Category Archives: life

Why I’m Never Going to Make It as a Writer

academics, life, writing, , , , ,

Corby Kummer, august senior editor for the Atlantic and one of my all-time idols, thinks my writing is shit.

Fine, he didn’t say it exactly like that.

Kummer was teaching a weeklong writing workshop, and everyone had submitted second drafts of essays on food. One by one, he whisked us into the hallway for individual conferences, then periodically returned to give comments to the entire group. All day, I had a nagging feeling that something was wrong. Why wasn’t my piece being read out loud to the class? Why was it at the bottom of the pile?

Wendy was one of the lucky ones. Her first paper was so perfect that her “revision” was to write another paper.

For the second paper, Kummer told her that he had no comments. It was perfect, again.

I congratulated her on her double win. Then I went back to doing what I do best—worrying while looking happy about it.

Bells tolled. My afternoon stupor was interrupted by Emily’s shoulder tap. “Hey Crystal, he wants to see you.”

In the vending machine alcove, Kummer was marking papers with a vengeance. I glanced at mine, lying on top of a trash can. It looked oddly clean and blank.

“You’re an expert writer, but you’re too self-conscious.”

Kummer looked at me, eyes framed under a furry blanket of hair. He continued.

“I read some of these lines and think, ‘Would you say that in speech?’

“Take this part, where you talk about dropping a lobster into boiling water: ‘The sucker will thrash and create a lively ruckus.’

“It’s like you’re detached and having these self-conscious remarks. You’re so incredibly aware of what you’re doing that it’s distracting. You just sound…Writerly. With a capital W.”

Did I mention that Kummer rejected me for a writing fellowship at the Atlantic three months ago?

I needed to defend myself.

“When you tell me to use monosyllabic words, I feel like it strips away my writing. Maybe I like using long words in daily conversation!”

Kummer gave me a skeptical look. “Shall we go through this piece from the beginning?”

I nodded. I needed to pee.

“You have moments that flow. This part about adding ‘fistfuls of julienned scallions, ginger and garlic’ is nice. Oh, and I can’t believe I missed this the first time—‘Atop a clinical ad seeking sperm donors, I gently placed the cutting board’– that is such a lovely detail.

“This reference to Hades, I just don’t think you would say that in speech. Did you really mean to say that?”

I twitched on the inside.

“Maybe I’ve been reading too much Jane Grigson [a writer who uses lots of classical references]. I don’t know, I was working on this at 6 am.”

“Oh my.”

“Well, it was better than writing it post-party.”

Kummer gave me a look. I am not sure if it was sympathetic or admonishing.

He went on. “Are you familiar with David Szanto? He had the same problem.”

David is a writer who taught at the beginning of the year. He is also a former student at the university, and my go-to advisor for all matters related to writing.

“David used to say, ‘I can write this piece with 3 different tones. What would you like to see? ’

“I guess I want to see you develop a consistent voice. What do you sound like?”

I looked at Kummer and stammered, “Don’t you see? I feel incredible pressure to write whatever you want me to write.”

“But that’s exactly it, I want to hear you.”

I started to cry. God, I hate when I do that.

“What if I am a pretentious person who loves high-falutin language?” I asked.

“You would call yourself a pretentious person?”

“Do you see the shirt that I’m wearing?” I waved at my body. “It says, ‘Bad grammar makes me [sic].’ If you called me pretentious, I would not be offended.”

Kummer’s face wrinkled with a smirk.

“You know, back when I was younger, people called me pretentious too. So I can relate.

“Writers have a way of hiding behind a façade, and you can’t really get to know them. It’s like they have something to protect. They want you to see a certain aspect of themselves, or maybe they’re too embarrassed to show their true selves.

“I want to see who you really are.

“This line—‘stop being a pussy and just kill the damn thing.’ I think that’s you. That’s who I want to hear.

“Now, I really wish I could read more of your writing. I’m curious about what your voice really is. After working with David for a week, I think he really nailed it down.”

He handed me a blue tissue. I wiped my nose less than gracefully.

“You know what, David thinks my writing is great.”

“Of course, I’m not surprised,” Kummer replied.

“I am sorry that I have made you upset.”

I waved him off between sniffles. “No no, it’s all right, I really appreciate your honesty.”

“Okay fine, then I’m not sorry that I made you upset.

“I am being so harsh because I want you to go to that next level.

