Consistency

I refuse to have New Years resolutions, for a thousand reasons. More interestingly, though, I can’t make any resolutions because I am stubbornly always going to be this person.

Tonight Cheng Mun and I Zoomed with some potential fellows for next year. Afterwards, she read some of her old application essays aloud. I hadn’t saved mine to my computer, so I had to log into Interfolio to see what I had written for my own. Just under a year later, it is interesting to see what I was thinking at the time and what I thought the application readers would want to read from me. I wrote those essays in a few hours in early January, at the kitchen table on Tulip Street, a glass of sour beer next to me. Reading them again, I could’ve written them now. Some lines are slightly more cogent versions of sentences that appeared in my PhD applications. Some pieces of that application were eloquent (and at the time, I felt certain that they would be well received) and I am glad I got to read them again. At the same time, I am filled with a little bit of sadness about what I thought would be desired of me in this job and how horribly it contrasts with what has actually been expected. All of the things I wrote, the things I thought I was hired for, have been received with confusion when I have voiced them here. In my IEP, I have had to spend a lot of time explaining why the things that I am knowledgable about are true and real and important. In the application process, I thought the fact of my hiring was proof that those things were also valued here.

I knew I would be hired for the job. I said many times that I did not know how it would turn out, but that I would be very surprised if I did not end up with a job offer. Now I wonder what about me seemed desirable. Did I seem like the kind of person who wouldn’t try to put up a fight or try to change things? My mother says that her best friends always says that when you get a job or acceptance, it’s also a little bit of an insult. They see something in you. You can’t always be sure the thing they see is your talent. Maybe it is just your willingness to go along with some idea they have about the world.

Pangs of something

I am sitting at a table in one of the classrooms at NYUSH. I feel the table shaking slightly because Julius sits next to me, writing as he does in the notebook where he seems to do all of his thinking. He is wearing a peacoat inside. He looks extraordinarily European.

It’s finals week here and the office building--university is extremely quiet. It does not have the manic, unhinged quality of finals week that I always relished at Bryn Mawr. I used to love going into the library at that time, when it would be open 24-hours a day, and soak in the absolutely reckless vibrations of every other stressed undergraduate. Once during a writing center shift, an older woman called me over to the beanbag chair where she was wrapped in one of our communal blankets. “Wake me up at nine PM,” she said, as if I were nursemaid, or her mother. “A fews ago my alarm didn’t go off and I woke up at midnight. All the lights were off and I had to call public safety to let me out of the locked library.” Finals week should feel a bit like that, like waking up in the dead, cold library at midnight because you decided falling asleep at someone’s workplace was the way to go. But now, the hallways are empty and there is a sense of letdown that is decidedly un-December.

A few weeks ago an Amazon package arrived from the US for me. I fetched it from the university mailroom and brought it up to the fifth floor. Inside was a tiny Christmas tree and miniature ornaments, made in China and sent to the US, where my mother picked them out and had them sent from the warehouse to me in China again. Opening it, it felt briefly like an integration from an old life to the life I have now.

November

Every few weeks I think about writing a post about how strange it is to find myself living here every day. When I first came, I thought a lot about how it was “only 10 months,” as though it was something I needed to suffer through, counting down the days to the ending. Sometimes I still feel like this. The semester is coming to a close and there is a sense of relief in that; it is half over. I admit that some things about it are hard. But mostly I just feel weird that I am living each day, still my whole and complicated self, eight thousand miles away from “home.”

I have felt this way before, showing up in another country and looking at the sky and just marveling at the fact that I made it to a far away place, where things are happening just the way they are in the US or anywhere else in the world. It is the surprising feeling when you realize just how many people live in the world, are living at the same time as you. This feeling is greatly enhanced now that I am properly living in another country. I buy groceries here; I go to work here. I go out with my friends and I watch Hulu on the couch on Saturdays. Yet I am also incomplete in certain ways. “It’s really not my home,” think to myself (a la Joni Mitchell) every few days. And who do I talk to about it? Almost no one. One of the strange aspects of this fellowship is how little all the fellows talk to each other about how bizarre it all feels. We mainly talk about the GPS course the first years take, or what restaurant we want to go to, or what graduate schools we want to apply to. I think on some level we are trying to maintain an image of intrepid world travelers. Which we are, of course. I wouldn’t take that identity away from any of my colleagues. I still think we all have done something sort of strange and wonderful and something most people would not do.

I remain proud of myself for coming here, even though I am “so far” out of college. It all happened so quickly and part of me is still living in June, waiting for it all to commence. I am very glad not to be living then, though. I could not do quarantine again. I do not know what I will be doing when I am next in the US, though I don’t have as much anxiety about it as I’d expect from myself. Except for health insurance, which I am very concerned about.

I am trying to write these graduate school applications and have more or less lost sight of anything to say about myself.

Skate Country

Today I felt at peace for the first time in weeks, maybe. I biked with a friend to the West Bund (the riverside on our half of the city, Puxi). They went for a run while I put on my brand new roller skates and tested my hand (feet) at the pavement there. A group of us have taken up rollerskating. Sunday was our first trial run, but the landscape we chose for the venture was made of brick and it was exceedingly hard to skate. I felt myself wanting to wrack up the momentum I am used to, but it was simply too challenging. I fell on my ass plenty of times, much to the amusement of my friends and every Chinese person in the neighborhood (yes, a lady filmed us and sent it to her friend on WeChat).

But tonight I was alone in a lovely dusk by the river with miles (kilometers, even) of paved road. It was what the Rillito River aspired to be, before it realized it was limited like many of us by its geographical circumstances. It was a funny parallel to all the hours I used to spend on that riverwalk in Tucson. The river is the hub of the city—all the major skyscrapers are there and at night they are beautifully lit. One phallus-shaped building flashed like a rainbow barber’s sign. The road was smooth and I quickly remembered that I know how to skate. I cruised down the river at my own pace, passing lots of people and tiny dogs. It was breezy and perfect. I was alone but not lonely in a way I haven’t been since I moved here. I felt very much at peace, in touch with myself and my feelings. I am supremely grateful for this experience.

Today I decided that I will most certainly be applying for graduate school this application cycle. I paused my Chinese lessons so I could devote more time to it. It is a bit of a crunched process but there isn’t really anything I am as good at as writing things, particularly application essays. I miss school and I miss having things and goals to work towards. I have learned so tremendously much in the past two and half years. I am so glad I took the path I took, although sometimes it feels like the years of my life are slipping away at an alarming rate and I am aging externally without growing much inside. I will be 25 in exactly two weeks. I am trying to pretend it doesn’t scare me a little.