I live with someone who is still in the early stages of mourning the loss of her husband. When she speaks of him, and their love, their family, the life they built together, and the terrible absence his death left, which she describes as being completely and utterly worse than losing her parents (a prospect that already seems worse than anything I can imagine), I can physically feel the reverberations of her suffering in my own body.

I’ve never felt so sure about the truth of this Faulkner quotation, which I’ve posted before:

“I know the answer to that and I know that I can’t change that answer and I don’t think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.” — The Wild Palms

You never get it cheap. Even if you’re the one to die first, you might have to watch the person who loves you the most watch you die, which might very well be even more horrible. But as horrific as the combination of love and mortality is, it also seems utterly right. I have rarely sat across a table from a crying person and felt so sure that her crying, her pain, her suffering is absolutely appropriate, even beautiful, a true reflection of her love, not something that ought to be fixed or corrected or medicated away or hidden. I also feel like I have learned a vast amount about relationships and romantic love in general just from observing someone else’s grief, and I honestly feel grateful for that, as if I have glimpsed some sacred treasure well before my time.

In the midst of her suffering, my friend insists that it is of the utmost importance that I find someone to share my life with whose eventual death will hurt me just as badly as she’s hurting, someone who sees things the way I see them, who really cares. Even in worst kind of pain she’s ever felt, she says that the alternatives, of either going through life alone or with a person she didn’t have that kind of connection with (and she thinks many marriages fall into that category), are more unthinkable.

It’s really changing the way I think about dating, and it’s making me look back over my own relationship history with different eyes, and really think about what it is I’m looking for in the long-term.

I’m also rethinking The Rules. Yes, I really have read the actual book, prompted by an experience several years ago in which someone I dated for only a month or two, about whom I had gotten really worked up, literally disappeared into thin air and stop returning my calls. (This was the first time I had experienced this relatively common event in the New York dating scene.) As embarrassing as that is to admit (not to mention that one of the The Rules is never to admit that you’ve read or practiced The Rules!), it’s also true that the basic principle behind it all is more or less right. People are just plain more attractive when they seem unattainable, and the more someone pulls away from you, up to a point, the more you want to be near them. This is, I think, just a result of how our egos function. At some hidden (or not so hidden) level, most of us think that we are great and desirable. So, if someone else seems to think that we are actually not that great, we then think that they must be even more great and desirable than we are. Why else wouldn’t they appreciate our greatness and thus be scrambling to be near us all the time?

The Rules are sortof right, and they sortof work, sometimes, particularly in cases where you actually are too busy to see your romantic interest often and not just playing some hard-to-get game. But in light of this grief I’ve observed, they also seem just utterly ridiculous. I mean, seriously? This matter of romantic love is incredibly important. What on earth are we all doing, going out there and playing games with one another’s hearts and messing around and not telling the truth about our feelings and choosing to be involved with people who blatantly abuse us or with whom there is only some tiny microscopic chance of things ever “working out” and all the million other things that go on in dating life all the time? Why are we all so scared of being rejected, when getting rejected is absolutely inevitable in an endeavor in which we are basically tasked with sorting through everyone in the world to find the one or two people (if we’re lucky) with whom we can share this particular type of love?

If I actually thought I had to solve this problem using reason or my ego alone, I probably would have given up a long time ago.

Regarding party girls: Karaoke is the easiest way to get completely trashed on cheap beer. It is possible to wake up the next morning and not be hungover because you’re actually still drunk. Every single woman my age is looking for an excuse to scream along with Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair songs in public. You should check to make sure the cup is right-side-up before pouring the coffee. Nightlife in New York is more expensive than you ever imagined. If, at 10:30 pm, you are embarrassed to wear your outfit for the animal-themed party on the train, because you are afraid of being mistaken for a furry/hooker, do not fear, because by the time to you arrive at the club, surrounded by people in full-on fetish gear, you will realize what a cute innocent stuffed animal you are in comparison. By 2 am, you will need food so badly you will not even care if the people in the pizza place think you are a furry/hooker. There is no such thing as being too hungover to go to Mass. It’s okay to stay home on the Internet all night; you’re not really missing that much.

