Goals

I'm amazed at my own lack of productivity. I never thought I'd be the kind of person who can stare into space for almost two weeks with absolutely no projects at hand, or at least try to do some work. I am writing a lot, which is the only thing I need to show that my brain has finally released its creative congestion. For the first time in a long time I feel a fluidity in my thoughts, and not the staccato rhythm I normally hear inside my own brain.

Goals.

One of my great revelations during this sabbatical is establishing new goals for the next nine months. I have a tendency to attack goals and write them off, guns blazing. I'm an editor by nature and nothing pleases me more than crossing off something in my never ending To Do list.

Number one on my goals list is to be better at money, really, for good this time. I have an impending 13.25% percent raise and I can open up my 401K account. Doing the numbers last night, I could easily live on first of two monthly paychecks. How cool is that? Except that I really don't, somehow I manage to eat away the next paycheck and the next...

I'm not in debt, far from it, but I'd really like to max my IRA contributions and my 401K once it kicks in and have a bigger emergency fund. All plausible things, for sure. I've made way less money before, and somehow I managed to max out my IRA when I was making minimum wage and banking on tips. These days I don't bank on tips and I'm still amazed at how much I make now (not a whole lot, really, but more than I've ever made) and yet I've only contributed $300 to my IRA.

Granted, school ate up all my money, and the huge tax bill is about to eat more of it, but still, there really should be more money left.  I read at The Billfold that most people treat their checking account as an allowance, and they rush to get it to $0. That pretty much sums up my checking account mind set, a rush to get it to zero.

All of my money issues summed up in a sentence, the internet never ceases to amaze me.

For the sake of transparency I'm going to lay out some numbers:

$3151: My tax bill, I've written the check and I have the funds to cover it. I'm mailing it out as soon as I return home.
$500: My fellowship check that I'll receive when I return home.
$585: State grant for school.
$1085: Money I owe for tuition, should get paid in full once the two checks are deposited.
$345: I sold my P&G shares, I've held on to it for two years and I'm ready to let it go. I made a 10% profit (I think, maybe more) and I'm happy to say I profited from the Market. I cashed it out because I wanted more liquidity and I'm thinking of putting the money into my IRA.
$900: My credit card balance this month. Yuck, I know, but this is the highest I've ever seen my credit card balance. I paid $200 (and some small change) to the tax prepaper, over $500 for my bi-annual car insurance payment for my sister and I, and it was time to pay the phone bill (same arrangement with my sister).

I'm hoping when my next paycheck shows up next week, I can zero out my CC balance. It drives me nuts carrying any balance on my CC.

deux

It seems the universe has its electrical wiring crossed again and I'm left literally scratching my head on what to do, and where to go.

I checked my email and found a reminder for my incomplete FAFSA application for next school year. Completely unlike me, you see, I like to close doors behind me firmly shut and without any chances of cracking open. So I filed the financial information page on the FAFSA and because (or maybe even without it) of the messy tax business I had to deal with this year, I don't qualify for any grants.

My life plans tend to revolve aroud how much money I do or don't have which includes schooling. Right now, a full-blown graduate school program is out of the game plan. Not a particularly bad decision considering I can't decide on which program to enroll in. One day it's Finance, another a Humanities program, the next, Business Management... and another, Web Development.

I hate that my identity is so tied into what my future career might look like, I could barely make a decision everyday without it being a giant dissection of what I should do with myself. And then of course, I find myself reading a terrifically depressing article about a MFA graduate who can't find decent employment. A few clicks later, I find a job posting as an Editorial writer for one of my favorite web sites in the planet.

Two highly contrasting ideas all in one place, gotta love the internet.

Ugh, calories

Watching this video genuinely made me smile, it makes me think about the choices I need to make in life. Stay in food, or do something else entirely different.

http://vimeo.com/24340531

And so, I thank you

Some people you just know is going to live in a special spot inside your heart. When I was first looking into four-year colleges I saw Prof. W's resume in the college webpage, and right away I knew she was someone I had to know. She had a resume I always I wanted to have, her CV had all the right experience, right schooling, and most probably, the right people on her phone list. One of the reasons I chose this college is the chance to work with her, to learn under her tutelage and have a first-name basis relationship with her.

