First Week of School – A Brief Photo Essay

My kitchen:

My desk:

I had a Gina-only weekend in Cbus while MDB headed to Ashtabula for his high school marching band reunion and performance and I spent most of it lesson planning and eating.  Friday’s lunch was my take on a Philly cheesesteak sammy without steak or onions or a delicious roll.  I started mushrooms and roasted red peppers in a pan.

 I took them out and browned a butterflied Buffalo chicken sausage.  I took that out.  I added a Flat Out wrap and started building with the chicken sausage, Swiss cheese, mushrooms, and peppers.  I folded it over and let it grill for a few minutes.  Voila le sammy.

Et encore, voila le sammy.  Inside are a few dops of Light Mayo.

I’d been spending long days in my apartment hunched over the computer so, around 2:30, I was feeling a bit stirred.  I asked CBF if she was up for humanoid company and we agreed on Lavash.  I had a pistachio baklava and a Besma cake with a pot of hot mint tea.

No, I didn’t need two sweet things after a week of keeping myself on track, but there was something alluring about the combination of honey and coconut and the dense texture of the cake.  As I came to the last bite, I was glad for my mint tea.  My mouth was almost glued together with sugar and I was unbearably thirsty.

I looked at the state of my kitchen and at all the foods requiring a half hour of preparation and decided that because I was on my own and because I’d been cooking all week and because it was Friday, I was going to go easy.  I hit Giant Evil and came away with a Kashi 3 Mushroom and Spinach pizza and a bottle of BV Coastal Pinot Noir. 

The first of two glasses of wine:

And the pizza, cooked unevenly in my jumper oven:

The pizza was just all right.  The thin crust was soggy with the water from the mushrooms and spinach.  The cheese was a bit plasticene.  I ate the whole thing, rationalizing that I was going to exercise in the morning.

Saturday morning dawned gray and sopping and spitting drizzle.  I scrounged for breakfast before heading up to the Clintonville Farmers’ Market just north of North Broadway.  By the time I found a coveted street spot right across from the tents, it was a downpour.  Market customers were booking back to their cars, leaving chagrinned vendors standing woefully behind their goods.  While a tent dripped into the back of my shirt, I picked up purple new potatoes. 

I stood ankle deep in a hole of muddy water and chose a Delicata squash. 

From a stand redolent of basil from, appropriately enough, a cascade of basil leaves taking up half of a folding table, I picked up 4 of these unusual looking, and exquisitely sweet tomatoes.

While another tent poured water on my face and glasses, I took up these beets.

I eventually was soaked enough.  My hair was hanging in strings and my jeans, heavy with water, were beginning their slide from my waist.  On my last stop, I picked up this wheat bread.

This bounty cost $14.  And it made an excellent lunch.  I steamed some beet greens for ~ 5 minutes and added them to a plate of sliced tomato, a browned chicken sausage, and whole wheat with butter.

Saturday night involved various gatherings to which I brought my camera, but never once used it.  I ate some delicious homemade pasta and crock pot meatballs and all sorts of crunchy things with dip at my first stop and then, later, I had a second dinner at a homemade Indian food feast.  The curry was fantastic and the sweet potato pudding unforgettable, but RDM ate the last of the fried acorn squash before JJM and I arrived so we were robbed of this delicious treat.

I had more unpictured treats at the MFA picnic on Sunday.  I remember a spoonful of my own lasagna, a spoonful of my own Tzatziki dip, some salad, some chicken tagine, some of the juiciest corn I’ve ever tasted, some bread pudding and, yummy, some blueberry pie.

No, I did not exercise at all until yesterday when, in an attempt to adjust to teaching an evening class, I cast myself into the out of doors in the middle of the afternoon for an hour of interval cardio and weights.  The air is a perfect crisp bite for it.  The path is canopied in leaves changing ever-so-slightly. 

But there was a dead raccoon.

Being a third year MFA at OSU means that I have more home time to use as I see fit.  This doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done, it’s just that I’m not in a classroom, have very little in the way of timely obligation to others, and must structure hours myself.  I’m glad for my new teaching challenge this quarter because it forces me to get my ass in gear and figure out how this whole class blogging thing is going to work, how the readings are going over, and how the syllabus itself is structured.  I have a break from the rote 110 syllabi and aims, although I enjoyed developing new assignments and methods for those classes.  There is a danger in having teaching as the sole structural element; i will spend all of my time lesson planning and little of my time drafting and drafting and drafting.  My writing assignment for Autumn quarter is to draft draft draft.  Winter and Spring are given over to revision.  See?  There’s a bit of structure.  Perhaps I will tackle the problem of structure in the same way I tackled the problem of what I put in my mouth.  I’ll write it up.  If anything, it will force me to face what I’ve done on a particular day.

