Written on a napkin:

So I'm sitting here writing something so I don't look like a complete lamer. I'm sitting at a table by myself, drinking a glass of white wine, wishing it was red, contemplating my #8 slot in the open mic and hoping that somebody-- ANYBODY-- from my school decides to show up.

This is the MFA open mic reading for all the grad schools in the Bay Area. When I heard about it I thought wow, what a great idea! The opportunity to meet other people in other programs and hear their stuff.

Hey, Blinky is here! I hope she comes and sits with me. I'm waving at her and let she seems not to see me which means everyone here, if they notice me at all, must think I'm an even bigger loser for waving at nobody. Oooh, she has red wine. Come sit with me, red wine drinker.

And she did, and so that's where the napkin stops.

So, yeah, tonight was the open mic reading for all the students in all the M.F.A. programs in all the grad schools in the Bay Area. It was organized by somebody from Mills College, which is located in Oakland. Students from a whole bunch of schools were invited: USF (where I almost went), SF State, Mt. St. Mary's, and good old NCOC (my school).

I was v. excited about this event. I figured it would be good practice for my upcoming feature reading (still trying to overcome stage fright) but my main motivation is that I wanted to meet some other poetry students in the area. I already know everyone in my program. Time to infuse my milieu with some new blood.

Today, it wasn't looking like I was going to make it. I woke up in the afternoon with a raging headache and a general feeling of squickiness. I finally went out (with much effort) into the cold to buy a sandwich, which alleviated one aspect of the squickiness and exacerbated another. (Suddenly I had something in my stomach to throw up.)

So I came home (after getting a sandwich and returning a DVD) feeling worse and I curled up in my bed and read for a little while, until the light hurt too much and then I just shut my eyes. I also fished an old Advil out of my wallet and took it. Hey, I was desperate. (Aside: I was re-reading Bridget Jones's Diary. It's just as good as I remembered, but it really strikes me as ironic that Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, both of whom are in the movie, are both discussed at length by Bridget Jones in the diary.)

I think the lint-covered Advil and the semi-nap helped. Then, after fifteen minutes of lying down, the phone rang. I didn't answer it, but it was somebody I work with, saying, Hey, we should hang out and have a beer sometime. That was exactly the push I needed. It reminded me of why I wanted to go to this thing tonight: to make some new friends. Plus my headache had subsided. So I went.

You can see by the napkin scrawl above that things did not get off to a promising start. But I stuck around, and after a while, Blinky, Probst and Carrots (a red-headed thesis student) all showed up to represent our school. Not bad, considering the shitty weather and the East Bay locale.

Both Probst and I signed up to read, and I picked three pieces that seemed like they would read well. (Dense, language-based poetry is difficult to follow when you're listening to someone read. It's always a good idea to read humorous or pop culture poems, or, my personal favorite, poems with the word 'fuck' in them.) So I went up and read, and I think I did fairly well. The audience clapped loudly after each poem, and they laughed appreciatively at the funny parts.

After the reading was over, a couple of people came up to say they enjoyed my poems. (I ended up getting more than my share of compliments, which made me happy.) And I wasn't too terribly nervous. That is to say, I was nervous, and I shook a little, but I was able to read through the whole thing at a good pace and with a lot of energy.

I think my feature should come off well. At least I'm no longer scared out of my mind, and that's a good thing. Wine will definitely be involved, though. Most definitely.

After the reading, my cohorts took off, but I hung around and got into a few conversations. Everyone felt the same way: we thought it was a great idea to get all the grad students together, and we were sorry there hadn't been more mingling.

I ended up talking to one guy in particular, from Mills, and he and I were tossing ideas around. We talked about doing rotating readings at each of our campuses (I'd like to see the other campuses in the Bay Area) and possibly getting a small group together for a monthly workshop. That's the idea that really gets me excited-- I love workshops, I have no classes that are outright workshops, and it's a great way to make friends with people and get to know their work.

So I declared myself the "liaison" for New College and exchanged contact information with Mills Guy. We weren't the only ones doing so; from what I heard, almost everyone is excited about the potential to intermingle.

I hope something comes of this. I was sitting at the reading, listening to the other poets, and scanning the faces of the people sitting in the room. If I had gone to one of these other colleges, these people might be my friends. I looked at their faces and wondered about them, wished I could talk to them all, wondered if there were any kindred spirits out there.

I'd love to get a little more connected. There's a whole community of poets in the Bay Area, some of whom probably share my age group, and motivations, and dreams, and sensibility. It's all part of my quest in pursuing my degree in this city. If there are kindred spirits here, damnit, I'm going to try and find them.

"'Choose two of the following, and suppose that they have joined forces in a corporate merger. Describe the resultant commercial' followed by a list of companies. I chose Tampax and Old Navy. Here’s my commercial..."