I find myself thinking about the past year usually around my birthday in November, simply because the birthday milestone always strikes me more deeply than the new year’s milestone. (Their relative proximity helps.) I usually can’t remember to write the new year’s date until past April, anyway. I’m usually good throughout January but into February and March I have a last year’s date relapse until in April I start writing the correct year automatically. Then I find sometimes in September I’ll accidentally write “2007″ or “2002″ or whatever the case happens to be and I’ll stare at the paper, say, “It’s September, for goodness’ sake!” and then giggle at the date.

It’s flurrying presently and with the windchill it feels about 20 degrees Fahrenheit which both adds to the new year’s flavor and makes me very happy that Bryan and I are not the sort to want to go to Times Square to watch the ball drop this evening. I haven’t yet met any person who lives in New York City who has any desire to actually go do that. (Especially in rain or snow.) Additionally I haven’t met any residents who live/work in Manhattan who like being around tourists. For the most part the tourists walk slowly, gawk, and get in the way of New Yorkers attempting to go about their daily routines, and if you know anything about the New Yorker stereotype you know we’re all impatient, ornery, and loud-mouthed. (It doesn’t take more than a month or two of residence or employment here to develop at least one of those traits. Even my very even-tempered friends feel the New Yorker temperament pulling at them.)

But back to the “year in review” part. (See? I’m bad at staying on-topic.) 2008 was busy. Busy and full of change, but looking back, nearly every year I’ve ever had has been both busy and full of changes. If I look back and call a year “slow and boring and all the same” I will cry. That’s not living life well, to my mind.

2009 will, in all likelihood, be busier than 2008. In 2009 there will be an epically historic presidential inauguration, my bridal shower, our wedding, our annual ski trip to Utah, our honeymoon to the Caribbean, two Pennsylvania receptions in May for the March wedding, and then a move from our current studio apartment once this lease is up at the start of the summer. I can’t wait to move to a bigger place. After the move, who knows what will happen in 2009. Hopefully the economy will be back up (or getting up), things won’t seem nearly as bleak in general when we look out at the future.

2008 started with us as we were at the end of 2007. Bryan was working as an investment banker, gone most of the week and when he was home he was either exhausted or too wired, mostly glued to his computer while I was glued to mine. We watched a lot of television; I did a lot of stuff alone, like eat dinners and listen to music and pretend to work out on our home’s elliptical. Over the summer, things got weird and interesting. Bryan got pounded by his bosses. He pulled all-nighters and had no time to breathe. He got to the point where he could not countenance working there any longer and took a leave of absence in July. During the leave he called up a contact and arranged an interview — and found himself another job. He formally quit and moved jobs in August and then we found ourselves in a strange place. We were finally able to set a date for the wedding, now that Bryan’s job wasn’t going to be able to keep him from attending it (as might have been the case with banking). Bryan was working normal business hours (9 to 5 or 6) instead of banker’s hours (9 to 12 or 2am) and we had so much more time together. We had to rearrange the studio apartment to give us some peace and some more space to work; we started eating meals and enjoying the city together. Things settled back to normal for the fall and in November I threw myself into NaNoWriMo with gusto, ultimately winning. December burred by in activity associated with the wedding and now it’s finally at the end of the year.

This year I read a lot of books, though I feel as if I read more at the end of 2007 than I did for most of 2008. Even so I encountered a lot of new authors. I accomplished a lot with my books and my worlds, though I wasn’t as consistent a worker as I could have or should have been. I look forward to 2009 as I look forward to every new day: I know I can be better than I have been and I’ll keep striving for that.

Now at the end of 2008 I’ve been tremendously busy with wedding planning stuff and in early 2009 I imagine it’ll only get worse and more hectic. Only a few people are coming to this wedding and it’s taking up so much of my energy to plan it. I can’t even imagine having a wedding involving hundreds of guests. (I can barely imagine the cost, either.) But 2009 will bring that wedding and it’ll happen regardless of whether or not it goes off perfectly or with a few hitches. I’m confident things will work out and I’m trying somewhat desperately to not be a nitpicker, perfectionist, or obsessive control freak about every detail. I’m trying to be calm and relaxed about it all. We’ll see how it all ends up.

What else happened in 2008?

It was the first full year of my life I didn’t attend any school, as I can recall. (I started nursery school full-time in September of the year I turned 3 that November, with pre-school the year after that. I started Kindergarten at 4.)

I look back and marvel at how fast all of it went by. What happened in 2008? The seasons changed, the layout of the apartment changed, we explored more of Manhattan than we ever have… we got older. And it’s done already. I remember thinking, back in the late 1990s, that 2010 was so far away. But as of tomorrow, 2010 will be next year. I’m… flabbergasted. I still remember when that year seemed something futuristic, unreal.

I think sometimes that the years I spent in high school were the longest years of my life and every year that leads me further from that time makes that sentiment all the more real. These years beyond that have gone by fast — speed-of-light quickly, a few of them. Like the college years. I was having too much fun for time of have lingered pleasantly around those years. “Time flies when you’re having fun” and all of that? Why is it so true? I didn’t have a lot of fun in high school and the days seemed to hang on me. For a lot of it, I was miserably focused on work, reading, and writing, not really looking up and staring at the world beyond a vague wish/prayer for it to be over as soon as could be arranged. Perhaps most of my elementary and secondary schooling years were that long. Fifth grade seemed to take an eternity. Eighth grade was a good year, I think; that one went fast. 