Yesterday, I started with the breakfast on the bottom of the last post.  I took care of some personal biz and then started the real work of the day: continued revision on a story that has boomed from 32 pages to 52.  The wife has finally died!  MDB thinks my focal character is a bastard!  Problems are being solved.  My lunch was the same as my other lunches this week, except that I grilled the Flat Out wrap after my M-I-L commented about warming up her wraps before filling them.  I sprayed a pan with PAM EVOO and threw in the wrap.  I then added a dop of Sabra’s sundried tomato hummus, some Amish swiss, a Boca burger, and a tomato.  I let it rip for a bit before rolling it up and pressing it with my spatula.  Grilled!  Or partially grilled.  The cheese had melted into the hummus.  That’s all I cared about (there used to be an exclamation point here, but I remembered a workshop this past spring where multiple exclamation points were discouraged, for me, for life).  I scarfed all pre-picture.

I continued work on my story and then headed out on more personal biz.  I hit the library and Target and Giant Evil.  I made an unpictured snack of the rest of the tomato from lunch, some more Swiss, and a few multigrain crackers.  JA arrived soon after and, determined to get some cardio in, we walked to campus and back in the rain.  It was lovely.  I could have used a slicker of some sort – and I really want one – but it was great to catch up and smell the rain and the leaves and see the river dappled and foggy and gray.  And we got our exercise in.

I preheated the oven to 350 for the enormous piece of salmon I got on sale at Evil.  I dressed the week’s first fleshly protein in PAM EVOO, chili powder, ginger, low sodium soy sauce, black pepper, sea salt (thus negating the low sodium part), and sesame oil.  I baked for 15 minutes.  Should have been 17.  Meanwhile, I chopped a clove of garlic and ran it around a pan with EVOO, red pepper, and nutmeg.  I then added rinsed and drained black beans, and a diced roasted red pepper.  In the last few minutes, I added spinach and took it off the heat.  Here’s my plate with half of the salmon (roughly 1/4 lb), the delish side, and some steam-in-bag brown rice.  And yes, that’s Parm cheese.

My late night Netflix viewing was Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a documentary made for HBO in 2008.  His story is heartbreaking and confusing and the depiction of the California judicial system is damning, but what struck me the most was Polanski’s instinct for survival.  He just kept going.  His mother was gassed by the Nazis, his father was taken to a concentration camp, and Polanski was left alone on the streets of Poland.  He becomes this hugely influential director living a life of great comfort and prestige until his pregnant wife is murdered.  I didn’t know that he was a suspect.  Abetted by media reports, the public made specious connections between the material in Polanski’s movies and the murder of his wife.  The documentary glances off the murders in a strange way.  That the Manson family was responsible is secondary or tertiary.  I’ll have to re-watch to see if they even say “at the hands of the Manson family” or the like.  The press turns on him.  And then he has sex with a 13 year old girl and his fate is in the hands of a judge described as incompetent and dishonest by both the prosecution and the defense.  And then he’s gone.  For good.  He starts over.  He marries again and has been married for 19 years.  He wins an Oscar.  He’s accepted into the Academie Des Beaux-Arts.  So much has happened to Polanski in one lifetime, to paraphrase one interviewee in the documentary, enough for many many lifetimes.

Here’s this morning’s breakfast – Kashi Go Lean waffle, Fage 0%, and warmed mixed berries.

This passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” is unspeakably beautiful.  I can’t get it out of my head.

She turned and he followed her.  She had been away – he could have wept at the wonder of her return.  She had passed through enchanged streets, doing things that were like provocative music.  All mysterious happenings, all fresh and quickening hopes, had gone away with her, come back with her now.

She turned in the doorway.

“Have you a car here?  If you haven’t, I have.”

“I have a coupe.”

In then, with a rustle of golden cloth.  He slammed the door.  Into so many cars she had stepped – like this – like that – her back against the leather, so – her elbow resting on the door – waiting.  She would have been soiled long since had there been anything to soil her – except herself – but this was her own self outpouring.

