Room temperature Thai coconut soup from the can on a Tuesday night. Yes, please. I am officially a college student.

Classes started yesterday. I woke up to a pretty, peach-colored cat taking a shit on the main lawn.

Intro to World Lit was the first go; a wiry, gray haired man with a soul patch, stood silent for the first ten minutes, all of us staring at him patiently, silence, silence. Then he exploded: “Welcome to college! I’m gonna talk a lot about age-specific writing–do you know what age-specific means?” He enunciates with spit and vigor. “Like, why do you think they throw Romeo and Juliet at you when you’re in the seventh grade?” Thick Brooklyn accent–”Because they’re crazy adolescents who won’t quit jumpin’ all over each other, and you get that at the time! You really resonate with that!”

Lots of Eastern and Western goodies, starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Next class, Critical Thinking & Writing, taught by a very solid poet & food writer. She had us dissect a Sylvia Plath piece called “You’re” and William Carlos William’s called “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Exciting curriculum: the role of ‘the feast’ in African literature, linguistics and symbols, Jamaica Kincaid, Samuel Beckett, JoAnn Beard, good old Flannery and a whole bunch more. She had us write our life story on the back of an index card, an expounded on the importance of no wasted words.

I just finished an essay for her class on the etymology of “erotic.”

Hello, Eros!

Allie is reading passages aloud from a 1919 copy of The Sex Life of Girls and Young Women right now (kudos to my mother.) “…And watch out for the girl of ill-breeding, who walks the streets in dresses designed only for parties, and frequents the circus when it comes to town…”

My ecology teacher is the most nihilistic man I’ve ever met–he’s a geologist! He’s seen the world! Who can blame him? He’s seventy-something-years-old, twice retired, and he talks about the world, Beijing, the greenhouse effect, The Soviet Union, watching children in Uganda haul thirty-five pound jugs of water to and from the shore, all day long. We’ll be studying sustainability, our role and the government’s responsibility. He’s got a lot to teach.

He dresses the same way he dressed in 1973, in spite of is body.

My writers workshop is taught by a man who just flew in from Berlin. He had us all write badly and then tear up our pieces and threw them into the middle of the room, swearing to be gracious with ourselves during the year, and also, to not write badly. He gave us some essay’s to read (Pamuk’s, “My Father’s Suitcase”) and assigned us a couple of personal essays by Monday, based on the form of each essay.

Basically, we’re learning to write about huge events without directly writing about the event itself, and instead, letting details and the mundane guide the message.

Some students have no idea why they’re here; maybe the school threw money at them, or they’d always wanted to give writing a spin. And then some of them know. Some of them have worked for newspapers, magazines, publishers, or want to be food critics, harlequin romance novelists, teachers, story-spinners.

Eighty percent of the student body smokes like chimneys. Ah, to be an artist!

No, but really. As soon as I’m outside the classroom, I’m reading and writing. Or playing. I read and wrote for five hours yesterday, with friends by my side, creating, doing their own thing. Eating gummy worms and Hohos. And not without a late night jaunt for refreshment.

Like a play pen.

The apparition of these faces in a crowd;

petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

There’s a health food shop on Myrtle & Washington called The Carrot. The shelves are tall and the aisles are narrow. I did some grocery shopping there yesterday, and chatted with the shop owner for a while. There are murals done by Pratt students all over the walls. There’s fresh bread and Amy’s coconut thai soup. He made me a smoothie, and while he was mixing it he began to explain the physical benefits of each ingrediant. Blueberries,  cashews, soymilk, agave, omega.

I drink it.

Ever since arrival, I’ve been hungry, but every meal I’ve had has left me feeling heavy or sour or emptier. This was the first truly satisfying thing in my belly. And there was more. He hovered above me with the blender.

“Drink up so I can top it off!”

So I gulp, and he pours.

“Keep drinking!”

I gulp and gulp and he pours the rest in, right there at the counter with people in line.

Then he says, “If you’re looking for a job this semester, we could really use some help on Saturdays.”

The heat is so damp and heavy here that the paper in my room is limp. My non-perishable food and my dresses are kept in the same space. Welcome to the city. I briefly considered living bike-free, but have changed my mind. Vicky hooked me up with a crust punk kid from the Slope who refurbishes old commuters.

I’m not sure if you know what it’s like to trip on the sidewalk–a stupid, rubber chicken, Stooges-style stumble–and have an entire city block’s worth of pedestrians have something to say about it:

“Hey, you alright?”

“Shoot, you’ve got pretty eyes, but you can’t walk worth a damn.”

“Havin’ a rough day?”

One after another, each person I passed. And my ankle hurt, but I’m used to tripping and ankle-twisting. There’s just nothing like acknowledgment. Everyone is seen here. New York is like a functional Western family. Every time, every single time I come back it hits me like new: home. This feels like my happy place.

