trash.

I don't know what's going to happen with the job I interviewed for last Friday. I don't know if I'll be going to Valencia, or if I'll ever get to graduate school. In the midst of all of this, the only thing that excites me is renting a house with wood floors and lots of windows. It all feels so domestic, and the feminist inside me wants to shed myself of it. And there's this extreme side of me that wants to just leave everything and jaunt through Europe.

I made a friend in my senior year of FSU. Her name is Valerie and she is currently an au pair in Paris. Shaved head, unshaved armpits, thick eyebrows and lashes like a bamboo forest. The first time I met her she was wearing a few lightbulbs around her neck. We bonded over seitan and she got me hooked on soygurt. Unabashed, strong, independent, and compassionate. She was the very essence of what I wanted to be, and still want to be, and once was a long time ago. Somewhere along the way I lost a little piece of myself, that lies still in a dark place, probably in the mind, because that's where everything perceived lies and waits.

Our shared class was an Advanced Fiction Workshop with Pulitzer-prize winner Robert Olen Butler. I hated him. "Where's the yearning?" he would say, holding one of my short-short stories in his hand. "This is more like prose, not a short-short. Throw it away." And I'd come up with corny quips, like why don't you throw your butt away or I'll throw you away. And he'd set it aside, the short-short that secretly wasn't fiction, but fact. The story that composed the strange indifference I had felt a week before, while trying to get a broken vacuum to work on my boyfriend's dirty rug, while said boyfriend told me to stop 'messing with his system'. But it's dirty, I said, it will only take me a second, once I fix this. And the boyfriend turned into a shadow and disappeared. And it was put aside for lack of yearning. And Butt-ler was probably right, which makes me hate him even more.

Everyone yearns for something. Even if it's not clear what the person is yearning for, it's still there. Even if the words don't convey the yearning, it's still there. If we don't yearn, we're not human. And let me see how many times I can type 'yearning' before it starts reading like 'YEER-ning' and not "YURR-ning."

"Ha.Ha.Ha," Butler says with reproachful satisfaction. "I'm the best and everyone loves me, but I'm wrong because one of my students thinks I'm full of buffalo crap."

I know, it's cruel. It's something I'd never say to someone's face. And Valerie was the only one that kept me sane in that class. Just knowing that she'd be sitting nearby with her soygurt and her lightbulbs helped me endure the "throw it away, throw it away, throw it away."

I hope I get the job, and I hope I don't get the job.