English Major (pt. One)

Below is the first entry of two about a recent discovery I've made. The second part is going to conclude it in a way that will make the whole thing a lot less pessimistic-y.


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Choosing classes for my coming school year, browsing over the classes that looked interesting,

Classics. Writing. Literature. Journalism. Rhetoric.

it began to dawn on me. Two words were forming, whispering, increasing slowly in volume, steadily as the ticking of a clock enveloped in cotton, fastening itself to me, burning itself into my forehead in scarlet letters, a neon arrow hovering dagger-like above me, calling me out, pulling me towards a realization I was not ready, decidedly unready, to face:

English major.

No. Anything but that.

I am the daughter of my father, a man who could have literally any job in the world. His natural abilities coupled with his hard-earned skills could have landed him a gig as a scientist, a mathematician, a fiction writer, a reporter, and editor, a science writer, a teacher, a songwriter / musician, a consultant, an economist, a historian, an engineer, a food critic, an inventor, or anything involving heavy lifting and making puns. I am the daughter also of my mother, a doctor, “single and loving it,” with an apartment in Cole Valley, spunky and sporty and retired at 47 and about to embark on a road trip around the country on her savings.

Was it to be I, the daughter of two intellectual success stories, having lived in San Francisco my entire life and having received (and in the process of continuing) an elite education, who would end the line?

Images flashed through my mind: myself, miraculously sporting stubble on my face, holding a cup and a cardboard sign—will recite Lorca for food. Myself, a beleaguered English teacher, explaining Romeo and Juliet for the fiftieth time to seventh graders who couldn’t care less, having left San Francisco, the only city I could ever truly love, and now living somewhere in Middle America, the only part of the country I could afford. Myself, working at a Starbucks, occasionally reaching down under the counter to hit a few keys of the laptop I kept there, having finished the first paragraph of my book after three years…

"He Looked Right At Me!"

Bob Dylan wrote "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" about a relationship I had.

Well, that's actually pretty unlikely, since I don't think I was alive when he wrote it and even if I had been I probably would never had met him for long enough to fill him in about my boy drama. Yet somehow, that song--and also a number of Federico Garcia Lorca poems, and maybe a book or two--seems to accurately and eloquently sum up a time period from my life.

This is not bizarre. Most people go through the same basic life experiences and feel the same emotions. The people who become famous are the people who can most succintly put these emotions into words or images or sound. So when Bob Dylan sang "I wish there were something you could do or say to try and make me change my mind and stay," enough people felt their eyes widen and thought "Holy Shit! That's me!" to make the song a hit.

With that said, PLEASE STOP QUOTING THE BEATLES AT ME. It's not profound.

Love,
Avi

Gabo Would Be Apprehensively Tolerant, if not Proud

Here is a little comic that I drew for my Latin American Literature class. It is based on an idea I got from One Hundred Years of Solitude and I am still trying to figure out how to print it.
(If the pictures are small, click them to see a big version)

I Forget Which of the Scooby Doo Characters Scripps is...

Because today's comic references an all-girls' high school, I thought this might be a good time to muse about why I chose to register at an all-girls' college.

First of all, Scripps is sort of Girls' School Lite: since it's part of the Claremont composium, there are boys in the neighboring colleges and even boys taking classes at Scripps. The only places there won't be boys are the dorms and the bathrooms, which brings me to my second (first?) reasons for choosing an all-girls' school: the idea of co-ed bathrooms makes me really unconfortaBLE. I am sure that a set of pangendered or transgendered people feel equally uncomfortable walking into a boys' versus girls' bathroom, but I think that one-stall unisex bathrooms are probably a better solution to this than multi-stall boy/girl bathrooms, which are now standard for most schools. I plan to avoid this!

All-girl dorms also = cleaner and less likely to be smelly?

The second/third/fourth reason is that I can't count, JUST KIDDING, is that an all girls' schools caters to girls. This sounds trivial, but since one of my biggest fears about college has been a rocky transition, I think it will help to go to a school that has seen and understands what it is like to be a nervous girl in a new place. Also, there are tea parties and a rose garden and pianos. These are things that ladies like I enjoy.

This brings me to my last reason: girls are nice. An anonymous male friend to whom I mentioned this warned me that "girls can be pretty nasty" and brought up one of my least favorite old stereotypes: "if a man doesn't like you, he tells you to your face, but girls go behind your back." As a girl, I know where this stereotype comes from: I do think that women are less likely to approach people they dislike about their flaws, but I don't think that this stems from some evil desire to plot and deceive. The concept of women being more than sweet, docile creatures--that is to say, beings capable of anger--is relatively new, and not all women feel brave enough to express anger, especially towards men. This does not seem nasty or conniving to me. While movies like Mean Girls, John Tucker Must Die, Bring It On, and a bevy of other such movies paint groups of girls as a sort of noveau mafia that customizes cement shoes for its enemies, I haven't experienced anything like this. Girls can be dumb jerks, but they are not inherently evil or conniving except in some extreme cases. And anyway I haven't heard too much about girls bringing guns to school.

Can tea parties actually count as two reasons? I like tea a lot.

I think being around girls will be a welcome change. I will get to wear sundresses and not worry about eating too much cake. When I spoke to ma belle-mere about it, she told me that it was really exciting coming from an all girls' high school and going to a co-ed university, and even though she took it back when I reminded her that it would be the other way around for me, I think the excitment may work in either direction.

Expect to hear more on this topic if I go and decide that I hate it!

A Writer (in Theory).

The problem with choosing any sort of identity for oneself as a child is that it determines what sort of Christmas gifts one will receive for the rest of one's life. When I decided in second grade that unicorns were a pretty cool thing, my dad's faceless horde of friends in Los Angeles and Chicago began sending me unicorn books, toys, trinkets, and clothing. When a couple of years later I began to write the sort of terrible stories that small children write, journals began pouring in from every imaginable source. I did not find these journals at all conducive to literary inspiration, since I was much more wont to writing short fiction pieces about magical whales than recording anything about my daily life. The truth did not seem to me a worthwhile subject for writing, so I began one or two of the journals but never got past a first entry in any of them.

With my discovery of the Internet in eighth grade came a profound desire for self expression. I dove into websites like Xanga expecting that blogging could be the thing to launch my brilliant prose into public view. Of course, an online journal proved to be no more inspirational than the physical ones of my childhood, and after a year of recording what I ate each day, I gave up on the web's blank and yearning templates as well.

I considered  my inability and lack of motivation to document my own thoughts in a compelling way to be one of my greatest failures as a writer. Mollusk Antics has been the first semi-autobiographical project I've properly maintained, and it is more visual than textual.

A couple of things finally inspired me to start up another blog: the satisfaction I get from drawing Mollusk Antics, the realization that thoughts that seem insignificant now might be interesting to me/others later, the feeling of importance and transition that has come over me during the process of choosing a college and preparing to graduate high school, an article I read in the Chronicle this morning about getting discovered as a writer because of an email, and some really questionable lamb chops I ate that might be messing with my head.

The key to success is prolificness, quantity begets quality, et cetera. That is why I created this blog. I will probably discuss some of my comics a little as well, but it is more a method by which I can elaborate on the autobiographical aspects of Mollusk Antics in words.

That is all for now. The internet is a lovely thing and so is spring break.