On Friends

The young graduate experiences a shift in his or her immediate relationships. In some ways, this is of course expected. Apartments are rented, roommates selected or avoided, housemates are coordinated, and parents are once again solicited for support (typically with the assurance of brevity under their roof). Friends disperse and move away, or the graduate him or herself moves away, setting up in a new city. And of course, boyfriends and girlfriends are broken up with, face increased phone bills, buy webcams, move in together, or get separate places, and in general learn to see and hear less or more of each other, as the many various cases may be.

Yet beyond the sheer logistics of finding new jobs and housing and cell phone plans—and beyond the immediate heartbreak of partings—a subtle change begins to affect how the recent graduate relates to others. There is a lesser-marked sea change, which I have encountered in my experience. It seems to me that it has something to do with shifts in schedules, priorities, and much to do with the loss of a contained campus. No matter how busy the student’s life may be, I would argue that this is a shared life: to some degree, it obeys the same clock, calendar, and geography. The beauty of the campus is that it provides a bounded space and culture: no matter what your own path may take, friends are all around, all the time, in every day and class and exam and dorm and dining hall.

The graduate, however, experiences an individuating phenomenon.

For me, I stayed in Palo Alto. I said goodbye to most, though hardly all, of my Stanford acquaintance, and I moved in with my boyfriend in a small, one bedroom apartment, a matter of a biking distance from the University. My boyfriend, you see, is still a graduate student.

I was ecstatic about this change, and I still am. Stephen is by far the best roommate I’ve ever had. He’s quiet and I’m comfortable with quiet; he deals with my hysterical bouts better than any friend of mine I’ve ever known (largely, I suspect, due to the fact that girls tend to feed off of other girls’ hysteria—but I digress). Despite some difference of opinion regarding the correct frequency for doing dishes, we work well together. And, lest I fail to mention, it is possibly the most wonderful and satisfying feeling in the world to get to share your life with someone you love.

So we moved in, and I reorganized my bookshelf, and I started a new job. And before long, I felt isolated. Despite the fact that I had a boyfriend turned roommate, many friends nearby in apartments, and friends still on campus, life was suddenly much, much lonelier. I achingly wished I could simply stroll down the hall and flop on Alyssa’s beanbag as often as I wanted. I missed being able to count that I’d sit by Killeen in Chaucer and naturally could have lunch with her afterwards. Now, I had to call my friends. I had to set things up.

Setting things up seems very, very simple. It’s remarkable how big of a deterrent it can be to people of my age level. In my life as a recent graduate, I’ve become aware that to a greater or lesser degree, every time I want to see a friend, I have to organize and make it happen. And accordingly, it has become very clear to me which of my friends are actually capable of doing this and willing and able to put in the effort (as little as the occasion may require!), and which are simply not. Some friends are good at this. Some are utterly miserable. None are perfect.

Some embrace social planning whole-heartedly. I would include myself in this group. We’re all about our Gcals, we respond promptly to emails, when we receive a suggestion or an invitation, we don’t just say “Sure!” we say “When?” and “Where?” Others, I believe, have a sort of carryover mentality from when they were students. They are vague on details, not great on follow-through. If in fact they have calendars, it is not at all apparent that they use them. And of course there are all sorts of gradations between the two extremes.

I began to realize that I was going to have to relate to different friends by different sets of rules, according to each of their capabilities. My friend Becca is a professional tutor, and she works until 9 each night. With my work schedule, I go to bed at 9:30. There’s pretty much one evening a week I might be able to see Becca, if I can catch her. My friend Killeen is chronically late, to pretty much everything, completely democratic of level of importance. I try not to see movies with Killeen, or go to restaurants where we need reservations. My friend Lucy is challenging with with complex logistics. I avoid doing things with Lucy that would require advance planning, the purchasing of tickets, or the coordination of a group of people. I’m bemused by friends who only respond to certain forms of communication, in favor of any others. Lessons learned: Paco is wishy washy on email, but lovely on the phone. Silas and my brother Jason will ignore any and all Facebook communications. My friend Kay only responds to text messages. Literally. This is a pretty tough one for me. I’m not a huge texter, and would much rather email/chat/call. Sometimes I email Kay and then I send her a text message to tell her to check her email. It’s not very effective. I don’t see Kay very much.

The worst are the friends who are grad students or doing academic research, and really just don’t get it (the “it” being the you-have-to-actually-exert-yourself-if-you-care-about-seeing-me). Their lives haven’t changed. They still stay up until 2 or 3 am every night, they automatically have people in their labs and classes who are doing the same things that they do and interested in the same things that they are. I’m sure they love to hear from their former undergrad friends, but they don’t need to relate to people the way working graduates are motivated to reach out to their friends. I recently had it out with my friend Margaux, doctoral candidate in cancer cell biology at UC Berkeley, and, hardly a week later, my friend Kate, future doctor of veterinary medicine at UC Davis. Margaux, admittedly, has always been tricky to pin down. Kate simply seems extraordinarily overwhelmed these days. Regardless, events culminated in my feeling hurt and frustrated, largely due to my impression that neither of them were putting in any effort towards our friendships. Many conversations later, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are still wondering at what exactly I was being so uptight about.

It’s an adjustment, for sure, and a lesson in loving your friends for who they are, and not accusing them for what they’re not. And after a lot of moping and finger pointing—and more drama than I’d care to ever partake in again—I think I’m ready to develop a personal resolution. I’ve spent far more time being lonely and resentful of my friends than anyone ought. Better to let it go, and actually try to be a better friend to the people I love. If my friends have felt anything like I’ve felt in the past year, well, they could certainly use a good friend about now.

