April 7: Favorite Job, Ghost Faculty, New Cartoon

On this Second Sunday of Easter, I'm going to write about my favorite place to work.  In fact, when I'm working here, it doesn't even feel like work.  It's not stressful or burdensome.  I like all of my coworkers.  Well, almost all of them.  And I get to do what I love:  talk about writing and books and plays and movies and poetry.

I'm talking about the teaching at the university.  Since I started studying for my Master's in Fiction Writing, I've been teaching college-level English courses.  Composition, literature, creative writing, technical writing, and movies.  That means I've been at it for over twenty years.

Last Wednesday, I met some of my university friends at a local micro-brewery for drinks and dinner.  They were going to a poetry reading afterward.  I sat there, listening to them talk about their careers.  Some of them had new books being published.  Some of them were going to some kind of conference this weekend in one of the Carolinas, I believe.  And some of them were raving about former students who were publishing books and starting doctoral programs.

I am out of this loop.  I don't teach full-time, so my forays into the English Department realm are limited to guerrilla-style pop-ins.  After I'm done teaching, I swing through on my way home to check out my mailbox.  I don't serve on any committees.  I usually can't attend department meetings.  I don't advise any undergraduates.  I'm one of those ghost faculty members.  An adjunct.

I have another job, one that provides me with the health insurance and benefits that the university doesn't.  That job eats up the majority of my time.  Out of bed at 4 a.m.  At the office by 5 a.m.  Work and work.  Teach at the end of the day.  Home by 5:30 or 6 p.m., if I'm lucky.  This other job is necessary.  It's not one of my favorite things.

When I was having a drink with my university friends last Wednesday, one of them started complaining about how many classes he'd been assigned to teach.  Four sections of Mythology for next fall.  A summer class in Spiritual Writing.  "Oh, my God," someone said, "did you ask for overload classes?"  Everyone looked at him with pity.

I sat there thinking, "You're living my dream, buddy.  You're living my dream."

Saint Marty is a little jealous, but he'll get over it.  He has to.  He has to get up for work tomorrow morning at 4 a.m.  He doesn't have time for jealousy.

Confessions of Saint Marty

April 6: Funny Girl, Elizabeth Gilbert, "Eat, Pray, Love," New Cartoon

She was a funny girl, old Jane.  I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful.  She knocked me out, though.  She was sort of muckle-mouthed.  I mean when she was talking and she got excited about something, her mouth sort of went in about fifty different directions, her lips and all.  That killed me.  And she never really closed it all the way, her mouth.  It was always just a little bit open, especially when she got in her golf stance, or when she was reading a book.  She was always reading, and she read very good books.  She read a lot of poetry and all.  She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie's baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it.  She'd never met Allie or anything, because that was her first summer in Maine--before that, she went to Cape Cod--but I told her quite a lot about him.  She was interested in that kind of stuff.

Holden and Jane are the only two characters in The Catcher in the Rye who are identified as readers of really good books.  Holden reads books by authors like Isak Dinesen and his brother, D.B.; Jane reads poetry.  Holden has certain ideas about what makes good literature.  As I've said earlier, the mark or a good writer is that, "when you're done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

A few years ago, everybody was reading a book by Elizabeth Gilbert.  Oprah did a show on it.  Julia Roberts starred in the film adaptation of it.  It was one of the best-loved and most-hated books of the time.  Even now, when this book is mentioned in conversation by "literary" folks, it's usually in pejorative terms.  For some reason, Elizabeth Gilbert's book has become the stereotype of the self-absorbed memoir.  Gilbert is a spoiled, privileged whiner, according to popular opinion.

Of course, the book is Eat, Pray, Love, and I'm writing this post to reclaim it.  I read it when it was first released, and I loved it.  The writing is vibrant and funny.  Gilbert's story is transformative and wise.  I think the reason the book got such a bad rap is that Gilbert seems to have such good luck.  I mean, she gives up the American dream--husband, home in the country, great career--and spends a year living in Italy, India, and Bali.  She eats a lot of good food, prays and meditates, and falls in love.  Basically, it's a book about blessings.

