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SHOUTOUTS

To anyone with a Montel problem from John:

To every woman living with a guy and getting tired of hinting at when the guy is going to ask you to marry him, or any similar situation, here's what you do: You take him out for a great dinner at a wonderful restaurant. Get down on one knee, and ask him to marry you. If he says no, spend that night at a friends and move out the next day. Go find someone who will either ask you himself or say yes when you do.

To BG from Unremarkable Man:

I was a bit disheartened with your response to "Sean." I know perhaps that he deserved a little twitting for his gender stereotypes. But after eight years in a relationship that he felt he was committed to, he is obviously in a state of confusion, perhaps denial, and more than bit of emotional anguish. He's teetering on the border of vulnerable and bitter, and came to you for help. Your answer was a bit curt and provided him little no direction in resolving his problem.

I really have come to like Breakup Girl, (and I see from last Friday's superlist that her taste in music is exquisite, by the way.) Please give Sean a second chance at some healing and strength.

BG responds: You're right. About Sean and about my taste in music. So. Hey, kiddo, let me tease out the helpful-to-you core in my flip answer. Right now sucks for you. Understandably. You feel treated badly by a woman; you're entitled. But -- and I totally say this to women about men, too -- after the sting softens (WHICH I PROMISE PROMISE PROMISE IT WILL) you will do yourself a disservice, first and foremost, if you do women the disservice of assuming that they all live to treat men badly. 'Cause then whom will you date? Some woman who does. I don't want you to do that any more than you -- or the excellent women who would otherwise date you -- do. Meantime, hang therein.

To Hopeless in Seattle from Been There:

6 and 1/2 years ago, I was in almost exactly the same situation as you. I was just coming out of an olympically dysfunctional relationship, and dating a wonderful woman who was doing the same. Both of us were looking for nothing more than good sex and good conversation. I came to realize that I was falling for her, and one evening, as I was headed out the door, I kissed her and told her I loved her. She said nothing (she had a migraine at the time), but I was totally stress-free about it. Maybe a week later, she told me she loved me.

In two weeks, we'll have been married for three years.

The moral of the story is that love is weird, emotions are unpredictable, and the only way to be sure you're not missing the opportunity of a lifetime is to be honest about how you feel and give the object of your affections the opportunity to do the same in a totally safe environment.

Good luck, and whatever happens, in the long run, you'll sleep better.

To Katiebaby from Jade:

Let me tell you a story. When I was a freshman, I fell head-over-Keds in love with a junior. He was my best friend, and we spent a lot of time dating, breaking up, becoming friends again, dating, over and over. Then he graduated and left me behind. Sound familiar? We wrote often, saw each other when he was home on leave (Marines this time, not college, but same deal), and our friendship grew, while we grew up. Fast forward two years. I'm graduating, and the two of us are still friends, but the kind who think maybe it would be great to spend the rest of our lives together. So we get engaged. Then I go to college. And WOW! I find a whole new world full of people and ideas, and most importantly, I find out who I am. Things are wonderful, and I still love Corporal Boyfriend, but I also kind of like the Cute Dorm-Guy, the Big Football Player, the Intellectual Grad Student...and I find out that I'm becoming a different person, and that the Corporal doesn't quite fit into the picture of who I want to be with anymore. Fast Forward again. We broke up. Not because he left me, but because I left him.

The thing is, Katiebaby, you're 15. That's a great age. You're figuring out who you are, what you want to be, etc. So is your college guy. He'll go on and learn more about himself, and so will you. Maybe the two of you will end up together, and maybe not. But don't stifle your own growth in order to fit into his world. Yes, you love him. Great. Love him with everything you've got. Then realize that there are lots of other really neat guys out there, and someday you might love one of them instead. There's time, and it's ok to fall in love with someone else. Especially as you grow and change into the woman you will eventually be.

That doesn't help much now, I know. You're sure the two of you belong together. But don't make any decisions until you try out KatieAthlete, KatieMusician, KatieScholar, KatieCollegian, and find out what she wants.

To Sunclytie from Saundra:

Unless she happens to have a job that makes her fabooooo-lously wealthy, independent of Sunclytie mom, then she should brush off the "not like us" argument, and follow her heart. After all, she's not the one who's rich, her parents are.