Interconnectedness is the assumption of the college student, and adulthood can be staggeringly lonely at times, even under the best of circumstances. Yet, there’s also something wonderful in venturing into the unbounded territories beyond the campus. We have the opportunity to reinvent and redefine ourselves, and part of that is the person we want to be and the role we want to take on in our myriad relationships. I, for one, hope to have many friendships and relationships throughout my adult life, and I intend to keep working at them.

Limbo

The thing about interning is that you’re just never entirely convinced. At any moment, it feels like the work you’ve done and the effort you’ve made could just go up in smoke. At the end of my six months at the publishing house, the understanding is that if they are unable to hire me, they’ll “make a few phone calls.” At least, that was the understanding that I tried to voice during my original interview, and again after three months when I sat down with my managing editor and got my second offer. Now, however, I entertain doubts. I’m in debt, and I don’t know whether I should keep on top of job searching and I really don’t want to.

It’s a dull sort of niggling sensation, behind everything that I do or feel these days. It’s aches, this lack of certainty. Sleep deprived, I ride the trains to and from this gorgeous city and I want to move there but I persuade myself that I can’t, not yet. There is too much to figure out first, too much unknown.

It could all vanish—San Francisco, writing, editing—just like that. I would have to scrap it and start over again, and who knows where I’d end up. I had a conversation with my best friend from high school recently, and she voiced something that I’ve heard a number of times over the last year, from various close friends, in various refrains.

“You know, Becky, I have friends that I worry about,” she smiled, “but you’re just not one of them. I know you’re going to be fine.”

“Yeah, well, I wish I knew that,” I laughed.

Time is never wasted. I’ll have learned something, after 6 months, right? As long as I truly believe that, that can’t vanish, surely.

And so I keep riding trains and repeating to myself, the promise that the rock of the world was founded securely to a fairy’s wing, perhaps, after all.

An Ode to Tutoring

“WHETHER I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens



* * *

It’s Saturday morning at 8:45 AM and I am already fully dressed, sitting in a classroom and sweating bullets.

The high school students are on their way.

It’s a practice SAT morning, and for the first time in my life, I’m not taking the test. I’m proctoring, another one of the many benefits that comes from working for a test prep tutoring company.

I can’t remember being more scared of anyone in a really long time. In my mind it doesn’t feel like so long ago at all that I was at Taft, but scanning the room, I don’t recognize these people. They terrify me. They almost look like adults but they’re not. I am sure that given the incentive, they would eat me alive. How is it that anyone actually teaches difficult subjects? All I have to do is watch a clock (I forgot my stopwatch at home, of course), and even so I’m at the brink of a nervous breakdown. I’m sure they could mutiny at any moment, and there would be absolutely nothing I could do.

23 has never felt older. A couple of days ago I learned that Heidi Montag is 22—a year younger than me! I felt stunned but silly at the same time, aghast that I’m starting to overtake celebrities and that shows and movies and popular narratives are no longer centered around my age group. Superficial for knowing let alone caring who Heidi Montag is.

Even worse, I’ve turned into the kind of person who willingly gets up early on Saturday morning, puts on a company t-shirt, and sits through a 4 hour exam because her day job pays so lamely that she simply needs the money. I’m pretty sure my 16 year-old self would emphatically not approve (especially with regards to the t-shirt). She would have never made these choices. Or would she?

There was so much I didn’t like about that person when I was her—her awkwardness, her inability to talk to boys, her incredibly harsh treatment of certain friends—that I have a hard time separating all that embittering and clouding insecurity from what she actually must have been like. I am sure she was quiet and smart and inept. I suspect she seemed promising to her teachers and parents. I wonder how much of her is still here, in whatever it is that I’ve become, and honestly, what she would make of me.

A Fear of Homelessness

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Bauer, had strong feelings regarding the treatment of homeless people.

She was a tall, kind woman. We had just finished a unit on saving the wetlands. You could tell that Mrs. Bauer was the kind of person who really cared about this kind of stuff, and not just because you had to. Sometimes I imagined her at home in the evenings, worrying about the environment. I would picture her and her husband at the dinner table, discussing important issues.

"Mr. Bauer?" she would say.

"Yes, Mrs. Bauer?" Mr. Bauer would pause, a forkful of green beans suspended in midair.

"I've been worrying about the Great Blue Herons."

And so on.

Mrs. Bauer had me anxious on behalf of the herons, myself. I tended to take these things pretty seriously. After our unit on conserving electricity, I was vigilant about shutting the fridge as quickly as possible.

"Don't leave that door open!" I'd admonish my dad, innocently pouring himself a glass of milk. "You're killing salmon."

On this fateful day, however, we were not discussing the murder of fish or the endangerment of birds. Mrs. Bauer had turned to humanity. She was talking about how we should consider and treat the people around us in our little, second-grade lives. It was a major topic of hers. Since the beginning of the year, Mrs. Bauer had stressed the golden rule, "Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you." She encouraged all of us to think about where another person is coming from, and to try to put ourselves in his or her shoes ("Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins," suggested reading: Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech).

Mrs. Bauer was on a roll today. She asked us about homeless people. What we thought of them. How we thought most people treated them. I pictured this one guy who hung out on 23rd Street. My dad called him a "bum." I always held my dad's hand and went around the other side of him when we had to go past this guy on the way to Escape From New York Pizza. I would walk fast and try not to look at him and even hold my breath a little bit. I was wondering how and if he ever cleaned his beard when Mrs. Bauer really let it rip.

"The next time one of you sees a homeless person," she held all of us, hypnotized, in her gaze. "I want you to think--once, this person had a home. Once, they had a family, just like me. They are not so different from you or me. Who knows what has happened to them in their life. Any one of us could become homeless."