Yesterday was my first day of school and, like other first days in my 19 years of first days, I felt all elbows and legs.  I managed to get 2 hours of writing in before a quick wrap lunch.  Here’s my Flat Out honey wheat filled with hummus, swiss cheese, a Boca burger, and some tomato.

Vegetarian again, yes, but it held me well into my busy afternoon.  I drove down to campus because I was going to be on the move as soon as I gave my administrative talk to my 5:30 class.  I noticed that the apocalyptic construction project on North High seems to be nearing completion.  They’ve paved the road and there was only 1 jackhammer operating as I drove by.  I copied my syllabus and delivered it to authorities for approval.   At 3, my MFA colleagues and I were treated to a Q&A lead by one of our alums, Holly Goddard Jones, who is on tour for her fab short story collection, Girl Trouble.   As I read each story in Holly’s book, I reveled in the characters, their dark, sometimes awful, sometimes strangely hopeful situations, the risks Holly took with points of view outside of herself, her precision in language, and the long, luxurious narratives that give these stories their scope.  This collection has everything I hope to be or do or become when I’m a “grown up” writer. 

Holly’s Q&A was just as inspiring.  I wrote down the word “wait” a few times.  And then I circled it.  And then I put it in caps.  And then I wrote the word “patience” and circled that.  It was refreshing to hear the realities of post MFA life with its highs – agents and editors at summer literary conferences – and lows, where it’s all the nose-to-grindstone stuff and endless footwork.  Things happened and then they didn’t happen.  The process from the first story to the packaged book was long and filled with revision and persistence.  If academia is the chosen road, teaching loads can be high and writing time goes out the window.  Sometimes stories need to be re-done after we thought they were done.  She talked about the writing “plateaus” where we write stuff on a certain level, cruising along, and then, out of the blue (OOTB, as LKA would have it), we jump up because we’ve thought about our characters for so long, we’ve written in a certain way for so long, we’ve understood things in a certain way for so long, that it’s time to jump and cruise along the level above.  I imagined it like one of those early computer games where some creature is walking along some ledge and you have to move the joystick and press the buttons in a certain combination to enable the creature to spring to the next ledge.  Or do computer games still have that?  Anyway, that story is the “turning point” story where we’re doing things differently and with an increased understanding of craft, of character, of how to tell a good story.

After the Q&A, some students from the summer Young Writers Workshop sat down with Holly and she talked about inspiration, process, habit, and craft.  About halfway though her talk, I got sandwich on my shirt and then smelled like sandwich the rest of the day and had to walk into my first day of teaching with grease stains down the front of me.  It was still worth it to sit in and observe how she interacted with high school students, encouraged, and fielded questions.  After my first day with my upper level composition students, I gathered a few MFA peeps and headed over to the Barnes and Noble at Lennox for Holly’s reading and book signing.  As I drove home, takeout in hand, I felt inspired and restless to get back to my 50 page short story and…patient. 

Here’s my dinner – a Greek salad from Lavash.  I also had a bowl of their cream of mushroom soup, but I gobbled it too quickly.

Here’s this morning’s breakfast – 2 pieces of TJ’s multigrain toast with butter and honey.

 

I spent the last day before the start of my final year at OSU in my apartment alternately rationalizing why I should and shouldn’t be watching SVU episodes on Netflix and reading endless lifestyle blogs.  “The quarter is about to set in.”  “Work harder.”  “You’ll have all quarter to stress out.”  “You have it easy.”  That kind of thing.  I roughed out a draft of a personal statement.  I read a few things.  I spiffed my syllabus, class website, and class blog.

For lunch, I had a honey wheat Flat Out Wrap filled with Sabra’s sundried tomato hummus, Amish no-salt swiss, half a (Canadian) tomato, and a Boca mushroom mozzarella pressed vegetarian thing.

Long days by myself make me want to eject myself into the out of doors to see other humans, even if I don’t talk to them.  After snacking on this half of a reasonably priced cantaloupe

I hit the pavement for a 45 minute jalk along the Olentangy.  It was buggy.  It was humid.  It was sticky.  The river was muddy and reeking of rotting vegetation and dead things.  It reminded me of driving past the C&O Canal in late August and nearly suffocating from the stench.  I also canoed in the Canal and, no, it’s not a pleasant, bucolic experience.  I arrived back at my apartment dripping in sweat and with bugs hanging out on my upper arms and chest, but satisfied that I was able to complete 10 intervals of walk 2 minutes, run 1.

