A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late October, 1999
Saturday, October 23, 1999
4:30 PM. My “Writing for Webzines” workshop went well, but it exhausted me. I’ve been home for nearly three hours, yet I’m still feeling wiped out.
I got to ArtServe at the Fort Lauderdale branch of the library nearly an hour early, at 9 AM, just because I’m neurotic. And since all the computers in the library were busy, I didn’t have much to do.
Although eight people registered – including Lenny Della Rocca, I noticed – only four adults my age or older showed up, and most of them are heavily involved in writing.
Boyd, a retired physician, had a book on creative writing taken by Doubleday as a result of an editor seeing it up on the Web; Marzi is a widely-published op-ed and feature writer who’s a lawyer and teaches at the University of Miami Law School; Diane is a poet and short story writer; and Owen is a technical writer for Siemens whose mystery novels “have been rejected by every publisher and agent in the business.”
It was a good idea that I included material on electronic books, books on demand, and using the Web to promote your writing because they weren’t very interested in publishing short fiction in webzines – which was the listed subject of the workshop. Owen in particular seemed to have an exaggerated sense of how much money can be made from publishing short stories on the Web.
With my notes and the help of the participants’ contributions, I went for three hours without taking a break, though each of them left at one point – to use the bathroom, I assume. In my last hour of teaching, I started to feel puckish and probably my blood sugar went down.
Anyway, I’m glad it’s over, and while I feel a sense of accomplishment, I also feel drained. I don’t really have to do any work for the rest of the day, and I don’t have the energy to drive to Coral Springs to see if the Sunday New York Times is in when I haven’t yet read Saturday’s edition.
Today would have been a perfect day to spend outside because it’s been sunny, mild, dry and relatively cool. I think I’ll open my glass door now to get some fresh air, actually.
Since I returned my home, my only trek out of the apartment was to fetch the mail from my mailbox and the email from my office computer.
I wrote Vish a note saying I didn’t feel comfortable with his staying over in my apartment since I haven’t yet met him in person, and that he’s welcome to visit if he understands that he’ll be staying at a nearby motel and that he can’t assume anything sexual will happen.
If he goes ballistic over this, it will just confirm my judgment that I’m doing the right thing. If he’s hurt, better now than later. He’d left another E-greeting card that I’d deleted when I saw it was Susan Polis Schultz, mistress of treacle verse.
At this point I’d be happen to break off all contact with Vish. I liked him at first but he came on way too strong and seemed to blow our relationship all out of proportion.
But the experience with him and the one with Tim in San Francisco is useful because I myself have acted similarly in the past. Look how antsy I got last fall over that dopey but very cute kid I met at the video bar on Las Olas or with the Puerto Rican shrink who who persuaded me to get naked on the first date but never called me again.
It’s so easy to get infatuated with someone over the Web – as I did (and he with me) just before I came back to Florida when I started emailing that guy Bobby, the singer in Miami Beach with two kids.
The two best relationships I’ve made from the Web were with Gianni, whom I met the day after he got my reply to his ad, and with Kevin, who was so far away that I knew we’d never meet for a very long time.
I also seem to have now gotten past the infatuation stage with Jaime. We’ll never be close friends, but we like each other.
Monday, October 25, 1999
2:30 PM. I’ve never really liked those days when I don’t teach until the evening because they seem to constrict my daytime when I get all anxious about the class.
But given the choice between teaching one night a week and three day sessions, of course, it’s easier to teach eight classes rather than 24 – or even the 16 of the Tuesday/Thursday schedule.
Last evening I watched Felicity and read a bit, getting to sleep around 10 PM. It is kind of nice not to have to rush anywhere in the morning, though I still managed to get to school at 10 AM.
I sent emails to Sat Darshan, Jaime and Alice, and I read Vish’s notes about his being “very disappointed” with me. He said he’d thought I had a sense of humor and that his remarks about my thinking about him and his sexual prowess were just kidding around.
Well, they probably were, but online, without a smile or look, it’s hard to distinguish between sincerity and kidding. He got a bit huffy, and I don’t know where we go from here.
Perhaps it’s a fatal flaw of mine that I get antsy when guys like Tim or Vish become so intense, and so I look for ways to cool off the relationship.
On the other hand, I feel differently with guys I meet in person and click with. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t find either Vish or Tim all that appealing.
In any case, it’s not like my life feels empty without a boyfriend; I guess I worry more about feeling tied down than I do about being lonely.
