Failing at Being an Adult

The world is a better place with a good cup of tea.

Better if it’s coffee, but I still can’t find a single gilly-wiggling place that sells Coffeemate, or even an off-brand equivalent. They had something called “Coffee Whitener” at Aldi’s, but it looked suspiciously like baking soda.

My bed is comfortable. I have several blankets on it, and waking up in the morning burrowed in them is quickly becoming one of my favorite experiences.

I don’t entirely understand this incessant need to document the most mundane details of my international trip other than that it is wholly new to me and I am a writer, so the natural conclusion is to tap at my keyboard until there is nothing further to say. I can’t imagine that it would be the slightest bit interesting to anyone else, and if you are, in fact, still reading this sentence, I thank you heartily, though wonder why you are giving your no doubt valuable time to the ruminations of an arithmetically-challenged college student.

News for the Day: Wind Chill Factor sucks.

It was a balmy 43 degrees today, and since the sun was peeking through the clouds when I woke up a little after 8 this morning, I decided to only wear a tank top, sweater, wool coat, scarf, gloves, jeans, two pairs of socks, and leather steel-toed boots, instead of the “unnecessary” extra sweater and pair of leggings.

Well that was a mistake. The wind here is temperamental, sweeping down alleys and streets in fits of adolescent rage, biting through all but the thickest of layers. It was ridiculous how cold I was, and, being sick, how rather miserable. With my general low morale and meager breakfast, it was not the most exhilarating of days.

Not to wear the subject thin, but the Money Crisis is looming closer. While I technically have enough to pay everything that I need to on Monday in terms of charges (rent and internet), everything beyond Monday looks bleak indeed.

The last few minutes walking home today, the sun decided to come back out through a massive break in the clouds to the south and west. This light directly hits—and heats—my third-story window. And since my bed nestles up against said window, I was able to thaw looking out at some truly beautiful English countryside. With my high vantage point, I can see miles further than even the second-story windows—over the trees, to other backyards, even to the hills beyond, with just a tiny glimpse of the Isis.

Thawing, I began formulating plans.

All enquiries thus far into job opportunities have been turning up answers generally aligned with the statement, “We’ll keep our ears open, you keep your chin up.” While this is all well and good, my stomach is less polite.

In desperation, I took out my raggedy folder of Old Writing Pieces while the the sun, at least, cheered me on.

I tacked up one printed script idea and two short stories on my pegboard. Then I ripped sheets from my little notebook and labeled them accordingly in ascending color from dark blue to lime green: Novels, Short Stories, 462 Scripts, Capstone Scripts, and Other Scripts.

Under each title, I then wrote down the titles of projects I’d already started on, in the order that I first wrote them.

Novels: Fathers of Lies, Arden, Rave, Velvet, Jersey, Pan, This City*

Short Stories: Underwater, The Fort, How to Become a Filmmaker, Lynnwood Atlanteans

462 Scripts: (excepting ones that have already been made into films) Caldonwell, Pick Up, Penny, Papa Bear

Captstone: Leila

Other Scripts: Disconnect, The Baptist, A Brief History of Bus Stops**, The Queen of Spades, Sirens, Rave***, Pretty Girls are Good For*

*Ideas based on other ideas/things I’ve written. For instance, both This City and Pretty Girls are Good For were both poems I wrote. I had the thought that they might translate well either to graphic novels, regular novels, or screenplays.

**This has technically already been produced. However, I think the story really better suits a feature length script. I have ideas for building a larger story around the base of what’s already there.

***Rave is a novel, but an unfinished one. I think it would be an incredible screenplay. A really high-budget, special-effects, LOTR kind of screenplay, but awesome nonetheless.

I then went through my list of short story submission places, narrowing it down to a No, Maybe, and Yes category. The New Yorker and Paris Review both made it into the no pile. Why delude myself? Calyx (literature by women), McSweeney (they will read your work even if no one has ever heard of you), Avery (there’s no entry fee), American Short Fiction (payment is competitive—score!), Dappled Things (having to do with religious/spiritual themes), all made the Maybe list, for a variety of reasons: didn’t know if it had monetary compensation for winning (which is the whole point, since I’m broke), didn’t know what their criteria were, or wasn’t sure I fit their style.

Only three made it into the yes pile: Alimentum (all about literature concerning the appreciation of food), because it has a $500 prize, One Story (because it has a $100 prize), and The First Line (because it has a $20 prize and wants submissions that are “as eclectic as possible,” which resonated with me).

So my pathetic money-making plan it to spit-shine old short stories and/or poems and submit them, or, depending on the submission guidelines of the top choices, write an entirely new piece. Problem is, I don’t have internet, so I can’t look up what those guidelines are, and when I do have internet, I generally only have my iTouch with me, not my laptop, so I never have all the pieces present at the same time in order to sort out this aggravating puzzle.

The other problem is, it takes anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months to hear back from these people. So even if I won something, and even if that something paid, I might not receive the funds until after I am back in L.A. Still, I can think of nothing else that I am good at that I am legally allowed to do while residing in the UK.

My mother always said, “Find a way, not an excuse.” I would love to find a way. Mine ways just tend not to work. And venting into the ether of cyberspace is so much more fulfilling in the muscle-tension-knotting time being.

FYI, this cup of tea is delicious, albeit lukewarm now. Still, superb.

I don’t regret coming. There were a few days—the very first days—that I did. I was exhausted, hungry, sore, staying in places that made me uncomfortable either emotionally or physically or both. But sitting in my room with my green duvet and my rose-spotted curtains, I do not regret coming. A great part of it is this:

I remember flying by myself for the first time—no parents, no Grandma, just me in the air by myself. I was incredibly nervous—the sort of nauseous anticipation that is one of my many common afflictions. But once I was waving goodbye and walking down the ramp to board the plane, my sense of elation skyrocketed.

