Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Tuesday, March 2, 2000

8:30 PM. Last evening I indulged my secret vice: watching the WB Network’s Dawson’s Creek and Roswell. What will I do in Tallahassee, which has no WB affiliate?

Since I lived in Gainesville without cable TV, in a city with no CBS or NBC affiliate, I probably will also go without cable in Tallahassee, either, and just go cold turkey on high school soap operas.

I’ve just returned from the office, which I deliberately avoided until after dinner. I got my day class’s syllabi all printed out and xeroxed. I’ll do the evening class’s syllabus this weekend.

But I can already feel myself detaching from Nova, which is natural. In this final semester, I’ll do the best I can, but I’m not going to drive myself crazy.

Having managed to sleep well again last night, I’m beginning to remember how it feels to sleep eight hours a night. Too bad I go back to sleep deprivation starting Sunday night.

This morning I left here around 9:45 AM and stopped at the Davie library to check email. There was a note from Teresa – I really miss her – and Kate Gale said my books are at the printer but there’s a delay, and instead of having the books at the end of March, they won’t be shipped until the second week of April.

“No problem,” I wrote back. “Whatever.” (Kate probably thinks I must have undergone a lobotomy.) The truth is that I didn’t expect to see the books as early as mid-April, much less in late March.

Anyway, that’s another reason not to stress out so much about my Nova teaching this term: I don’t know that anything will come out of The Silicon Valley Diet, but pushing the book will do a lot more for me than anything I can do at Nova.

Obviously I don’t want to screw up at the end of my career at NSU the way I did at the Center for Governmental Responsibility at UF, so I will try to be on my best behavior.

From the library I drove to the Pembroke Pines Barnes & Noble, where I saw that the Times had a feature on Dennis Cooper. What shocked me was the photo: at 47, Dennis looks so old.

I don’t like violence, so I’m not so interested in reading his work although I’m glad to see that his books are getting critical respect from academics and some literary types.

My gay-themed stories are as far from Dennis’s fiction as you can get: they’re essentially the equivalent of high school girl romance novels or the WB soap operas, at least as far as their view of gay relationships is concerned. In my book, nobody even sips wine. Maybe that’s why I think it might appeal to certain teen boys.

I drove down Pines Boulevard to BCC-South, where I found Patrick outside his office talking with the students on the P’an Ku staff.

We went to the cafeteria for lunch with Kyra and Mont, who’s now the provost of South Campus. Patrick and Kyra are obviously delighted with his taking over that position.

BCC is building a new center in the county’s Southwest, but it will be staffed with adjuncts and full-time faculty who’ll commute from South.

We talked about Jeb Bush’s One Florida plan and articulation between the community colleges and universities, Bush’s push for an FSU medical school, and his resistance to a minority law school at FAMU.

Mont says that BCC has been behind in online courses but that South Campus has an incredible number of computers: right near us in the cafeteria were a row of fifteen PCs, to which students could just go up to and search the Web.

Kyra apparently has a New Age-y book coming out. She told me that she went to Arizona State, which has a great Art Department. This past week she was in New York and got caught in the huge demonstration protesting the not guilty verdict for the cops who shot Amadou Diallo.

Patrick said he’d like to arrange a reading for me on campus in April, and of course I’ll be grateful for that.

Back home after lunch, I called Richard Kostelanetz. He wanted to know why I thought he’d be crazy to live in Broad Channel, and I explained about the mentality of people there and how, though it seems geographically closer to city than Rockaway, it’s actually more isolated because there are no stores, restaurants or post office.

Richard seems genuinely interested in moving to Rockaway, but his space requirements – for his books – are going to make the kind of place he needs difficult to find.

Richard said he gave up on Alan and Carl Karpoff’s mother Marilu and her assistant at the real estate agency. I imagine he drove them crazy the way he often can drive people crazy.

Still, I enjoyed talking to Richard, just as I enjoyed having lunch with the people at BCC today.

So yes, I do feel I’m having more of a vacation now.

I got another reply to my Planet Out ad, and this time I replied, mostly just to get a pic. The guy gave me all sorts of numbers – cell phone, pager, beeper – and he sounds a little bizarre.

Plus he hates rap music, like every gay white guy over 30 I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a big hip-hop fan, but I have a really hard time with close-minded people.

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Monday, March 6, 2000

3 PM. Remember my dream the other night about the plane landing on the streets of Los Angeles? This morning I woke to news that a Southwest jet bolted the runway as it landed and came to rest near a gas station outside Burbank Airport. How weird.

Last night I slept well, but not enough. Once I was up at 4:50 AM, I couldn’t get back to sleep.

At my office at 7:20 AM, I had an hour before class to check email, Lexis/Nexis, and do other stuff.

Justin said that his play was a big hit at the Turnip Festival. He’s got a new part-time job (with benefits) working with theater groups at the Henry Street Settlement House; the pay isn’t good, but the kids there are enthusiastic.

Unfortunately, Justin doesn’t have the time or money to see his plays that are being produced in Los Angeles. He said that Larry’s work is part of a group show at a Philadelphia art gallery, and they’re going down there tomorrow to see it.