I guess I’m glad 2008 is over. 2007 being over was much more somber because it meant so many things were real. 2008 ending is just a year ending. I’m looking forward to too many things in 2009 to be forlorn about this year’s end.

So happy new year, everyone. I hope your 2009 is exciting.

I mean, should we be doing something more for Christmas Eve? I have fond memories of going to Christmas Eve church services but in recent years the service at my old church near my parents’ has been uncomfortable, mostly due to the new pastor who is a little weird. I don’t know any churches, really, in our neighborhood, nor would Bryan probably be amenable or excited by the prospect of going to church tonight. He was raised Jewish and as such doesn’t really feel comfortable being in a church, even for a service as festive and unusual as the Christmas Eve service.

It all leaves me with this strange displaced feeling. Christmas time really is here but it doesn’t really feel like it yet. Maybe I can blame it on the fact that retailers have said it’s been Christmas since Halloween, so it’s gone on so long it feels strange. To add to that, we don’t have any overtly Christmas-y things in the apartment. We really don’t have a tree (or room for a tree, though we have a tiny potted evergreen bush/tree); I put up some LED lights and I have a bunch of holly-scented candles and some fun red garland and a few ornaments decorating the apartment, but it feels a little anti-climactic. I think what I need is for something really fun and Christmas-y to be on TV tonight, or maybe I need to blast some of Josh Groban or Kristin Chenoweth’s Christmas albums (or Hanson’s…don’t judge me!) and get in the mood for tomorrow. Tomorrow will feel more “normal” Christmas — going to my parents for Christmas dinner and presents and dessert. I’m really looking forward to that.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy 4th night of Hanukkah, everyone!

(Which reminds me — note to self: buy a menorah so you have it for next year…)

The main reason CMU is unusual is because every student — and the faculty and oddly a large portion of the staff — are all passionately obsessed about something. Typically these people, being in a research university environment, tend to study that something either as their main course of study or as a minor or in a single class or in some capacity — in something intramural, extracurricular, something. Sometimes those obsessions run completely parallel or perpindicular to what people actually study; you find all sorts of types playing CMU’s Varsity sports teams and even more sorts playing everything else. Even more interesting are the humanities or art people who are obsessed with video games or Star Trek; the psychology majors who are entranced by metaphysical principles, the computer programmers or future doctors who love to write or paint or build wooden structures in the shapes of crazy things like Death Stars. CMU is full of people who defy the stereotypes of every conceivable major — they even defy the stereotypes of college students, period. CMU lets you be a professional, amateur, or wanna-be nerd — in a good way. Randy Pausch is just one of the most famous examples of incredibly talented people who just happen to be fanatically obsessed about a lot of different things but through the medium of Carnegie Mellon find a way to put everything together (or heck, keep them separate) and be completely themselves in the process. Being at Carnegie Mellon enabled me to be consistently surrounded by people who fascinated, challenged, intrigued, or generally surprised me in every way possible.

When I was accepted to CMU in March of 2003 for the Fall 2003 class, I was accepted into the Science and Humanities Scholars program — called SHS — because I had cited on my application my interest in (first) Biology, (second) English, and (third) History.

(In actuality, I had cited these three in that order because of several reasons, all of which I feel completely guiltless about divulging now that I have my B.A.: first biology because at the time of applications in Fall 2002 I had already gotten a 5 (out of 5) on that AP exam and done really well on the biology regents and all of my grades demonstrated a mastery of science in general but especially biology; second, I thought I’d have a better chance of getting into college if I went with science as my primary subject of study while really knowing that I wanted to pursue English and writing as the ultimate goal. I put history because I had gotten a 5 on the AP US History exam and I was good at it; I’ve always had that Jeopardy brain for remembering that the French Revolution was in 1789, the British abolished slavery in 1799, the Louisiana Purchase was 1803… etc. I was good at it. And for me, psychologically, I needed to put my best foot forward with my applications because getting admitted was the most important factor — I could always change majors later on. By the way, to a high school student, “majoring” definitely seems a foreign concept — how many people (1) know what they want to do with their life or (2) like any one subject enough to want to commit more years of study to that subject? I only had a career path — novelist — but no definite plan of how to get there. Admittedly I somewhat got around that by applying to colleges that had creative writing programs, majors, or minors but that was all secondary — I figured I could always switch over to CW later on.)

So when I was accepted to Carnegie Mellon’s SHS program I felt a little odd; the wording of the acceptance praised my academic prowess in subjects all across the academic spectrum — I’d imagined them reading my application and saying, “Good in math, science, English, history, and SHE EVEN PLAYS SPORTS (three at the time) — what more of an eclectic person could we want?!” — and felt a little odd about that. Like, my master scheme of getting into college by putting my academic foot first… worked? Wow. That feels weird. (Not to mention that it hadn’t worked at several colleges — I am an Ivy League reject and proud of it, all these years later.) I was especially weirded out by the fact that I was accepted into such a selective program because I’d done it without really anyone’s strategic input. I’d never sat down with anyone and said, “Here is my grand collegiate scheme! What do you think?” and gotten a response. I simply walked up to my parents, my teachers, my guidance counselor (ha; more on my high school’s system at another time) and said, “This is where I am applying. I need you to fill out this form for me. [Smile.] Thank you.” [Walk away.]