I did a lot of Web research on Sherman Alexie for my Core Studies class. His Web pages seem a bit too self-promoting for my tastes, and his later novels don’t sounds as appealing as The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but he’s still a writer I admire and feel a kinship with.
Leaving Nova at 11:30 AM, I bought some groceries at Publix, did the laundry and have been reading the paper. I need to review the material for tonight’s class, but I’m not following Joe Cook’s admonition to “wallow” in it – probably because seventeenth-century English and colonial history is only mildly interesting to me.
I’m doing the best I can. After all, I’ve taught classes in the Bachelor of Professional Management program like Organizational Communications, where I know even less about the subject.
This morning I wore my contact lenses, my long-sleeved Nautica black shirt with green stripes and my stonewashed black Guess pants. It’s too bad last week’s haircut was too short because short hair accentuates my wrinkles and wattles.
*
10 PM. I suppose tonight’s Constitutional History I class went all right. I’ve got about 14 students, and we’re crammed into a little room way out in the new modular Marketing Annex “building.”
I felt I did a poorer job than I did in any class I taught last term, but this stuff is so unfamiliar to me. All I know about stuff like the Stuart Restoration and the Glorious Revolution I picked up from offhand reading or by watching BBC costume dramas like The First Churchills.
Next week I’ll still be a little shaky. I guess I need to do more work and preparation; I’m teaching this like I used to teach the BPM courses, relying almost exclusively on the text. At this point I almost hope the students don’t do the reading.
At least I have two students from last term who are taking the course out of sequence and who know I’m not totally incompetent.
I spent the afternoon reading and resting and accomplishing very little. The Bank of Hoven sent me a check for $442.22, the return of my security deposit and credit balance for the secure Mastercard I canceled. I put the check in the ATM at NationsBank before I got to school.
Well, at least I’m prepared for teaching Alexie’s book tomorrow. I plan to stay home all morning and not go in till 12:30 PM.
Tuesday, October 26, 1999
8 PM. I kept replaying the tape of my hesitancy during last night’s class as I lay in bed, so after dozing off briefly, I was up until about 3:30 AM. At least I got to read much of Sunday’s Arts and Leisure section rather than merely toss and turn.
Try as though I could, it was difficult to sleep much past 6 AM, so I operated all day with little sleep. However my energy level was high, perhaps because of the cooler-than-normal weather. Only now do I feel all systems shutting down, and that’s after two glasses of iced tea and Barnes & Noble this evening.
This weariness is probably a false alarm, and in a little while I’ll be wide awake. I do wish I could get myself on a later-to-bed, later-to-rise schedule, but I’m basically a morning person.
After exercising this morning, I made a two-week car rental reservation for Phoenix. I’ll have to return the car the morning I’m leaving and get someone to drive me back to Sky Harbor in the evening. My America West frequent flyer number is okay for both the flight and the car rental.
I went to Nova at 10:30 AM though I came home an hour later for lunch.
Today was Santa’s and LaToya’s shared birthday, and I’d contributed towards cards and gifts. Marie insisted I take a piece of birthday cake back to my office, but not finding anyone on whom I could foist it, I ended up feeding my garbage pail.
Lots of email today: students wanting to know their grades first of all, students wanting to give excuses for not showing up today second of all.
Vish said he hoped everything was okay now, and when I said it was, he told me he was happy.
Travis, the guy from Charlotte, told me about an LGBT youth conference in D.C. that he attended with “6 youths” from his group. He asked when he can visit me. Him, too?
I think Travis – who still avoids telling me his last name – is more interested in seeing Fort Lauderdale’s gay clubs than he is in seeing me, given that he’s a hot young guy. I guess I could hook him up with Jaime and his friends, who could take him out on the town.
I also heard from a woman who answered the ad I placed in Phoenix. A 29-year-old artist, she sounds great – I’m bi enough to be turned on by lipstick lesbians – but I’ll have to see whether she replies again when she finds out I won’t be around for seven weeks.
Tom wrote about dealing with a boring visiting novelist, Ann Patchett, coming to guest-teach in his Tulane workshop and how he’s passing on her reading and also on NOCCA’s “so-called ‘party’ to ‘honor’ us no-longer-theres.”
He gave me the reading list for his spring term Short Noel course at Salisbury State: great stuff by Walser, Calvino, Mishima, Beckett and others. It’s a class I’d love to take (or teach).
