A list of demands for my man of letters.

I'm currently reading "Of Human Bondage" and it's converging strangely with the new Harpers'* I am concurrently reading. Last article in Harper's is a review of a book about William Hazlitt, and the first line is "From Samuel Johnson to Christopher Hitchens..." so you know I'm down from jump street. Along with the Maugham book I took out from the library was a Samuel Johnson collection and a fictionalized biography of said-same Dr. J. What do these guys--and Susan Sontag--have in common? They are "men of letters": "an intriguing combination of critic, sage, scholar, journalist, and dilettante...a public intellectual...combining the erudite with the popular." I also think of bell hooks. I often think of bell hooks: she is my north star: who also has (apparently like this Hazlitt they are talking about) an abiding empathy, the "rigorous and imaginative compassion" of DFW.

Where I'm going with this is--well, first things first, forget astronaut or ballerina, I want to be a man of letters. I'm also wondering what a man of letters actually does in the media-determinationist post-capitalist world in which we find ourselves. So often the revolutionary thinkers were those that undermined prevailing ideas, but as we now operate in a near constant state of advertising-driven idea-flipping, bombarded by letters, covered in silly letters, awash in loud letters, well then. My hope is that the fluffy icing will always be fluffy icing, and that the sharp mind of a pure heart will always cut to the center of discourse. We can only assume the best of a cake or cake metaphor.

The "Of Human Bondage" thing comes in for illustration: how I reminisce for a time of simple class warfare and prim Victorian oppression, for I would be a hipster libertine. Now, however, I find myself a true Catholic in a world of easy want and insincerity. I blame Ian MacKaye and Kurt Vonnegut both.

The mid-twenties narrator, Phillip, he's running into every example of foolish libertines and delusional adherents of the Good Life and I'm at this ridiculous job where I just learned they are teaching "Criminal Thinking Errors" and Freudian constructs to the boys on the fourth floor, the ones going to big kid jail soon. What about a little love, people, what if the skills you need to steal a car and lie to the cops are the same skills needed to get a good job and run an investment firm? Where is the art in life, the right for everyone to feel the smug compassion that is my daily fuel? Are there people who still can't see that their misbehavior is your gentlemanliness, that their delinquency is your success?

My demands: I demand a man of letters who can finish the ideas I start. I want no Demitri Martin-type shorthand replacing insight, but neither will the cruelness of this world lead my man of letters to kill himself or become a pickled and fusty conservative. I want workaday imagination, vigorous compassion, and enough sarcasm to keep him or her alive for the duration.

*This issue's short story contains scenes around Toledo and is called 'the Blade.' It's Denis Johnson-reminiscent and a silent shout-out to Toledo: it's both these things!

Question: anxiety about your lack of anxiety is called what?

I'm saying no to the PhD program to which I was just accepted. I only sporatically abide by sober standards of behavior but I always know where I'm supposed to do--and I'm supposed to pay off this damned debt. School will not offer funding for a part-timer, and I can't afford to go full time. Also, I don't want to go full time, because as sick and stressed and heartbroken as this job has made me, I am not done with it and it is not done with me. Who quits a job in this economy? Plus, I'm thinking I'll go for the big brass ring and apply to University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. The name alone used to sicken me! I wanted to attend the School of Dismantling The System! These days I'm not so sure. Now I want to be where the power is, the power of money, class, and prestige, where the books are leather and the buildings Gothic. It seems that I will always be an outsider, and there is no better place to be outside than the inside, right?

Outside of the outside is either inside or nowhere. I'm too angry to be an insider and too much a lady for nowhere.

In the meantime I will prompt my gifted co-workers to their greatest, and attach my name to their accomplishments. I will coast on the great expectations of my friends and family, who assume there is genius in there somewhere, under the hair and head cold. That's right, Chicago Winter. You get one last punch in.

Katrina asks me why I no blog no more, and I have no good answer. In the absence of a good answer I will just go ahead and blog, and then I can say "Katrina, what the hell are you talking about?" Because, you see, I'm blogging all the time.

For instance, I'm doing it right now, at work.

Remember when I thought my non-standard work schedule would be calming and centering? It has been; I am now cooking all the time, and doing yoga. I'm also deeply infatuated with a married co-worker and it is frustrating and great. Due to the sad-pants direction in which I'm heading, I'm trying to get my date on, in person and in Internet. In person, I try to talk to nice guys with beards and spend less time with charming and shallow alcoholics. On the computer, I chose chemistry.com because it involves my favorite of the soft sciences--personality tests! They are choosing men for me based on colorful pie charts, just like the village elders would have, had my people stayed in Ireland and Ireland developed pseudo-scientific Power Point-style mating rituals.

It's nearly my year anniversary here at Kid Jail, and since I love a good retrospective, I have been comparing my year at the last job with my work here. In a sweet convergence, I will be leading a Trauma-Sensitive Care training with the line staff this month. Of course this was the training I desperately wanted to lead at the residential center, but seeing as I was the Training Coordinator, it was more important to sort resumes and discuss the finer points of dental coverage. Man, that job sucked!

Following a big conference I attended in November on "Trauma and its Aftermath" I suddenly knew what I wanted to research for my PhD and applied to Jane Addams. I was watching a panel with the great Bessel van de Kelk and His Eminence John Briere and it just hit me, and continued to pinch and shock me until I was forced to speak out on the last day at the last paper presentation. I was on holy fire!

Since the application, however, I have had the time to deeply question my choice of research and of schools. In developing the handouts for this training, however, and thinking endlessly, endlessly, constantly about these kids and cultural conceptions of these kids and communities and crime, it's pretty obvious that I am supposed to pull at this thread until it no longer keeps me up at night or causes me to cry on the bus. This equation has worked well in the past: what is it that makes you cry, St. Renegade, what is keeping you awake at night with empathy and rage? You should probably make that thing your job. In fact, you should blog about it.

The plan, then, is for increased blogging on the following topics: 1. Dating and 2. Various inchoate weepy thoughts about children in Chicago and the meaning of life. I can also write about vegetarian recipes, urban teen language, and missing my friends that have moved away. Coming soon.