Admittedly, I was a pretentious little twit during my senior year and I was seriously desperate — desperate – to get the hell out so I wasn’t very nice to people. (I held the belief that I’d rather be rude, pretentious, or arrogant than pretend emotions I don’t legitimately feel because I didn’t want to be “fake.” I’ve since learned that pretending emotions you don’t generally feel in certain situations is called “tact.” I have also since learned that being able to preserve a certain self-image or someone else’s emotional frame of mind by being tactful in certain situations can be a very crucial skill to possess.)

But back to getting into CMU — I hadn’t been totally decided on CMU publicly until sometime in late April but I was mentally set on it the moment I opened the acceptance envelope. I felt so warm – never mind that it was my first major college acceptance — I was ready to sign the paperwork immediately. But for everyone’s sake (including the sake of the little doubting voice in my head more concerned with my happiness than the fact that Pittsburgh was 400 miles from home) I decided to actually visit Carnegie Mellon. I’d applied without having visited — my parents had only been keen to take me to the big places and the ones within easy distance and I hadn’t been keen on going to anywhere less than an Ivy for a long, long while (remember that I was a pretentious twit?) so I’d never bothered going to visit CMU before my acceptance. But they had this funny thing called a “Sleeping Bag Weekend” that would occur in early April from Sunday to Monday where I’d get a chance to sleep over with a current student and actually visit the campus sans-parentals and I was there. By April of my senior year I was so mentally messed up by the driving, almost depressing desperation I had to rush me to August 2003 that I nearly cried with relief at the thought of actually going to college like a real college student, even for only a day.

I took the abominably long Greyhound trip to Pittsburgh — was it 7, 9, 11 hours? Who really knows anymore? And when I got there it was cold and going to rain. Brilliantly I hadn’t checked Pittsburgh’s forecast before leaving and I’d packed for New York appropriate spring weather. At the time — and for about 6 months afterward — I was convinced Pittsburgh was in the US’s midwest. They have since educated me that Pittsburgh is the gateway to the midwest but sure as hell clings to its north-eastern pretend status. (Additionally, regarding the weather, native Pittsburghers will brag that Pittsburgh has fewer sunny days / more cloudy days than some places in the Pacific Northwest like Seattle or Tacoma but I haven’t found the statistics to back that up — despite agreeing with them that statistically that has to be true given my own experiences, ha ha.) So my first view of the campus was under thick gray cloud cover. It didn’t start to rain until Monday. The grass was so green despite the clouds — the Cut, the large grassy space dividing the main area of campus was just brilliantly, inconceivably green — and I was stunned that people were walking around with umbrellas swinging from backpacks and having a grand old time. The people I met that day and the next were so smart, but not in a very conscious way. They all seemed to know a lot and were intensely, crazily giddy about their passions — including Carnival and Buggy, which I got a taste of — but they weren’t pretentious. It was amazing to find such proud… well, nerds. I had no word for someone proud to be brilliantly well-informed about really specific subjects but nerd. But that was me, too — me, exactly.

I’d go into profuse detail about my freshman year but that’s another story. This whole story will probably find its way into either a semi-fictitious account or a memoir — though I have a rule I’ve imposed about memoirs: I’m only going to write them or at least publish them only when certain unspeakable-in-a-blog conditions are met. They haven’t been yet met.

Basically the whole reason for this CMU period of reminiscing is because it’s been about 7 months since graduation and all of my December graduate friends are graduating and I feel both way too old and way too young at the same time. Damn it. Though admittedly having Bryan at this stage in my life prevents the romantic me from falling into the senioritis depression of high school but sometimes I feel like I’m getting there. I have these bursts of lack-of-productivity-shame that remind me of being in high school senior year… I’m so close to doing what I want to be doing but I can’t get myself there. The only problem at this point is my own willpower is the only thing stopping me. Not my age, no the natural progression of things like time and high school and whatnot. I am 22. My life is not over. But I know that so I keep dawdling. I need deadlines, I need timelines. Bryan and I need to work on developing those. In the meanwhile I need to find a way to be frickin’ productive without it being (a) dark outside and (b) it being the last moment. As I always say to you religious readers, I will be more productive. Sigh. The thing about being a judgmental procrastinating perfectionist is your best, your most productive, is never probably as good or as productive as you will ever want.

Anyway his lecture, “Lessons to Live By,” is terrific. I highly recommend watching it.

Edit: On a side note, I received an actual application for admissions to Carnegie Mellon in the mail today. They send all the material they send to prospective students to the CMAC members (Carnegie Mellon Admission Council) and I have to say that I am phenomenally glad I don’t have to apply to college again — not for any other reason than to have to relive high school again. I’d gladly relive college (sometimes I wish I could, parts of it) but I’d never, ever want to relive high school. Standardized tests, social awkwardness… never. Don’t get me wrong: I’d do things differently. I’m much wiser now. But how can I know that if I did those things the person I am today would be that same person? I don’t think I would be. If I did better on the SATs (one of those things I’d change) I might have gotten into different colleges, and I might never have discovered how wonderful Carnegie Mellon is. If I’d done things differently… I can’t say. We are who we have made ourselves. I’ve made myself who I am and I can’t want to change the person I am now… too much.