Putting all that aside, Elizabeth Gilbert is a hell of a writer.  Here is her description of eating the "best pizza in the world" in Naples:

...They have only two varieties of pizza here--regular and extra cheese.  None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle.  The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried.  It's soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin.  I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy, or thick and doughy.  How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy?  Holy of holies!  Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise...

Gilbert turns everything into a spiritual experience--food, prayer, and love.  If you haven't read Eat, Pray, Love yet, if you've avoided it because of all the negative hype, you need to give it a chance.  If you've read it before and fell into the trap of popular Gilbert hatred, tear the cover off the book and imagine you're reading something by an up-and-coming essayist.  You won't be disappointed.

Elizabeth Gilbert passes the Holden Caulfield author test.  She makes Saint Marty want to abandon his life and travel.  Maybe he'll go to Green Bay next weekend.

Confessions of Saint Marty

April 5: Sense of Humor, Sharon Olds Again, "Diagnosis"

One of the things that allows me to live the life I have is my sense of humor.  I have two basically full-time jobs that barely allow me to pay my bills.  I'm a part-time medical records clerk who works over 50 hours per week for part-time benefits.  I'm a part-time adjunct English professor who's been teaching part-time at the same university for close to 20 years.  I have a book manuscript that I can't get published.  And I have a blog that I obsessively write posts for that I'm not sure anyone cares about.  I have to have a sense of humor.

I've had a good day.  I had breakfast with my best friend whom I haven't seen in close to a year.  I had a great appointment with a therapist.  I just ate a Reese's Peanut Butter Egg.  I'm watching Stranger than Fiction, one of my favorite movies ever.  The snow is melting, and I have the whole weekend ahead of me.

On this P.O.E.T.S. Day Eve, Saint Marty's turning to Sharon Olds again, because she is a poet who has a sense of humor.

Diagnosis

By the time she was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me.  I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood.  My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long.  My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face--
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She's doing it now!  Look!
She's doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor.  Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

Jesus had a sense of humor, too

April 5: Prince, A Real P.O.E.T.S. Day, Pastor Friend

"No idea.  I just want to thank you for being such a goddam prince, that's all," I said.  I said it in this very sincere voice.  "You're aces, Ackley kid," I said.  "You know that?"

I just searched through my copy of The Catcher in the Rye for a passage where Holden is talking to a real friend, not some guy whom he's mocking or secretly hates.  I couldn't find a single person Holden truly likes, aside from his little brother and sister and a few kids he meets in the park.  Other than that, Holden is pretty much on his own for companionship.  He can't even be intimately involved with a prostitute he's hired.  There seems to be some kind of threshold that adults can't cross over with Holden.  So I chose this little piece of dialogue in which Holden is making fun of Ackley, calling him a "goddam prince."

I'm having a real P.O.E.T.S. Day.  I didn't go to work today, and I did most of my house cleaning last night.  That means all I really have to do today is blog and read.  Maybe do some writing.

I met one of my best friends for breakfast this morning.  He's a Methodist pastor, and he works for a church in the Lower Peninsula, just below the Mackinac Bridge.  He brought his sons up for a visit during their school spring break.  Since my pastor friend got transferred to his downstate church, I've only seen him a handful of times.  He saw me through some of the most difficult moments of my life, and I miss his daily presence in my life.  Unlike Ackley, my pastor friend really is a prince.

We were able to visit for a couple of hours this morning at McDonald's.  My daughter was excited to see his sons, as well.  They've known each other since they were very small.  During the time we were together, I really didn't care about what else was going on in my life, what bills I had to pay, what work I had to get done, what I wanted to blog about.  I ate and laughed and enjoyed my friend's presence.

Very few times in a person's life do you meet someone who's a true friend.  One who listens to your problems without trying to solve them.  One who reads the same books, goes to the same movies, and likes to the same music as you.  One who travels four hours on snowy roads through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to see you.

Saint Marty had breakfast with his true friend this P.O.E.T.S. Day.

Thank God for true friends