Anyone could become homeless.

Mrs. Bauer let this sink in. And sink it did. Anyone could become homeless. It didn't take me long to make the logical leap.

I could become homeless.

I thought about it on the walk home. I thought about it while I was doing my homework. I didn't think about it so much during dinner, because it was Chicken Divan and it was really good, but that night, brushing my teeth and climbing into bed, it came back to me.

Anyone could become homeless. I could become homeless.

I doubt that for my classmates this lesson was much of an event in their lives. But for the overly imaginative child, the child whose yuppie parents didn't allow her to watch television, the child who read too many romantic Black Stallion novels, well, it was another story. My eight year old self was ingrained with a fear of homelessness from this point on her life.

I believe that Mrs. Bauer's words stuck with me growing up. They encouraged me (or terrified me, as you would) to be a better student. I think it may be argued that an accute fear of homelessness may develop later in life to a larger fear of failure: of not getting the score on the test that would get the good grades that would earn the good internship that would secure the good job that would prevent, ultimately, homelessness. It all comes back to Mrs. Bauer.

I am not sure if my 8 year old self is as silly as she seems or wiser than us all. Not to wax Dickensian, but in a sense, after all, there's not so much that separates me, or any of us, from destitution. A few people in my life, but people are mortal. My health and my intelligence, my freedom from any major addictions, but these things too have been known to decline or fail. My good fortune. In the end, I think it mostly rides on that.

Work hard, my friends, and stay healthy. Anyone, after all, can become homeless.

Hardy on Family

"Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every time that he returned hither he was conscience of this divergence, and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental aspirations... were as foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet."

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

The Poor Upper Middle Class Graduate

The three months of my unpaid internship have come and past, and, thankfully, I now find myself gainfully employed—well, gainfully employed to the tune of 14 dollars an hour with no benefits. The book publisher I have been interning for has decided to keep me on, and despite their struggling finances and a company-wide hiring freeze, they’ve signed me for another three months, paid.

On the one hand, it’s an enormous relief, and trust me, I was and am ecstatic. I feared my ability to find other work, and I’ve really loved writing and editing as my—can you believe it—actual job. On the other hand, I have entirely burned through my savings from my previous loathsome-but-unfortunately-better-paying law firm position, leaving me breathtakingly broke at this point in time.

Most of the time, one tries not to think about it. I check WellsFargo.com as little as humanly possible these days. This may be about as intelligent as sticking my head in the sand, but I go into paroxysms of doubt and anxiety when I see the account balances. Aside from paying my rent, my train and bus pass, and insurance, I endeavor to buy nothing. Yes, absolutely nothing. Is this practical? No. Am I in credit card debt? Of course, although nothing, I desperately hope, that two more paychecks (halle-freaking-lejah) won’t sort out.

I have started compiling a list, of those things that I need, want, and generally pine after. It is entitled the When Becky Isn’t Poor Anymore List:

Dry cleaning
Take shoes to cobbler
Blender
Ramekins
Tart pans
Steaming rack
Mascara
Clothes shopping
New laptop
A Subaru Outback Legacy, from approximately 1997
A pony

If some of these items seem frivolous, well, so be it. You try living with four month-old mascara, or having a bag full of clothes that you would really quite like to wear but haven’t been able to since June because you can’t afford to take it to the cleaners. I would like to point out that the computer that I write to you from is literally falling apart. My charming youngest brother Bruce kicked it a few years back, and the hardware has been slowly splitting apart ever since. Yesterday the poor thing lost a foot. It gives me a whole new appreciation for the cliché of not having a leg to stand on.

On a more serious note, however, I do know that credit card debt, however minor, is nothing to dabble in. And there is, as you may have guessed, reader, one inevitable and depression-inspiring solution: the much dreaded phone call to the parents. I can’t bring myself to do it, or at least I haven’t been able to yet. At this point I’d rather pay off interest than admit defeat. My parents are investment bankers, and while they made very positive noises when I announced that I was going to quit my vile law firm job after only nine months, I have and continue to have my doubts about their enthusiasm. Part of me thinks they’re waiting for the call, and I hate that. I so desperately want to make this work on my own, and prove to myself, more than anything, that I’m a competent human being and not just an entitled, impractical, upper middle class brat.

I am amused by the fact that my banker parents have been blessed with markedly impractical children, and I suspect this poetic justice must often be the case in comfortable families. There are four children in my family, and so far, of the three of us that have graduated, we’re batting 3 for 3 going into the arts. My sister Jessica is an assistant in a modern art gallery in Manhattan, my brother Jason is an aspiring documentary filmmaker/bartender, and then there’s me, book publishing. I don’t know how much my other siblings may have dug into the parental resources or not. At the end of the day, does it matter? Regardless of the exact details, there’s a mindset singular to the newly “self-sufficient” upper middle class college graduate. We have never considered the possibility that we’re not going to be okay. This, I believe, drives our career and life choices just as much as a tenuous financial background may drive another graduate to consulting, i-banking, or, ahem, law school.

The thing is, I think my parents are guilty of more than just spoiling us (which, of course they have, though god knows they’ve tried not to). I was up visiting my parents for a weekend recently, and I had a conversation with my mom. We were in the kitchen and I was attempting to evasively answer her questions about my finances. She started in on describing the path that had led her towards business school, something I’ve heard many times, but something that I hadn’t heard before came up.

“My father, the architect,” she mused, “struggled his whole life. My grandparents even paid for the deposit on the house in Mercer Island, for instance. He just never seemed able to sever that umbilical cord. When I graduated, I was sure I never wanted that to be something I worried about.”