Being born in the fall but having a school district enrollment cutoff of December 31 was such a boon and a curse to me; I feel both too old for my years and too young for my experience. Bryan is 11 months older than me yet we went through the same school year together so things are somewhat different for him. It’s as if he’s appropriately mature. My whole life I’ve fought against the fact that numerically I seem a little young but realistically I feel age-appropriate.

I was only riffing tonight regarding this in lieu of inviting folks to my 22nd birthday bash this November via Facebook. I felt… well. I felt odd realizing that I am really turning 22 when I feel like I should be… 24? 25? I don’t feel only 22. I know (hell, I already do this) I’ll feel old and want to regain those years of my youth that I spent with abandon. I already have eye wrinkles and three gray hairs (ones I can see anyway) and somehow I feel both too old and young at once. Gah. This makes writing about coming of age fictitiously (in my YA novels) difficult; it complicates matters far beyond what you’d think of them as being. A person “comes of age” you think, when they achieve certain life objectives. Certainly Van Gennep said as much in his book The Rites of Passage. But even so… it’s not as if I haven’t gone through those rites yet — in a way I’m still going through one of them. But I still feel incongruously contradictory. Like… I get, at times, very baby-crazy, then at times feel like I need to be sixteen again, but to do it “right” this time — as socially crazy as television recommends. So… confusing. So contradictory. I said in my college admissions essay I am a contradiction. I wonder if I’ll ever outgrow that.

Ah, melancholia, serenity, and boredom. What you dredge from me.

Also:

Rock of Love: Season Finale. Boo yah, I was right when I called Jes from the first episode. HA! Her innate intelligence caught me off the bat and I have to say I was rooting for her all along. I hope she’s happy.

I am somewhat guilty of the latter. I haven’t really stayed in touch with folks I knew in high school. Vaguely, rarely, perfunctorily. I had a busy freshman year of college — the year it would have been best to stay and keep connected — and by the time that was over, I was with Bryan and focusing on getting better grades and everything in the past was essentially nonessential. In a way, most people of the past were nonessential after I graduated.

This morning I was obligatorily checking Facebook and I saw a high school teammate’s sister got married. In attendance at her wedding were a huge group of my high school teammates (softball and field hockey) and the boys with whom they were friends or had dated. I have vivid memories of high school spring and fall days by the gym parking lot watching these people socialize (probably from over the cover of a Robert Jordan book) and thinking, “Wow. They’re not very intelligent, but damn they are pretty and fun.” (Mentally putting people down kept me from feeling too lonely. Damn high school.) Here they were in these photos. Some of them got fat — and ugly. Some of the guys had started balding (one in particular pretty bad, and I had LIKED him, ugh), and it looked for all like it was 2001. Like nothing had changed for them in 6 years.

Granted, I made several assumptions (and yes, those who assume make an… yes, you know). But I don’t really care whether or not anything’s happened to any of them. I don’t really respect them any more. If I got back in touch, what would we say? I was years younger than a few of them and we have nothing in common anymore besides. I have no desire to get in touch with them except for negative reasons, and I really don’t want to be that bitchy girl who gets in touch to gloat. I can gloat without them having to be present, and it’s somewhat more respectable that way.

Anyway. I had a bitter, odd moment when looking at those photos. I negated that, I think — I hope — by IMing with a long-ago friend from CMU who now works in the city. Reconnecting with her will be infinitely easier than reconnecting with anyone from high school (well, with a lot of folks from high school. There are a few notable exceptions). Hopefully we’ll be able to get together and catch up and enjoy ourselves a little — and this city we’ve found ourselves in.

As a writer and reader, I take autobiographical portraits a little too seriously. I’m not going to do the David Copperfield version, though I plan to be detailed. This is, as far as I can write it, the path that led me to my chosen avocation: creative writing.

I was in search of a career path from a young age. That “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question was one I took very seriously. In first grade, I decided I loved dancing around and singing the soundtrack of The Little Mermaid, so perhaps I’d become a singer. In second grade, I realized “singer” was much too narrow a career path for someone of my many talents, so I then changed to “acting.” But by third grade, I remember telling others—in a very precociously obnoxious voice—that singing and acting were things any old person could do. I wanted to do something unique. I wanted to create. Having been inspired by Disney, I thought the perfect outlet for this vast creativity I assumed I had would be through animation. I’d been obsessed with the Disney musical animated films of the early nineties—what better way for me to spend my adult life than having fun? I watched the “making of” specials of Beauty and the Beast and saw how the animators brought Belle to life and thought, “Wow.”

Then came the travesty of my nine year old life. Pocahontas was released when I was in fourth grade and my dreams of animation were shattered. “It’s not historically accurate,” I practically bawled to my parents. “How could they make a movie that’s a lie?” I understood the difference between fiction and non-fiction, of course, but I was appalled that Disney would confuse a generation of children with lies. (I hardly considered myself a child when I was a forthright nine year old.) The real Pocahontas was only thirteen! John Smith had red hair! How could the animators commit such an atrocity? (I’ve always been prone to shameless melodrama; no wonder my second grade teacher saw acting promise in me.) The answer was somewhat better than I’d been expecting: the animators don’t create the story, they simply add the pictures, like an illustrator. It’s the writers who create the story.