“I spent half my time copyediting the rest of the class’ papers. In terms of copyediting, this is flawless.

“You’re an excellent writer—you’ve made yourself into one—and you’re ambitious.”

Maybe he was making that up entirely.

I bet he hates that I used the word “august” to describe him in line one.

I don’t care.

Back Roads of the Italian Countryside, or My Daily Commute

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Note: This post is mostly geared towards UNISG students, so it will be fairly useless to you unless you need to get from Bra to Pollenzo.

Living in Italy, you start to realize that there are always two ways of doing everything, the official system and the back door in-the-know route. Take the process of acquiring a permesso di soggiorno residency permit, required for all non-EU citizens staying in Italy for over 90 days. In Bra, you can either go to the Post Office, pick up an application kit and struggle to figure out what to put down so as to not have your application rejected, or you can go to the Al Elka-L’incontro center for foreign citizens, which provides consulting services and staff who fill out the application for you. Granted, the center is only open for 7 hours a week, on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, but that is different gripe. Ah, Europe.

Similarly, there are many ways to get from my apartment in Bra to UNISG campus in Pollenzo. There is a bus available and one of my flatmates has a car, but I have opted to make use of my bicycle and bike to class daily. This has led to some scary, ahem, entertaining rides to class, since intercity Italian roads strongly favor wide trucks and no shoulders. And so, I set out to find an alternate route to school besides the one suggested by Google Maps, and began exploring the back roads between Bra and Pollenzo. After a week of exploration, I had discovered a number of small dirt-lined roads, some of which were unpaved and lined with gravel (e.g. a bike flat waiting to happen), others which were just as crowded with traffic as my original route. Then Laura, one of my classmates, told me that she had learned the perfect route to get to campus from an undergrad student. Free of traffic and thoroughly paved? I jumped to follow her.
Continue reading Back Roads of the Italian Countryside, or My Daily Commute →

L’Appartamento

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Home is where the heart is, so your real home’s in your chest! -Captain Hammer

Unlike Cornell, which barrages you with information every other day about freshman orientation, the University of Gastronomic Sciences is a bit more laidback. To get information, you really have to be proactive and seek it out, which is fine because the administration staff is very responsive. In an email I exchanged before arriving in Italy, I was told that the flat would come furnished with desks, beds, blankets, a TV and a kitchen with pots and pans. Oh boy, a cable TV? I don’t even have one of those at home!

Anyway, the flat has definitely exceeded my expectations, considering the bare bones aesthetics of my Cornell dorm room. Here, I have two other flatmates, and we each have our own rooms, which are considerably larger than I expected. Actually, I wouldn’t have minded if the rooms were smaller to give more space in the kitchen, but that is the way the cookie crumbles.
My room opens out onto a balcony, which is conveniently equipped with wires for hang drying clothing, since we don’t have access to a dryer.

Outside my balcony, you can see a garden below, where the neighbor putters about in the morning with a watering can.
Continue reading L’Appartamento →

Odyssey to Italy: Results

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My first Italian sunset, right before I realized I was hilariously lost.

It was going perfectly, until it wasn’t. I managed to navigate through London, catch my connecting flight in another airport, and got through Turin before making a mistake. At the Turin Porta Nuova train station, I asked for a ticket to Bra, and it was printed with the destination as “Bra.” Thus, I assumed that the train led directly to Bra, especially since the clerk didn’t mention any sort of transfer. An hour too late, and after some fitful dozing on the train, I panicked when I realized that this line didn’t directly go to Bra, and I should have transferred trains at Carmagnola. Luckily, the first person I asked for help was ludicrously well-prepared and whipped out a complete book of train timetables, and helped me figure out a new itinerary to get “home.” With palpable relief, I stepped off the bus at 22.37, about two hours later than planned. My flatmates came to pick me up in a car, and were overjoyed that I hadn’t inadvertently ended up in France or something. All in all, I have taken 10 planes/trains/buses to trek from New York to Bra, Italy in the last 24 hours, while lugging about 3/4 of my weight in luggage, up and down stairs, through traffic, across bumpy cobblestones. Heathrow might be my new favorite airport now because they offer the free usage of luggage carts. This has been one of the most draining days of my life.