Patrick responded to my comments about P’an Ku and said BCC’s spring break begins on Wednesday, but the cafeteria and other services are closed today and tomorrow.

Patrick also once again expressed nostalgia for the reverence of the life of the mind that he experienced at the University of Buffalo.

I went to my first HIST 3020 class – Constitutional History II – at 8:20 AM, but the only person there when I arrived was Janice Weed, who gave me that horrible evaluation last December for Constitutional History I.

We chatted about her Millennium honeymoon in Manhattan until finally the other students straggled in. Tommy, Jordan, Sheila, Rosario and Lubna from Legal Research and Writing are in the class, as are a couple of other students I already know.

I began by apologizing for not being a historian. Then I went over the course outline and explained how we’ll be working on the material. I let them go early to buy the textbook and returned to my office.

During the next three hours, I had students coming in to see me, phone calls, and other school business.

On Wednesday there’s a Liberal Arts Division meeting at 3:30 PM, and I’ll probably attend even though the meeting is about the new curriculum, which won’t affect me because I won’t be around next year.

Home during the noon hour, I read and made notes for a lecture on a basic introduction on torts for tonight’s class. There will probably be more students in the class than the fifteen I’ve got on my roster, and it’s likely I’ll get new ones next week. The class is in that horrible Sonken Building, where I don’t have access to a VCR.

I’m going to lie down and rest my eyes for an hour and then have a bite and go over to school early. Tomorrow I’ll need to prepare by rereading the chapter on the Civil War Amendments.

Marc called from the kiosk where he was working today. He’s coming in from Phoenix at 5 PM two weeks from Wednesday, so I can pick him up at Fort Lauderdale Airport, though he says he’s tentatively rented a car and may not need me to. He just doesn’t want to pay more than $200 for the week.

Gianni was supposed to be coming to the U.S. today, though with him, one never knows. Perhaps I’ll hear from him; perhaps not.

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Tuesday, March 7, 2000

3:30 PM. I’m cranky from lack of sleep. I just exercised to a second hour of Body Electric so I can avoid working out at 6 AM tomorrow, when I’ll probably still be tired.

Tonight I’ll be watching the Super Tuesday primary results although since it’s a foregone conclusion that Bush and Gore will win all or most of the states, I don’t need to stay up late and wait for all the returns to come in.

When I get cranky like this, I think that George W. Bush is exactly the kind of President our country deserves. The economy will turn lousy, and Bush will be incompetent, and maybe suddenly people will forget about Clinton’s supposed moral failings.

Last evening’s Private Law and American Thought class went all right, I suppose. I got to Nova at 6 PM and spent about an hour introducing myself, the course as I’m teaching it, the syllabus, etc., and then I lectured on torts in general until about 8:30 PM, wrapping up with preview of the theme I’ve chosen for the class: mass torts.

There were fifteen students, the majority of them former students of mine, but I got the feeling that they were not that thrilled with mass torts or what to them is a heavy reading list. Hopefully, some of them may come around to appreciate books like A Civil Action or The Buffalo Creek Disaster, which I love.

At the office, I played on the computer for a while and then came home to watch Ally McBeal, but mindless TV couldn’t get me to unwind, and I lay awake in bed for hours.

When I did go into my morning REM sleep, I had bad dreams – like the one where I was staying at Justin’s apartment in Park Slope, but all his pets (dogs, cats, birds) were yelling that they wanted me to leave. I guess I must feel unwanted.

I did go into school today, for an hour in the morning and then again in the afternoon. Oh, how I hate dealing with grade-grubbing students, like the one I gave an A- last term to who today said, “You’re killing me!” because I’m dooming his chances of getting into medical school. (He’s such an asshole, he’ll never get in, and if he did, he’d be a horrible physician.)

I did change two students’ grade on my own as well as another one because I felt slightly bullied into it.

Jaime, of course, canceled our Saturday lunch. Suddenly he’s got tickets to Titanic. People don’t change, and he’s still the same jerk I thought he was when he kept using excuses canceling all our scheduled meetings back in the fall of 1998.

I only feel bad that I allowed myself to be fooled again. But Jaime just made me feel even more sour on life.

I went to a tag agency, where I was told that they need not only the transfer title and the emissions report and registration, but I have to have an insurance card.

So I called Geico and added the Mercury to my existing policy. In the next week, when I get the card, I can go down and pay the $230 or so to transfer title from Jonathan to myself.

Back at home, I made sure I carefully graded the legal memos by my current students who will want to see their papers tomorrow, and I wrote to Patrick and a couple of other people.

At noon I listened to Jeb Bush’s State of the State Address. Outside the Capitol in Tallahassee was Florida’s biggest political demonstration ever, against the end of affirmative action with Jeb’s One Florida plan.

At least I know that at Florida A&M, most of my fellow students won’t be conservative – though I do expect them to be fairly homophobic. Today I learned the LGBT group at FAMU never got enough active members, so they had to join the gay group at FSU.

I probably would have more qualms about going to a historically black college if there weren’t also a major university in the same town.

Still, moving is kind of wrenching.