Well, that settled it. If I wanted to use all of my wild creative capacities and have fun, I’d have to become a writer.

I’d always been a voracious reader, but no more than any middle grader with a library card and an appetite for adventure books. Between fourth and sixth grade, I started consuming more books than I ever had before. I pushed beyond grade level into larger and thicker chapter books. I invaded adult sections, tearing through the shelves for anything with key words to signal to me the book might be good: adventure, excitement, mystery, fantasy. (To that end, however, I skipped books my other precocious friends were reading; those “Austen” and “Vonnegut” people never got a second glance from me until much later.)

The realization of my future career happened when I was twelve, in seventh grade. I finished reading a children’s series book—one of those serialized, flash in the pan sort of publications that most teachers disapprove of—and I recall vividly thinking, “I could write that.” It didn’t seem so hard. I knew I aced every spelling test and certainly by reading enough books I understood how to punctuate and use quotation marks effectively. That year I wrote something akin to a first series book of my own by telling the story to myself each night before falling asleep and typing it up the next afternoon—instead of doing my homework.

My fascination with the process deepened. In keeping with my personality, I realized that the only way for me to improve as a writer was to read and research. To teach myself all I could learn about the craft—in a way that my normal education wasn’t teaching me. I read more and more children’s fiction—mainly historical adventures or books with quirky female protagonists.

In the summer of 1998, the summer before my eighth grade year, I heard a rumor about a Star Wars film being released in 1999. The re-releases of the original trilogy had captured my imagination and reinvigorated my love of those movies, which—like the Back to the Future movies and the Indiana Jones movies—were part of that “adventure” genre that I’d always found exciting. The clear plots, the quirky characters, the clear-cut villains—I’d absorbed it all as a kid. In hearing about the Star Wars movie, I decided to do some “research.” I found 500-800 page novels in the book store—Star Wars novels—and devoured them as a twelve-year-old, acquainting myself with this world of the movies. I began, in an odd way, to analyze the films more closely and even analyze the styles of the different writers. I began to voice my opinions about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and their creativity to others, and when Star Wars: Episode I came out in theaters, I was at that first show telling college-age boys, “Anakin Skywalker will turn to the Dark Side in the third movie, not this one. Jeez. The six movies will represent his character arc, from innocence to temptation to evil to redemption. Jeez.”

I began adopting the tone of the movie reviewers I saw on television; I started picking up the newspaper and reading film reviews and imitating the way the writers criticized film when I spoke to my friends. I rented and watched Oscar-winning films with my parents and began memorizing years and names so at any given moment I could spout, “Oh, yes, Forrest Gump won for Best Picture, and Tom Hanks won for Actor; he won the year before, for Philadelphia, didn’t you know?” By the time ninth grade came around, I was a full-blown, overly pretentious thirteen-year-old critic, and had completely gained the reputation of nerd. Thus started my high school experience.

The first text we read in my ninth grade English Honors class was The Odyssey. I was floored. How could that have been written so long ago? Those ideas are still around and being used! At the same time I was marveling over Homer’s genius, I found my sixth grade sister’s Scholastic Book catalog sitting on a table at home. I leafed through the discount books and found one little known one crammed in a back page. The description? “A boy discovers he is a wizard and embarks on an adventure-filled school year filled with danger and excitement.” The details of that particular description elude my memory, but I can easily remember the words “adventure,” “school,” and “excitement.” I had my mother order it. Immediately. This was September 1999. I subsequently devoured Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in one night of reading. I fell back on my pillows at two in the morning, thinking, “Wow. Now that would be easy to write.”

However, the next school book we read in English class was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. “Wait,” I said to myself. “A boy…wizard. A school of magic. Dragon. Hmm. This seems… familiar. Did LeGuin steal from Rowling?” I checked the publication date — almost thirty years before Rowling. I started thinking about it more closely, but even as I wondered, I realized that LeGuin’s book was different from Rowling’s, on some level I wasn’t comprehending. As always, when I was curious and didn’t know the answer to a question—I researched. I read. I found all of the Earthsea books and read them. I kept my eyes open. I read books more during the fall of 1999 and the subsequent winter break than I ever remember reading before that time. It was an adrenaline-filled rush of what I was calling “research.”

That December, I discovered Rowling had written two more Harry Potter books (which I immediately checked out from the library) and heard, to my surprise, that a fourth was expected the following summer, in 2000. I pushed on after that, reading through lists of “recommended reading” from the library, encountering children’s, young adult, and adult books along the way. I kept asking questions. Which book came first? What is being ‘creative’ and what is ‘stealing’? What is intellectual property? What is a trope, a motif, a theme, symbolism, metaphor…?

Meanwhile, school was going well. I was getting good grades while also secretly writing novels instead of doing my homework—I’d do my homework in odd snatches here and there, maybe one night a week and between classes, but I’d always hand it in, impeccable, on time. For some reason, school was absurdly easy for me; consequently I never learned to study. I did algebra by instinct and repetition, wrote history papers as if I were arguing about the finer points of a movie I’d seen last week. And somehow it was all working out — I never stopped to wonder about it, never stopped to think that college or anything else could be harder than that. After the PSAT, I started to get college brochures in the mail. Columbia University had a summer creative writing program for high school students. I vividly remember grinning at that. Finally! Something… challenging. Some way to test myself and to pull out all of the secret writings I’d been doing for my high school years. I wrote a short story for the writing sample and submitted it—and got in.