I was alone. And I was fine.

Going off to college was a similar experience. I hate crowds, I hate socializing with strangers, I hate being forced to do embarrassing things in public, like state my name and where I’m from. I was excited to be out of the state, thousands of miles from home. But the dread of that first week was excruciating. After I had established friends—my roommates turned out to be angels and the students and faculty of the film department became an entirely new family for me to fall in love with—it quickly became natural, comfortable, even enjoyable.

But those were all relatively normal experiences to begin with. This—going to Oxford—is wholly unprecedented. Besides Victoria, Canada (which I traveled to with my family), I had never been outside the country, let alone across an entire ocean. And while it is an English-speaking country, the culture, I knew, would be perhaps only vaguely recognizable.

And while there has been “sticker shock” (yes, I allude to money yet again), there has not really been “dear God, send me back to America this instant, I don’t want to be around these crazy people a moment longer” shock. I love it here. While I would not want to live here, I value the time I have been given.

This is especially true in the case of the education I am about to receive.

During Orientation, our programme instructor mentioned that Oxford was one of, I think three, academic institutions either in Britain or in the entire world that still taught with the tutorial system. That is because it is incredibly expensive, and it is incredibly expensive because they match one professor with one student for an entire term. A clarification: I’m sure the professors have more than one student, but they only have one student at a time, for completely different subjects.

I will spend the next 8 weeks pouring over books and articles on both Contemporary Narrative Fiction (focusing on works that successfully use first-person narrative) and British Fantasy Literature from Beowulf to Harry Potter. How cool is that? And it directly relates to my career choice because I picked the subject, not from a list, but from the corners of my mind that have been fascinated by a certain subject matter and have been unable to find adequate instruction in said subject thus far.

Academia aside, a secondary—though hardly less important—benefit of this excursion will be the attainment of what I would like to call “calmness.”

Certain things get me very agitated or nervous—improvisational performances of any kind (playing sports almost gave me panic attacks because nothing could be predicted, rehearsed, or perfected ahead of time), unknown experiences (what the heck is the “Tube” and why do I need to buy an oyster card to ride it?), or cataclysmic changes (moving, divorce, birth).

While home over Christmas break—already separated from Phil by thousands of miles—I was becoming more and more worried about being away from him for 4 and a half months. He told me, “You know we’re not going to be able to talk every day, right?”

I didn’t understand how he could be so blasé about it. I was already upset that we’d been separated for two weeks—how was I going to last another four months, not only without him, but without anyone I knew?

It has become more clear to me that I do not trust things. In my psychology class, we learned about something known as “object permanence.” Children under a certain age do not have object permanence. For example, if a child’s mother leaves the room—thus making the child unable to see his mother—the mother ceases to exist. He or she has no idea that the mother will be coming back. He only knows that she is gone. And that the world must be coming to an end.

I believe that I have something akin to that child’s terror, and it has only grown worse with the years.

Since I can remember, I have been a packrat. I have said many times that if I lose an object, all the memories attached to it are gone, too. The loss of a necklace, a pair of shoes, even a car becomes the loss of an event, a stretch of lifetime, an entire childhood. And the feeling of losing one’s memories—one’s identity—is not only terrifying, but upsetting, akin to losing a loved one.

I suppose that on some level, I thought that if I didn’t see Phil for four months, he would fade away like so many other things have.

I remember during my parents’ divorce I was so angry and so intent on being a smooth, impenetrable fortress of non-emotion that I refused to think about happier times, my entire life, basically, up until that point. I would look ahead, I would not form new attachments, I would not form new memories. I would simply exist until something worth hurting over came along.

Years later, when I had calmed down and the greater part of the anger had dissipated, I found that I could not recall certain things about my life. It was not so much a memory loss as an incredible memory repression. And now, when I wanted to take certain bits of my life down to examine them, I found that I could not.

I don’t have nightmares often—maybe once every few years—but when I do, they always feature people that I love dying.

My cerebral rootlessness coupled with my intense lack of trust has forged this odd post-adolescent lack of object permanence. If something is out of my sight too long, it ceases to exist, just like the years of my life before the divorce.

Obviously it is not a total memory failure, or I would be far more confused than I am now. But it has affected me enough that even the threat of not being able to remember something sends the lining of my stomach clenching in nausea.

So when Phil said, “You know we won’t be able to talk every day, right?” it hit me hard. He is an adjusted human being. He is stable. He is confidant in the relationship we have established. I know myself too well to be confidant in anything. Nothing is permanent. There is not a single thing in this world that doesn’t have some essential flaw in its foundation. Entire mountains crumble. How can mere people stand the weight of bearing up each other?

This is not to say I am pessimistic about my relationship with Phil, or “pre-dooming it.” It is, in fact, because he is so important to me that the fears arise. Losing him—to the fog of memory or to some medical complication, or God-forbid he gets hit by another taxi—would be devastating in a way even I cannot fully comprehend.

So while I value what I have been given in attending Oxford University and learning from some of the most brilliant academic minds in the world, it is not without a cost. The lesson I have learned is this: you cannot gain something without losing something of equal or greater value.

The doorbell rang earlier. For one insane split-second, I thought Phil had flown across the Atlantic to surprise me. The hope was absurd, and yet I could not squelch it for that half second. Why do we wish for things we know cannot have? Is that hope or is that lunacy?

My computer tells me I am on page five. That is about four and a half pages more than I’m sure you wanted to know about this trip or the inner workings of my mind. I will leave you in peace, cyberspace.

Pray for this cold to go away, for money to rush from my wardrobe like fog from a bucket of dry ice, and for the serenity of being rooted to find me somewhere in the walls of this ancient university, so that I will know what it is to feel at peace before I return from where I came.

Emily