For a moment, I was floored. Images of my own umbilical cord floated up behind my eyes; wrinkled, spongy, and supernaturally white, it was tying me forever to this woman in her sunny kitchen with her 80s Italian pottery and enviable complete Le Creuset set. And then, I recovered. If nothing else, my elite education has given me the ability to draw a counterargument, even if I may not have entirely convinced myself yet.

“But mom,” I said, shimmying a pan the way she taught me. “Surely that can’t be all there is to it. It is not some random happenstance that made all of your children go into the arts. You were an East Asian studies major; Dad was Latin American History. You may have been very happy with your jobs, but they were always your jobs, not your interests. Growing up, you read us C.S. Lewis and the Legend of Davy Crockett, not the Wall Street Journal. I don’t just happen to love literature. I was taught to. And even if I can’t make it work, I think I owe it to myself to try.”

“You’re right,” my mom patted my shoulder. “You go for it, kiddo.”

I don’t know how much she meant it. Most of the time, I don’t think I have half the conviction I pretend to have in what I’m doing right now. But in my better moments, I hope that if I can just scrape by for the next three months, it will all have been worth it. That I’ll look back on my life and think of these as my formative years, when I made a decision about who I am and what I want, and just went for it. Right? Well that’s the theory, anyways.

Adventures in Clerking: Part I

She was the newest addition to the law clerks at the firm, a recent graduate, in her first real job, excited to be there and to learn and grow as a professional. Already, things were not quite as she had imagined. There were seven lawyers at the firm: three partners, four associates, one big-haired legal secretary, one remarkably crotchety bookkeeper (who seemed to come and go as she well pleased), one incredibly nice and incredibly abused driver, and then the clerks, four of them—Valentina, Kunyu, Laura, and finally her, Becky. All of the clerks were recent grads. All of them had higher aspirations than clerking.

At the end of the first week she realized that there was not going to be any formal, or informal, for that matter, job training. She was doing the best she could.


When Becky arrived, just a few minutes past nine, not a single attorney’s car was in the lot. She recognized Valentina’s beater Toyota, with peeling red paint, and Kunyu’s bike was locked inside the courtyard.

She entered through the kitchen.

“Hey!” Kunyu had a phone tucked between her head and shoulder. She was also in the middle of doing a huge stack of dishes. Attorneys, Becky had quickly learned, were violently allergic to doing their own dishes.

“He—hey,” Becky stammered, not wanting to interrupt Kunyu’s conversation.

“It’s okay,” Kunyu gestured at the phone. “It’s just the fucking court. They put me fucking on hold again. Hello? Yes, I’m calling on behalf of attorney Nicole Ryan? Is this department 47? Good. Yes, she wanted to let you know she’s going to be fifteen minutes late. Yes. Yes, that’s all she told me. That’s all she told me! Okay, bye.” She hung up. “Fucking court clerks.”

The door slammed, and Laura, the clerk-receptionist, traipsed through on her way to the front.

“Oh hey, hey, hey!” she grinned, “ready for another fun-filled day at NAB?”

Kunyu rolled her eyes.


Becky’s office was at the far back upstairs corner of the second building. She spent most of the morning trying to decipher and execute a task that Tom, the head attorney, had given Valentina, which Valentina in turn had given her. None of it had been very clearly explained, and even if it had been, it was still stultifying boring. She slogged through a huge box of documents, trying to figure out what information was relevant, and compiled notes into a memo she eventually intended to give to Tom. She kept at it for a couple hours, but then finally reached a dead end where she really didn’t understand what to do. Grabbing a pen and paper, she headed downstairs and across the courtyard to throw herself on Valentina’s mercy. Valentina had been at the firm for the longest, and as such had been promoted to the position of Tom’s exclusive law clerk (why anyone would want, let alone accept, this promotion, Becky mused, was a mystery). If anyone would be able to decipher these directions, it would be her.

Becky went back in through the kitchen door again. She was greeted by the sight of Kunyu violently kicking the photocopier.

“Fucking—oh hey! Yeah, it’s not working again. Sometimes if you just kick it…”
“Right…” said Becky, “yeah, sure. Uh, I’m just going to go ask Valentina a question.”

Kunyu didn’t hear her. She was busy slamming doors on the machine, and listening to its machinations. Becky inched around her, and crossed the lobby into Valentina’s front office.

Valentina was typing like a madwoman. Her back was to the door.

“Uh… Valentina?” Becky queried.
“Yes?” Valentina whipped around. She had dark unkempt hair, and an aquiline nose, on which were perched a dainty pair of reading glasses. She peered over them, still typing while looking in the other direction.

“Oh!” she stopped typing, finally. “How are you? It’s crazy around here today!” she chortled. “Except, no really. It’s crazy.” She grabbed a document and walked over to the fax machine.

“Uh… fine? Actually, I was hoping I could ask you a question.”
“Sure, sure,” she smiled, “oh shit, though, is this about that Hunsaker stuff? Cause I have no fucking idea. I don’t even think Tom knows what he wants.”

Becky’s heart sank in her chest.

Valentina took a look at it, and gave some suggestions. They weren’t hard and fast answers, but Becky supposed they were better than nothing. She headed back over to the other building, stopping through the kitchen again to get a cup of tea. Liz, the big-haired legal secretary, was helping herself to a bagel. It always seemed like Liz was in the kitchen.

“Better have a bagel…” she muttered, in a strong Long Island accent, “before ya start to get shaky!”

Becky had a very hard time understanding when Liz was talking to her or talking to herself, now and in general. Becky opted for just smiling and nodding. Not to be vicious, but looking at Liz, it was hard to believe that the woman would hurt from any lack of food. Becky tried to estimate how tall Liz was without the hair and six inch heels that she always wore—5’1”? 5’2”? Becky grabbed her tea and retreated from the kitchen before she could become entrenched in conversation with Liz. It was known to happen.


