Schoolio

I just wrote for four hours. I feel like my head was squashed by a large truck. But I feel good. I'm learning to just sit my ass down and write. A lot. Dialogue is a new thing for me, and, working with it now, I'm realizing how essential it is. It provides a moment of rest from the relentless paragraphs. It lends a quality of the real to the piece. I can't believe I just wrote "a quality of the real." I guess grad school is worth the price of tuition.

My backpack that I swore I wouldn't carry to school is breaking because it has been repeatedly packed too full with a laptop, plugs and chargers, a notebook, my phone, and a million books. Now I have to pay the Russian shoe guy five dollars to fix it. Can I write that off?

I'm in love with being back in school. It's my new boyfriend. It makes me think, gets me out of the house, makes me feel like I'm on fire. It gives me a reason to jump out of bed at 8 AM and a reason to go to sleep reading Alice Munro stories. It gives me compliments. For the first time, I can't imagine the relationship ending. But of course, it will, in 17 months. And I'm already depressed about it.

I like asking my writer friend Katie if she's "on campus." I like swiping my ID at the copy machine in the library and seeing that it says I have 494 copies left for the semester. I like copying the liner notes of by Delta blues CDs I have to listen to for my History of Jazz class. I have a girl crush on my workshop professor.

I even like that I hate an aging beauty queen numbskull that somehow got into the same program as me and sits in my workshop class exclaiming "In this piece, the city is also a character!" about every goddamn story we read. If she's the only negative thing about school, I can live with it. Little does she know (for she hardly knows anything), I'm already thinking of her as a character in one of my stories. That's how I'll get my revenge (palms rubbing together, eyebrows raised, the evil writer chick--me--rears her power-thirsty head). I just knew that her first story was going to be about the Holocaust or something. Oh wait, I'm sorry, it's about September 11th. I'm serious. How dare she.

Enough of her. Anyone know of any good student discounts in the Tri-State Area? My loans are dwindling and I may have to make collages out of Brooklyn Lager bottlecaps and New Yorker poem fragments for Christmas gifts. But I wouldn't have it any other way.