The last response I got was from a guy at a bus stop. He said, “Didn’t the afternoon get better? Whay’d I say?” And it was true; the sky had gone from sewage gray to a thick, hot blue and he said, “I took a group of kids to Coney Island today, and they were whinin’, and sayin’ sad things about how the day would go, and I said ‘Wait! Just wait!.’” He slapped his hand on his thigh.

“Now you listen to me,” he continued, “You finish up the day with style now, alright?”

On the L that night, one of the kids from a group I was with was trying to open a bottle, unsuccessfully, and a man from across the train car walks over, takes the bottle from the kid’s hands, and pops the cap off against a metal ledge. Just like that. And the man hands back the drink, and retreats to his respective seat smiling, laughing.

I love this city.

I scaled parts of Brooklyn on foot, found second-hand shops and treasures thrown from people’s windows. People are constantly yelling to each other from across the street:

“Hey, Steve! Where’ve you been?!”

“Oh, you know, I’ve been inside!”

“Alright, well I’m goin’ to the deli! You need somethin’?!

“Nah! I’ll be on the stoop!”

And that’s that. God. The stoop! America needs more stoops in it’s neighborhoods!

I saw my first cockroach in Greenwhich Village dodging cars on a busy intersection. We explored the neighborhood, eating gelato outside of a shop window chock full of light-up globes, talking about family. Later we toured every sex and fetish shop between St. Vincent’s Hospital and Broadway. Instead of greasy little men, the shops were filled with enthusiastic, well-spoken women, showing us their favorite products.

I love the people I’m meeting, the community I’m cultivating. I made that very clear as soon as I arrived–to myself, my roommates–that I was looking for a sense of community, family. I didn’t need to explain any further. They got it. These girls are gold. We’ve become very close, very fast, and the other night, after a romp in the West Village, a few of us ended up on the floor of our dorm, with a couple of people we’d recently met, holding each other and sighing and talking about revolution, learning trades, anti 9-5 stuff–to which Allie said with a cathartic sigh, “I think my chi is centered. I think that’s what’s happening.”

As of last night I had slept about three-and-a-half hours in two-and-a-half days. I’ve lost any solid concept of passing time. It’s fluid here: 1pm and 1am are virtually the same thing. As a result of this, sleeping and eating are optional, and won’t happen without lots of intention.

What else? Hung out in shoebox studio and watched movies. The use of small space is inspiring. Sought continuity in my sleeping and eating patterns, until all of a sudden, it was 3:30am, and who knew, and well, I can always sleep tomorrow. Stoop sales. Record sales. Revamping our space with found objects.

We went to a drag show at Lips last night and got stories from the harried, Tammy Faye Baker-blonde bartender.

A breeze here feels like someone’s breath. People use a lot of slang, stuff I’ve never even heard before, and I sound like Annie Oakley trying to translate. We photocopied passages out of The Guide to Getting it On and posted them all over our building so as to prompt the/a sexual revolution. We made flyers for my birthday party: photocopies of a rollergirl telling everyone to come on by. We even bought a phallic ice tray from our romp in the Village for the event.

In response to my qualms about the people in college food service, a new friend, Jordan, said: Here’s what you do. Next time they’re ringing you up, start talking. Just say hey, introduce yourself, and so on. And then the time after that, talk a little more in depth, get to know these people. Then next time, ask them what they’d be doing if they weren’t working food. If it’s a trade, find out about a place where they could learn that trade, and be like, “Hey, so I heard about this place where you can learn to make glass…

Or, in lieu of our other endeavors, just photocopy and post.

A Catholic priest, a business man, and a vagabond on crutches walked by, chatting amongst themselves. Allie and I were sitting on a red pew pushed against the side of a coffee shop.

“New York’s crazy,” I said.

“Oh, don’t I know it,” she cooed.

“It’s like some kind of vortex.”

An ice cream truck went by and she blew smoke through her nose: “More like a New Yortex,” she said.

The other day I watched people blow glass, and walked across Brooklyn by myself. My mother and I touched trees at the botanical gardens and I bought her birthday ice cream. At school, I threw pie at my building mates in an attempt to build community, and I found myself zooming around town again, late night, acquainting myself with a very personable graffiti artist scene where they greet & goodbye with cheek kisses, just like the French.

There is something deeply intimate about this city.

And in the dining hall, it is the haves being served by the have-nots. The angry, exhausted working class serving art students their precious tofu, wraps, smoothies. I walked around and talked to the cats–there’s an entourage of mysterious felines that slink around the central building– and I thought of a system where students serve students, clean their own toilets and hallways, cook their own food. There is something flawed the ways things are right now.