Becky kept at it with the Hunsaker documents, counting down the minutes until lunch. Finally it was 12. She went over to Kunyu’s office, which was right next-door, intending to nonchalantly ask her if she’d like to have lunch in the courtyard together. Becky was still semi-awkwardly trying to make friends.

Kunyu was slumped down in her swivel desk chair, one hand holding a phone to her ear, the other holding her forehead. A strange device was sitting at her desk, and momentarily forgetting to feel awkward, Becky picked it up and started looking at it. It appeared to be a set of goggles, but with two large plastic appliances attached to each side of them.

“Yeah, alright,” said Kunyu. “I’ll try that again.” She hung up the phone.
“What are these?” Becky asked, curiosity getting the better of her.
“Tom’s audio swim goggles,” sighed Kunyu. “Apparently they’re state of the art. Too bad they don’t fucking work!”
“They play music? To listen to under water?”
“Audiobooks, actually. Tom prefers LeCarre mystery novels.”
“Novels?” Becky was amazed. “I didn’t know Tom was much of a swimmer.” Or a reader, come to it. Tom was a very, very, large man, who suffered from diabetes. Swimming was difficult to imagine.

“He’s not. He hates exercising. That’s why he needs the novels.” Kunyu shrugged.
“And you’re fixing these?”
“Yep.”
“That sucks.”
“Tell me about it. We’re in the middle of a double-homicide case, our client is facing a lifetime in prison, and I’m spending my time fixing swim goggles. It’s fucking ridiculous.”

Becky laughed. What else could you do?

“You want to have lunch?”
“Yeah, okay. I think Tom is at Le Maison for lunch, anyways. He won’t be back for at least an hour.”

Adventures in Clerking: Part II

After a pleasant lunch in the courtyard, Becky stopped by the main building to check her inbox. Tom and a couple other attorneys strolled in through the front, back from their lunch as well. Becky kept her head down and tried to stay out of the way.

“Hey, hey… you,” Tom, Becky realized, was addressing her. “Sit down with us for a second.”

She sat down with him in the center of the lobby, along with Daniel, one of the junior associates, who seemed to be attempting to smile reassuringly. She didn’t quite feel reassured.

“We need you to do a very important project for us,” Tom intoned. He looked very serious. She looked from Tom to Daniel, suddenly feeling nervous.

“Absolutely. Tell me what you need.” Legal pad posed on lap, she readied herself to take thorough notes.
“So you know that case, that, that—”
“Hunsaker,” clarified Daniel.
“That Hunsaker case,” Tom continued fluidly, “what we need is one of those, those—”
“Grids?” supplied Daniel.
“Right, a grid, like a, a—”
“Table.”
“A table, exactly, of the, the—you know, that thing you’ve been working on—”
“The chronology,” Daniel translated, “the Hunsaker chronology that you’ve been researching for us. We’d like you to organize it into a table.”
“Great,” her voice quavered slightly; she prayed they didn’t notice.
“So for columns, no for rows, we want dates, for columns, we want document, bates stamp number, description, source, who was involved, and oh, oh—well let’s start with that.” Tom nodded, satisfied, at Daniel. He scratched his ear. That seemed to be the end of all the instructions she was going to get. She looked down at her pad of paper. She had written down:

grid
table
columns rows, dates
columns doc, bates? stamp #s, ? ? ?

She looked up at both of them. Her mouth felt incredibly dry.

Daniel looked like he had something else to add. In the end, he settled with, “If you have questions, just come talk to me.”
“Okay,” she was reeling, “Would you prefer this done in Word, or Excel?”
“What?” Tom seemed outraged, his voice nearing hysterical. She shrank two inches in her chair. “What is she asking? ‘Excel’? I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a computer program--” started Daniel.
“Excel? I don’t know, I don’t care; we just need a grid, okay? Alright? Just a grid. Simple. Can you do that?”
“Excel will be fine,” Daniel interjected.
“However you want to do it, I don’t care,” Tom was throwing his hands up in the air now. “Just a grid. You can do that, right? That’s not too much to ask for?”
“Of course not,” she felt about the size of a six year old. Just behind Tom’s head, she noticed Laura, the receptionist, was smirking.
“That’s no problem,” with effort, Becky made eye contact with Tom. “If anything comes up, I’ll talk to Daniel.” Thank God for that.
“Okay,” said Tom, somewhat calming. “Great. That will be very, very useful for us. Now Daniel…”

And they headed slowly and loudly upstairs to Tom’s office, debating a finer point on a sexual assault and battery case.


Becky took a deep breath. Laura caught her eye, and laughed.

“That’s a very important project, there,” she grinned. “You better get right to work on that one.”
She looked at her paper. “All he wants is a simple Excel table, right? With like five different columns?”
Laura shrugged, “Sounds like it. But that’s a very important project,” she imitated Tom’s tone, “that is critically important to us. Are you sure you can handle that?”
Finally Becky smiled, but there was still a curl of tension in her stomach. “Ah, man,” she said, “I’m really glad I have that Stanford degree, to prepare me for such difficult projects, such as making a single table in Excel.”
“Excel?” mocked Laura, “what’s Excel?”
Becky smiled. “Laura,” she began, “what’s a ‘bates stamp’—?”
“No, really though,” said Laura, as the phone rang and she reached for it. “You should get going. He’ll buzz you before you know it. It’s one of those days. I can tell.”


