A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late August, 1999
Monday, August 23, 1999
8 PM. I just walked over to Walgreens after chatting with the 70-ish man I see walking every evening. He told me he walks an hour every day but he cut out his morning walks because the sun was too strong.
After I taught in my old shoes this morning, my foot began hurting, and this afternoon I put ice on it. I’ve been doing my stretching exercises, but the problem never seems to go away permanently.
At Walgreens I bought a get well card for Teresa’s mother. Writing just before she left for San Francisco, Teresa reported that her mother fell on cobblestones on Saturday and broke her hip.
Teresa got to the hospital after her mother had surgery to put pins in the hip. Diana had a local anesthetics, so she was lucid and talkative, but now she’s in a lot of pain and will have to stay four days in the hospital.
The surgeon thought he was dealing with an old lady, but Teresa’s mother swims for an hour every day and is not my idea of someone old though I do associate broken hips from falls with frail elderly people.
Teresa had to go to San Francisco, as Deirdre had nobody else to look after Nathaniel and couldn’t get out of her presentation at a medical conference in Tokyo, but now instead of staying longer, Teresa will return to New York right after Deirdre returns.
Teresa’s sister has to take Heidi to Binghamton on Wednesday, but as Teresa said, her mother has her father by her bedside and dozens of friends out in Mattituck.
Last night I couldn’t sleep. Probably I was a bit excited – I’ll use that word rather than anxious – about the start of classes today.
Then, at 12:30 AM, I started ruminating about all sorts of silly what-if scenarios related to my parents, Jaime, whatever.
Finally I shut off my mental chatterbox and managed to get a few hours’ sleep – enough so that I wasn’t tired today.
I want to sleep well tonight because I expect more excitement-related insomnia tomorrow night when I’ll be meeting Jaime at the Gay and Lesbian Book Group at Barnes & Noble. I told him to look for the shabbily-dressed old geezer, to which he replied with a compulsory “LOL.”
On Wednesday I have to give my first real lesson in the morning and then attempt to teach five chapters in the evening class, though I expect it can’t really be done.
Today I exercised at 6 AM, and I was in my office by 7:15 AM, dressed in a tie, dress shirt and pants.
My Political and Civil Liberties morning class had just 15 students, and if it doesn’t get larger than 20, that’s fine with me. Mike Torres and Chris Villani from the baseball team and Craig Rappaport and Jorge Garriga from my Language 2000 class are all students I’ve had before, and that helps.
Every one of the students is a Legal Studies major and nearly all went through Les’s Constitutional History I and II. Chris said Les was “boring” and another student said, “He went into things too deeply.”
Most are juniors, but I’ve got about five graduating this year and a few are applying to law school. Basically all I did was introduce myself and go over the syllabus, answer questions and try to put them (and myself) at ease.
I let them go at 9:40 AM, twenty minutes early, and then talked with one older student, a 40-year-old married Jewish guy from Brooklyn who worries that he won’t get into either Nova or Saint Thomas law schools and is afraid he’s too old to be starting law school. Of course I told him I started at the University of Florda when I was exactly his age.
For the next couple of hours I went to my office for my nominal office hours.
WT, the new head of the Writing Program, came by and took my photo with a digital camera for the department website, but otherwise I was alone.
I read part of today’s Times (wearing my contacts, I had to hold it far away) and copied files from oldest kids.
On email, Sat Darshan said she’s still congested from her cold. Today is Gurudaya’s first day at Phoenix College and Seth darshan was probably more excited about it than her daughter.
At Broward Community College, Patrick had three classes in a row. He’s teaching four sections, all different courses, and is also the advisor to both the newspaper and literary magazine.
By comparison, I felt guilty because it was 10 AM and I don’t have to teach again until Wednesday morning.
I don’t know how long I’m expected to stay at school every day, but I left at noon, changed, and went through my mail: bills, the third refund of a department store credit balance in three days, and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle and Job List.
The Job List, which I stopped getting in the years I wasn’t an AWP member, is now 80% non-academic jobs, reflecting the dismal job situation for creative writing professors.
I’ll apply for any jobs I think I have a chance to get: mostly one-semester visiting writer gigs like the one at Sweet Briar College, a place I’m familiar with from being a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
But I find reading the AWP magazine – especially seeing the ads for the endless number of MFA program – is depressing.
I saw that FC2 – the Fiction Collective successor – is now at Florida State in Tallahassee. Robin Hemley had a piece in the Job List about cover letters. He’s a full professor at Western Washington now.
Mostly I feel glad to be out of what seems like a creepy, insular world of interchangeable writer-professors.
It rained heavily again today, keeping it cooler than normal.
Thursday, August 26, 1999
Last night’s class went very well, except that standing in my shoes messed up my foot. I’d better stick to my sneakers even if it looks less than professional. I will no longer sacrifice comfort.
I’ve been putting ice on my foot since returning home last night, but the inflammation is apparent, and tomorrow I’m probably going to be hobbling again. I just hope that this episode of severe pain doesn’t continue for five or six days like last time.
But teaching Political and Civil Rights went fine last night.