This week’s grocery run was hampered by the fact that I still didn’t have the money OSU owed me so I had to stick to only the veggies that were on sale and many cans of beans.  I’ve managed to throw together some interesting soups with these ingredients and yesterday’s dinner was no exception.  I started a pan with EVOO and a clove of garlic.  I then added a quarter of an onion and some baby carrots.  I let those go for a bit and then added a drizzle of sesame oil, a splash of low sodium soy sauce, ground black pepper, a bay leaf, hot chili powder, and lots of ginger.  I stirred.  Then I added some rinsed and drained black beans, some low-salt diced tomatoes, and a couple handfuls of mushrooms.  Here’s the pan.

After those ingredients got comfortable, I deglazed with chicken broth and let it simmer for 10 minutes.  I then added handfuls of spinach.

I forgot to take a picture of my bowls as I consumed this delicious and healthy and filling dinner, but I was far too hungry.  The black beans and carrots provided body and substance and the soy, sesame, and ginger gave it an Asian-inspired flavor so, despite the lack of meat protein, I wasn’t hungry for sweets the way I usually am when I don’t eat meat.  In fact, I haven’t eaten meat since Sunday.  That’s a long time for me.

My last summer weekend in The Cleve was a hodge podge of good, local food, riding around, and strenuous exercise. 

I was feeling low and overworked when I arrived in town on Friday night, so MDB and I headed to #1 Pho, a place I discovered while in my first writing conference at Cleveland State.  As a side note, that conference changed my life in many ways.  I read my work for the first time.  I – silently – rubbed elbows with other writers.  I met BK, but didn’t know it.  I met KB, but didn’t know it.  KB and I talked about starting a writing group.  The first one didn’t work out.  We tried again, and invited BK.  And then we invited SS.  And then we had the Cleveland Heights Writing Group.  KB had a friend, MDB.  In fact, KB was late to an afternoon workshop during the writing conference because she’d had lunch at #1 Pho with MDB.  MDB liked writers.  He read blogs.  I had a blog. 

Anyway.  #1 Pho.  We split chilled spring rolls with pork, shrimp, and cabbage wrapped together in rice paper, served with a sweet and spicy dipping sauce, and garnished with peanuts.  For our main, we both ordered the #1, their classic beef pho in a cinnamon-esque broth with noodles, sprouts, Thai basil, and hot peppers.  Pho makes me feel soft.  It makes me feel warm and tenderhearted towards mankind.  I also had Vietnamese beer, so that could be part of the softness and tenderheartedness. 

Here is a suspended animation shot of me about to devour some Pho.  If it looks like I’m pledging allegiance to the Pho, it’s because my dress was low cut and not cooperating.

After #1, we weren’t ready to go home yet so we headed downtown and nabbed an excellent parking space in the alley next to Johnny’s Downtown.  The lake wind was fierce as we walked the crowds on West 6th.  OSU and Toledo had their “game” in Browns Stadium the next day so the usual drunken shouting and lurching surrounding OSU games came North.  MDB went to Toledo for a year so he was thrilled when he saw the rare Toledo shirt.  He also treated me to his version of the Toledo fight song.  His lyrics involved dildos.

We ducked into the downtown Phoenix, ordered warm beverages, and listened to the Black River Belles do a few songs before making our way back to the car and through the night city to University Heights.  We hadn’t had a city date in a long while.  I’d forgotten that there is a clock on the front of Tower City. The scaffolding is gone from the top, too!  It looked naked.  There is a new club called Lust and it was empty.  Anatomy was as empty as the first and last time I was in there.  The Blind Pig was hoppin’, as was Blue Pointe, XO, Johnny’s, Crop, and The Metropolitan Cafe.  We saw 2 Bentleys.

On Saturday, we drove out east on Mayfield, way out, in search of an orchard.  We were in southern Ashtabula County when we figured out that we were on the wrong rural road and had driven past any place where the orchard might have been.  We detoured through Amish country and ended up at Middlefield Cheese where we bought no salt swiss, smoked salami, and Farmer’s cheeses.  We asked for directions to an orchard and, after some wrong turns, somehow ended up where we wanted to be in the first place:  Sunrise Farm in Burton, Ohio.  We picked up half a peck of honey crisp apples, a maple chocolate thing for MDB, and a cashew chocolate cluster for me for road snacks.