Tom buzzed Becky in her office approximately every thirty minutes on the hour and half hour for the rest of the afternoon. She lost track of how many times she printed out the template for the Hunsaker table, ran over to show it to him, and came back with his corrections. Eight times? Ten times? It felt like the most horrendous waste of paper she had ever experienced. At one point, Tom objected to the height of a particular row, and she internally debated whether or not it was worth it to try to explain the Autofit feature of cell sizing. She decided against it, and just adjusted the row manually, even though it was unnecessary.

Nearing the end of the afternoon she felt shredded, a pile of nerves. And for what? she thought. For some rehashing of the information that they already have, that they may or may not actually use in trial. She stepped into Valentina’s office, to drop off the finalized template into Tom and Daniel’s boxes. Not that it was actually filled in yet. Tom just wanted confirmation (ie, more trees to die).

Adventures in Clerking: Part III

Valentina practically leapt on her. “Becky!” she looked frantic. “Can you do the Whole Foods run?”
“Um… yes? Wait—what?”
“We have office meeting tonight? You know about office meeting?”
“We have a meeting tonight?” Becky died a little inside. She was so ready to go home.
“Office meeting! No one told you about this? Figures. It’s not really a meeting. We just eat a bunch of food and the partners drink scotch and that’s about it. It’s one of our ‘job benefits.’ Ha.”
“Oh.” That sounded bearable.
“So can you go? To get the food?”
“Sure. Yeah, no problem.”

Valentina frenetically wrote out a list, with very specific instructions about what sort of sushi was Tom’s favorite (spicy tuna), and exactly which loaves of bread she should look for, and which items to get from the cold case. Becky started to perk up a little bit. It was a nice break to get out of the office, for sure, and she purely enjoyed food shopping. Laura gave her a company credit card—telling her not to spend over $150 exactly, or Judy, the bookkeeper, would kill someone—and she was on her way. Company credit card in one hand, scribbled list from Valentina in the other, she stepped into Whole Foods, breathing a sigh of relief while surveying an impressive pyramid of grapefruit. Then she checked the time.

It was 4:45. Meeting, as Valentina had strictly admonished her, would start in exactly 15 minutes.

She grabbed a cart and started running.

“Spicy tuna… Sonoma chicken salad… Sour Batard? No, it was the Sweet Batard…” The other patrons were giving her looks. She didn’t care. Seriously—who are these people? With nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon than do their leisurely overpriced shopping—they’d never understand.

She rounded a corner to the cheese section. “Two soft cheeses—” she instinctively grabbed a brie, then dithered before pulling a Dutch wedge with an orange rind, “—and one hard.” Manchego? Gouda? Wasn’t that a semi-hard, technically? She started to panic, and just grabbed a Huntsman cheddar in front of her. ‘You can’t go wrong with cheddar, right?’ she thought to herself. ‘And besides—it’s just cheese.’

She rounded the corner to the checkout, and sweating it out in line, attempted to tally the cost of everything in her head, while simultaneously trying to double check that she had pulled everything on her list, which proved both counterproductive and headache-inspiring. Mercifully, it all came out just under $150. She grabbed the bags and ran to the parking lot.

When she pulled into the NAB lot, Kunyu met her at the car and helped her quickly unload the bags and take them into the patio. Laura had already pulled plates and glasses, which she was setting out. Liz was already there, of course, asking where the food was, but Tom was not.

‘Thank GOD.’

Valentina came out as well, and helped unpack the items. “This looks great,” she said, smiling at Becky, “you did a great job.”

Becky attempted a smile.

One of the junior attorneys, Nicole, was holding a wine bottle and looking around helplessly.

“Did we—” she asked Kunyu, “—bring out the wine opener?”

Kunyu gave a dark look. She went into the kitchen.

Liz was reaching for a drinking glass. “Do we,” she turned towards Laura, “not have any water??”
“No,” said Laura, though only Becky seemed to hear her. “The whole office is out of water. There’s no more water in the world.” She went into the kitchen.

And so it went, the clerks running in and out of the kitchen to grab items as needed, people opening bottles and passing food. Becky started to perk up after a glass of wine, and really, the food was delicious. Tom finally seemed to be in a better mood, which in turn led the entire office to breath a sigh of relief.

“Pass the salmon,” Dan, the youngest of the three partners, said while intently texting on his Blackberry. ‘Please?’ Becky thought to herself, before passing it down. Dan was supposedly the office manager. The longest conversation Becky had ever had with him was the fifteen minutes he interviewed her, before needing to take a phone call. Dan had just screeched in from court, and he and Daniel embarked on a lengthy discussion about a case with which Becky had no familiarity. Valentina was able to ask one or two semi-informed questions, but really the male attorneys dominated the bulk of the conversation.

“The thing about these kinds of cases,” Tom was really working himself up now, pounding the table next to his glass of scotch, “is that they have absolutely nothing—no research, nothing—to prove that these people are any threat whatsoever! We really need to—”

Here Liz muttered something. Someone passed the cheese plate to her. Tom spoke louder, visibly irritated.

“We, as a society, should really do something—”

Liz muttered something else, interrupting again. Tom glared. Liz muttered into her plate.

“People just always have to find someone to blame, it’s amazing—”

This time, Becky, Valentina, and Laura all distinctly heard the words “hard cheese,” followed by a shaking of big hair. The clerks exchanged looks amongst each other.

“What—what,” exploded Tom, turning on Liz, “is your problem? Can you not see,” here he gestured the entire table, “that we’re talking? What, what is it? You want something else? What?!!”

Liz shrugged, and started to mutter.

“WHAT?!” said Tom. “We can’t HEAR YOU!”
“Well,” Liz shrugged her shoulders, holding up her hands, “Well, ya know, I was just looking for the hard cheese…”
“There!” said Tom, “right there! You have the cheese right in front of you!”
“Well, ya know… there isn’t any hard cheese… ya know, the hard cheese? That hard cheese that we usually get? I was just hopin’ for the hard cheese…” and then she devolved into muttering again.