Regarding jewelry: The 4 C’s are cut, color, clarity, and carats. A diamond can be “induced,” and that is not a good thing. In order to get jewelry appraised at IGI, you have to go through a series of locking doors without anything really in between them, like in a movie where someone’s accessing an underground vault or a secret room at the FBI or something. Your gemologist will answer her cell phone at least 5 times while assessing your bling. When you write down your address for them to send the report, she will know what street you live on. She will say, in her thick Jersey accent, the one with the pagoda house! You will say, I live in the pagoda house! You can only get about 25% of retail value by selling diamonds in the diamond district, which is on 47th Street.

Here I am dressed up as a wolf in the Lower East Side circa 2:30 in the morning, standing in front of an apartment building next to Crash Mansion. This picture was taken on my girlfriend’s iPhone in the dark.

‘I’m not angry at you. I will never be angry at you. I’m only angry at myself,’ [said Dakota Fanning.]

‘I can’t comprehend how people can be late or obese,’ said Haley Joel Osment” (66-7).

“Haley Joel Osment said Dakota Fanning should tell the therapist he was a graduate of New York University. Dakota Fanning said she did and the therapist was impressed and said something nice about New York University. Haley Joel Osment said the only purpose of going to New York University was so Dakota Fanning could now say to her therapist in the presence of her mother that Haley Joel Osment had gone to New York University” (77-8).

– Tao Lin, Richard Yates

* * *

I’m a member of the Rumpus Book Club, which is currently discussing Tao Lin‘s newest novel, Richard Yates. The book, which I have not yet finished, concerns the relationship between 22-year-old writer and NYU alum Haley Joel Osment and 16-year-old high school student Dakota Fanning. Haley meets Dakota online, talks to her on Gmail chat constantly, visits her in New Jersey, has illegal sex with her, and treats her like shit, causing her to spiral into bulimia.

Anyone who knows my history will already know that I have a lot to say about this.

Richard Yates is the third book I’ve read by Tao Lin. I’ve also heard him read in NYC. He’s friends with some of my friends. We’ve published in some of the same places.

When I was 14, in Georgia, in 1997, I met a guy online, who was 19, in Michigan. We talked on ICQ, and then AIM, all the time, for hours and hours every day, and all night long. When I was 15, he came to visit me covertly at sleep-away nerd camp. When I was 16, he came to visit me at home in Georgia, with my parents’ permission. When I was 17, I went to visit him in Michigan, with my parents’ permission. I lost my virginity with him. When I was 18, in 2001, I moved from Georgia to New York City, where I started as a freshman at NYU right before September 11th happened. Tao Lin started at NYU that same semester, I think. This was the same time period when students were killing themselves by jumping from the balconies in Bobst Library all the time, before the protective barriers were installed.

In 2002, prompted by infidelity on my part, I dropped out of NYU and ran away with my online boyfriend. I was 18; he was 23. We hitchhiked all over the country together. We panhandled for food. We panhandled to pay for an abortion when I got pregnant. He hit me. I don’t mean he slapped me; I mean he punched me in the face hard enough to knock me down. We stopped hitchhiking, broke up for a few weeks, got back together, and got an apartment together in Washington, DC. He got a job at Whole Foods. I got a job in a bookstore and then a yoga studio. We became vegetarians. We read the labels on everything we ate, and only ate whole grains and organic things. We were so poor, we hardly ate anything. At 5’10, I weighed 120 lbs.

All this was, as you can probably imagine, a disaster and a mindfuck that took me years to get over. I was literally missing for months and my mother was, understandably, a wreck. The police were involved. I, the missing scholarship girl, was on the top of new NYU president John Sexton’s to-do list.