After a stop at Stone Oven and Trader Joe’s, we headed back to the house and (finally!) hung the closet doors.  We have closets.  They have doors.  Huzzah huzzah.

Dinner was mini steakies marinated in EVOO, pasted garlic, balsamic, cumin, and chili powder and then grilled medium rare for me and bloody for MDB.  We scrounged for sides and came up with sauteed onions and oven roasted carrots.  Here’s my plate backed by a glass of Montepulciano.

Sunday morning breakfast was a protein and carb power hour for our bicycle ride.  I had a toasted English muffin with honey and Greek yogurt with raspberries.  We loaded up the bikes and headed for Peninsula and the Canal Towpath.  Here’s my bike, pre-ride.

And here I am at the 8 mile point.

Here’s MDB at the same point, but with his ankles covered in weird burrs.

We rode 16 miles that day.  A record for me.  It felt unbelievably great to do that, and with some leg left over after we got back to the car.  In celebration, we went to lunch at the Peninsula Winking Lizard.  I had a Beck’s Light.

And one of their seasonal specials – a tomato, basil, mozz, and red onion salad onto which I added a side of grilled chicken breast.

In the background, MDB is handling a delicious Buffalo chicken wrap.  Afterwards, we stumbled back to the parking lot (legs having seized a little in the A.C) and headed home to an afternoon of Browns football that was beyond disappointing.  I had a mochi.

We defrosted pork chops and MDB covered them in a cajun-inspired rub involving cloves and other ingredients while I made a salad salsa thing with tomatoes, basil, and mint from our garden and 2 small avocados.  I dressed all in juice from 1 lemon and 1 lime and S&P.  We also heated up some brown rice.  Towards the end of the chops’ grill time, MDB brushed them with honey.  Here’s my plate.

Um, if I may say so, my salad salsa thing was probably the best I’ve made and it paired perfectly with the honey brushed chop.  Oh, delicious. 

This past weekend was a delightful respite from my Columbus rice or pasta n’ beans routine, but it was still wallet friendly. 

Now, back to the business of rustling up that refund money…

It’s gray here in Columbus.  Gray and damp and humid.  My favorite, save for the humid.  My third year of graduate school starts on Wednesday.  My third and last.  This is the last time I will anticipate school starting, unless the universe somehow wrinkles and I end up in a PhD program.  Or, if the universe turns inside out and I end up with a fellowship or residency at a place involving a school year.  My feelings about these things are as gray and dull as today’s weather.  I need some hope to spring.  Perhaps a newly finished story will do that.  Certainly, yesterday’s 16 mile bike ride with MDB did that.  I felt healthy and fit and competent, even as I sat down to lunch at the Winking Lizard and had a beer, calling it a “reward.”  I was able to side step my usual Bayou Burger (cooked medium) in favor of a tomato, mozzarella, and basil salad with grilled chicken breast on the side.  I wanted a Great Lakes Octoberfest, but I opted instead for a Beck’s Light.  Small victories. 

I felt rather incompetent when I woke up at midnight – after sleeping for 3 hrs – grabbing my legs in agony.  A bone deep throb.  Every one of those 16 miles from quads to ankles.

Nothing feels the same as a finished story though.  Another one to add to the finished column.  Or the finished-for-now column.  I’d thought I was done was Story 1 last summer and then took another pass at it this August.  I ended up cutting 2,000 words and sharpening the language and pace.  I saw something new when I approached those pages.  The thought of reading them again, of dealing with them, of fixing them scared the shit out of me.  It was done!  I think it’s a better story now even though I had to “murder [some] darlings.”  The new version is out to 7 places, 1 of which returned a “no” so quickly that I didn’t believe it’d actually gone to the Northwest and back again.  The others have it in their slush and, when this is so, I’m hopeful.  I like the feeling of having a story out to new places.  Anything could happen.

Nothing feels the same as a finished story, that is, until I get some magical email.  Or do they do it by phone?  Until someone from one of those magazines calls and says, “Gina?  This is ______ ____________ from ____   __________ _______________.”

