Letters to the Editor
Gwool
Published Letters: 366 Editor's Choice: 40
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Managing a Trifecta
[Read the article: What am I doing here?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Reportedly the three biggest stress factors one can face revolve around job, relocation, and sex. You relocated to the dream job (Ok, so it is education, but indulge me a little poetic license), and you left behind a recently acquired LoL (Love of Life).
So, congratulations, you have hit the trifecta!
You aren't real pleased with the people in the program. Part of this could also be not actively seeking to make friends with them given you are consumed with thoughts about the guy you left back home. That your LoL will be relocating to join you could make things a little easier and might get you to engage the local population. With the LoL as muse and instant gratification sexual satisfier, you might just find your outlook toward the progam pick up and your view of your writing change.
From where I sit you have nowhere to go but up, so sit back and enjoy the ride for a while.
Figuratively and literally.
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Grow a Pair
[Read the article: Graduate schools can drive you crazy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I read this wheezie whine about betrayal and wanted to scream. It is a true sign of an affluent society that we can have so many people pursuing graduate study programs in the arts. It means we've evolved beyond scratching out basic survival needs and have the luxuary to allow folks to hole up and chase their dreams.
Great.
But why whine about it? Where is the lost appreciation of the ability to have one's basic necessities met while pursuing something with precious little tangible, economic benefit. (I support the pursuit of the arts, but let us understand it is a luxury and not a goddam necessity, OK?)
I played around with the arts and toyed with applying to the Yale Repertory Theatre. I'd picked the John of Gaunt deathbed speech and a specific rant from Long Day's Journey Into Night as my two pieces and was raring to go.
Then I managed to fall in love with someone. I also talked to a few people not the least of which happened to be my brother. He, too, had done his fair share of acting and was now a senior partner in a Big 5 accounting firm. As he said he acted practically daily depending on the audience. He also reminded me that the Screen Actor's Guild had far and away the highest unemployment rate of any union in the country at about 90%.
If I sucked at acting I could starve. If I sucked at business I could always find a way to make ends meet selling copiers or whatever the hell else was available and hot at the time.
I also write and have been told I am fairly good at it. I create research reports for a living, so it comes in handy. I also fire up a weekly column for a collection of local rags with a subscription base of about 10,000.
It would be lovely to had to the Macdowell Arts Colony and hide in a cabin and write the great novel. I would kill to be able to write a humor/political column along the lines of Maureen Down, Art Buchwald, or Molly Ivins. Hell, I would love to act.
But I have obligations and responsibilities. I willfully made choices driven, one can argue, by the little brain south of my belt line, but I have very few regrets.
I did not want to ask a woman to come along on a journey that had a 90% chance of being an abject failure. I figured I owed her more than that. So I forewent acting and creative writing became little more than a hobby while I sold computer gear and later became a market researcher/consultant to the technology industry.
So forgive me if I do not have a lot of patience for folks who have pursued a path towards the arts who complain about being betrayed. They are off pursing something a very privileged few get to chase. Someone else has put their oar in the water to keep the ship of state moving along while they sit on board chasing that idle pursuit.
This sounds far more sour than I intend. The point is to appreciate the opportunity rather than to whine about how hard it is. Life has it's rough spots, boys and girls. For some it is worrying about whether or not they have enough money to put food on the table.
Hearing someone worry about their writing exercise being betrayed by "the man" will be something those people simply will not be able to comprehend.
So stop whining and consider yourself lucky. You are.
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He's Right
[Read the article: Joe Biden's Obama drama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obama is the first CREDIBLE black candidate. No one realistically expected Jackson, Sharpton, or Chisholm to have a snowball's chance in hell.
But, the poverty pimps have put the establishment back on its heels. It's not what you do, it is what you say, as evidenced by the firestorm around Biden.
The black caucus had better get used to more scruting, as the worm is turning. Hispanics will soon eclipse blacks as the largest minority and they have different attributes reflecting poorly on the african american culture.
Biden accurately depicts Obama as the first credible black candidate. Yeah, he used words like clean and articulate, which set off a firestorm. Well, hell, he IS clean and articulate looking akin to a Mitt Romney and not slightly rumpled like a John McCain.
Still it ought not surprise. Some poor Washington, DC finance manager got the ax for using the term niggardly, so nothing is surprising when the african american community chooses to get a case of rabbit ears.