There were aspects of the dynamic between me and my then-boyfriend that resembled that of the fictional Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning very much. It was a mess. I was very, very naive. But, even so, it was so much, SO much, deeper and more real than the relationship the characters in this book have, and our IM conversations were better-written and more “literary” than theirs, by a HUGE factor. And despite the fact that this particular experience of mine is close to some of the horror stories people tell about why kids shouldn’t be online, I am 100% grateful to have had pretty much unfettered access to the Internet while growing up.

Like Tao Lin, I’m 27. I started using the web as a social medium when I was 11. I started making personal websites when I was 14, which was how the ex in question originally got in contact with me. The benefits of having access to a world outside the reaches of the small, Southern town I grew up in far, far, FAR outweighed the negatives. But, as I have mentioned before, the Internet was a very different world in those days than in 2006, when Richard Yates is set. It was much smaller and felt like a private club in some ways. The people I knew IRL usually didn’t know the first thing about the web.

After we broke up, my ex went on the thruhike the Appalachian Trail, and to marry a very nice, very smart, and insecure girl from South Carolina, whom he met on the Internet. She is younger than I am. They are both vegans. He’s held a series of hipster-y jobs in hipster-y towns (e.g., a bike shop in Portland). He currently works at Whole Foods again, and he and his wife are separated. From what I can tell from his web presence, he is a lot happier and healthier than he was when we were together.

After we broke up, I went on to mend my relationship with my family, and to have a long series of power-imbalanced relationships with men who were, on average, 12.5 years older than I was. When I was 21, I went back to NYU and got a full-time job there with tuition remission benefits. I went to school part-time for five years and graduated summa cum laude with no student debt. I wrote about my hitch-hiking experience a lot, in places like The Sun. I’m applying to Ph.D. programs for next year. After eight years of vegetarianism, I recently started eating poultry again.

On the subject of NYU, it is the most expensive university in the world. The financial aid sucks in comparison with most universities on the same tier. What I would have paid, had I not worked here, even with a large scholarship, was completely ridiculous. I’m so glad I didn’t do it. An NYU education is not worth what it costs, period. I’ve heard it said that NYU, the largest private owner of real estate in NYC, could stop collecting tuition for ten years without feeling it. I believe it.

However, as much as NYU screws its students financially, it treats its employees (unless they are grad student TA’s in certain departments..) very, very well. In addition to my salary, as my employer, NYU gave me a high-quality, free education. And NYU’s retirement plan for employees is so generous (if I contribute 5% of my monthly income, NYU contributes 10%) that, at 27 (unless our economy really never recovers) I’ve already put away enough money toward my retirement that I’ll probably be fine when I’m 65.

Actually, he wound up spending most of the talk telling wonderful stories about what it was like to be a close student of Trungpa Rinpoche and forthrightly answering questions from the audience about the controversial areas of Trungpa’s life (he was/is just as well-known for sleeping with many of his female students and drinking a lot of alcohol as he is for his teachings). Baker simultaneously touched on a wide range of spiritual matters, and his presence gave me a particular warm, glowy feeling I tend to get when teachers and other people with very strong spiritual practices coupled with clear understanding speak to me about these issues, which is rare and wonderful.

I had not intended to take notes, but somehow wound up doing so. I think I was the only person in the room doing so. I remember experiencing joy when I realized, in an academic context, that I did not need to slavishly record everything in order to absorb a lecture, and that I could just sit there and enjoy the talk without worrying about remembering it for an exam. But, on the other hand, I regretted not having any notes from HH the Dalai Lama’s teachings in NYC on my birthday this year, which I also enjoyed but could barely say anything about when people asked me what it was I liked. So the compromise I make, I suppose, is to take short, somewhat cryptic notes that might not evoke much for anyone but me. The following might not make much sense out of context, but represents some of the lines he spoke that resonated strongly with me. Some of this is quoted or paraphrased from Baker’s memories of Trungpa’s teachings, some from Baker himself. [Some additional later commentary is added in brackets.]