The summer of 2001 I spent immersed in poetry and fiction writing workshops. The first day of the workshop the professor asked, “What is your goal in life? What are your ambitions, your dreams?” I seriously thought about it — more seriously than I’d thought about almost anything of late.

We read poetry and wrote poetry—mine were melodramatic and emotional, but I didn’t care; reading poetry taught me more than attempting to write it ever had. All the poetry I’d ever read was Keats or Yeats or the Beowulf poet’s—definitely of a different era. I’d never read anything modern before. Then we read short stories. Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver. I’d never heard of these people—I’d barely ever heard of the “short story” before. Guy de Maupassant and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, sure—we had to be taught what “allegory” and “allusion” were, of course—but never any more modern authors. My middle and high school reading lists up until then had made me think that to be a writer one had to be many things I was not — old, dead, willing to write several hundred pages of iambic pentameter — so I had started to wonder whether this career was for me. But through this class I began to see my dream becoming real, tangible — very, very reachable. Most interesting of all were student stories. Other students who actually loved to write! None of my high school friends enjoyed writing anything—let alone critical essays, which were fast becoming my lifeblood—and most of my high school friends were determinedly “undecided” about their future aspirations. But these writers! Idealists and dreamers, all, and I felt at home. If this is what college is like, I told myself, I need to get there—now.

By eleventh grade I was determined to write my end-of-year free-topic five page paper on something having to do with my secret obsessions of Star Wars and literary criticism. I told my teacher I was interested in exploring the theory of Star Wars. He looked at me seriously. “Well, then, you’ll need to read Joseph Campbell,” he said. “Who’s Joseph Campbell?” “A literary theorist. It’s a little advanced for eleventh grade. We don’t start teaching theory until college level, but…” I, naturally, was undaunted. I analyzed the Star Wars trilogy using Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book discussing the universality of the hero myth in cultures across the world based on familiar and frequent reoccurring tropes, themes, and motifs. I realized then, because of that paper, that there was a discipline for my obsession. That people actually study and write books and papers and argue about this stuff—for a living.

That was it. I was an English major after that, no question.

That summer, of 2002, I took a college-level writing course at Yale and I was fully committed to going to an Ivy League by the time college applications came around that fall. Princeton had a creative writing major, Brown had a program, too… I Googled and discovered a few unknown names. Johns Hopkins? Carnegie Mellon? I added them to the list. But ultimately, I figured, it was all moot; I was applying Early Decision to Yale and I was going there. After all, my life experiences had taught me that I always got my way. School was a breeze—so too would college be. I’d gotten into Yale’s summer program, after all, I’d gotten into Columbia’s; a poem of mine was published in a national journal—and I hadn’t even thought it was that good! I would get everything I wanted.

The acceptance letter was going to be posted online on December 14th. I was online on December 12th, chatting with a friend who just found out he’d gotten in Early Decision to NYU. “We’re supposed to find out on the 14th but when I logged in, it was already posted. You should try it.” So I did. For the hell of it. My fingers tensed over the mouse. This was it, my moment. I could practically see it now: “Congratulations, Erin!” I clicked the button and waited for the page to load the .pdf.

“Dear Ms. ——-, We regret to inform…”

My life, my future, seemed to shatter, splinter around me. All of those plans! Those dreams! My angsty, over-emotional teenage years had yet to actually hit me — I’d been on a dreamy, exciting rollercoaster of books for so long, I’d forgotten that terrible things could actually happen to real people. Where was my happy ending?

The next two weeks were hellish. I scrambled and wrote essays and college applications and applied quickly to programs I only half thought about. On top of it all, I lost my grandfather. Having to deal with that trauma on top of the traditional teenage trauma of applying to college while still shaking from a rejection… I had never felt so miserable. I couldn’t write; I reread old favorite books for the sheer sake of escaping—something I’d never had to do before. I’d always scorned kids who read fantasy to “escape” — I’d only read it for fun, for “research”; there I was, desperate for a happy ending, for someone to love me, for my life to be picked up and placed on the correct path through divine intervention, little-old-wizard intervention — something! Anything! Life had always been so good and predictable. I began praying I’d stumble on a time machine so I could skip to August and find my life was already all figured out for me. I didn’t want to face the same dangers and tests the heroes I’d always read about had to inevitably face; I just wanted to jump to the end of my own story — because college, at that time, felt like the end, the finish line of life. Up until Yale’s rejection, I’d been so busy breezing through life I didn’t realize that a little bit of bottom-dropping-out trouble was something I and everyone else have to weather at some point. I just wanted to give up.

My lone consolation was that the only people who knew I’d been applying Early Decision at all were the people involved in the application process. Had I subconsciously kept it a secret (kept all of my college choices a secret) because I was afraid I would fail? Because deep down I knew that one day I might face the Chasm of the Unknown and I didn’t want anyone to give me their pity. I was too proud, too full of myself to want anyone’s sympathy.