Third Coast took Tom’s prose poem “Why I Hate the Prose Poem,” and he’s now got another book he can’t sell, a collection of prose poems. Two readings are coming up, and Tom expects the usual New Orleans attitude of indifference at both UNO and Tulane.
Crad sent a letter that was really a stock market report.
It turned out that Teresa and Paul did get stuck for four days in St. Maarten due to Hurricane Jose. Luckily, it was just a Category 2 hurricane, but there were floods and wind damage on the island.
They were supposed to leave on Wednesday afternoon, but all flights were canceled, and they couldn’t get out on Friday, either, so they finally got back home via Miami on Sunday night.
Still, they had a comfy condo, and they liked St. Maarten so much that they took a timeshare, getting one week for 99 years for less than the price Teresa pays for a summer in Fire Island.
Paul is still fretting over the sale of the lumber yard. Though they haven’t found the origin of the benzene, the buyers want $200K to clean up the “spill.” Hopefully, the parties will agree on a figure and they’ll finally close on the place so that Paul will feel relieved.
Teresa said that tomorrow Susan has her C-section for her baby boy and they’re already planning the bris. She concluded her email by saying, “Now I’ve got to figure out what to do” – meaning with her life.
Alice somehow got water damage in her apartment from Hurricane Floyd when her 19th-floor balcony let water in. But it all had a nice ending when Travelers/Citigroup gave her a ridiculously large five-figure sum as a settlement.
This weekend she and her brother are going to Atlanta for their cousin Mel’s daughter’s bat mitzvah. (Alice still calls it a “bas mitzvah.”)
Mostly she wants to see Mel and his brother Larry and Larry’s fiancée (“maybe wife by now”) Zoë Heller, a Vanity Fair writer.
Alice said she was interested in my take on E-rights and wanted me to talk about them at an upcoming salon that she holds regularly.
The email also contained interesting stuff forwarded by Josh (originally from Harry) and Rick. For me, the Web is like the days back when I was an undergrad at Brooklyn College and was in constant contact with so many friends.
I need to write Eileen to thank her for recommending Dr. Chusid; the orthotics do seem to be helping my feet.
In Core Studies today, we had a pretty good discussion of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven although I did much of the heavy lifting. Still, I left class feeling exhilarated.
I don’t expect my students’ reaction papers on the book to be as good as their verbal comments, but if I can force myself to grade the papers by Thursday, I’ll have a much better weekend. In Thursday’s class, I’ll show Smoke Signals.
I’ve already begun reading Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land and really like the Chinese/Jewish Scarsdale milieu, but despite the relative breeziness of the narrative, I think some of the students may find the novel difficult.
After dinner, I went to Barnes & Noble to finish today’s paper and read the Second Circuit decision upholding the rights of writers against those of publishers in Tasini v. New York Times.
Wednesday, October 27, 1999
9 PM. When Mom called at 11 AM, I knew something was wrong.
Dad and Marc went to play tennis yesterday, and Marc heard a pop in his ankle and was immediately incapacitated. He either burst a ligament or a tendon.
He’s at home today on Motrin and crutches and using ice. I’ll call later tonight to find out the doctor’s report.
And to think Mom had worried about Dad’s playing tennis for the first time after his heart attack two years ago.
Also in Arizona, today was Kiran Kaur’s and Trevor’s severance hearing in a Phoenix courtroom. Sat Darshan and Nirankar attended, and it turned out that Rebecca didn’t show up. Instead, she sent a letter saying she was contesting the severance of her parental rights as far as Trevor goes.
But the judge and Child Protective Services made sure Rebecca will be out of the picture for both kids. Sat Darshan said if that hadn’t happened, she would now be trying to smuggle both kids out of the country to stay with Ravinder’s family in India.
Now Kiran Kaur is free for adoption. But Sat Darshan said it saddened her as the court went through a list of possible biological fathers for the kids and how none of the men were remotely interested: “Not exactly a Hallmark moment for my child’s scrapbook.”
This morning at Nova, I read a law review article on queer legal theory by Frank Valdes and wrote him at the University of Miami Law School. That reminded me of Rosalie Sanderson, so I also wrote her at Emory University.
I went out to Eckerd to buy beta-carotene and a card to send out to Thien and then came back to school to xerox articles on Gish Jen’s work and search Lexis/Nexis for writing by Marzi Kaplan, one of the participants in my workshop.
Travis in Charlotte said that he was “just kidding” about coming to visit me and that it wouldn’t happen until we know each other better. “I find you interesting (not to say handsome),” he wrote.
I wouldn’t say handsome, either.