* * *

The first duty of a teacher is to be completely open with his students, to be completely who is he, which challenges to the student to fall in love.

revealing ourselves -> connection -> open society

True compassion arises from open accepting communication, open hearts, being ordinary.

Compassion is acceptance, non-judging, not being sorry for someone or pity.

Meditation practice teaches compassion by teaching us to stop judging ourselves when our minds wander, but simply to accept it and return to the present moment.

Letting be.

The whole world is my body. [Trungpa's response when a student at a public talk, during which he was drinking and smoking, admonished him for defiling his body, which is his temple.]

There is a myth of objectivity in academia. Every question someone poses is a trick, because it assumes only a certain, small set of possible answers.

The only way to gain wisdom on the path is to ask your master for it, clearly.

Crazy wisdom.

The purpose of practice is to gain freedom from our own minds, in society, with people.

Create an explosion.

Aloneness to openness.

On the path, we begin with many rules to keep us from screwing up and hurting others, but we move toward insight, responding to what IS, in each moment, with no rules needed.

Be who you are. Go home to your depressions. [Trungpa to the packed audience at the end of a poetry reading which also included Ginsberg and Bly; Baker interprets this as a warning against setting up others as great heros/artists and comparing ourselves to them, rather than being who we really are.]

Do not be afraid to be a fool.

The definition of a confused sentient being is a person lost in dreams, especially future-oriented dreams, including nightmares. WAKE UP.

Love your life.

The point of practice is to become a completely ordinary human being. Striving to be extraordinary makes us subhuman.

Sometimes pleasure and pain are hard to come by. [Trungpa's response to a question from Baker as to why he would want to fall in love again, with a woman other than his wife, when that would bring so much complication and trouble.]

Compassion is ultimately reflected as the beauty of the world, unimpeded phenomena, forms, colors.

Curiosity is a virtue of the enlightened mind.

Psychology/cognitive/cogneuro programs:

Stanford University
location: Bay Area, CA
people: Lera Boroditsky, Michael Frank, Kanalit Grill-Spector
deadline: November 23

NYU
location: NYC, NY
people: Athena Vouloumanos, Gary Marcus, David Poeppel, Alec Marantz, Lila Davachi, etc (having worked here for years and knowing everyone in the department does not help)
deadline: December 12

Harvard University
location: Cambridge, MA
people: Susan Carey, Patrick Cavanagh (sortof, he’s really in Paris), Steven Pinker
deadline: December 15

MIT
location: Cambridge, MA
people: Nancy Kanwisher, Rebecca Saxe, Edward Gibson, Molly Potter
deadline: December 1

UC Berkeley
location: Bay Area, CA
people: Eleanor Rosch, Tania Lombrozo, Marc D’Esposito (also, in Optometry, crowding folks Den and Sus)
deadline: November 30 (?)

Writing programs:

Stegner Fellowship
location: Bay Area, CA (Stanford)
people: Tobias Wolff
deadline: December 1

Michener Center for Writers
location: Austin, TX (UT Austin)
people: Elizabeth McCracken
deadline: December 15

Iowa Writers’ Workshop
location: Iowa City, IA (U of Iowa)
people: Marilynne Robinson!!!, Ethan Canin
deadline: January 3, 2011

University of Florida
location: Gainesville, FL
people: Mary Robison!!!
deadline: January 14, 2011

Brooklyn College
location: NYC, NY
people: Michael Cunningham, Myla Goldberg, Amy Hempel, Julie Orringer
deadline: January 15, 2011

Things to do:
- finalize psychology statement of purpose and customize for each school
- write writing statement of purpose
- update CV
- finalize writing portfolio (if you would like to read/critique, please email me)
- secure letters of recommendation
- take GRE one more time to improve math score (I ran out of time the first try, totally bombing, but according to Mitsu’s calculations, based on what I made and how many problems I left blank, if I could just do it faster I’d get a 720-740!)
- figure out how on earth I’m going to afford all these application fees

This would seem pretty doable if I weren’t essentially working three jobs and having weekends with schedules like:

Sunday, Aug 18
8am: walk Grover in PPS
11:15: Mass at Corpus Christi in Morningside Heights
12:30ish coffee hour in CC rectory
2: lunch at Veselka with Becky in the East Village
4: Eva Dean Dance NY Fringe Fest performance with Megan in LES
6-ish: walk Grover in PPS
7-ish: BBQ at Alice’s in Park Slope
late-ish: walk Grover in PPS

I busted my knee up so badly on the way up the walk when bringing in one of my suitcases on the day I moved in that it resulted in my first trip to the emergency room in my entire life. Mitsu says this is yet another reminder to be more careful when things are going well. The house is now christened in blood, and I’m healing up well.

I got a lot of great feedback on my draft Statement, namely that it’s too long and personal, which I already knew. The new draft is under way.

I have been talking with Heather Anne and Mitsu about their startup, The Lived Body, which I’m really excited to help out with in any way I can. It’s not just that I’m excited about the project, though it really is one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever heard of, and it could one day totally change the way both you and I live our lives. It’s also that I’m excited (yes, now, in 2010) about the whole idea of startups.

I feel like this should have always been obvious to me, that there are smart, motivated people out there starting their own companies, building things, making things happen, doing work not because they want to get paid but because they want to give something to the world. But it actually took me a very long time to approach work in this way. This is the same issue I was hinting at in my statement. For such a long time, I was in the lab, doing science, writing papers, having some success, etc, but I always coded it as “my job,” something I was only doing in order to finish my BA, or in order to afford to live in the Village, or in order to please my boss or my family or someone else. I almost always completely refused to admit that I actually enjoyed my work, or that it was in any way offered as a gift to others. Taking this year off and coming back, and being so very, very glad to be back, makes me realize that most of that was just a story I told myself, and under there I actually do have the intrinsic motivation I always felt that I lacked. So it is with Heather Anne and Mitsu, who are both such brilliant people. The very fact that this can even happen, that like-minded and talented folks can find each other, often from far-off places, connect, and collaborate, with real results that benefit society at large, is such a miracle. It gives me hope for us all, even in dark times.

Katharine A. Tillman
Statement of Purpose

I have loved language all my life. My mother is a voracious reader of such high caliber that these days she often complains of being unable to find anything worth reading that she hasn’t already read in an entire public library. I grew up surrounded by books, being read to and reading. I started keeping journals at a very young age. I was publishing my writing on the Internet by the time I was 14 years old and in print magazines by the time I was 18. I wanted to be a writer more than anything.

My mother, the eternal bookworm, discovered somewhat late in life that she also had an interest in and talent for science. The hard sciences satisfied her thirst for concrete and verifiable knowledge about the world in a way literature courses never had. When I was in elementary school, she went back to college for a degree in Biology. By the time I was in middle school, she was pursuing a masters in human genetics. She taught me how to do Punnett squares, to match up chromosomes for karyotypes, and to breed fruit flies with funny wings and eyes. I thought all this was a lot of fun, but I still considered myself to be an “arts person,” not a “science person.” I wanted to study writing, or philosophy, or art.

I changed my tune somewhat when I took AP Biology my senior year in high school. My teacher, Ben Davis, was phenomenal, and it remains one of the best and most rigorous classes I have ever taken. I stayed up all night studying. I loved it. I started my undergraduate career at NYU as a Biology major, taking junior-level molecular and cell biology courses my first semester of freshman year. Looking for a work-study job, I found an opening for an RA position in Denis Pelli’s lab in the Psychology Department. He and his students studied visual perception.

Denis, it turned out, came from a family of artists, and was interested in the question of beauty. This was one of my favorite topics in philosophy, and the moment when I realized that it was actually possible to ask (and answer!) questions about how people see the world from a scientific perspective – even question about aspects of perception as seemingly ephemeral as what makes a particular painting beautiful to a particular observer – completely changed my life. I still remember that moment vividly. I was 18 years old; it was nearly a decade ago.