At the glass blowing studio down the street, they have a scholarship program for low-income women to learn how to make their own glass beads in an attempt to supply them with a trade, something beautiful to provide, pedal and sell so they don’t have to do things like serve art students. Urban Glassworks. This is the right idea.

It’s five a.m. and in four hours I will be en route to Six Flags in New Jersey. New Jersey?

Facing belly-down on a long board strapped with pillows, a helmet on my head, sliding down the lane of a subterranean bowling alley where bodies are the bowling balls–this is where I ended up on my first night in New York.

Leaving home was hard. Dustin’s expression, as I revolved through the doors with a suitcase in my mouth, has not stopped it’s steady ache. I sat next to a nice Hispanic man from East L.A. and sucked in air trying not to cry, but crying anyway. The man’s name was Carlos, and we shared a table in the Atlanta airport (lo! The Atlanta airport!), and over sandwiches he told me about his children and earthquakes he’d seen.

I plateaued over Greensboro, Alabama, and had a long talk with a young man en route from Costa Rica to Williamsburg where he was going back to freelance for a little music rag, deciding whether or not he wants to stay in New York, until which, he’d be camping on his friend’s rooftop.

Oh, it seems everyone is shifting. Kind of like the East L.A. earthquakes, it feels like giant snakes are making the ground undulate.

My coats are being sent to me a la poste, and of course it is raining. Raining really hard. After a wet and complicated wrestle to get my stuff moved in, my mom and I had soup at Mike’s Coffee Shop across the street and said, “Shit, if this isn’t an adventure.”

And then I started to unpack, and my roomates came back, and quickly, we were planning dumpster dives and birthday parties. Vicky, an Aquarius from the Bronx, who push-pinned all of her CDs to the wall, and Allie, a Sag from Baltimore with psychedelic stars tottooed to her collar bone.

And it was with them, and another new friend, that I ended up on the G at midnight, after the ice cream social, the improv show, and an array of summer-camp style orientation. It was with them, these earthy, lively ladies, that I ended up at a club called The Galaxie, with a disco ball, and a screen projecting Pulp Fiction, all the original brownstone moldings on the columns and ceilings, and black-lit human-bowling underground.

I met a couple of kids from Manhatten who go to an alternative high school called, “City As School,” which means exactly what it says. It’s all about the experience, the visceral,  the hands-on, the interactive. It’s about re-learning your environment into a classroom. It’s basically a gleaming archetype for public schools across the country. Trust-fund babies and homeless youth attend alike. Spread the word: City As. City As.

We stopped for Dunkin’ Dougnuts, ran into a few more Pratt students and then partied home together.

1. You have to become a capitalist in your own cute way. That’s right. Take on a mentality that has essentially ruined the Western world. You have to stoop, mooch, and
smile your brightest, but not without a new and improved spin: You’ll dress up in terry cloth with your mother and go to estate sales, charm people into giving you their dead
parent’s furniture so you can sand it down and sell it for more than it’s worth. You’ll learn a trade—dressmaking, busking, housecleaning. You’ll clean toilets with white vinegar, ingesting all manner of fecal bacteria—so you can go to college! Like you’re supposed to. Get a degree. Become a successful and valuable human being.

2. Make yourself seem as poor as possible, and as spectacular, too. Twist the truth if you must. These institutions have money to give, you just have to seduce them with your story. Bring them to the edge of the boiling, volcanic pit that is your life and have them look inside. Think you don’t have any lava to bear? You do. Milk it. Melt them with magma. Treat it like currency, because at this point, it practically is.

3. Then, you have to work. First at the American Federation of Musicians where your dad is secretary treasurer; you drop picket signs on your toes, and bleed all over the thirty-year-old union member files you are supposed to be alphabetizing. You do all of the work in a shallow attic with freaky yellow lighting, and your dad brings you cold cans of Sierra Mist bobbing with ice floes.

Then you work at the Paper Zone. You help disgruntled brides and spaced out mothers-to-be design announcements. You learn to love paper. You smell it, hold it up to the light, rub it between your thumb and index finger.

“Thank you for calling the Paper Zone, how can I help you?”

“Yes, hello, I’m looking for Spekletone 100% post-consumer in “White Sand.” “Just a moment.”

And amid hundreds of similar papers—Curious Lightspecks in “Ivory,” Nakoosa Linen in “Sand”—you can track down whatever was requested, with the singular and bulk prices on the back of your hand. Amen.

Your boss gives each employee a huge box of factory cast-offs. You learn how to silkscreen at a fifteen-dollar workshop at the YMCA. A connection at an art supply store gives you free silkscreening supplies. So you and a friend start chopping your free cardstock and making stencils, and voila, you’ve got a silk-screened card business erected on free supplies. You pull all-nighters, pressing prints in her cold basement, sipping black tea, stamping your logo. You call yourselves a la Poste.

