The One Tale From College: Submitted!

Ciao, Tutti!

Despite being on summer vacation officially, I have not been able to get much rest in reality, even though I've certainly been trying. I've been quite busy for an unemployed college grad on his "honeymoon." Just to recap:

1) While the TESOL certificate hasn't come to the house yet, it's only a matter of time. I'm currently looking for seasonal ESL work in New York city as well as a year's worth of employment in Istanbul. No rest!

2) My grades for my last semester came in: straight A's for the first time, pulling my GPA up to 3.9 if you're using only two significant figures. Smoking!

3) Two seconds ago, I submitted my short story "The One Tale From College" to Fence Magazine. Therefore I've removed it from the blog to avoid any possible legal difficulties. Also, a last second decision, I submitted the story under my pseudonym, S. P. Arrow, so don't be thrown by someone with that name having written exactly the same story I wrote.

4) I've got to write about some of the great books I've been reading and great CD's I've been listening to. I've been meaning to for a while, but some things just slip the mind sometimes... Suffice to say that I've been devouring novels and new music as if they don't exist in New York City.

Sorry for the wait. I'll be updating more often in the future. I bow and beg for forgiveness, or something like that.

-Sam goldsmith

Week 1 of CTESOL Classes

Ciao, Tutti!

I present my flowchart of the turbulent emotions of week 1 of my CTESOL (Certificate for Teaching English as a Second Language) classes:

Friday, May 7 - Cried in bed from loneliness, realizing all my best friends now live away from home, and I care about such things now. Went to the MET, but it didn't make me feel much better.

Saturday, May 8 - Had brunch with Owl Eyes before my flight. It's always exciting to spend time with those energetic friends of mine! Then caught my flight, which was delayed 3 1/2 hours and had to land in Salt Lake City to refuel.

Sunday, May 9 - Arrived home at 1:oo am. Any chance to get over jet-lag before classes started was squelched. Tried to have a relaxing day.

Monday, May 10 - Thrown into the mix. Handed a lesson to plan for "teacher practice" on the next day and another for Thursday. Apparently missed an important introductory week, and the instructor used TESOL jargon I'd never heard before (Lexis? Concept Check? Ss? What?????). Thank goodness there was another latecomer! Our instructor, though, is wonderful and patient, and already I learned a lot, enough to feel I could start my lesson plan without being completely blind. Longest day of classes since high school. How do those guys handle a full day of classes?

Speaking of high school, bumped into my high school English teacher on the way to the subway. We mutually pretended not to recognize each other.

Tuesday, May 11 - It turns out I've always been nervous in front of a class, though not knowing the level of the students beforehand didn't help. They were more advanced than I had anticipated, and I finished a little earlier than expected, even after using all my back-up activities. Overall, though? I was getting the hang of things around there, even though I was still yet to sleep well. Bonus: I finished John Wray's newest novel, Lowboy.

Wednesday, May 12 - J.J. Cale says: "Wednesday's hump day, hump day's Wednesday. The week's half gone." I felt so full after every lesson period that I can't even talk to people. The last time my head felt this heavy was... Cold War/Spy Novel class at NYU last semester. Speaking of NYU, as I was heading home on the train many of my friends were listen to Alec Baldwin at their - their - graduation ceremony. I was indescribably overjoyed I missed that!

Thursday, May 13 - The second class went much better than the first, even though things still didn't go as planned. I guess this means I'm learning something and getting better in general at this. Learned about teaching business English. I have no interest in teaching business English, but we still learned some interesting things about cultural awareness. All in all, our instructor rocks, and we earn our money's worth in the classroom.

Friday, May 14 - We talked about teaching children. Safe to say: parents can be creepy human beings at times. I'm much more afraid of a pair of them than a classroom of their bite-sized monsters. Went to Rasputin's in San Francisco to celebrate, hoping to buy the new LCD Soundsystem (which doesn't seem to come out until this Tuesday, sadly). Got scared by its size and headed home empty-handed.

Will there be a time in my life when I'm not tired out of my mind? Better yet, will I ever get a moment to celebrate my apparent graduation? Perhaps I'll be able to celebrate with a Turkish job interview and be amply prepared to teach English as a second language. Because in real life we don't get to let time stop, do we. Maybe that's why everyone else says the time has gone by so fast, when I feel like it's taken forever, and I'm still not done.

-Sam goldsmith

Farewell to New York

Ciao, Tutti!

And arrivaderci, New York City.

As of 4:55 tomorrow afternoon, I will be on my way out of this cubist sculptor's paradise, finished with college as of yesterday having never truly diving into college life. And it makes perfect sense that I will be going out on a mood swing; New York is a giant mood swing in itself. Example: this morning I helped an older man open the gate to his jewelery shop and we shared a good laugh before I was to walk on, the green light on my side, and get my ears blown out by a taxi driver making a sharp right and speeding off at 40 miles per hour. Mood swings. New York can't decide between angry and jovial, overwhelming and accepting, antisocial and agoraphobic, and the city jerks like an awkward drunk between these poles.

And here I am, leaving in a mood swing of my own. I can't deny my hating it, as I always have, even though it's been years since I've last left a love life on the left coast. I've never liked cities, I've never liked concrete, and I've never liked large groups of people. But, despite all the obvious reasons for my refusal to like New York, I am drawn to it, falling under its spell. Because it's main attraction is people. The impressive buildings are only tall for a few days - the experienced New Yorker looks up only in surprise for the rare instance he sees the sun. The museums are so numerous that Miró begins to look like Michelangelo who begins to look like an ancient Egyptian temple. There are so many concerts that they are all mediocre with the pressure of cranking out 250 each night, and music veers away from innovation and towards survival, as all New Yorkers must learn to do. But once you get to know some of the individuals who somehow found their ways here - from the suburbs of Chicago, a mansion in the middle of nowhere upstate, a tiny town 45 minutes from Flint, Michigan, or from a Jewish Nashville outlier - and all have crazy or normal lives to lead them here, I can't help but become attached.

So it's not New York that I've grown fond of, just the strange collection of friends I've made like unpolished colored marbles. And yet, how can I separate these things? The friends are in New York; they live here as I have. They exist in this suffocating atmosphere and we are united by our survival instinct, our tenacity in keeping from being swallowed by it. Our comradery is not formed based off our unified weathering of a magnificent storm but in our communal strength in avoiding the storm altogether, the beautiful fact that we were all driven to suspend the storm from reality within each other's company. And this is what makes some of the people of New York so wonderful once you get to know them. They suspend the awful and smelly habitat of the city and replace it with a warm cooperative of their own. New York ceases to exist, but that which takes its place could not come to pass without the city laying the groundwork first. If only it weren't so! And yet it cannot be any other way, I and I try to have no regrets.

So I will leave this city and the people in it. I will miss the people in it and forever loathe the city, but I'll have to put up with it whenever I want my old close friendships back.

- Sam goldsmith