I left college before I had the chance to meet her and take one of her classes.

While the years waned and waxed before me, I had thought about her, and what great fun it would have been to learn under this teacher I had mythologized based on her CV.

When I made my Odysseus-like return to the same college I had left so long ago, I looked her up again, in the incumbent professor's roster. Bravely, I wrote her a letter of intent asking her to sponsor my independent learning contract. I couldn't move to the city where my college is, and my next best choice is to pursue independent study and research. Fine by me. I got promoted at my job, and got to keep my excellent medical and dental insurance.

She said yes, I look forward to working with you.

Last night, before I turned in to bed, I received her evaluation of my work from the Winter Quarter that I just finished. Is it cheesy and hormonal when I say that I had to fight back tears when I read what she had to say about me? I was so overwhelmed I couldn't read the whole thing. Little by little, I read each sentence, paragraph, until I finally finished her love letter of sorts.

And so, Prof. W., thank you, thank you for making one of my greatest dreams come true.

Ruzielle writes in her self evaluation that encountering the work of bell hooks was “the most fruitful aspect of my studies,” inspiring a “multi-layered experience” that expanded her knowledge of both African-American and women’s studies and encouraged her to read the works of writers such as Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and Adrienne Rich. Her study of hooks, together with a set of eye-opening experiences working with an educational lobbying group, also prompted her to shift her focus from leadership per se to education. Ruzielle writes that, “[a] healing of sorts occurred,” allowing her to understand her own experience within the broader set of race and class structures that “undermine minority and female students.”

 

What follows are some of my remarks on individual essays and blog posts. I found in all of Ruzielle’s writing incredible confidence and an astute sense of timing; in fact her writing is so strong that it is sometimes too easy for her to use her elegant prose style to resolve contradictions within the essay that cannot otherwise be entirely resolved. These papers are not good examples of close reading, but they successfully use existing texts as springboards for quite subtle analyses of contemporary social issues. Ruzielle’s first two essays were very much an investigation of her own relationship with the book she was reading, but I noticed (as she herself did) that she shied away from really unpacking the emotions that arose for her as a result of that relationship, or acknowledging the ways in which the book might affect her own approach to addressing systematic inequities. Her third essay, by contrast, was an incredibly complex investigation of the socio-economic forces and myths that lead highly-trained immigrants to take up low-skill American jobs.

 

In subsequent essays and blog posts Ruzielle took up themes of gender and labor, her ongoing ambivalence about the food industry, as well as shaming, whitewashing, and the other dark sides of the “model minority” discourse. She also continued to seek out books that would provide her with less Eurocentric models of leadership, as a way of pro-actively investigating her own professional practices. As the quarter wore on she also began to delve more deeply into her own family history and into specific elements of the Filipino experience in America in the context of the model minority myth. Her week 8 essay on these topics contained some of her most searingly astute lines, such as one in which she describes nursing schools as a kind of “puppy mill.” Her week 9 essay, written after a visit to the state capitol to meet with members of the Higher Education Committee, was also refreshingly pointed and direct. “Now, more than ever,” she writes, “education is being used as a weapon against the disenfranchised. . . It sends the message that we’re always one signature away from being erased from history.” Ruzielle makes especially cogent points in this essay about educational access for minority/disadvantaged communities.   

 

In her final blog post for the quarter, “Against the Grain: In Pursuit of an Intellectual Life,” Ruzielle synthesizes the insights from previous essays (weeks 3, 8 and 9), with a particular emphasis on the myth of “well-paid STEM careers.” Ruzielle’s account of the cycle of aspiration and despair is worth quoting at length:

 

And when they migrate to the US, the crushing pressure to provide for the family derailed everybody’s STEM careers, or at least their STEM education. Women, of course, were especially vulnerable. . . .When once we were all forced into STEM careers, the strain was alleviated; only to be replaced with the pressure to take low-paying, soul-crushing labor in the healthcare field. . . . Nothing kills ambition and potential more than a tainted ideology that’s been re-gifted and passed on to the next generation.