In January I resumed normal life — only it wasn’t normal at all. On the 6th I started interning at a publishing company in Manhattan as part of my senior internship experience (the W.I.S.E. program) and I was confused for a college student immediately. On Mondays I filed away writers’ paychecks, then read hundreds of pages of slush; on Wednesday I assisted with design and found a kindred, font-loving spirit, then learned how publicity works. People kept asking me what school I went to, then when they didn’t recognize my high school’s name as a college, I had to add, “Um. I’m a high school senior. Not a college senior.” That was new. My newfound humility of December made me keep my head down and my fingers working. I tried to be as normal as possible even though my future was a dark gray blur.

Juggling the internship as well as a few AP classes was tough. I had to miss 2 days a week to commute to Manhattan. My internship mentor was also my English teacher and kept chuckling when I promised him I’d give him a 5 for his records without a worry. “You need that in-class time to do well on the exam,” he said. “You miss most of the book discussions.” But I didn’t care. Knowing how to write, to blather endlessly on anything using the perfect balance of SAT vocabulary and intellectual quotation was the one thing I knew I could handle. I suffered weary depression and senioritis. I learned all I could about publishing and the world of writing books — storing it away meticulously — and kept telling myself that I could just keep on going, keep on pushing past graduation and the loathsome summer and get to better and brighter things at college.

I got my first acceptance letters from the “safe” schools and tossed them aside. They weren’t to places I really wanted to go, anyway. That odd college Carnegie Mellon wanted me, flashing its thick paper and fancy words about “selective programs” at me but I still held out. NYU then wanted me. But Brown didn’t, Princeton didn’t — and I couldn’t fathom why. I’d accomplished so much, why didn’t someplace good want me? I got 5s on my AP exams, aced my Regents, I was graduating second in the class. Why not me? But, a colder part of me nagged, why do you want to go there so much in the first place? Do you even care about those schools at all? If the goal is to be a novelist, I kept thinking, shouldn’t I just go somewhere I can be happy as an English and Creative Writing major? Or, more importantly, can’t I just go somewhere I can feel — at home?

I visited Carnegie Mellon on a weekend whim. It was rainy and cloudy and cold and it was April. “Pittsburgh is like this a lot,” my student host told me. “I never leave home without an umbrella.” I stood on the campus, on the quad, and I recall vividly looking at the grass and the yellow brick academic buildings. None of it seemed drearily washed out — it all seemed so… alive. It was the weekend before their annual Spring Carnival, too, and one of the parking lots was being carefully transformed into an actual student-built carnival, complete with complex booths. There was something goofy called “Buggy” involving students pushing very short girls uphill in aerodynamically-designed go-carts. There was a band without pants. How quirky, I thought. What an odd place. My student host told me the rumors about Carnegie Mellon. “They say we’re nothing but smelly CS nerds here,” she said. “We’re a lot more diverse than that, as you’ve seen, but that other thing is true — we’re definitely all a bunch of nerds here. Everyone you meet — we’re all obsessed with something. But that’s what seems to bring us all together.”

Everyone at CMU is obsessed with something? I thought. I was most definitely home.

I could get into my experience the last four years at Carnegie Mellon, but that’s a novel in and of itself. Every semester at CMU has shown me something different about both myself and the world at large. Ever since coming to CMU I’ve realized a great many things: I love technical things, but from a distance, the way one loves the sunset but doesn’t wish to travel to the sun. I love biology — my high school obsession is still a New York Times Science Tuesday love — and I love challenges, but I’ve learned to seek out the enjoyable ones. What’s the point of a challenge if I can’t enjoy myself along the journey? I know now that I’ll never really understand coding — not because I fundamentally can’t, but because I just would rather do something else. I tried the sorority thing for a year, disliked it, and left. I did community service but wasn’t consumed by it; I even dabbled in a Mechanical Engineering course I ended up pretending I never took at all (or at least it doesn’t exist on my transcript). I was an Orientation Counselor for one year, sharing my enthusiasm with new freshmen — but didn’t go back after I realized I was getting to old for that kind of thing (the cheering, the partying — not for me). I spent one Spring Carnival as a Booth Chair, building a booth on the Carnival midway and getting a sunburn to prove it; I spent two Carnivals pushing Buggy (pushing that little girl inside the aerodynamic go cart), and I held up a trophy at the end of my first year and cheered. I dated, I danced, and I met the man I’m going to marry. (He’s proposing to me next month — kind of strange how these things turn out, huh?)

Academically I still love English and I love history. I still, of course, love essays and consider them my lifeblood. As a freshman I impulsively told my first academic advisor that I was going to complete a Senior Honors Thesis and he smiled and nodded, “That’s great,” in the way academic advisors smile and nod at precocious freshmen. And yet this year, I did it. I successfully completed my Senior Honors Thesis entitled “Girls Who Save the World: The Female Hero in Young Adult Fantasy,” combining my love of critical theory and essay writing with my lifelong obsessions with adventures, strong female characters, fantasy, and heroes. I’ve also loved being a double major in Creative Writing — I’ve gotten my poetry published in the school’s undergraduate journal, and I’ve won awards for my fiction and screenwriting. And I still write — on my own time, still reaching toward that goal of becoming a successful young adult novelist.

When you ask me to tell you about myself, I really can’t just tell the simplified version. Even what I’ve written here has been super summarized, or so I keep thinking when I reread what I’ve written. Capturing a life in prose of any length is tough — I just hope I’ve given you a big enough slice!

