Cubists and Coffee Rings

It’s an exhilarating thing to find yourself, white wine in hand, rubbing shoulders with Harvard professors at the faculty club one day, and sitting on the roof of your car, among the dumpsters behind Starbucks, dragging on the second half of someone else’s bummed cigarette and blowing smoke into the heavy spring air, the next.

Dear Livejournal,

Please forgive my year of utter absentia. I've been busy figuring out how to pay my hydro bill and steaming milk and grading papers and smooching. There are surprisingly few adorable sound-bytes yielded in that pursuit.

Keep on truckin'.

hugs and kisses,
Tamar

It's the middle of a Sunday afternoon at Starbucks and this real estate of a hard-backed chair next to the outlet is my most valuable possession.

What, I ask you, is happening to this world when spellcheck highlights 'Hogarth' as misspelled and offers to replace it with 'HOGWARTS'?!

You know it's time for a haircut when your split ends pop off with the same mystifyingly clean break as asparagus stems.

The fact that I'm handing in my Master's qualifying paper tomorrow morning is meaning nothing to me now except clean sheets, clean underwear, a normal eating schedule, and sleep.

NOTHING else.

I'm too tired to be saddened by that.

December 17, 2007:

Great. My solitary library nook is now steadily overrun with facebook-stalking undergrads, and I just went from serious intellectual researcher lost on my own earplugged planet to the girl who eats her Doritos too loud.

In other news, I just graded 48 final exams in a mere 24 hours, my diet seems to consist entirely of real and/or processed cheese, the city of Somerville charged me $100 for the privilege of plowing in my car, keenery tools just swept my two favorite reality shows, and my gynecologist totally made fun of me yesterday. Like, to my face.

However! Tommy and I are apparently starring in a 1940s film noir crime caper, The Big Combo-ver, a tale of sexual intrigue and moral ambiguity, complete with kicky little wigs. Just between us, I think this is the break I've been needing to turn this all around.


If They Only Knew...

It's a trifle disquieting to zoom to Wikipedia to look up a book so pretentiously poetic that they would give it to Jenny on the L Word as the book that "changed her life", and when meaning to search for "The Autobiography of Red", the search-spot-of-shameful-past-searches automatically fills in "The Anna Nicole Show".

Upon walking to the library on this beautiful autumn afternoon, I found myself trailing behind a little twink of an undergrad in a tiny, tight dress and Paris sunglasses, talking loudly on her cell phone. We reached the stone stairs, and with the quickest accidental slip of a flip-flop, she tripped and fell, the wind simultaneously blowing her lower dress up and her upper dress down, all her God-given ladyparts splayed every which way.

"Oh my God!" she screeched into her phone, mid-fall, her bare thonged bum still exposed to the elements, and my face. "Like, the MOST embarrassing thing just happened!" The play-by-play narration continued, in lieu, I might add, of fixing her dress. The guy walking past her grinned at her spilt, tan-line'd chest, and she laughed shrilly. "I KNOW!" she screamed. "Like, I TOTALLY just fell!"

Victorian England this ain't.

And then there comes along a day when you realize you know diddly squat about nothing.

This is like asking a grown-up to retake his driver's test. As IF my professors could just sit down and take their comps again. You get used to your own standards. You drive over the speed limit and forget to signal, but you're experienced, you're safe, you don't get flustered. Rules aren't broken, they're adapted and deepened to suit your needs. So what if I know nothing about Latin American art? It's NOT MY FIELD.

Nor is Renaissace, Ancient, Baroque, American, Chinese, Indian, African, Oceanic, Romantic, Contemporary, or Medieval. MODERN EUROPEAN. GERMANY AND FRANCE. 1850-1945. THAT'S ALL I KNOW.

And I've never once been in an accident. So leave me alone.

Dude.

So FREAKING hepped up on caffeine right now. My butt has crunched into the shape of this wooden chair, and the Police are once again serenading me from Satellite FM, the voice of Starbucks.