I worked in Denis’ lab for one semester, and then, for personal reasons unrelated to school, I left NYU entirely for almost 3 years. During that time, I travelled all over the country, worked in a yoga studio in Washington, DC, wrote, and did freelance technical editing for the Journal of Vision, which was then very new. When I decided to return to New York and my studies in 2004, Denis offered me a full-time job as a researcher and lab manager. One of the perks of this was that I could take NYU classes part-time, for free.

In the five years it took me to complete my BA, with a major in Psychology and minors in Creative Writing and Classics, part-time, I also published 3 papers in collaboration with Denis and other members of the lab, presented my work at 8 conferences, learned vast amounts about psychophysical research, and, as lab manager, about teaching, mentoring, NIH grant proposals, and dealing with the IRB. Most importantly, I learned how to think critically. I learned what makes a scientific question interesting and what makes an argument convincing. I vehemently denied it almost the whole way through, but I became a scientist. Thanks to Denis’ unwavering concern for my development and rigorous intellectual standards, I became a very well-trained one.

My first scientific paper, “Parts, wholes, and context in reading: A triple dissociation” (Pelli & Tillman, PLoS One, 2007), used a novel knock-out method of text manipulation to prove that word shape, letter-by-letter decoding, and sentence context make independent, additive contributions to reading rate in words/min. It received press coverage from sources as diverse as Scientific American, BoingBoing, and FontFeed. My second paper, “Crowding and eccentricity determine reading rate” (Pelli, Tillman, et al., JOV, 2007), was a mammoth with several mathematical appendices, laying out the visual factors constraining how fast we read text. My most recent paper, “The uncrowded window of object recognition” (Pelli & Tillman 2008), a review of what studies of vision crowding have taught us about how the brain combines features to recognize objects, was published as a Perspective in Nature Neuroscience.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it still took me another year to realize that I really was a scientist, and that a career in academia is not only what I have been preparing for all my life, but also what I am best suited for and I what I want. The “problem” has always been that I have so many other interests. I still publish my creative writing (both fiction and essays). I show my photographs in exhibitions. I have had an intense contemplative spiritual practice for ten years. I thought that in order to give all these other pursuits the attention they deserved, I needed to leave the lab. I tested this theory for one year, and found it to completely and utterly false. My “outside” interests inform my research, making it better, and the converse is also true. The theme underlying all these diverse passions is the same: a tremendous, unwavering fascination with both minds in general and my own mind in particular.

I want to understand how people perceive the world, think, and narrate their experiences. I am fascinated by the questions of how language influences seeing and vice versa. I want to know the relationship between language and memory – how the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and what our past histories have been constrain how we see and interpret our present surroundings and situations.

I’m currently working on a paper, “Reading pictures” (Tillman & Pelli, in prep), which presents evidence that reading and object recognition, two tasks traditionally studied separately by language and vision researchers, are in fact remarkably similar, perhaps relying on the same cognitive processes. In my graduate work, I hope to continue in this vein, combining my interests in perception and language.

Moreover, I want to ask the big questions in cognitive psychology. I don’t want to be another cog in the research machine churning out papers documenting tiny advances in obscure topics that only matter to a tiny group of expert specialists and will never be heard of by ordinary people. I want to be a scientist, psychologist, scholar, academic, and professor in the highest sense of those words: a fearless and unapologetic intellectual whose work is devoted to the cause of pursuing knowledge and understanding for the benefit of everyone. It’s a lofty and idealistic goal, I know, but I am sure that the next step is to begin working toward a doctoral degree.

I could not bring myself to look at my sister Rachael, who died so young, but turned my back on the open casket and stood there with her mother, Barbara, holding her hand and thanking people for coming. I remember how surreal it was, to realize, when I made it down to Georgia, still as shocked as anyone that Rachael could actually be gone (it is still hard to believe, more than two years later), and feeling, more than anything, incredible heart-pain sympathy for Barbara, who had lost her only child, and for Rachael’s and my father, who was in no condition to process his loss and instead was running around Savannah trying to borrow a Tracy Chapman CD to play at the service, that *I* was one of the people people were there for, that I, who had so many regrets, who had not seen her in so long, was in a very real sense one of the closest people to her in the world, I was her family, I was the bereaved.