Like all good bureaucracies, OSU decided to fix something that wasn’t broken in the name of upgrading.  Unfortunately, that something was whatever database of check boxes controls financial aid and tuition waivers.  Controls their presence in my – and hundreds of other graduate students’ - bank accounts.  The short version is that some of us take out financial aid to make ends meet.  Usually what happens is that tuition waivers are put through sometime after the first of the fiscal year and our financial aid is disbursed on top of that in early September.  That disbursement results in boons to bank accounts left empty by paycheck-less summers.  We dutifully fill out our FAFSA’s, our direct deposits, and wait.   This year, we’re still waiting.  Financial aid disbursed all right.  Mine only paid some of my school bill and left me with an outstanding balance well into the thousands.  What’s missing?  Oh yes, the tuition waivers that haven’t been processed.  My fellow students have reported no answers at financial aid, no answers to email inquiries, and pointless redirections to websites that tell them to wait.  I report redirection to websites, email attachments that announce nothing, and emails that have gone unreturned.  Somehow, the word is that all will be fixed soon.  How soon?  They don’t know.  No one knows.  They need to put whomever is in charge of getting those precious football tickets out in charge of financials and paychecks.

Meanwhile, we have bank balances like $8.76.  Or, worse, – $65. 

Yes, I’m worried and frustrated and biting my nails to the beds.  My National City bill pay page has been eerily silent.  I’m expecting reminder calls any day now.  That said, this reminds me of yon undergraduate days at CWRU when I somehow made it on much less.  I had dining hall access during the academic year so three meals per day were taken care of.  I worked two jobs on campus for a rough total of 20-25 hours per week and I went out all the time.  When I went to a bar, I dropped cash for round after round after round of the cheapest beers on the menu.  I went to the Winking Lizard every Tuesday after the Euclid Tavern closed.  I didn’t sit patiently with one beer as I tend to do now.  I slapped my debit card on the counter and drank my ass off.  I bought cigarettes every other day.  I shopped at Rave and Dots and Deb and, if I was flush, Old Navy.  

Now, I hardly go out.  I don’t shop unless I absolutely have to.  Like if a pair of pants has a major hole in a sensitive area.  But the hole has to be major and the area sensitive.  I no longer smoke.  What I need to remember in this lean time is how I ate in the summers 10 years ago.  Food is the big drain when your daily expenses are gas and postage for sending stories into the void.  Here’s what I remember:

1.  Ramen – “oriental” and “chicken” made in the hot pot for style points

2.  Shells and cheese – packets of goo nestled amongst the pasta

3.  Lipton noodle packs – Alfredo in a minute!

4.  Roman Meal wheat bread

5.  Cheapest peanut butter in the store

6.  Cheapest pasta sauce in the store

7.  Beans

8.  Whatever cans of soup were 10 for $10

9.  Enormous box of off brand Cheerios

10.  Michelina’s frozen meals

11.  Reconstituted potatoes

12.  Chef Boyardi ravioli and Spaghettios – when no microwave was available, these were slow cooked in a mini crock pot for that cooking all day flavor.

13.  Bananas or grapes or apples on sale

I’m sure my sodium was off the charts, but I didn’t give a fuck.  I was 140 lbs (those were the days) with a nicotine addiction and the vicissitudes of a fledgling love life to worry about.  My grocery bill was high if it reached $30.  I got angry.  What was I doing with more than $30 worth of groceries?  I had no idea about sodium or preservatives or chemicals.  If the fat content wasn’t so bad, I ate it.   One summer, a few of us decided to get healthy with the guidance of the healthiest one of us and we started buying chicken and vegetables.  I went to Payless and bought a pair of running shoes with no arch support.  Those of us who could ran around the track where a new dorm complex now stands.  At a dinner party, a friend of mine, half in the bag before she started cooking, nearly tackled my first husband to the ground because he wanted to make a stir fry with a full fat oil.  We were still drinking and smoking and carousing, but we relied on our chicken and vegetables and fruits from a nearby farmers’ stand to feel healthy even as we detoxed from each weekend’s binges on PBR, Bud Light, Boone’s and Kamchatka with various mixers.

We were somehow healthy even as our exercise and good eating phase flickered out.  It was too expensive, we said to each other.  We don’t have time.  We resumed our cigarettes and continued our love affair with alcohol.  We were somehow happy, even when we were disappointed or the victim of unrequited love for one of the guys who played pool in the dorm lobby or fighting with our parents or getting betrayed by people whom we held dear.  In the back back of our minds, way back there, we knew whatever it was would pass.  We’d be happy.  We’d have money next week.

As a P.S. to the below, JJM passed this quote along to me during today’s Columbus to San Francisco email exchange:

“I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.”

- Gordon Lish