Dan looked up from his phone. “I didn’t see any hard cheese either.” Mouth open, he and everyone inspected the table.

Tom’s eyes bulged out of his head. “Well,” he pronounced disdainfully, “did we,” now turning to Valentina, “not manage to get any hard cheese?”

Becky had that shrinking sensation again.

Valentina did her best to diplomatically state that no, ‘we’ had not gotten the particular cheese that Liz was thinking of, but that there was a very nice alternative, and that ‘we’ would certainly make an effort to get the cheese in question next time. People passed and helped themselves to more food, and there was a semi-awkward lull. Becky could have sworn she heard Liz iterate the words ‘hard’ and ‘cheese,’ in varying combinations, at least twenty more times during this space of a few minutes.

“Well,” Tom pronounced, “did anyone catch what happened on Dancing with the Stars last night?” Suddenly Tom was amazingly animated, and the table erupted in laughter and banter, and the conversation moved on.

Becky, who did not happen to own a television set, once again had little to nothing to contribute. For the rest of the evening, she sat silently in her corner, spitefully drinking wine and fretting about cheese, and thinking it was stupid to be fretting about cheese, but still fretting about cheese.

“But—but—you don’t understand. They were swim goggles. He was making her work on his swim goggles.” Becky was standing in their kitchen in her pajamas, having just put some water on for tea. She was appealing, as best she could, to her boyfriend’s sense of moral justice in this world.

He was drawing a blank.

“What? Swim goggles?”
“He was making her upload audio books onto his personal swim goggles!” she heard herself reaching hysterical. She crossed her arms over her chest, and watched a wisp of steam curl out of the mouth of the humming kettle.

He tried to process this. “But—I mean, he’s paying her, right? So who… cares?”

“But you don’t understand—he’s just so—pedantic—and—belittling—and—but—but—swim— Stephen!”
“It’s okay, Miss B.” Stephen folded her into a hug. He reached over and snapped off the stove, just as the kettle started to scream. “You’re right, you’re right.”
“You just—you couldn’t understand,” Becky sighed. “They’re so—so—”
“Swim goggles?” Stephen offered, handing her a box of chamomile.
“Swim goggles!” Becky sighed. She poured herself a cup, and together they headed off to bed.

Lesson 1: Taking it out on your boyfriend

She came home that day feeling something miserable. It was not the first time. Lately the miserable days were far outnumbering the non-miserable days. Which is why she was so grateful that her boyfriend, whom she had moved in with just a few short months ago, had promised to go jogging with her that evening. It would be an understatement to say that she had been looking forward to this all day. It was the one last thread that had maintained her sanity throughout the last eight hours, that had kept her from running screaming from the insane requests, buzzes, phone calls, emails, and meetings that plagued her working life. Running, she had repeated to herself. Running tonight. Running tonight.

She took a deep breath, and, not feeling any less tense, swung open the back door of the apartment, stepping into the kitchen.

The kitchen opened out on the living room, where Stephen was sitting cross-legged on the couch. He was surrounded by notebooks and papers, and was intently focused on the laptop positioned directly in front of him.

“Hello,” he smiled, glancing up.
“Are we going running?” She something-less-than-snapped while rifling through the mail.
“Err… um…” he glanced at the screen in front of him. “Yes. Give me just one moment.” Hunched shoulders and rapid typing ensued.

She sighed. He kept typing. She tried sighing a little louder. Still typing. She stared as hard as she could, hoping to bore through the laptop, certain that if she could just regain eye contact he would immediately understand the utter urgency and desperation of the moment.

Stephen kept typing.

Exasperated, she gave up and stepped into the bedroom. Dropping keys then handbag then shoes, she face planted on the bed, and in the wink of an eye dropped into an angry sleep.

Forty minutes later she woke up feeling angrier. The daylight was waning. She stuck her head round the corner of the bedroom; half hoping the pillow hair might enhance the effect.

“HEY!” This was not yelling—she was not a yeller.
“Yes?” he looked up.
“You promised you’d take me jogging!” this was not whining—just a factual statement of the enormous treachery that had been committed.
“But… you fell asleep?”

The flood broke loose.

“AH! You’re horrible I hate you you’re the worst you you—” she continued, striding into the bedroom, pulling off her shirt and finding her things and tying her sneakers and now and then he would try to interject, in the mildest of tones, “But, Miss B—” which was invariably cut short by a dark look and heated if unintelligible muttering. She desperately wanted to beat him out of the house but unfortunately she had her long hair to tie back and bangs to pin up, so if anything he was ready before her, a fact that she attempted to ignore while slamming the screen door.

They strolled out into the waning light, shoulder to shoulder, an ominous silence growing between them.

Steve wore silver shoes and bright blue running shorts. He had an amiable English face, and endearingly scrawny legs. Steve hated to exercise. Constitutionally thin, he didn’t much see the point. It was something he did for her, because he knew that she loved it and loved his company.

They had walked nearly a block before he finally turned to her and appealed, “Miss B, how are you?”

To some, this might have been the tipping point: the ideal moment; to vent, to fold, to confess, to apologize, in short, to make some constructive effort towards feeling better. Our heroine declined this opportunity.

It swelled. She exploded.

“AH! I hate you!!” she not-yelled, and reaching up one arm she shoved Stephen directly sideways into the nearest hedge, before taking off full speed down the sidewalk, the fastest she could run.