I found out over the phone, a voicemail from my grandparents, while walking in Washington Square. I walked to the NYU library and sank down to the floor in the stacks, and called my mother to tell her. Then I went to Mass. I had been Catholic for only a month and was in the habit of going to daily Mass at St. Joseph’s in the Village after school. I was crying, in my usual pew, and one of the priests came up to me and asked if I was alright. I said I had just found out that my sister had died. I said that she was only 30, that she was engaged. I could not believe that I was saying these things and that they were true. The priest, a sensitive young Dominican, asked me her name, and offered that very Mass for the repose of her soul. Then I had to tell a lot more people. I had to say it, over and over: my sister just died. I had to look at that look people get on their faces when you tell them something like that. I had to excuse myself from work and school to travel to Georgia. I had ballet tickets with Leigh that night, and I didn’t know what else to do since I wasn’t leaving until the next day, so I went to the ballet, it was the Kirov, who I hadn’t seen when I was in St. Petersburg because they were on tour, and I remember that Leigh cried when I told her what had happened, and I, the bereaved, didn’t know what to say to comfort her, my friend, who felt so sorry for my loss. I did not think about it at the time, but Rachael had loved the ballet.

Gloria, my new landlady in Brooklyn, lost her husband only two months ago, and cried several times during her interview with me. She kept sort-of-apologizing for not being more businesslike, but not really apologizing, because you can’t, and I knew that, and everyone knows it. What can be said? What can one say to the grieving? I ran right into my friend Eléna Rivera outside Corpus Christi at Fr. Wizeman’s wake, and she was crying, and I hadn’t seen her since I left New York over a year ago. “Oh, Eléna!” I said. I was wearing sunglasses, and I’m not sure she even recognized me at first, but I already had my arms around her when I said “It’s Kat. I’m back. I’m here.” What else can you say?

When we do something for the first time, and it already feels familiar, are we remembering the future? (The very first Mass I ever attended, as exotic as it should have been, felt familiar to me.)

I am, as of August 1, an NYU employee for the third time. I was hired in 2001, in 2004, and now, in 2010.

The other night, one week after Fr. Wizeman’s funeral, I was kicked out of a public park in New York City by a police officer, who said it was closed after 11 pm, though the posted sign said 1 am. The flashlight in my face reminded me of being 18, hitchhiking, sleeping in parks, in the woods alongside Interstates, under overpasses. Always the flashlight in the face and the wanting to see some ID. They’d often ask-tell me, so young-looking, so young, that I wasn’t going to show up on a missing-persons list, now was I? And I, so innocent and incapable of lying to the police, said, well actually, I might. But they ran my ID and I never showed up. I was, in fact, a missing person, and, because of this, I have absolutely no faith that the system works at all. The cops always seemed surprisingly reassured when my runaway accomplice, then 23, claimed he was going to marry me.

We trespassed and panhandled so often that these encounters with the police became commonplace, not even scary for me, a girl who had been gravely terrified of cops as a child. We never actually got in trouble for anything, we never got “taken in,” the worst thing that ever happened was a sheriff from some Southern state giving us a lift out of his county. And that was how I learned what it really means to be privileged, that if you are a pretty, well-spoken, white girl who comes from an impressive college (even if you only stayed there for 6 months), you can get away with anything.

After I became a found person again, I got to look through the police reports concerning my disappearance. The most shocking thing I found, in this file that was all about me, was to see that a stranger, someone who had never spoken one word to me in my life, an “authority,” had described my family, in print, as dysfunctional.

Do you think there is a special room in hell for people who make out after funerals? I asked, half-joking.
You mean, for those who go on living? he said. No.
It was exactly the same response I had given myself, in my head, the split second after I asked the question.