this is a problem, because how can you write with conviction about something when its written under the pressure of needing to do it for someone else? You try and convince yourself that your knowledge of this will be the thing that pushes you through it, and it will eventually. But you're not buying it right now.

Then your 4:00 appointment arrives - the student from Macedonia - and as you read through his paper (which should be a drudge because you are marking grammatical errors every three words, but isn't because his communication is clearer than most of your other students' - heck, it's clearer than your thesis) you begin to get lost his story of his father teaching him how to repair a gold ring. You are caught up in his story and can see this student's father sitting with him at a work bench teaching him how to solder, file, and polish. This student represents something for you, but you don't completely know what it is. You are glad you didn't send him packing to 101 for non-natives. Maybe he represents your desire for independence as well as connection (but the minute you write that, you don't believe it). Maybe you just wish you had a cool accent and not the non-accent you tried so hard to have so that you didn't have a Minnesotan one.

You think about a record your parents had when you were a child that described the ministry of the apostle Paul from the book of Acts(you feel embarrassed that you just admitted to something so churchy, but then you don't really care either). You remember the actor speaking for Paul recounting a vision he had one night where he saw a man standing there saying: "Come over to Macedonia and help us." You remember the meaning of the vision, but for some reason it registers differently now. Every time you see your student, you think of this dream of Paul's.

You wish you were in Macedonia.