Flatigue

I work from my flat, so it is no wonder that I am sick of it.

But I am also sick of working for no pay, of my increasingly strident craving for appointment, convenience and privacy, and of reproachful stares from Georgian friends who ask how my Georgian is coming along and I would speak so much better if I just moved to my mom's house in the country and made more Georgian friends and how come I don't visit ever? I am weary — arg! arg! — of delicious twists of savory khinkali, of buying cheap and flavorful fruit from old women with solid racks of gold teeth, of emerald-green Tarragon soda, of the evocative deteriorating terraces and winding quiet cobblestone alleys in Old Tbilisi, and of feeling the city get a little warmer and more golden as Spring takes hold.

Are there birds flitting past our balcony at dusk? Bleuuugh! Lofty stone churches resonant with antique chanting? Bah! Friends gathered at supra to toast and sing and drink one another under the table? Humbug! A trip to Armenia tomorrow to stay at an off-season luxury hotel with sauna, pool and billiards in the middle of a gorgeous alpine landscape? Piffle! Pish tosh!

How convenient — no. How absolutely soul-and-sanity-saving-ly, sourpuss-smotheringly necessary — that in less than a week I fly to the US to spend almost three weeks in New Jersey with my Dad. Ah! Cafés within bookstores within shopping malls, glossy New Yorker magazines stashed in the bathroom, productive eavesdropping, men with backpacks, women in sweatpants and sneakers, front lawns, fast-food, Ben & Jerry's, dark beer, dinner dates, rude strangers, estranged neighbors, hippies, preppies, goths, yuppies, nerds, geeks, punks, freaks, ethnic and cultural hodge-podge m'godge HERE I COME!

There's 24 hours in that visit home when I will be vying for a fellowship. That 24 hours will will be difficult and sweaty-palmed and interesting - I will probably have a very looong entry about my humiliation and defeat — or triumph and glory — once it's over.

I sent in my graduate school decisions. Anyone wait-listed for IU, New School, or Syracuse will be happy to know that I'm bound for NYU's Cultural Reporting and Criticism Journalism program come September. It's by far the hardest, brainiest, most toughen-you-up-and-get-you-published-est program of the lot I was admitted to, and really I wanted to go to graduate school to shape my wet soggy brain into something steely and lethal and my tentative prose into a marketable and professional portfolio, so I'm going to go for it. Soaring student loans and the infamous NYC real estate market are in my future, so help me god. I can't wait.