A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early February, 1999
Tuesday, February 2, 1999
8 PM. Last evening’s class went fine. As the class hadn’t finished reading Seize the Day, so I spent an hour talking about the book, and then after the break, I played the 1972 film version of Slaughterhouse-Five.
It holds up well after all these years, and by now the novel is taught in high schools, where some of my students have already read it.
I noticed that one student had found the old entry on me in Contemporary Literary Criticism and was passing around the xeroxed pages.
A student came up to me during the break and said he has to go home to Guyana for three weeks. A student in another class has to go to Jamaica and another to Venezuela for family reasons.
I do try to work with the night students when they have these demands. Past immigrants like my great-grandparents never returned to their native lands, but today’s immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America have close ties to their countries and go back frequently and phone regularly.
I used to think they would all assimilate, but now I wonder. It bothers me when I hear that someone like Thien or one of my students says he really feels Vietnamese or Cambodian. I want them to be Americans – but not totally assimilated because I love diversity and think increased immigration is great for the U.S.
But these are people who were born abroad. Will their kids who are born here feel differently? I don’t really know how my great-grandparents felt, but Grandma Ethel, who came to the United states at 10 or 11, felt American. She and my other grandparents and their siblings never considered themselves Europeans and never expressed a desire to see the countries in which they were born.
I didn’t sleep enough last night because I got up at 2:30 AM and began thinking about all the people I’ve alienated – Jon Baumbach, Sean, Patrick, Liz and everyone else at CGR – and all the unethical things I’ve done over the years.
After ruminating for about an hour, I was ready to turn myself into the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. I’m not a very nice person, really. While my family can be maddening, I don’t have the patience and sympathy for them that I feel I should.
Hey, should isn’t a word I use often, and let’s face it, I’m not really being honest when I say that.
Eventually, of course, I decided that I’d mentally beaten myself up enough and I dropped off to sleep for an hour, during which I had a nice dream about being in a resort hotel with Libby and her children.
This morning I made up the short-answer Organizational Communications Test – tedious work – and tonight at school I printed it out in the computer lab and made sorted, stapled copies In the Liberal Arts office.
My Writing Fiction textbook by Janet Burroway – it’s the fourth edition already – was in my departmental mailbox. That’s a reminder that in five weeks, after spring break, the second eight-week semester begins.
Larry Brandt called and offered me an Argumentative Writing class on Thursday nights starting in March, but I told him I already had the Fiction Writing class at that time.
Around noon, I went to return the videos to the Davie/Cooper City branch library, where I also got on the Web. I think I’m going to try to get my ticket to LaGuardia for one of the first couple of days of May, and if I buy it on the Web, I can get a thousand bonus frequent flyer miles.
Then, after that flight, I’ll have over 25,000 miles so I can get a free round-trip ticket. I’ll use that for my next trip to California because it’s stupid to go on a shorter trip for free.
Dad stayed out of work today because of his bad cold. Yesterday I overheard him tell Mom that Norman, his hated manager – who’s currently on vacation – has decided that he’s leaving the store for good.
But Dad is also very worried that Norman’s leaving means that he has advance word that Surreys is closing the Coral Springs store.
I get so frustrated with people who are so passive that they’re always taken by surprise and always a victim. I’m glad Marc is being proactive in searching for a new job already.
From the library, I went to the Pembroke Pines Barnes & Noble, where I had the luxury of drinking Rainforest iced tea (my favorite of all varieties) and reading the New York Times.
According to new studies mentioned in one article, people who strive for wealth, status, material success, good looks and fame are more depressed and unsatisfied than average folks. I used to want fame and success as a writer, but as I’ve gotten older, I guess I’m losing my ambition – though not quite all of it. I did, after all, initiate the story that Lourdes is doing on me for the Sun-Sentinel.
But maybe I really need to strive for what’s really important in life: self-awareness, close relationships with others, contributing to society, and my love of learning. I’ve always placed those goals above money and material possessions.
I’ve never cared about having a fancy or trendy car; my 1985 Chrysler New Yorker, for all its horrible looks, is perfect for me.
It’s amazing how I’ve actually done pretty much what I wanted to do all my adult life without ever having much money. Will I regret sacrificing security when I get older? Nah.
In a few months I’ll be starting a new phase of my life (notice I didn’t say “a new life”), living in a city I’ve visited only a handful of times, studying journalism and probably being very poor.
Thursday, February 4, 1999
3 PM. I wish I’d been able to find the time to walk for 40 minutes or so the past couple of days, but when I’ve had the time, I’ve preferred to do what I did in the last hour: lie down and go into a demi-sleep to make up for night time sleep deprivation.
