Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Thursday, September 21, 2000

3:30 PM. Last night wasn’t quite as bad as the sleepless night I had two weeks ago. I did, after all, get some rest – from perhaps 10 PM till 1:30 AM.

But after that, I was awake. I tried every anti-insomnia trick in my playbook, but nothing worked, as I expected.

Perhaps the expectations were the problem: a kind of performance anxiety creeps in, and I monitor myself struggling to fall asleep.

But at least I didn’t feel the kind of crazed despair I felt two Wednesday nights ago.

Professor Sylvester kept us till 8:30 PM doing a complicated rewrite assignment for two hours. Every once in a while he would give us facts about a huge fire in downtown Tempe as they would come in to an AP desk or local paper, and we would have fifteen minutes to do the next rewrite.

The professor did mention my note about Nixon, and he thought refusing to look up info on Tricky Dick for extra credit “showed class.” I settled for my B grade on the story.

During our break, I went to the Student Union with Neil, who told me about his internship working for the broadcast company covering the local professional hockey team (whose name escapes me).

Like a lot of the guys and some of the women in the M.M.C. program, sports are Neil’s only interest in the media; he couldn’t care less about government or public affairs.

Anyway, I came home and managed to fall asleep, but I had too much on my mind to stay asleep. As I’ve learned from past experience, having a late-night class and then an early-morning one is not a good combination.

As tired as I was this morning, I managed to be spontaneous enough in my 7:30 AM class at Mesa Community College, discarding the ad hoc “lesson plan” of going over the chapter in our snoozy text for something more lively – to the point where one student asked how much coffee I had.

“None,” I answered, “but it’s all fake, my energy level. Like acting.”

When Professor Sylvester said that some reporters who are the most scared of deadlines become adrenaline junkies who thrive on quick rewrites, I could relate. As a teacher, sometimes I perform best when faced with a challenge to make students interested in a somewhat dull subject.

That is probably also my strength as a writer, and I can understand why Tom feels my latest fiction lacks the energy of the old experimental stuff.

Well, if I ever go back to fiction, perhaps I’ll find a new way to play to my strengths.

It’s like how I’ve always loved radio and TV interviews because it’s a challenge to deal with the back-and-forth of responding to another person’s comments and questions.

I went to the dentist at noon today, and of course they proposed a treatment plan running to $2,000 – including extractions of my two remaining wisdom teeth.

I made an appointment to fix the fillings that have fallen out, and I’ll see from there. I hate going to dentists because they propose all this crap which would be fine if I had unlimited funds – and I hate to hear their scare tactics.

My feeling is, I wait till it breaks, and then I fix it. Still, the knowledge that I can’t afford the dental care I probably could use brought me to my low point of the day. It’s one more thing – like insomnia – that I can’t control.

Of course, a pop psychologist like Susan Jeffers would say I can control the way I react to the lack of control. While that may be true, I’m not at my best at coping on only three and a half hours of sleep.

Still, I’ve done okay, and If I can get through tonight’s Media Law class, maybe I’ll get better rest tonight.

My beard looks pretty skeevy right now, and I mostly look slovenly. But I’ll try to get past this point to see how it will come in.

My chin whiskers look silvery, but they were the same way three years ago when I shaved off the beard – probably as a reaction to the life change of leaving Gainesville and my job at CGR.

Speaking of UF, I read in the St. Petersburg Times that Kenneth Nunn resigned as associate dean of the law school over a faculty flap; he wants to make hiring minority faculty a priority while others, like Joe Little, want to fill slots based on subject area need.

*

8 PM. I’ve been so depressed the past couple of months in Arizona that I figured I should record my thoughts while I’m feeling good for a change.

Since I may battle insomnia again tonight, I don’t know how I’ll feel at 1 AM if I’m tossing and turning, and I want to write now because this is just as real as insomnia, despair and anxiety.

I left for school at 5 PM, when it was about 98°, ten degrees cooler than the week before.

Drowsy again, I began to feel tempted to close my eyes on the freeway, so when I got on campus, I got a small iced tea at the Coffee Plantation stand near Dixie Gammage Hall, not far from Stauffer, where the Cronkite School is.

David Bodney couldn’t come tonight, but he sent his law partner Peter Swann, who proved a first-rate lecturer as he went over the Arizona public records law.

The students in the class surprised me with their excellent comments about the cases, which they’d obviously read and thought about.

Of course, the students who spoke were a minority of the class, like Wayne, who’s taking the LSAT in two weeks, and Jennifer, who just graduated UVA and is quite smart.

Swann discussed various cases, like the Republic’s successful attempt to force disclosure of what was in the AIMS test, the state’s “pass-to-graduate” competency test that over 90% of the students failed, The lower court’s decision now being appealed by the state Department of Education.

If anything, the Arizona public records law is superior to that in most states, though I suppose Florida’s is pretty good, too. That’s comforting.