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I started Ship of Magic on Saturday 22 February. I finished it on 1 March, last Thursday. I had to read and read until it was finally finished—I had spent a lot of time reading it instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing throughout the week, anyway—and then started Mad Ship, the second book of the trilogy, on Friday 2 March. I finished that on Saturday. Then I began Ship of Destiny on Saturday and finished that this evening. The books were good. Surprisingly plotted, exquisitely characterized, brilliantly woven together. My one objection was the span of time for the story—about two years in the plot. I’m trying to piece together where the other years went between the Farseer trilogy and the Tawny Man trilogy (there are fifteen years between books) because I sort of expected more time to elapse. I wanted to see more of these characters’ lives! I also was expecting a The Blue Sword wrap up chapter—“And then they got married and had X number of kids and they traveled and saw these characters and had a good time and all was well for years afterward…”—but no. It just sort of—ended. Not that I blame her for doing it that way (admittedly she did tie the plot strings together and left it open for logical speculation). I just… I’m just saddened to leave the world. It’s so vividly imagined but the world’s big plot is resolved in the Tawny Man trilogy so that it’s sort of unnecessary to tack on further to that whole world with those characters anymore after that. I already miss Althea and Brashen and Wintrow and Paragon and Etta and everyone… so sad! I’ll have to reread it soon. (I always tear through books so fast on the first go-round—the plot suspense kills me—that I need another read or four to enjoy the subtlety and language on a sensual and academic level.) I liked this world and its characters more than Buckkeep and Chade and Kettricken—but not Fitz or the Fool! (Never!) or Molly!—and the rest of the cast from the Six Duchies books… But I ramble and you don’t understand. Back to self-pity…

I couldn’t stop reading this weekend. I mean, I might have, but I just didn’t want to. I kept telling myself, No, it’s okay, keep reading. You’ll catch up with that incredible workload all of Sunday. No, all of Monday. No, Monday night. Now it’s pushed to tomorrow night. Again, I have put off working on my thesis. Baaah! Peggy will get it on Wednesday morning and the onslaught of guilt between now and then will shred my insides. But I’ll pull through. I can at least depend on knowing that I always pull through in the end. It’s not comforting to realize that. It’s sort of depressing because it’s always the perfect excuse: why do now what I know I can competently do at the last minute?

But I digress and wallow in self-pity.

Other highlights of my weekend are vastly more interesting! Or at last “aww”-able. On Sunday Bryan and I celebrated our third anniversary together. (It’s an odd story, the reason why we settled on 4 March for our anniversary, considering our first kiss’ anniversary was 6 February. But I’m not going to tell it.) We kept saying all weekend, “Wow, it’s been three years. Wow, we’ve dealt with each other for three years.” We went out to brunch at the Walnut Grill, a local restaurant with a killer Sunday brunch menu, then went to Ali Baba, a middle eastern restaurant, for dinner. It was pretty good—the whole day. Relaxing and really unmotivating for homework. I love Bryan :)

On Friday I woke up early and wrote a paper in two hours for my English class (on authorship) and it sort of flowed. Now, why can’t I do anything else that efficiently? Oh, yes. It was due at 2pm and I printed it at 11am & got it into the box by 1:30pm. Cutting it close, eh? See, that’s what gets me to work efficiently—cutting it right to the last minute. But that’s so, so terrible for, well, everyone. Including me!

What this weekend showed me really was that I am looking forward to graduation more than ever mostly because I won’t have to be responsible for anyone but myself or Bryan. I don’t have to show up to work anymore or hand in papers or do anything for school again—it’ll all be on my schedule at my whim. Well, until things change again, because they always do. But until then I am just desperately wishing for the day when I can put school aside and just breathe. Really just take a breath and realize Wow, now I finally have time to do what I’ve been shirking schoolwork to do for the past ten years—write for me. Not for an assignment or for a professor. For me!

How desperately do I wish that it were the evening of 20 May 2007—after graduation, after the family leaves, after responsibility to everyone else leaves me to be with only Bryan, our soon-to-be vacated apartment, and the future. Never have I so desperately wished I could seize hold of time and crank it forward to meet me. I’m so impatient and frustrated. I want real life to come to meet me! Perhaps senior year of high school was this bad—No, it was different. I correct myself there. During senior year of high school I was desperate to find answers to my questions and prove I could be responsible for myself. I found answers—what will I do after graduation? What shape will my future take?—but I was still content to be shaped by school and formal education. I just—I’m clawing at the walls of the bubble. Throw real life at me! I’m ready!

Maybe I’ve been writing and reading too much about youngish characters who seize their destinies and prove their competency to survive in a complicated, ever-changing world. I’m more than ready for my next adventure. College has been an adventure, but I feel like I’ve conquered it. I’ve changed. I’m not that girl who held the Carnegie Mellon acceptance packet in her hands and thought, “But this isn’t Princeton…” This is me, a decade it seems, later. Now I’m in the calm before the call, the stasis before I’m yanked off to face my destiny. (Oh, thesis. How I love you.) The good part is I already have my man, my other half, at my side, so I don’t have to search for him along the next heroic cycle of my life. We get to experience that segment together.

Wow, how tangential my rants get… Hehe.