The flat is beautiful, and decorated with all kinds of neat murals and photography. I don’t know if this is handiwork leftover from previous students, or designed by the school, but either way it is most impressive, and definitely better decorated than any of my previous apartments. I’ll try to post more photos of the place tomorrow, but below is a shot of my bedroom. There is a balcony where I can hang clothes to dry and a nice full-length mirror. The kitchen has some china, pots and utensils included, but I’m still glad I brought my trusty 10″ Calphalon. The one thing the apartment is sorely lacking is an oven; we have a large toaster oven, but it’s going to be difficult to do serious baking in that.


After picking me up from the train station, we all gathered round the kitchen and broke open a beer. Many of you will not be surprised to hear I was told several times that I have impressive amounts of energy. Jet lag, schmetlag. Tomorrow, the plan is to get the bureaucratic paperwork out of the way (I have to apply for a permesso di soggiorno residency permit within my first 8 days in Italy) and maybe explore the town a bit. Classes start at 9 am sharp on Wed.

Lunch

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Excerpt from the consistently excellent webcomic Pictures for Sad Children

One of the best parts about my job is that the people I work with tend to be smart, funny and generally likable (when they’re not purposely being assholes). In particular, it’s nice that there is a large contingent of other AEs, who each have a broad array of quirky interests and backgrounds. This translates into fairly entertaining lunchtime discussions, which leap from Hegel to how to escape from a locked trunk in a matter of seconds. I’m not sure what everyone else talks about at lunch, but we jokingly call ourselves the “Witty Banter Table,” and I’m pretty sure we’re the most hilarious lunch table EVER.

Over the past few months, I’ve been taking notes on topics of conversation at lunch, which have been loosely grouped into categories. I make no claims that this is a fully representative sampling, but I am a little bit surprised that economics isn’t a more frequent topic of discussion. Only a little. Without further ado:

Science/Technology
  • Merits of Kindles vs books: shelf-life, eyestrain, DRM
  • Physics of cycling: drafting, relationship between weight and momentum
  • Question: Is it possible to shoot a projectile and have it land >100 miles away? You must take into account the earth’s curvature, cannot move to outer space, and must use materials that would not be incinerated. Answer: Yes, you just need to move the earth backwards.
  • Case history of the serial killer whale, whether it can be rehabilitated into the wild
  • Sexbots
  • Potatoes: should they be considered a vegetable given their nutritional profile?
  • Organic clawed spider farming
  • Cell phone radiation: are fears about cancer are founded? Followed by declarations that cell phones are so safe, one should wear a cellphone codpiece.
  • Mechanics and ease of generating electricity: could it be done by a group of AEs who happened to land in Somalia
  • Distillation of liquor
  • iPad suckitude and general Apple paternalism
  • Offshore oil drilling

Continue reading Lunch →

Lunch

life, , , , , ,

Excerpt from the consistently excellent webcomic Pictures for Sad Children

One of the best parts about my job is that the people I work with tend to be smart, funny and generally likable (when they’re not purposely being assholes). In particular, it’s nice that there is a large contingent of other AEs, who each have a broad array of quirky interests and backgrounds. This translates into fairly entertaining lunchtime discussions, which leap from Hegel to how to escape from a locked trunk in a matter of seconds. I’m not sure what everyone else talks about at lunch, but we jokingly call ourselves the “Witty Banter Table,” and I’m pretty sure we’re the most hilarious lunch table EVER.

Over the past few months, I’ve been taking notes on topics of conversation at lunch, which have been loosely grouped into categories. I make no claims that this is a fully representative sampling, but I am a little bit surprised that economics isn’t a more frequent topic of discussion. Only a little. Without further ado:

Science/Technology
  • Merits of Kindles vs books: shelf-life, eyestrain, DRM
  • Physics of cycling: drafting, relationship between weight and momentum
  • Question: Is it possible to shoot a projectile and have it land >100 miles away? You must take into account the earth’s curvature, cannot move to outer space, and must use materials that would not be incinerated. Answer: Yes, you just need to move the earth backwards.
  • Case history of the serial killer whale, whether it can be rehabilitated into the wild
  • Sexbots
  • Potatoes: should they be considered a vegetable given their nutritional profile?
  • Organic clawed spider farming
  • Cell phone radiation: are fears about cancer are founded? Followed by declarations that cell phones are so safe, one should wear a cellphone codpiece.
  • Mechanics and ease of generating electricity: could it be done by a group of AEs who happened to land in Somalia
  • Distillation of liquor
  • iPad suckitude and general Apple paternalism
  • Offshore oil drilling

Continue reading Lunch →