To Dateless Dilettante from Jo:

Just a quickie comment for Dateless Dilettante, who feels so desperately dreadful because she's not in grad school. Speaking as a card-carrying eternal grad student, I have some news for her. Three pieces, in fact:

1) Not all people who enter grad school are smart. A great many people who enter grad school just have a decent GPA, a bit of money, and no real idea of what they want to do.

2) Not all people who finish grad school are smart. In fact, most people who finish are those who learn to get up at 7:00 AM every bloody morning and write until 10 sodding PM -- day after day after day after day, world without end, amen. Surviving a PhD is mostly a question of endurance, not intellect. There are dazzlingly brilliant people in grad school, but in the last 8 years, I've only met five. The rest of us -- myself included -- are ordinary people who are really interested in a particular subject.

3) Grad school does not make you smart, it just gives you access to knowledge. It also doesn't make you feel or look smart. In fact, it makes you feel DUMB, especially if you have any brains at all. There is nothing like being confronted by the massed scholarship of the past 50 years on, say, Milton or Faulkner or H.D. to make you realize how little you actually know, or ever could know. All those who are not stricken by overwhelming humility by at least the third year of a PhD program are self-absorbed twits.

Grad school, at its best, is challenging, intellectually stimulating, and at times radically fun (when you give your first lecture to a real class and you rock their world, when you go to your first conference and people actually *like* what you have to say, when you get your first publication, etc, etc). Grad school at its worst is grinding out 350 pages of interminable prose (one. page. at. a. time.) while living well below the poverty line and fielding monthly "are you done yet?" phone calls from every one of your relations. As Elaine Showalter said at the MLA this past Christmas, it takes longer to get a PhD in the humanities than it does to become a brain surgeon. It's also almost as expensive, and jobs are damned hard to get.

Therefore, the only reason to go to Grad School is because you REALLY WANT TO BE A PROF. That's it. Don't go because you need your ego built up, or because you need to meet smart men. If you really are convinced that you want to spend your adult life correcting the logic and grammar of undergraduates for about the same amount of money that you're making at that mortgage company (this is the ugly truth, I'm afraid!), then apply to several programs (not just one or two!!) and take the best offer that comes along.

And finally, you don't need to decide that you're a sordid intellectual failure because you didn't achieve overwhelmingly during your first few years of University. Entering university at the age of 17 is pretty hairy to begin with, and entering a high-powered school without financial and emotional help at that age would be really hairy. Lots of students have crises of confidence or moments of panic, especially in the first two or three years, and lots of people flunk out the first time around. Blowing a year of university *does not mean* that you are not cut out for university. It means you couldn't do *that* year, at *that* particular place.

Most real human beings (as opposed to most robots) don't really know who they are and what they want to do before they're, oh, twenty-seven or so. You will enjoy what you do all the more if you take the time to figure out what you want to do. Don't despair quite so much. All is not lost.

And from Liz:

I just wanted to offer some advice to Dateless Dilettante. First of all, she shouldn't be so hard on herself for not knowing what she wants to do with her life. Perhaps she shouldn't look to a career to define who she is. If there's something you love to do, and can make a living doing it, great. But maybe she should look at work as simply a way to pay for life's necessities and allow for fun adventures in her free time. I also sense a lot of black and white thinking on her part. As in, All people in corporate America are mediocre-minded. All people in graduate school are highly intelligent & superior and know what they want to Be. Graduate school is a means to an end. Going to graduate school just to be in graduate school is a waste of time. I have been working in corporate America for about 4 years, after having graduated salutatorian from my university. I have met highly intelligent people in the working world, and others who, while perhaps did not have the best grades in school, do have an interesting story or two to tell. My advice is to just jump right into a job that sounds somewhat fun and interesting. She needs some real-life working world experience to help her stop living inside her own head.

And from Nat:

Trust me on this -- if you're into grad student guys and are intelligent yourself, it doesn't matter where you're working you'll attract them by the truckload. If you don't believe me, come hang out in Cambridge, MA and see. You don't need to talk about the mortgage company, all you need to do (a la Dale Carnegie) is say, "that's fascinating, what about Proust are you writing on ..." and he'll be more than glad to talk. And if you have to answer, say I'm taking some time before I go to grad school just to read and think and he will love that.

As for the rest -- I'm a Harvard grad student and I still don't know what I want to do with my life. Find something worthwhile to keep yourself occupied with, and give yourself a break.