This morning I went to Nova’s computer lab at 9:30 AM and did a few things on the Web that have made me feel I accomplished something.
On the Delta Air Lines site, I bought a ticket for $96 from Fort Lauderdale to LaGuardia on Saturday, May 1. That’s the earliest possible time I could be leaving Florida, as my last Fiction Writing class is on Thursday night, April 29, and I’ll need the next day to hand in grades.
Also on the Web, I used another credit card to put down a $100 deposit for an efficiency at Graduate Gardens and Graduate Halls, the University of Maryland off-campus housing, located one to two miles from campus in Hyattsville.
One development is on Adelphi Road. I remember that street from my visits to Kevin Urick in 1981 and 1982. Of course, this is just to put myself on the waiting list for an apartment in May, and there’s certainly no guarantee one will become available.
I’m just hoping some people move out after graduation, and most incoming grad students will wait to come until August rather than when the summer session begins.
Maryland is beginning to seem more real now.
Alice emailed that her brother and his family will be moving back to Washington in late May, too. She said that this weekend she and Peter are having a fancy 21st anniversary party at a restaurant, and of course she invited me to come up for the weekend.
She reported that her brother and his son were in New York recently and she enjoyed traipsing around with them; her nephew, a dinosaur fanatic, loved the museum of natural history.
Alice said she wishes she were selling more books, lamenting the troubles of the publishing industry and literary agents in particular: “I hope I can stay in this business another five to ten years, as I’d planned.” What does Alice intend to do: retire in her fifties?
When I’m on the Nova campus in the middle of the day, I’m constantly running into former and present students: “Hello, Mr. Grayson!” It would be a lie if I said it’s not pleasant. As at the University of Florida Law School and Brooklyn College when I was an undergrad or at Broward Community College, it’s nice to be in a place where everyone (or lots of people, anyway) know who I am.
At Taco Bell, I had a big Diet Pepsi while I graded some more papers. I’ve only got two left to do for tomorrow, and I should have plenty of time while my class is taking the exam in Boca tonight (assuming that my car manages to get me there).
I’ll bring along the rest of today’s New York Times and other schoolwork as well. If last evening’s Organizational Communications class is a guide, I may not get home till 10 PM.
The Senate “trial” resumed at 1 PM, and later today, they’re going to vote on 
whether to have Monica Lewinsky testify live and whether the three witness videotapes should be released to the public. It’s just a load of bullshit to me.
A year from now, I’ll be a reporter for the Capital News Service, presumably writing stories about the work of Congress. Perhaps I should keep a diary – not just this one, but one with lots of description and reportage, something I could turn into a book. Well, that will have to wait.
I hope to make at least a couple of good friends when I’m in the D.C. area. In law school, I was friendly with everyone, but I didn’t socialize much – not really much at all.
Part of the reason was that I didn’t have the same goals as the other law students – I didn’t want to practice law – but part of it was just me holding myself aloof.
When I did join the No On One campaign and later the Human Rights Council and worked at CGR, I felt more like I had friends in Gainesville – but I still didn’t socialize very much.
I need to do that in Washington, even if it’s not at the journalism school or the university. I definitely plan to join a gay organization; I’ve got to fight my tendency to be a recluse.
Saturday, February 6, 1999
9 PM. Last evening I began rereading The Crying of Lot 49. I wish I still had my old Bantam paperback edition; I remember the psychedelic drawing of Oedipa Maas rocking out in her paisley top and miniskirt and the Paranoids band behind her.
As I reread the book, I recognized some of the excitement I felt when I came upon the novel in high school. But my students are going to have a very rough time of it, as even I can’t follow the conspiracy plot carefully, and Pynchon has some very complex sentences and obscure references.
But I hope some in the class can learn not to worry about what they can’t understand and enjoy what they can. That must have been the attitude I came to the book with when I was a teenager.
It reminds me of how exciting the 1960s really were. I can remember discovering Vonnegut when I bought Cat’s Cradle at the Walt Whitman Shopping Center in Huntington before Vonnegut became a cult figure. His work really spoke to me then. I wish I could recapture the pleasure and excitement fiction gave me when I was an adolescent and young adult.
Of course, I haven’t read much fiction in recent years. Once I became a fiction writer, it began to seem like too much work.
I’m sort of that way with everything.
When I was learning computer education, I was excited by the new field, but gradually, working as a computer educator, I lost interest once I could see that artificial intelligence had its limits, that teaching Basic and Logo programming didn’t seem to lead anywhere, and that most computer-assisted instruction (CAI) software was junk.
After a while, the law also lost its luster when the initial exhilaration of legal study as a first-year student faded, though reading appellate decisions and law review articles still provides me with intellectual satisfaction.