Anyway, class let out at 7:30 PM, and I stopped at Whole Foods Market to buy milk, yellow sweet potatoes, those couscous wraps I love, and some cereals.

Driving back home, I felt really good. Actually, I usually feel good after my grad classes. I really love studying the law.

Yesterday I wrote for an application for the July Arizona bar exam. If I do decide to take the exam, it’s better that I do it in the summer, when there’s no adjunct work and no grade courses, than in February.

I’ll need to pay rent in the summer if I have to stay here, so I might as well study for the bar.

I’m worried about the character-and-fitness investigation – my CGR leave-taking haunts me – but we’ll see how I feel about this in a few months. The deadline for application is probably in January.

Even if I failed the bar exam, I’d at least be studying law again, and that would be fun.

---

Friday, September 22, 2000

9 PM. I’m tired after the week even though I can’t really say that I worked very hard.

Last night I slept okay, managing to fall back asleep every time I awoke until I finally got up late for me – at least these days.

School today went all right as I went over the model exploratory essays in our textbook. Trish Murphy is going to visit my English 105 class next Friday, which she called “not an evaluation but a celebration of your teaching” in the best PC/euphemism/feel-good/self-esteem fashion.

Still, I filled out a form about classes next term and left it in Myrna’s box, asking for three classes, preferably one of the more advanced classes and going down to English 102. I put English 101 dead last in preference.

I don’t know if they’ll offer me classes, and I might very well be better off if they don’t, but for now it’s smart to preserve my options. I can always turn down classes later.

The one thing that does stand out in my mind from today is this annoying ditzy girl coming up after English 105 and wanting to whine about minority scholarships as I tried to get away from her because her clueless racism so angered me that I was afraid I’d say something really nasty to her.

What I hate is when white people expect that because I’m white, I’m going to agree with their backward viewpoints. This girl never would have talked about this with me if I were a person of color.

She’s just an ignorant child, but she soured me for about an hour.

---

Tuesday, September 26, 2000

1 PM. I didn’t expect to feel overwhelmed by despair today.

Yesterday after getting the message from Peter about Andreas’s death, I got a message from Chuck Kelly of the Arizona Republic.

On Saturday, after Mom had given me another one of those “State Line” essays from the Sunday Arizona Living section, written by an Arizona author, I decided I’d email Kelly about my idea for an essay whose premise would be that where I live now looks exactly the same as my old neighborhood in Davie and every other suburban neighborhood – with the same big box stores, supermarkets, banks, artificial lakes, stucco, etc.

Kelly thought the idea was good and told me to get started on it. He’s going on vacation for ten days but said I could send it as soon as I finished, along with a “chapter excerpt” from my book, a photo, and a bio note.

The pay is $500, which floored me since I would have figured it would be more like $100. Now I’m scared that I won’t be able to do a decent job, and I’m dealing with the agony of having to write an article that would give me a great showcase and let people know who I am and that I’m not some bimmie freshman comp teacher.

Of course I’ll get it done, and this initial panic is part of the process.

Yesterday I went out to Borders after speaking with Alice, and I graded papers, which sickened me. I could see how stupid I was to mark up the MCC students’ papers the way I did.

I’m not a good teacher for these guys, and although my lowest grade was a C, I did give a lot of C+ grades, which used to be as low as I would go at Nova, and which were almost a substitute for F.

So on Thursday, I’ll have conferences with those who want to show up, and next week I’ll lightly correct and highly grade their revised papers.

But I feel bad about myself, bad about the low standards they have here, bad about a lot of things.

Alice’s grieving for Andreas will go on for a long time, and thinking about her in my usual self-centered way only reminded me of my own sadness.

Maybe I’m mourning the loss of my life in New York and Florida and the loss of that part of my identity. At CGR and then again at Nova, I had full-time jobs and enjoyed my work and liked being recognized and respected as smart and competent.

Here I feel that nobody knows me, so I have to resort to showing Debra and John at MCC my clips from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, as if that makes me worthy of being a person.

Anyway, I slept about seven hours last night although I was wide awake at 4 AM. It seems like I now get up between 3 AM and 4:30 AM every day no matter what time I fall asleep.

I still feel tired today, but probably part of that is depression. I don’t feel up to doing anything: not grading my ASU papers or writing my essay for the Republic or doing reading for my grad classes or calling the three guys who answered my Planet Out ad.

Oh, the other good news I got today was from Tracy at DLB: they probably will be able to fit in the three reviews of The Silicon Valley Diet, which will be great.

That should be making me feel excited and happy. But I just want to cry.

*

8:30 PM. Soon after finishing the last entry, I dragged myself over to Dobson Ranch Park, next to the library and golf course.

By the lake, I watched the ducks, which are handsomer and more subdued than Florida’s Muscovy ducks, though they must be related to them.

I wish I could say that going to the park and watching the ducks made me feel better, but I still felt drowsy and sick, so I returned home after ten minutes.