I remember my plans to move to Tampa in the summer of 1994, and that trip I made on July 4 weekend when no real estate places were open: I was coming down with a bad cold, and the whole day was a disaster.

Hey, at least I’m not sick now. But in 1994 everything worked out for the best, as I stayed in Gainesville and eventually got the job at CGR.

I will probably have some rough moments in the next few months, too, but eventually everything will work itself out.

I’m proud that I continue to take risks in my life. I think of all my friends who opted for security and played it safe. Yes, it would be nice to be financially secure like them and not worry where my next paycheck will be coming from. But boredom can also be a bad feeling.

Okay, so I have problems with permanence – but I don’t believe I’ll ever feel that my regrets outweigh the value of my experiences.

This year as a visiting professor of Legal Studies at Nova was a good experience, and I’ve stretched myself. But I am in Davie, teaching – which is what I was doing 18 years ago across the street in the English Department at BCC-Central – so it’s not as if it’s all been foreign to me.

Now I’m going to lie down and listen to NPR. Then I have to prepare for tomorrow’s class.

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Friday, March 10, 2000

9 PM. Today was an excellent day. From the time I awakened from a dream in which an adolescent me was getting admiring stares from young women as I bicycled barechested in the Lincoln Court bungalow colony of my childhood to coming home with five bags of groceries a little while ago, I was full of energy.

Probably another good night’s sleep helped. I know I measure my sleep like an obsessive hypochondriac, but I’m convinced that sleep deprivation causes a lot of my mental and physical problems – even though I often can function at a high level on little sleep.

At the office at 7:10 AM, I began entering addresses into my address book, and by the time I left the office at 4 PM, I got past 1800 entries without feeling that I’d done much work.

My Constitutional History II class went all right although I stumbled a little bit. But as Teresa said, history is probably one of the easiest subjects to “fake it” when you’re teaching.

Teresa said that Jade is thinking about becoming a social studies teacher although Purchase has no education courses and few history courses – at least according to Teresa.

During spring break this semester, Jade will be home, working at Martin Viette. Teresa says Jade sees the end of college a year from this summer and she doesn’t want to give up what Teresa called “her easy life.” Who would?

From 10 AM until noon, I worked on my own stuff in my office after first dealing with some students. One, upset about her B- in Con History I, asked if Dr. Lindley was around, and I lied, hoping she wouldn’t see him before he could escape to the airport in Santa’s car.

I collected some more names from Planet Out, where there seems to be a lot of thoughtful and intelligent cute guys out there – as opposed to the ones who answer my personal ads.

I wrote to Mark, who was off yesterday due to a teacher’s prep day. The New York City school system now seems more like the suburban systems – but it could be that I’m used to things as they were in 1968, when I last was a public school student and that everything has totally changed in the last 32 years. Certainly colleges have changed in that time.

The Times had a front-page story on “sudden wealth syndrome” in Silicon Valley and the havoc caused when young people find themselves rich beyond their imagination.

These days, it seems, everyone wants to be a millionaire by 24, and of course, garden-variety millionaires are now . . . well, a dime a dozen. And I keep reading stuff about Gen Y’ers worth many millions of dollars on paper – or the high school kid computer whiz in today’s paper whose summer job netted him $70,000 in stock options.

Tonight I went to the Sawgrass Borders, and as I read the next chapter in the Con History text, on laissez-faire constitutionalism in the Gilded Age, I kept seeing analogies to today’s world. Except then the U.S. was moving from a local agrarian economy to a technology-driven national industrial economy, and today our tech-driven “new economy” is global and based on the Internet.

Alan Greenspan is determined to keep raising interest rates until he can slow down the stock market, but “old economy” stocks are doing terrible while the Nasdaq index has doubled since last summer and hit a record 5,000 this week.

When so many people are questioning whether we’re in a bubble economy, can it really be a bubble?

My “Silicon Valley Diet” story already seems totally out of date. The Silicon Valley I lived in two years ago wasn’t awash in e-commerce, and only a couple of Internet firms had gone public by March 1988. So much for trying to be trendy.

I went back to school after lunch and a short rest, to collect my pay stub and do my own “work”: stuff like checking out iUniverse’s Toolkit for Authors on publicity, marketing, etc.

In the mail today Geico sent my new insurance card (and bill), which means I have everything I need to do the title transfer – but I better make sure I have a screwdriver to put the new license plate on.

Tonight I put on one of my nice new short-sleeved sport shirts and cargo pants, so I was under the delusion that I looked pretty good.

However, the only person at Borders who kept coming over to me was a boy about 2 or 3, and it turned out that he was fascinated by the straw from my iced tea. His mother kept apologizing, but of course I was delighted by the interruptions to my reading.

Leaving the bookstore at 8 PM, I stopped at the Publix at Pine Island Plaza for what I thought would be just a couple of items but ended up as $50 worth of stuff.

You can now see the new Bank of America signs under the NationsBank banners at both the Publix locations and the branches, so I guess the name change is imminent in this state.

Kevin said he’s starting rehearsals on Sunday for a new play he’s in. I congratulated him for dropping his pants at the end of the last performance of Oliver!.