Which, unfortunately for our heroine, was something less fast than the fastest Steve could run. After a brief episode of flailing about in the bushes, he reemerged on the sidewalk and easily caught up with her. At which point--being more of a jogger than a runner really, anyways—she ran short of breath, and was forced the indignity of having to slow down. What followed was a most peculiar form of exercise, as witnessed by the average onlooker. Sprint, then stop—sprint, then walk—sprint—walk—stop—wildly gesticulate—and then sprint again.

Between these spurts were short bursts of conversation: “But I—but you—but see—but AH!” “Miss B—please stop—I know—your job—” until finally, winding down, they walked side by side again, in the direction of home.

She felt something less than proud of herself. Breathing hard, hands on hips, she hung her head defensively, and as the last of it swelled in her chest, she exhaled, “but—see?”

“It’s okay, Miss B.”

They stopped with a scraping of sneakers on pavement. She considered, for the first time that evening, this possibility.

“It’s okay. Calm down, Miss B.”
“Don’t you tell me to calm down!” she finally smiled, and she let him slip his arm around her shoulders, and a few steps later slipped her arm around his waist as well.

“Stephen,” she said. A swallow lilted low on his way to his nest, and turning the corner she could see the glow of their porch light through the branches of the big willow tree.
“Hmm?”
“Do you love me even when I’m miserable and ridiculous?”
“Hm,” proffered Stephen, slipping his fingers into her right hand, and squeezing it in the dark.

She felt something more than lucky to have someone to cook a curry with that night.

Thoughts on Commencements

I had the opportunity recently to attend my brother’s graduation, from Vassar College in upstate New York. My brother Jason graduated with a degree in Film Production. It occurs to me that if there was possibly a worse major than English with which to graduate in the current hiring climate, Film Production might take the cake. Amazingly, Jason seems somewhat less than dead-panicked at his nonexistent prospects (a characteristic that I suspect has often distinguished us as siblings in the past—I believe it was all of October of my senior year when I had my first nervous breakdowns about joblessness?). In any case, I am very proud of Jason, and I cannot say enough how brave I think he is to have committed to do what loves to do. I shall be happy to report back on his progress. At the moment there is little to state for the record, beyond his intention to move to New York City in a few weeks time.

The occasion of Vassar Commencement brought a number of topics to mind, and gave cause for some introspection on my part. Primarily, marking the anniversary of my own graduation a little less than a year ago, I thought back on what my expectations had been at that time, in June 2008. Inevitably, this in turn led me to juxtapose these expectations with how events have actually unfolded. And finally, I began to ponder what has happened to me personally; in regard to my fundamental character, and in what ways I may have indelibly and ineluctably changed in the past year.

Last June, despite the fact that I had been through several interviews with no job offers in sight, I believe that I was still well convinced of the immense value of a Literature degree from an institution such as Stanford. I thought it a classical degree. A degree of tradition, even, one that great men had lived by and prospered. Steinbeck, I told myself, was an English major at Stanford, and he didn’t even bother to graduate. I did. True, I might have admitted, the Engineers and Computer Scientists of my class might have it slightly easier—but just initially, surely. I knew that eventually greatness and perfection were coming my way in the form of a letter of offer, and a little extra work at the outset would only make that accomplishment that much sweeter. I remember being irked at the graduation speakers for the English department’s ceremony. A defensive theme ran through all of their remarks: defending the value and usefulness of an English degree, reassuring us that we, too, were important and had much to offer to the working world. ‘Of course we matter,’ I bah-humbugged to myself. ‘We are the lovers and the crafters of language! Celebrate that! Don’t question it.’

And then I graduated. And I got a job. And it was not perfection, and I was not a crafter of language, I was the bitch at the bottom of a law firm food chain. And I had plenty of time, in my desperation and malcontent, to consider the heights to which my wonderful traditional classical humanities degree had flown me.

Do not fear, dear reader, there will be more on Law Clerk desperation later (and yes, I will still maintain that an English degree has value, if not the immediate economic kind). But suffice it to say, that sitting through the Vassar Commencement remarks, and listening to my brother talk about his situation, I came to one major conclusion. I do not know what I want to do, what I am capable of doing, nor do I have the foggiest idea what I would be genuinely good at doing. This triplet scares the hell out of me. It also occurs to me that it is less of a conclusion than it is a sweeping statement of bewilderment.

My sentiment about the past year, as best I can describe it, is a sense of unraveling, a losing of conviction, a disintegrating and remolding and re-disintegrating of expectation. Which brings me to my third and final question: have I changed? I believe I enjoy the same things as I did before; books, scones, ponies, friends. Has my personality changed? Despite that period of time during which I came home from the law firm crying at least twice a week, I do not consider myself any more bitter or disaffected than I was a year ago. (One point I must concede is that I have moved in with my boyfriend, which I would like to believe has not affected my character too much, but I suspect may have influenced me more than I would like to admit). What else may have shifted? The way I look, gesture, speak, write? I wear loafers now. I suppose there’s that.

My thoughts on commencements, then, are as follows. In my experience, graduation was not a conclusion. It was not a clean transition. It was not, even, a clear-cut introduction to the next “phase of my life.” It was merely a gaping, ponderous opening to a rabbit hole. Which I was promptly pushed through, and rapidly lost within the depths.

Luckily, however, being an English major, I have certain resources to draw upon. I was thinking today about Stephen Daedalus, shape-shifting on the shore, constantly changing and refashioning himself in metaphor. I count myself in league with Alice, growing larger and smaller and forgetting the poems she thought she knew. Or, if you’d prefer a cinematic touch, I’ll throw in Juno’s retort: “I don’t know what kind of girl I am.”

At least in literary company, a girl can be a little less lonely in her loafers, perhaps.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

To cleanse the palate, I thought we might start with some Keats:

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.