I guess I started to feel better at 3 PM, when the New York Times called to say they wanted to print the letter that I emailed them after I read Abigail Thernstrom’s op-ed page attack on California’s new law helping students with public college tuition, which she called a misguided entitlement.

Decrying grade inflation in the high schools, Thernstrom nevertheless said that “B is not exactly a bang-up grade.”

I wrote a rather fussy letter saying that a B used to and should still represent good, solid achievement and is not anything to be ashamed of. I mentioned today’s experience of being told that one student’s B+ was the lowest grade she’s ever gotten.

The Times sent me their edited version, which I okayed. At the end of the letter, they wrote, “The writer teaches English at Arizona State University.”

Well, if it’s in the New York Times, at least someone may notice.

I felt good enough to exercise to a Body Pulse low-impact aerobics tape, and then I managed to write a paragraph and some notes for my Arizona Republic article. If I can get it done by this weekend, I’ll be thrilled.

I did the reading on Arizona’s open meetings law for Bodney’s class, and I read and commented on my ASU English 101 students’ little plan for their papers. Then I watched Big Brother and read a few book reviews.

I have a mustache and circle beard now; this morning I shaved off the sides. At least I know I can grow a beard in a week’s time.

At Albertsons this morning, the cashier asked me: “Do you really go through all these vegetables in a week? I see you come in here and are always buying these frozen vegetables.”

Yes, I explained, I eat a lot of veggies because of my strange diet.

In a long email, Tom wrote about his Lowlands Press book sales, his poems, NOCCA, Debra’s work, and the news that he was invited to give a reading in Stuttgart on Election Eve at the successor to the Amerika Haus cultural center there.

Somewhere else, I read that Debra gave a talk on Walser in Saratoga Springs . . . I’ve forgotten the name of the college there. (Senior moment.) Tom said that Debra rarely lets him know what she’s doing these days.

And so I’ve muddled through another day in Phoenix.

---

Saturday, September 30, 2000

8 PM. I’m tired but have a feeling of accomplishment. After working on my State Lines column for the Republic for most of the day, I’ve got what seems like a pretty good almost-finished draft.

It needs editing and proofreading, but the vast majority of the work is done, and I think the newspaper will print it.

Of course, we’ll have to see what happens. There’s no rush since Chuck Kelly won’t be back from vacation until next week. Still, I felt I needed to do the writing this weekend, and I didn’t procrastinate.

I began scribbling this morning at 10 AM on the blank space on pages of the New York Times at the Barnes & Noble in Ahwatukee, which is where the column opens.

I kept feeling inspired and returned to scribbling ideas as I read a few articles in the paper.

This afternoon and evening, I first typed up what I’d written down and then used my hard copy to revise and then work on screen for hours.

Hopefully, I’m not just under the delusion that the piece is adequate, that it will stand up when I’ve got some distance from it.

Ordinarily I’d want to read as much of the Sunday Times online as I could tonight, but I’m not up to staring at the screen anymore.

However, I checked the Letters to the Editor section and saw that I will be in print tomorrow with three other letters on Abigail Thernstrom’s op-ed piece on California’s higher education plan – and it looks like our letters have the main position.

At least a few people should notice it, especially “The writer teaches English at Arizona State University.” So at the moment I feel about as good as I have since I moved here.

Maybe I am becoming an Arizonan. As I said in my article, it’s not a bad place to study American culture circa Y2K – mainly because it’s the same as everywhere else.

If the Republic does print the column, they’ll have my photo and a bio note, and I’ll have to find an excerpt from “Diet” that they can print without offending people uncomfortable with homosexuality.

Online, they’ll link a chapter – in my case, a story – from the book, and there’ll be a link to Amazon.com.

Someone at the ASU creative writing program will have to notice it. Well, I’m getting ahead of myself; Maybe Chuck Kelly won’t like my essay.

Last night, as usual, I woke up wide awake at 3 AM even though I had less than five hours’ sleep. But as I did yesterday, I managed to force myself back into a light sleep, this time from 5:30 AM to 7 AM.

After breakfast, I went to Basha’s, where I used a $5-off coupon I’d gotten in the mail to buy six bags of groceries. Then I got some gas at the Mobil station next to the shopping center and came home to exercise, shower and dress.

I left the Barnes & Noble at 11:30 AM for the Wendy’s across Ray Road because I felt shaky with hunger. Before coming home, I stopped off at Trader Joe’s.

While I listened to All Things Considered, I wrote out checks for credit card payments through the first half of October – and then realized that I had to go pay the rent before the office closed at 5 PM.

I’d wanted to call Sat Darshan, but it’s probably too late now.

Richard Kostelanetz emailed me a happy new year greeting, and tonight I really do feel that during this Rosh Hashona I am starting fresh.

Part of me says: “Beware: you may be living in a fool’s paradise.”

But how come no part of me ever says, when I’m feeling depressed: “Beware: you may be living in a fool’s purgatory or hell”?

It hit 103° today, but I just expect that by now.