And from Tom:

Don't let your current job make you afraid of talking to smart folk. You're only 24; it's not like you've been a secretary for 30 years and made a career out of it [Not that there's anything wrong with that. -- BG]. Heck, the number of humanities grad students, both current and former, with such jobs is probably sufficient to fill a few of the larger state universities! But in addition to that, seems to me what'd matter to a decent smart guy wouldn't be one's job so much as your exhibiting smartness, wit, range of knowledge, etc. in conversation and action. Don't let the job define you, let your words and actions provide a multisyllabic definition.

And from Dhalgren:

There was a time when I too thought that my worthiness depended upon my career and my success thereto. I was miserable then. It took me a decade to figure out that no matter where you go, you're going to encounter petty fiefdoms and the pure unadulterated power of networking. No matter what you do, it's going to end up being just a job in the long run. It'll have its nice points and also some unutterably dreadful boring points. You'll talk shop with your peers. You'll develop some deep yet narrow base[s] of knowledge.

I saw this early on in the comics industry when I flirted with getting into the business. I saw it in college as I observed the bickering within departments. I saw it in the world of work in both the public and private sector. Even if you love what you do, you'll encounter this. Even if you love what you do, you just might burn out on it in time. And if that had been what was making your life seem worthwhile, then what?

Ultimately it's all ephemeral. Work gets you food and shelter for the day, and perhaps a little more to stash for later. But that's really it. The status conferred by this or that title isn't much more than the same kind of swindle the Wizard of Oz pulled on Dorothy. You get to be the one behind the curtain of you play the game and kiss a little behind and do your time. We're really all just workers except for the owners. The titles and pretensions of professional status just serve to hide that.

I learned that the hard way, but I'm so glad that I know it now. I'm much more interested in excelling as a human being now than titles or raises. I've found work that I find ethical and worthwhile even if I don't love it and I have a great life outside of work now.

As an added bonus, since looking outside the world of work for self definition, I've managed to find some of the best friends I've ever had. They're just as smart as I am [I'm an intellectual too, BTW, even if I didn't go for that PHD], well read and savvy, even though they never were collegiate. Like BG said, there's smart folks all over the place in you look. Not all of us are writing [yet another] thesis about the semiotics of Joyce's grammar. In fact, the folks I know that never got locked up in the ivory tower are some of the most interesting.

And finally, from V (with a note for BG too):

Two things:

1) BG, I disagree with you about Eyes Wide Shut. I thought it was very interesting; it reminded me of Joyce's Ulysses (especially the Nightwalking bits) via Virginia Woolf, because of Kubric's way of having the scenes emerge out of the situation, rather than building the situations around a standard plot. But, then, there are people who don't like Joyce or Woolf, for some good reasons. (And I still don't like 2001.) And anyway, I didn't write to debate a movie. This letter is actually a

2) Shoutout to Dateless Dilettante:

The whole bit about "loving yourself before someone else will" carries with it that you are loving yourself *for the sake of* loving yourself, rather than for the sake of making someone else love you. That is, if you are trying to "love yourself" because that will make someone love you, then you'll probably fail because you won't feel "complete" without that final nail in the coffin... er... cherry on the dessert. On the other hand, learning to love yourself because that's a pretty nifty thing to do, and it feels pretty good, is something worth striving for. (I'm beginning to sound like a Whitney Houston song.)

An unlikely role model (well, she's mine, anyway) might be that woman in that soda commercial where she does the video dating service thing suddenly realizes that she's got a pretty good life without a man, and she leaves the video dating service place. Her life wasn't full *despite* not having a guy (or gal, I don't remember if they said what she was looking for); her life was full *period.*

So-- go watch movies, read books, go to museums and bookstores, to fulfill your own interests outside of finding someone else, or "looking smart." Do these things because they interest *you,* not because they will make someone interested in you. And, if it turns out that you're not actually interested in all these things (which seems unlikely from your letter), just remember that's okay, too.

And incidentally, a good number of so-called "intellectuals" are "Nice Normal Guys"-- and others of them also can be "Real A**es" and "Solipsistic Neurotic Jerks." My boyfriend is a pretty darn smart writer and my landlady is a history professor (yes-- professors can clean toilets and change light bulbs, too). They're both Nice Normal People!

BG responds: About the Joyce stuff, maybe you'd want to take that up with DD?

CONFIDENTIAL TO REX

Hey, kiddo, this 11/f must be weirding you out. Key is, you don't have to "get her uninterested'" you just have to say, "Please quit it."

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