This whole comps business is so oddly satisfying. Never mind that millions of brilliant brains have spent millions of hours cracking the codes of their slice of chosen field. Why do they call this a "master's" program? Because I am the MASTER of ALL of art history. Hellenistic Greece? Hudson River School? Yakshi goddesses? Three bullet points. Boom Boom Boom. Done. I rule all.

This is woefully patronizing to my undergraduate degree. All four years of development and criticism and memorization, distilled down to one two-hour slide exam, half of which is essay writing. And all things considered, we're all, like, only 800 slides to memorize? Didn't these exams used to be harder? Never mind how how U of T blissfully skated over non-Western art like it was a frozen pool of lemonade. Didn't I used to think undergrad was HARD? Could I have known that I would someday be tested on ALL OF IT in one go? Remember when these exams were JUST Imperial Rome? Or JUST the second half of a course on illuminated manuscripts? ONLY Cubism to De Stijl? An in-class essay on Dada's influence on Pop?

Ah, to be young and foolish again.

Why indeed.

I'm breaking from my self-imposed exile in a New Hampshire dreamhouse to sit in the only place within 500 miles that I can find internet. And of course, what was meant to be a routine email check has lengthened itself into a soul-sucking two hours of dicking around. Bank statements have been meticulously tracked, celebrities have been fugged, Wikipedia has offered up tidbits of the last two seasons of Top Chef, blogs have been perused, ex-boyfriends have been checked up on, and all updated Facebook profiles have been mentally recorded. I guess there's nothing left to do now but pick of University of Toronto's slack when it comes to all non-Western art.

Unless I can blab on a little longer to you, my sweet, whittled-down audience of two.

To debrief: since I've last posted a serious post, I've temporarily moved out of my apartment, misplaced and replaced all three roommates, punched a hole in my face, "mentored" "youth" at the Smith College museum studies camp, driven a 15-person passenger van around New York City and Boston, learned a thing or two about Islamic and Japanese art, rewatched "Schindler's List", spent three solitary nights in Wilmot, New Hampshire, and attended my first and last Harry Potter Midnight Book Party. I've reclaimed a self I thought Tufts had obliterated, and am slowly coming to terms with life beyond school, beyond roommates and Somerville gloom, and have decided to take this newfound summer optimism into my unrolling year. Alas, the only thing standing between me, here, now, and a future that seems to be slowly gaining light and shimmer, is Marilyn Stokstad.

Fucking comps. Vacation ends now.

Roommate Search: an ard-
Uous task, dependant on
Strangers’ writing skills.

Awww. What's better than getting all your final grades back and knowing that you've really earned that suit?



Sigh. Not much.

In the last few days, I have accomplished several more crucial steps towards becoming Bette Porter. Behold!

1) My bangs were getting a little long and unflattering. Teeny scissors, hack hack, now they're back to their flippy gloriousness.

2) I haven't really made out with boy in a while. While this is not good, Bette hasn't either, so there.

3) I bought a SUIT. Didn't mean to, of course, but I was killing time yesterday after getting my phone fixed (well, replaced. Who actually gets anything FIXED anymore?), and found myself daring to go into Express to end a year-long non-essential-clothes-buying drought. Now, I haven't even had time to buy groceries in the last two months, or do laundry, which may explain why my current clothes don't fit/suck, and I suppose was feeling especially entitled. Not SUIT-BUYING entitled, of course, but maybe an under $20 tee-shirt or marked-down last-season pair of pants entitled. So, as is engrained in my soul, I went straight for the sale rack. And what do I see? A beautiful blazer with even the three buttons down each cuff, the $140 on its price tag slashed to death with a fabulous red line, and $19.99 scrawled underneath. I, having come from a very promising job interview earlier that day, was charmed. A SUIT jacket, y'all. Which of course fit like a dream. I took it to a salesgirl and asked if there was any possible way that there could be pants that match this unearthed gem, and she took me right to them, claiming that the jacket was totally this season, and sneaking me sidelong glances like I'd just gotten away with something dirty. The pants look even better than the jacket. True, they were $70, but still, taken together, it's a $90 suit for what WAS over $200. And it's a small price to pay for LOOKING LIKE A TOTAL GROWN-UP. I now have something to wear to interviews. Exhibition openings. L Word costume parties. I can walk into a room and be all, "let me plan an education curriculum for your museum, bitches. Testify to the SUIT." and they'll be all "dag, yo. Museum professionals RESPECT."