There are about 15 students in the class, and last spring they got further along in Constitutional History II than the day class did – a group they said that Les often disparaged. More of the students in the evening class, as you’d expect, are older working people.
After class, I had a long conversation with one of them: Suellen Fardelmann, the longtime Cooper City mayor who moderated the 1982 Davie Town Council debate I was in and who now works at Nova running the Women’s Resource Institute.
She said I seemed very confident and in control of the material despite initially telling the class I was “only a visiting professor for this year until they can find someone competent.” (Of course, self-deprecation has always been a comfortable schtick for me.)
We went over nearly everything in the first five chapters until I started to fade out at 9:20 PM. I won’t be like Steven Levitt, keeping them till 10 PM or later. As it is, the only other person around when I finished was the night cleaning woman.
Steven emailed, saying he had heard good things about my classes (How? Does he have spies?) and that we should have lunch next week. Also, I agreed to help him run the legal fraternity.
When I told Jaime that last spring Steven had intimated that I’d better not give easy grades, Jaime said Steven himself routinely graded his “favorites” with A’s and told students that “thick” papers get better grades. Jaime also described Les as a “knit-picker” [sic].
Jaime would actually make a great teacher himself, and we’re exploring the possibility of us leading our own gay book discussion group, maybe at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center.
As you can tell, I’m okay with Jaime’s not seeing me as potential boyfriend material. I’m happy just to concentrate on keeping our friendship on track.
Kevin emailed that he’s got a part in a new play and has an audition for a better part this weekend; also, an agent is interested in representing him.
Teresa wrote that taking care of Deirdre’s kids is keeping her busy but says that everything’s okay in San Francisco.
When I got home from teaching last night, I felt exhilarated, so I didn’t go to bed early. Besides, I had to put my plastic bag of frozen sugar snap peas on my foot.
But I did rest between midnight and 6 AM, and after my usual breakfast and exercise, I went to Nova at 9 AM.
On the Web, I found a wonderful 114-page site that’s basically the notes of someone teaching a class on the First Amendment. Now that I’ve printed it out, I have an excellent resource.
I also paid for a copy of the Supreme Court oral arguments of First Amendment cases. It costs $48 on Amazon, but this version of May It Please the Court isn’t available at the library, and I think it will be a great teaching tool. Maria said that if the department didn’t have a tape player, I could order one from Media Services.
I don’t know if I’ll see Jonathan’s friend who is interested in buying my car this weekend, but Jonathan told me Dad was at the closing for the Apache Junction house yesterday.
It was the final closing, which Dad didn’t expect, so now the Graysons own the house and everything’s been turned on. They’ve got a phone number in the brand-new 480 area code.
Between icing my foot, eating lunch and reading the paper, I did a big load of laundry. I’ll probably go back to Nova now.
*
9:30 PM. So I went back to the office for a little while and got online. Then I picked up Jonathan to take him over to Sam’s garage, where his van was being serviced in preparation for the trip to Arizona.
He said he thinks it’s best to leave the cats outside and hope they will rely on their hunting skills or find someone else in the neighborhood who’s willing to feed them.
The Humane Society would just destroy them, as they’re not adaptable as pets, and he doubts taking the cats to Apache Junction is possible.
We went back at his store, where I waited outside while his friend Rob took a test drive in my car. Because we need to get a bill of sale notarized, Rob and I agreed to meet on Monday at 1 PM.
I’ll give Jonathan the cash I get from Rob and later pay him the rest of the money for the Cougar. Jonathan can’t sign the car over to me because the title is packed away and the insurance is paid for months.
Back home, I made a reservation at the nearest motel, the La Quinta Inn in Plantation, for Wednesday night, when Mom and Jonathan will be staying here with their pets.
It’s going to be a hectic week. I’m glad Steven, Patrick and Fred understood that I need to postpone lunch and dinner dates.
Pete Cherches returned my call of a few nights ago and told me of this morning’s rush hour horror in New York, when four hours of extremely heavy rain caused flooding that basically crippled the subway system and commuter lines. It took Pete over three hours from to get from Park Slope to his office at Equitable.
That was a far cry from the wonderful, relaxing time he had on his most recent trip, to Umbria and Switzerland.
Pete said he still gets the AWP Job List but doesn’t look at it anymore and said it’s the norm that most jobs now are non-academic. “There are no teaching jobs,” he says.
He also claimed to have “retired” from writing, though I suggested he could do it as a hobby, the way I do.
It saddens me that a writer as good as Pete can’t make a go of it in today’s inhospitable academic and book publishing climate. Somehow amid all sorts of casualties, I’ve managed to survive.
Saturday, August 28, 1999
8 PM. I just arrived home. It’s a pleasure to have a view of a beautiful lake and watch the waterfowl and to see the lushness of even something as tacky as a golf course.
I’d just gone over to Mom’s to get one last box of my copies of With Hitler in New York.
Coincidentally, the book was mentioned in a long feature story in the Entertainment section of the Toronto Star, about a new Hitler novel by Ron Hansen.
