You.

Dear Terrorist,

Once upon a time, in a land far and away called Ohio, I was trying to make a decision about what to do next with my life. I had been accepted to two MFA programs, one which was offering me money, and the MAT program here at the institution of my choice. I admit, I wasn’t happy when I went to visit the MFA program that eventually found money to give me, but that was partly because they weren’t offering me money, and partly because you wouldn’t agree to come with me wherever I went. It’s hard to think about figuring out a new place while trying to stay close to a boyfriend who is suddenly very far away. That was one of the reasons I decided to give up the writing and go get my MAT. I knew this place. I had lived here before. I liked it. I wouldn’t feel so alone and abandoned.

I was mostly wrong.

See, what’s important to remember here is that I didn’t just make this choice based on location, or even really on the benefits of this program over the other, post-graduation job-wise. I made this choice because I thought we would be Together Forever™. I thought getting my MAT would be the best thing for Us. Yes, capital “U.” You and  me. Us. You were going to go start your Ph.D. in a year. When I finished my MAT I’d come join you, wherever you ended up. Teachers are, for the most part, highly employable in many locations. And when, yes, when we got married, I would be able to provide decent health insurance for us. Unlike so many of our friends in grad school, I wouldn’t be forced to use the crappy student health care when I got pregnant. I’d also have a salary. We wouldn’t be living on your stipend and whatever I could scrounge up adjuncting or working some crap hourly job in a coffeehouse or a Target. (Remember Target? Remember how you said you wouldn’t move with me because you weren’t going to spend your year off working at Target if you couldn’t find an adjunct job in the area? Like being with me wasn’t nearly as important as being an adjunct? Like having to take an hourly job for a year was the worst thing in the entire world? Yeah. I remember that.) We’d have an actual income, a real income, an income that would help if we needed car repairs or furniture or, God forbid, wanted to buy a house. I knew I could always work on my Ph.D. when you got a permanent job somewhere, because I’d be able to take classes for free (or a greatly reduced fee) and wouldn’t have to worry about finding a school that would accept me and give me money so I could eat and keep my electricity on.

You never said, “Oh! Yes! That’s wonderful! We will be Together Forever™, and I want you to do this potentially disagreeable thing because it’ll benefit Us in the future.” I want to make it clear you didn’t do that, and you didn’t tell me what to do or encourage me to do something. You didn’t discourage me from one choice or another. You didn’t really do anything. You didn’t say, “You’re a great writer, and I don’t want to see you give that up.” You didn’t say, “You’ll be a great teacher, and yes, if we stay together that would be so helpful.” You let me choose for Us and plan the next few years of my life for Us. It wasn’t until I was here, at the institution of my choice, sad and regretting my decision, realizing this might not have been the right thing, wanting only for you to say, “Yes, we’re going to be together, and yes, this will be good for Us,” that you walked away. You left. You decided I was too needy and too wanting a ring and was too fat and too stupid and too unhappy for you to spend any more of your life with. You walked away.

You left me with this thing, this decision, this program that, even in the early stages, I knew wasn’t right for me. I was stuck. I was so depressed and so terribly disraught that the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with didn’t love me. You were completely over our entire relationship in less than a month. Less than a month! That’s ridiculous. It took me almost a year. It was amplified by the fact the longer I spent in this program, the more I realized I wanted out of this program. Everyone kept telling me I had put in too much time (even before I had put in a full semester) to quit. I crossed my fingers and wished upon every single star in the fucking sky that you’d decide you missed me. That you’d see I wasn’t a psycho, I was someone in a bad situation who really wanted to be given a little hope it was going to be worth it. But no. You walked away. You never looked back. You didn’t care what happened to me. I wasn’t your problem anymore.

