Reconciling myself

Well, I certainly dropped the ball on this thing. I was seized, unfortunately, by one of those Salinger (or Residents!) moments where I felt like being a bit more anonymous. In fact, I don't even know what I'm trying to do right now. I'll give you a brief lowdown on what you may have missed, had you not been present during every moment of my life and don't happen to be a nu-nu. This is in relatively chronological order.

-On what I believe was 4/20, I delivered my symposium project on Philip Roth. Entitled "Telling a Man by the Songs He Sings: Claims and Counterclaims of Anti-semitism in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go," I had spent the last several months, reading through as much of Roth's work as I could while simultaneously producing a 15-page paper that my sponsor would find of enduring quality. Luckily, she didn't find my thesis or anything I said to be that bad (I was probably helped by the fact that, even as an American literature professor, and a Jew to boot, she wasn't that familiar with Roth). Of course, the day before I had to pare down the fucking thing to a manageable 10 minutes. It turns out that reading my entire 15-page paper took something like 25 minutes, so I spent all of Friday hacking it until I was pretty sure I had produced something utterly unintelligible. No matter: very, very few people showed up. I would wager there were maybe 10 people there, and that includes the three students also speaking during my session (entitled "Literary Landscapes: Paradise, Politics, and Religion"--check out my abstract and stuff here) and their respective sponsors, although my sponsor couldn't be there because, irony of ironies, she had to go home for Passover.

Anyhow, I finally did it, and at least my moderator seemed to like it, and was particularly impressed that I did all the research outside of class. I asked her if (as department chairman) this would be good to go as an honors thesis, and she said yes. So at that point I was pretty happy.

-All of the internships I applied for--and I won't bother naming them all here--turned me down. Every single last one of them. So, faced with few other ideas, I decided to go back home once again for the summer. Turns out this was a bad idea.

-I did, however, receive an academic award from the school, which was cool because along with the prestige (I'm aware, don't laugh at me) of it I got $100. It was the Winifred Van Etten award, in case you were wondering. It's not a big deal, there are enough of these to make me feel not so special. Still, it was nice, particularly because I had no idea what I was getting until it was announced at the English awards/Open Field party. Mouton, or someone in the English department wrote a lovely introduction for me too. The only reason I enjoyed it was because it was poetic justice for none of my stuff getting into Open Field, which is the campus literary magazine. This is even though Freeman thought one of my stories was good enough to be entered into the Nick Adams short story contest (which I lost unsurprisingly, although I should add deservedly--I read the story that won, and it is actually an amazing piece of work). Apparently, my peers didn't think anything I did was good enough. I was depressed, but that made it a bit better.

Weirdly, I was invited to attend the English awards night as well as the interdepartmental awards night. Since I had already gotten my award previously, I was just asked to stand up to be recognized. There was no reason why I should have gone. The whole thing was like three hours and nearly unbearable, despite what was supposed to be fancy food. Apparently, there are a lot of awards here.

-Got hired to be the new Arts & Entertainment editor of The Cornellian, which, unlike my job back in high school, actually pays a salary. I was going for Opinions editor but I'm not surprised that they didn't choose me. To date, I have written pieces about the new Portishead album, the new R.E.M. album, and Iron Man. As is custom, the new editorial staff does one issue at the very end of the year, and it ended up not going so well for me as the result of some advertising mishaps, so I basically had to do the whole thing over again. The result: an epic piece on Iron Man that took up the entire page. It wasn't my proudest moment, and it was sort of another reason to be depressed. I couldn't look at it afterwards, that was for sure.

-I saw Iron Man. Loved it. I don't think my review is online, but I'll post it at some point.

-Took two classes, both of which fucked me up in unexpected ways: Grammar & The Politics of English turned out to be a mind-blowingly frustrating class, although not so much with the politics part as it was with the grammar. I don't know if anyone here has ever had to diagram sentences. I certainly hadn't before, but now I can say that it is a loathsome, disgusting, and surprisingly helpful activity. I think I am a better writer for taking the class, and it was sort of nice to have a professor who didn't like anything I did at all. I definitely needed that, but too bad it killed my straight-A winning streak for the semester. I'm not as concerned with that as I am with the way I was demoralized--somehow, even as someone with enough knowledge and passion of issues pertaining to language politics and linguistics, I found I had little of value to say. I did, however, get to do a paper on Salman Rushdie, who readers will know I am a big fan of. I think my thesis was something like the Ayatollah couldn't have possibly read The Satanic Verses before he issued his fatwa, and he definitely didn't read it afterward either. I know, it's so obvious. Story of my life.

Contrast this with Contemporary Fiction, a class I owned unequivocally. I found, astonishingly, that I was more in my element doing literary analysis, and what's more, I found myself enjoying the theory--yes, the theory--of postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Plus, we got to read some wonderful books, including one of my favorites, If on a winter's night a traveler. We also read Breakfast of Champions and J.M. Coetzee's Foe, amongst selections from a big Norton anthology of postmodern literature from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Sherman Alexie, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others. Philip Roth was in the anthology (excerpting The Ghost Writer) but we did not read him in class. I felt very much on top of things and was very proud of the writing I did in the class. In fact, I feel like I might put it on here, except it doesn't seem that profound on the internet as it did in the classroom. Anyway, my professor seemed to like it, and me, a lot. I think he liked that I would actually talk about some of the postmodern theory while most would complain it was impenetrable. As he would likely say, that's the point.

-I keep chugging away at Philip Roth. Just finished Deception, by the way, so I'm entering the home stretch. In my next post I'll talk about The Counterlife through Exit Ghost, assuming I can remember anything about them.

-I ended my junior year by doing my take-home final while having an extreme headache, and later, after attending quarter draws night at the bar, getting extremely feverish. Also, I hate packing and I knew I would miss my roommate, Jeremiah, although I'll see him again next year.

-Came home for the summer. The drive back was excruciating. Not only was I feeling extremely sick, to the point where I couldn't eat anything, but it was raining as hard as I've ever seen, to the point where I couldn't really see on the road. It was risky business, but I made it home okay. I've looked, in vain, for a job. It's hard, because pretty much everything has been filled up by people who came back for summer long before I did, as a result of Cornell ending pretty late. I need money and I don't know what to do.

So that's it. I'll get back into the swing of things, slowly. My question is this: from reading this, does this constitute a life well-lived? Obviously I'm not including stuff that is personal, but let's just say that that part is covered. Am I doing enough with my life? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?