cost/benefit

I turned in my last paper of the year around 1am this morning and I have a meeting about another paper tomorrow at 1pm. And then I am done. Well, not really, since, as my workshop professor said, "Summers are not for relaxing anymore. Summers are for writing." Writers need to read, and my summer will be full of reading and writing, just producing pages and pages, some of which will be good and some of which will suck. As long as I keep writing.
A fellow writer in the program here wrote on his Facebook page that the cost of his first year here is equivalent to that of a Porsche 911. ouch. And depressing.

It is hard not to get depressed here if you're a student. An art student, at that. New York is for the very young and the very rich, as Joan Didion paraphrased in her essay "Goodbye to All That," and she is correct. The city was great when I was 23 and charging exorbitant amounts on my credit cards. But now I am paying it back and the city - and its resulting costs of living - has lost its luster. I knew this coming into it, which is why I was kicking and screaming, moving here. Was it worth it? Begrudgingly, yes. My professors have been amazing, I have found a few that I really admire and want to BE when I grow up, and the guidance here has been great. I enjoy what I am doing - sometimes I honestly think, seriously? I can actually WRITE for a living? But I'd be lying if I said I didn't get nauseous when I think that my rent could be a mortgage on a house in Chapel Hill. Or rent in Southern Village in one of the amazing lofts. Or that I don't lie awake at night, dreading when the Columbia loans come out of deferment. But I made these choices when I decided to come here, and I need to see it as an investment. I have to believe it will pay off. Maybe that's naive, maybe it's foolish, but it's what I have to do.