The article quoted Alvin Rosenfeld, author of Imagining Hitler, and gave a one-sentence description of Hitler in my story.
When I got to the house, both Mom and Jonathan were lying down, but Mom soon came out of her room and chatted with me at the kitchen table.
This cross-country move is difficult for her, but it would be for anyone. The process seems endless. All the wall units and other furniture have been moved away from the walls, and of course there are boxes everywhere.
Mom said the movers electronically tag every box and piece of furniture; I’m sure moving is more of a science these days.
All kinds of problems are coming up at the last minute, so I’m glad I don’t have anything pressing coming up this week so I can help. I’m sure unforeseen emergencies will arise.
Today I reread the text’s chapters on the two-level theory of the free speech and association and my notes on the cases.
I’ve decided it would be good to give the students a handout on how to analyze cases. I’ll be happy if I can get up to the topic of obscenity this week.
Josh IM’d me this morning, saying his face had gone back to “65%-70% normal” and that Simon and his girlfriend were visiting New York.
While Simon was in the bathroom at Josh’s apartment, his girlfriend asked if he and Simon were the same age “because you look so much younger.”
“That’s what happens when you become a Republican,” Josh said.
I found my GRE score reports and filled out the form to have them sent to Arizona State and Florida A&M.
Glancing at Yahoo Personals, I saw an ad titled “One Thousand Roses,” not realizing it would be by LATINinFL (Jaime).
He’s such a romantic. While I wish I could have been Jaime’s knight in shining armor or whatever, at this point I know that I can’t.
Still, it occurred to me to send him some roses at work. I’d like to have with Jaime the same kind of affectionate email friendship I have with Kevin and Gianni.
But I know that Jaime isn’t attracted to me, so should I just stop pestering him?
I sort of like the idea of being infatuated with someone even if my feelings aren’t returned.
I know Jaime and I will never be more than friends, but he’s someone I relate to and respect apart from any romantic or sexual feelings I might have toward him.
Monday, August 30, 1999
9 PM. I just finished exercising to a Body Electric tape. If I keep staying one half-hour ahead, I can skip my 30-minute workout on Wednesday.
Last night I slept soundly, and my foot was not much worse today though I was still limping. When I told Charles that I felt funny wearing sneakers to class, he said, “They don’t pay us enough to dress up.” So I guess I can relax about my fashion choices at work.
This morning I had time to lie in bed and get a head start on today’s Times. In my office at 7:30 AM, I checked Lexis and email and wrote to Patrick and a few others, including Jaime.
But I need to leave Jaime alone. As of tonight, he hadn’t replied but that’s fine; he’ll reply eventually because he’s polite. However, it’s in both our best interests if I back off.
On Topical Currents, WLRN’s local 1 PM talk show, I heard David Reuter, the same guy who interviewed Andrew Holleran a few weeks ago, interview Brad Gooch.
Brad can be annoying, but in Finding Your Inner Boyfriend, he makes a point that I wish Jaime would take to heart: Jaime doesn’t need a boyfriend to complete him any more than I do – or anyone else does, either.
But at least I know that Jaime takes care of himself and doesn’t engage in the kind of unsafe sex that a new government report says is raising the HIV infection rate among young gay men.
With the new AIDS cocktail drugs and without first-hand experience seeing their friends fade away, suffer and die, guys in their teens and twenties just don’t see HIV as a deadly threat.
In class this morning, I think I did a decent job covering the rest of the cases on advocacy of illegal action going up all the way to the Brandenberg restatement. On Wednesday, I’ll go into the two-level theory of free speech and begin obscenity.
Amazon sent my purchase of the First Amendment May It Please the Court tapes and transcripts, so now I’ve got 16 oral arguments I can play in class.
Because I don’t want to keep asking for a tape player from Media Services, I bought a small portable cassette recorder/player/radio at Kmart this evening.
Together the tapes and tape recorder cost me over $70, but hey, it’s just part of the long tradition of teachers always buying stuff for class out of their own pockets.
I couldn’t find Carnal Knowledge at our local Blockbuster, so at least I’ll have some media for this week. While I can’t expect my students to find the oral arguments as fascinating as I do, I’m sure they’ve never heard anything like this before, so I hope they won’t be bored.
When I returned to Nova this evening, I replied to Ben’s message asking if anyone wanted to cover a Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:10 AM to 11:50 AM section of Other Voices/Other Visions in the next eight-week term by saying I’d do it.
Tom warned me not to take on other courses, but it wouldn’t be an extra preparation and I won’t have any other classes on those days.
Actually, at this point I’m not working much harder than I did the first eight weeks last fall, when I was teaching two day sections of Language 1500 and taught evenings for the BPM program all the way up in Coral Springs and Boca Raton. Now my commuting time is barely five minutes.
Well, we’ll see if someone else wanted the class; I’ll trust fate, as I always do okay when I put myself in the hands of the universe or God or whatever you want to call it.
I called the College of Staten Island and got the scoop on how to get transcripts sent out – and so I’ve got nearly all my transcripts, as well as my GRE scores, ordered for my applications to the journalism schools at FAMU and ASU.