 

Returning to the extended metaphor of consumption that threads through her writing thanks to her many years of working in the food industry, Ruzielle concludes this devastating paragraph by remarking that this phenomenon is “the legacy of the Spaniards, Americans and the Japanese who brainwashed our community into believing we’re meant for offal, and not the rich fatty tenderloin steak.”

 

Ruzielle’s writing is shot through and enlivened by a powerful set of tensions: she is hungry for constant stimulation and learning, and yet keenly aware of avoiding self-exploitation; she is driven to seek success, and she is passionate in her desire for connection with others, for genuine social change. The act of embracing her “intellectual self,” as she describes it in her self-evaluation, was not an easy or painless exercise, but I hope that it has been, and will continue to be, and empowering one, both for herself and for those lucky enough to encounter her writing

by the numbers

24 credits before I get my BA degree.
3 months before I graduate.
29 months of schooling that I paid for.
4000 dollars in scholarships.
0 dollars in student loan debt.

The Magician

I'm envious of Molly Young's writing career. Scratch that, if I could start all over, I will have a resume like hers, writing for the best magazines in the country and doing fun stuff and writing about it, which is what writers get paid to do. But bills need to get paid, doctor's appointments made, and a savings fund built; the erratic income of a freelance writer isn't included in my "plans." I just recently received medical and dental insurance, and quite frankly, I'm quite late in the game.

I was fortunate to have avoided accidents or any expensive surgeries (save for my wisdom teeth extraction, paid for in cash, from my barista tips and catering gigs). And so I go to my hideously boring and derivative job, where I invest in milking the most productivity out of the employees and deal with irate clients, and stare at financial statements.

The Microsoft executive told me my eyes lit up when I talk about books, writing and spending all my time living the writer's life--courtesy of my independent study curriculum. I don't think I've ever lit up in a work meeting, or even when the department made record-breaking sales.

The happiest I've ever been cashing out a check is when I received the money in exchange for my writing--$2500 to be exact. I didn't know I could be this happy receiving money from services rendered. Mostly I just feel smug and bitter after every paycheck arrives in my checking account; like there isn't enough money in this world to make me fall in love with my line of work all over again.

It's a beautiful snowy afternoon in Montreal and I spent most of it writing a paper for classes that doesn't even start til April. I should be on vacation, a sabbatical of sorts for the overtired body, and the weary mind. Yet I spend most afternoons beside the sun-lit sliding doors typing away, weaving words into magic.

Postcard from Quebec

I wish my geeky, awkward 14-year-old self would know that as an adult, her life is going to get bigger, grander, more fabulous than she could ever imagine. Her life is an endless list of six impossible things that manifest in front of her, one after the other.

Greetings from Montreal.

Here's a sentence I never thought I would write, greetings from French country, I'm writing this post inside a fabulous condominium overlooking a snowy landscape from the balcony. A few hours ago I had brunch in an old-school French diner with the menu written entirely in French, and when I walked over to the pharmacy across the street, the cashier ignored my "I don't speak French," protests. At the diner, I tipped 54% because I didn't know how to ask for small change, and the waitress speaks five words of English.

I love it, I just love it.

I've always been one of those girls, those girls who tried to learn French, prefer croissants over muffins, toasts, and hell, even rice (blasphemy, I know, coming from an Asian woman). One of my great dreams in life, and it still is, is to find my way in Paris, and luxuriate in cafes and boulangeries until my heart bursts from joy. But for now, a city a few minutes from Montreal would suffice, especially since the plane ride here from the US was paid for, and all my meals, and other affectations are paid for.

Such is my luck, you see, all the amphibians I've kissed in the past and finally, I found someone whose largesse and infinite capacity to love never ceases to astound me. Needless to say, this isn't all about his largesse. I have been with some people in my life who had two dollars to their name and yet my heart was all his, all his for the taking. Unfortunately, as they say, all the good ones are always taken.

Not this time, this time, I get to have the good one. The one all the other women dream about when they allow themselves to wish for a good man, a great man.