4) Oh, and I finished my first year of an art history Master's degree. Hey, you know, whatevs.

The conversation I just noticed scrawled on the wall next to this table:

[accidental pencil mark]

[arrow pointing to it:] "oops."

"There are no mistakes, only art."

"Art is dead."

"So is your soul, apparently."


Too true, pseudo-intellectual undergraduate existentialist wall graffiti. Too true.

I'm a single 25 page paper away from completing a whole YEAR of a Masters program. If that paper sounds like it's a lot of work, it isn't. Not at this point. My books are piled up next to me, shielding me from a library that has slowly emptied itself of students while I sat here, my butt liquifying into the wooden chairs. They are gone, and I, the lone keyboard tacking grad student, remain. God. I am so over this. I don't even know what I'd rather be doing, but I sure as hell know this isn't it. And yet tally ho I must. Have to crank out one more paper on post-Holocaust representation and the creation of an empathic space through imaginary, though visceral imagery that may or may not have anything iconic to do with the Holocaust itself. In 25 pages. Plus images.

Sigh. If only art were dead.

Raise your hand if you just completed an online federal financial aid form with information from your own tax return and corresponded all the right little boxes and IT ALL MADE PERFECT SENSE?

God, I am SUCH a grown-up.

The tension created in a library by hundreds of milling, sweating, studying end-of-term students is like a pheromone in the air, attracting our bleary eyes from our screens to one another, welcoming even the slightest twang of a distraction. Our elbows and rear ends and brains are turning to mush. The discs in our backs are compressing under the weight of the spare backpacks we've piled with books for easier transport.

Although some of us are smartening up.

Yesterday, Emily came running up to me, almost breathless with excitement. A job? A new boyfriend? A won lottery?

"Better!" she panted. "I got a locker at the library!"

You'd think this wouldn't be so exciting. You'd be wrong. See, when I was at U of T, one thing that made me want to become a grad student more than anything was the meager hole in the wall at Robarts known as the TA's Carell--a tiny personal space that was yours, all yours... where the brilliance simmers and flows like champaign down the walls. There, your own desk waits patiently, the walls are piled high with accumulated books, lesson plans and syllabi are carelessly-on-purpose taped to the wall next to a snapshot or two of the lover/family you haven't seen since Christmas, and a moldy coffee cup is perched precariosly on the windowsill. Your own door closes the world at large out, a concealed fantasy student tryst in, and solidifies your glory as a higher mind. Ah, the life of the graduate student. What's not to love?

Tufts, on the other hand, does not bestow their grad students with such luxuries. Beyond the photo in the glass case in the foyer of the department ("and mailboxes!"-Rhonda), the only thing that distinguishes the grad students from the undergrads during this, the Hell Month, are our obscene piles of backbreaking books. Emily gave me a tour of her locker, made a show of spinning the combination lock to a rapturous click, and stood back as I stared in earnest awe into the abyss, already crammed with books, promising footnotes and annotated bibliographies and, most importantly, chiropractic equanimity. She came up behind me.

"I honestly can't believe how much pleasure this is giving us. We need to get the fuck out of this program."

Jesus Christ, how freaking inspiring is the Boston Marathon? People coming from all over the world to our fair city, running the length of my childhood from halfway to camp through Newton Center and then finishing deep in the heart of Copley Square, running through ribbons and over a painted finish line, the remnants of which will still be there days from now. How wonderful must it feel to claw your way up Heartbreak Hill through the indiscriminate screams of encouragement coming from the legions of citrus-toting onlookers. How proud we all feel to be Bostonian today.

My own complaints from this past year notwithstanding, it fills my heart with joy to call this city my home on Marathon Day. Now if people would just have the same positive, fresh-faced friendly energy the other 364 days of the year, I think we'd be in business.

Oh, Staaaaaarbucks.