Paper Zone gets exhausting—all of those breathless scrapbookers and their pre-made “Vacation at the beach!” stickers get under your skin. Next you work for a sketchy non-profit called Sweet Treats, a foundation that supposedly benefits survivors of domestic violence. You walk in one day, looking for volunteer hours, and the owner hires you on the spot. She puts you in the back of the dollar bins store to manage an office selling clothing donations online. You gulp coffee and respond to emails and learn how to use eBay. As far as you can see, none of the money goes towards the needy.

Eventually, the owner gets too crazy, quivery, and there are animals in the ceiling of your office, stomping, clopping, with the rain season, so you leave. You work at a consignment shop a mile down the road, with a tag-team of attractive women schlepping heavy furniture around, sorting through treasures in the back room, sticking price tags on ceramic owl figurines.

4. Then, you learn how to start a business. You turn yourself into a cause, and hold benefits. You operate a natural housecleaning business with a friend; you call yourselves BioShine, and wear matching green t-shirts, leaving thank-you notes and lemon wedges in your wake. You learn how to sew. You get used fabric and clothing to refurbish and consign. You do website writing for a heat pillow business. You bang your tambourine on street corners with some musicians, singing in a 60’s cover band, guitar cases filling up with cash. You find quarters on the ground.

5. What happens when things complicate? Maybe your brother burns his house down and holds up two stores at gunpoint. Perhaps the legal battle drains your family’s energy and bank accounts. And then, maybe your mother does this miraculous thing: she takes a sabbatical. Your step-dad is working one day a week at the homeless youth center—and so the two of them hang out in the backyard drinking wine and talking, eating dark chocolate and Jelly Bellies all day. They get your brother into the state hospital, get the U.S. Military to pay for an apartment and three-square a day for the rest of his life. Your parents have been working forty-plus hour weeks their entire adult lives. It’s a beautiful thing. Everyone lives on credit and they tell you not to worry. So you don’t. College will happen no matter what, they say. And it does.

That year, they will make no money. But you will make a wad. Maybe you’ll graduate high school early, gold stars and all, guidance counselors warning you not to count on getting accepted anywhere special. You’ll comb the Internet for scholarships and grants. You’ll write a ton of essays, fill out a stack of forms: Name, address, phone number, why do you qualify? Well, because I’m the best. That’s why. Because I will change the world. And because you report the previous years’ tax history when applying for financial aid, the money pours in: You and your mom giggle at each other. On paper it looks like you lived on nothing but canned corn.

6. So you learn to ask for help: grandma and grandpa kick in a portion, as do your parents. A few months before takeoff, your calculations show you’re a few thousand shy. Back to the drawing board. Back to the car. You sit shotgun, your mom at the wheel. You start going to the Goodwill donation center on the outskirts of the city. In two huge warehouses are endless bins of clothing, shoes, knick-knacks and furniture on their way to the landfill. You buy by the pound. The more you get, the less you pay. You start going to garage sales, haggling loudly, and speeding away with your loot. You wear matching terry-cloth rompers and people are so taken with you, they start giving stuff away. They tell you stories, invite you inside, handing you tables and teapots with the conclusion of each anecdote.

You start picking up free stuff, too—theatre seats, kitchen tables, old chairs. If something’s broken, you take it home to your step-dad for repair. Everything you get, you resell at the consignment shop you were working at earlier that year. And this is the deal-sealer. This is what pays for the final difference.

Sound like a lot of work? Sure. But you don’t have to get A’s. You don’t even have to go to high school. You don’t have to work at McDonalds or Target. You don’t have to settle for state school because guidance counselors say that’s all you’re eligible for. In fact, you go to an obscenely expensive school. You find ways to make money, doing things you like. You write thank-you’s to the organizations that gave you cash. And contrary to what you’re taught in high school, and for that matter, by most institutions you have been or ever will be associated with, you learn to not settle for the mediocre, the less-than. And this brings you back to square one, a place you can only work uphill from: dumpsters

is under construction. But stay tuned!

During my time on the edge of Bed Stye, leaping around my art school campus like someone from Fame, or rather Do the Right Thing, I want this site to serve as a way to stay in touch, swap ideas, adventures, share what I’m concocting, include you in creative alchemy & experiments, explain what that tattoo on my face is, if what you heard is true, and that I’m dating both Lou Reed and Christina Page, etc…

For those of you who snailmail, I do not want my technological advance (big step for me) to take its place. The postal workers need their mail sacks fattened! As Anne Carson says, “There are many words to describe what it feels like to not receive a letter, but few to explain how it feels when one arrives.” Let’s not forget.

In lieu of this transition, this whole post-secondary education thing, I’m posting a story I’ve been working on, my own personal how-to-pay-for-college guide in six easy steps.

Though, easy is subjective I suppose.