Innocence and Panic

My friend Erica reminded me that it has been a while since I wrote on here. It wasn't that I had forgotten, of course, but merely that I've been seriously self-censoring. March was full of panic, which extended all the way into April.

I briefly and unwisely got myself into a "relationship situation" -- which if you know me at all, will know that it is a little like a diver caught in a bed of kelp... stuck underwater and as the air supply depletes, increasingly paranoid about exactly what it is one is cutting away... kelp or one's own hoses. Anyway. I survived. Barely. It was very unwise. Really... the correct answer to the Gatorade commercial is "No, I don't have it in me." Spare everyone the grief already.

If a fool were to persist in his folly, he would become wise. I think I'm wise enough now. You never know what is enough unless you know what is too much. I think I now know what is too much. I even agree that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. (But why is it that the proverbs of hell make so much more sense?)

Despite the drama... I managed to get one thing done. I submitted my application to UVic on time... and got my offer of acceptance letter... and confirmed my acceptance of the offer. I am now a grad student.

I had always wanted to go to grad school... though what I had in mind was always something more along the lines of philology... rather than this Masters in Public Administration, which, if there was an opposite to an MFA in Creative Writing, would be it.

I've been sick for a week now. I'm still recovering from strep throat and the flu. My car is still in the parking lot of the West Coast General Hospital (I hope) from which I was discharged on Thursday. Shawn has rescued me twice now... and I am grateful for his friendship.

I've been doing some reading while I've been sick... Neil Bissoondath's The Soul of All Great Designs, which frightened me into acknowledging the gravity of my predicament... Marie Phillips's Gods Behaving Badly, which was fluffy and light... A.M. Holme's This Book Will Save Your Life, which it doesn't... but as low on the literary totem as it was (it'd be the underground bit that you couldn't see), it was still readable in the sense that it was fluffy and light... and... one more book-- the suicide-inducingly disappointing collection of short essays Nobody's Mother.

I bought and read Nobody's Father on the ferry some months ago. It is a collection of essays on what it meant to be childless in our society written by 23 men who are "Nobody's Father." It was an interesting read... interesting enough for me to go in search of Nobody's Mother, the book that precedes this by two years, which the Globe & Mail reviewed as "...essential reading for holy warriors, right-wing demographical hysterics such as Pat Buchanan, and any young girl considering what she might do with the 70 years or so that stretch in front of her." I can't blame the review... after all, it didn't suggest that I read it, I who am trying to stay ahead of the game by examining my anti-natalist views before the horloge biologique hits me like a tonne of bricks.

The collection is seriously disappointing... the essays are written by 21 women... but they all appear to be the same woman. They even teach the same subject at the same university. There is no fresh thought, no original argument, no inspiration. Unlike Nobody's Father, there was no celebration of childlessness. It's sickeningly depressing... and pretty much makes me want to go get knocked up before I become one of them. This is not what I had in mind when I picked up the book.

I'm better off sticking to Schopenhauer. And in the meanwhile, I've just hit the big snooze button on life-- grad school.