I was thinking today, though, that my career has been less disjointed then it initially appears.
After all, once I found my home in academia as an undergraduate in Brooklyn, I never really left higher education. Since 1969, I’ve been either a college student or a faculty member. That’s because I love learning and teaching.
For all academia’s drawbacks, it provides a community that is generally liberal, tolerant and – as corny as it sounds – at its best, I have felt nurtured there. It’s also a place where I had the ability to compete.
Yeah, I can be cynical and scathing about the exploitation of adjuncts, the laziness of tenured faculty, the petty politics, political correctness, grade inflation, pomposity, you name it – but I have to say that I feel at home at Nova, the way I felt at home at UF, BCC, CUNY, LIU and other campuses.
And I’ve also been consistent in continuing to write and to publish, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or just completing my diary entry every day for the last thirty years.
I got a brochure for Bread Loaf 1999 today. In 1977, William Meredith, during his lecture/reading at the Little Theater, said that as he got older, it was important for him not to write and to publish. Only as I get older do I understand his thinking.
Of course, I could be justifying my own laziness, but sometimes I’m very proud of what I haven’t written: a memoir, a screenplay, or a solipsistic one-man show/performance piece.
Tuesday, February 9, 1999
9 PM. Last night’s Lit class went fine although there were some strange people in the class, like the kid Nick, who has some kind of psychiatric problem that’s evident in his affect and comments, and Ayome, the Nigerian guy who left the class for a while to take a nap and then returned.
But showing scenes from the video of Seize the Day seemed effective in leading to a lively conversation afterwards as we returned to parts of the text.
Then I introduced Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Which I expect will be hard for some of them to understand.
At home, I printed out some Nexis articles on Pynchon, including a New York Times story about the sale of his letters to his agent Candida Donadio, that I remembered clearly because it appeared on my first full day in California last March: that Wednesday when I left the Motel 6 in Santa Clara and went to Villa Montalvo for the first time.
Nearly a year later, I still can’t get over what a privilege it was to spend last March and April in Silicon Valley.
In reading the articles on Pynchon, it was news to me that he was born in Glen Cove in 1937 and was the salutatorian at Oyster Bay High School in 1953. That was probably the last time he was definitely seen in public.
My students seem fascinated by Pynchon’s reclusiveness – although he has an active life under a different identity.
When I got to the DMV on University Drive and Pembroke Road there was an enormous line that went all the way outside. They were telling even people with appointments to wait on the line.
After seeing that it wasn’t moving, I started back to my car when the loudspeaker told the people with appointments to move inside and line up at the reception desk. From there it took about 35 minutes until I had my eyes tested (I wore contacts and had to squint), paid $15, and got my new photo ID driver’s license.
The photo is, oddly, just about the best picture I’ve taken in years: owing to some photographic quirk, I look younger and more handsome than I actually am.
The license, which was going to expire on my birthday this year, now expires in 2006, but of course I won’t be a Florida resident much longer. I’ll probably not get a Maryland driver’s license unless I buy a car there and need one.
As I don’t expect to live in Maryland for more than a year, I doubt I’ll apply for residency. My status as a student will let me keep my Florida address, and I can still register to vote in Maryland, I think.
Anyway, I need to remain a Florida resident through the end of my grant this coming summer.
Dad was unable to keep his appointment with the cardiologist who’s been treating him since the angioplasty. This is because the HMO won’t let him see that doctor anymore, and Dad’s primary care physician has to refer him to an approved one.
But Dad was also concerned about his vision problems since last week’s cold, and he went to Bascom Palmer (although they won’t let him go back there after this visit) where Dr. Cousins said that the floaters that have reappeared may go away with time or they may not, but the pressure behind the eye was normal.
Dr. Cousins told Dad – and another ophthalmologist in the room – that Dad’s cataract surgery was the worst botched-up operation he’d ever seen.
He went so far to say that the doctor who performed it “should not be practicing in this country” and that Dad is lucky to have any vision at all.
Whenever I bring up the possibility of suing the original eye doctor for malpractice, Dad reverts to his nervous, helpless state and doesn’t want to talk about it. I’ll be happy what I can leave Florida and get away from my parents and Jonathan.
Marc sent me the Body Electric video in today’s mail, and I also got the report based on my FAFSA form.
Just my luck: I’ve been selected for auditing, so the University of Maryland is going to need several documents from me to verify my financial statements, and I’ll have to file an amended report once I do my IRS paperwork and file my tax returns.
I spent hours reading two chapters in the Organizational Communications textbook and putting an outline on the computer. We’re supposed to do a third chapter this week, but I can’t see how we can possibly get to it.