Right now I’m pissed. I’m so angry I could hit and punch and kick something, break something, because I got stuck here. I had nothing to look forward to, nothing to be waiting for, no future with someone I loved, no big relief that it would end and I would move forward. And now I’m not moving forward at all. I’m stuck in an internship that makes me angry and sad and hopeless. The job market in the area is pretty much non-existent, especially for someone like me who already has a master’s degree. The higher education job market in the area has also tanked, thanks to the economy, so I can’t even go back to being a lowly adjunct. I have no money, I haven’t had any money, so I wasn’t able to bypass the getting a job process all together and go get my Ph.D. No money for applications and retaking the GRE and all that nonsense. And I’ve completely and totally stopped writing. I’ll never get published or move toward being a Real Writer, because if I do get a job I’ll have no time (just like I haven’t had time for the past two years, no time and no inspiration because my soul has been so crushed doing this program), and if I don’t get a job I’ll still have to get some sort of hourly position (with no health insurance), maybe at Target (how ironic).

I hate you for leaving me, and I hate you for letting me get stuck. I do. I hate you so much I almost can’t stand it, because I was just trying to do something for us. For you. I wanted you to be happy, I wanted you to have a good life, and I wanted to do everything I could to make that happen. I would have done anything for you. If you had told me to stay in Ohio with you, adjunct another year there before you left for a Ph.D. program, I would have said yes in a heartbeat. I didn’t have to leave. I left to try and make a better life and all I got was two wasted years. I have wasted two years of my fucking life here, in a fucking program that hasn’t benefited me at all. I have nothing to show for it, and now I’m now that I’m struggling through the last bit and wanting, with every breath in my body, to just fuck it, I realize there’s not even the reward of a job. And I blame you. I fucking blame you for my depression and my anxiety and how horrible I treat the people I love.

I’m sure you’re fine. I bet you’re happy. I bet you have an incredibly attractive and thin and smart and funny girlfriend who you’d do anything for. I bet you have everything you’ve always wanted. I wish I could make you feel what I feel for one day. I wish you could have this fucking monster in your head for one day.

Love always,

Me

Dear York County Library

Dear York County Library,

Your Rock Hill location sucks. A lot. There is no place you can go to escape the really loud buzzing of florescent lights. And the buzzing is loud. Headache inducing. Possibly epileptic seizure inducing, if epileptic seizures can be induced by sound. You do not have an APA style guide. I am glad you’re carrying the MLA style guide, and I’m mildly amused that you have the Chicago style guide (since we all know that’s not a real style), but for the love of all that’s good and holy in this world, can’t you have one measly copy of the APA guide? Do you really need the fancy-schmancy illustrated Strunk and White? (And, because I just remembered it, you don’t even have the real MLA guide. You have the guide for writing research papers, but you don’t have the guide for grown-up people who might be in the humanities.) This would have been less of a problem if you had WiFi. Honestly, how could you not have bought a wireless router by now? I know you have internet in your “Technology Center,” but the computer I used to try and find an APA style guide with was running some incredibly ancient version of Internet Explorer, so I’m pretty sure you just need to do a complete overhaul of your “technology.” See, if you can’t be bothered to have the appropriate resources I need to do my work, you need to provide me with a way of obtaining that information, without having to use my library card to get into the “Technology Center” so I can spend five seconds looking it up and then heading back to my laptop, which I work on so as not to take up space on a computer someone might really need. You know, like a homeless guy who luckily doesn’t smell bad enough to be breaking one of those library rules I read about on your website. Before I arrived. Because I couldn’t access your website once I was there. 

Another thing. A library is a very different thing from a Barnes and Noble. I know, I know. Shocking. But, you see, a Barnes and Noble is a store. People go there to purchase things and drink overpriced coffee. They don’t go there to do work. Sure, you may see someone trying to beat the system by reading the book or magazine in the store, and people who enjoy their overpriced coffee might come in and do work in the cafe. It really isn’t a necessarily quiet place, though, because it’s a store. Just because the library has shelves with books on them and tables for people to sit at does not mean it’s just like a Barnes and Noble. Libraries are historically quiet places where people go to read and work. If you are in a library and looking for a book, it is more than common courtesy to be quiet about it. It’s a rule. It’s on the list of rules, right after the one where the library reserves the right to kick out people who smell too bad, and right before the one that says you can’t sleep there for an extended period of time. While I know people are dumb and might not understand the difference between the library and the Barnes and Noble (and I understand y’all are just too polite to tell them to shut up), I expect the library employees to get it. If I sit on the second floor in a far corner that has no study tables or corrals or chairs around it, I’m sitting there for a reason. A quiet reason. Miss Library Employee who comes by yammering with Mr. Library Patron needs to zip it or hush it or use her freakin’ inside voice, because I really can’t expect anyone to learn appropriate library behavior if you aren’t practicing it yourself.

Love always,

The Center of Attention.

Help for those who are bad at relationships.

I recently had a conversation with someone where we agreed that it was super nice back in junior high and/or middle school when the easiest way to find out if someone liked you was the following note:

Do you like me?

Check one:

◊Yes     ◊No    ◊Maybe

It was so simple, so easy. Pass the note to the cute guy in your math class. He reads it, checks the appropriate box, and sends it back. The most complex it could get is if you had to go through your best friend who went through his best friend. And then you had your answer. If it was a yes, you could meet at each others’ lockers, sit next to each other at lunch and school assemblies, and maybe someday start holding hands between classes. If it was no, you pouted and complained about him to your friends via other notes that would be passed around during class, especially class you had with him. If it was a maybe, you did your junior high/middle school best to flirt, hoping to win his affection, and eventually you’d set your sights on another guy and forgot all about guy number one.

I suppose it might have been different for guys, but even if it was, with the girls doing all this work, it wasn’t like they were really sweating it.

Now that I’m grown-up and the days of note passing are behind me, but I’m still all caught up in the internets and social networking (dear lord I hate admitting that), I’m starting to see that there needs to be an internets equivilant to the “Do you like me?” note. This one is the “No, I don’t like you” note.

 

Dear __________________,

◊ I am offended by something you did or said online.

◊ I feel like you’re stalking me.

◊ I do not like you and will probably never start liking you.

I do not wish to communicate with you anymore in any capacity.

Comments:_________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

___________________ 

If you are ever in a situation where you need to break all ties, this helpful outline of what you should say can easily be copied to the e-mail or messaging client of your choice. You can cut and paste it, or, if you’re extremely lazy, just send someone a link to this blog entry. Even if you don’t fill any of the information in, whomever you’re sending it to will probably understand the message. Afterward, if you’re so inclined, you can go about defriending or blocking their every move, but at least you’ve provided them with an indication they did something wrong. 

Unless they did something really wrong. Like kill your cat. Then you don’t need to provide them with any sort of acknowledgment you’re cutting them off.

Dear Really Loud Guy in Panera

Dear Really Loud Guy in Panera,

You are being really loud. I understand that Panera isn’t a library, and while some people are here to do work and abuse the free Wi-Fi, most people are just here to chat and enjoy coffee and delicious baked goods. You are well within your right to chat with your companions, but even if I wasn’t trying desperately to come up with a thesis for a paper that is now several months overdue, I would be annoyed by how loud you are. You are really loud. I think I detect a little bit of a New York accent, and I did have a professor once who explained he only sounded like he was yelling at us due to his New York upbringing, but I still shouldn’t be able to decipher every single word you’ve spoken in the last fifteen minutes. And it’s really annoying to everyone in the establishment that you’re on your cell phone. People tend to be more forgiving if you’re loud and chatting in person, but being loud on your cell phone isn’t as excusable. You could go outside. I know it’s hot out there, but do you think everyone is interested in the argument you’re having with your wife over what you’re supposed to buy at the store? Is it really her fault you don’t have the school supply lists for your children? Should she really know if the stores you’ll be shopping at have copies of the school supply lists? And no, I highly doubt that the lists would be the same for students at two different schools, considering they’re probably at different schools due to being in different grades, and usually different grades require different supplies. Your middle school daughter probably doesn’t need a pencil box and pack of 24 crayons like your second grader does. 

If you’re going to continue to be loud, could you at least be loud about progressive education and rhet-comp. theories? That would be helpful. 

Thanks so much,

The Center of Attention