Futuring

Today I submitted my application to graduate, and I've had to suppress this impertinent giddiness that threatens to overtake me any minute now. Spring quarter, the last one of its kind that I hope ever to spend at my huge university, begins March 24, and with it the countdown to my freedom on June 10.

While a part of me is filled with glee at the thought of finishing, another part of me (the school-marmish old woman who lives inside me) is wagging her finger, reminding me that I'm not yet done and that there will be no celebrating until that 60-page final chapter is on its way to my dissertation co-directors on or before March 19.

The other part of me wants to watch Oprah instead of reading about the Philippines, and today ordered the latest 1,296-page translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky of War and Peace, and the latest novel by Canadian author, Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road. I've decided to start the pile of books that will await me once I've unshackled myself from my dissertation, and these two will be at the very top. I already have a similar pile of untouched magazines that is also awaiting my liberation.

But the good news is that yesterday I completed 20 pages, including notes, of that last chapter, so that I have one-third of this last project done. It won't be perfect once I finish by next week, but it will be a hefty first draft. I still have a lot of reading to do, but as I tell my mami, at least the skeletal structure of the last limb of my Monster is in place. Now it's a matter of giving if flesh.

Today I also organized all the materials I've used and am using on the dissertation in four differently colored pocket folders so everything is within reach and ready for me once the revision process begins in earnest in April. I'd really like to have the whole thing done and revised at least once, introduction and conclusion included, by the second week in May. Wish me luck!

(I have to confess that I'm an office supply store junkie. I stepped into Staples today, looking for rolling-ball pen refills and walked out with $30 in supplies, including the multi-colored pocket folders that are now very well in use. I also found these highlighters that come with little page flags that I saw some time ago on Oprah and vowed to get for myself, and I got large post-its with my initial on them because you can never have enough post-its in my world. For me, walking into Staples is like walking into a shoe store or a bookstore or a cupcake store!)

All that organization helps keep me grounded in the present since I have a tendency to live very much in the future. For as long as I can remember, I've tended to always live futuring, that is, I not only can foresee future events but I also experience them psychically as if they had already happened. Thus, I often have to remind myself that the future isn't the present yet. And I have to constantly remind myself that by futuring I also wish the days of my present away.

Futuring is my way of willing the future to mold itself to my aspirations, but it doesn't always work, of course. After all, life is what has happened to me while I've been making other plans (which is not an original saying but supposedly John Lennon's quote). Since I've always been big on planning, life has taught me a thing or two about improvisation.

In any event, today has been a little about futuring by filing that form and collecting the many others that will have to be submitted in May with the dissertation draft, and a little about being present at this moment. Now that I think about it, though, there may not be any contradiction or clash between the two.

As a teacher of Latin American and Latin@ literature, I show my students how writers from these traditions tend to prefer an achronological time, and how in their texts the past, the present and the future all exist together, turning sequential time into a fiction. Perhaps I've been missing my own point, and trying to impose on myself a view that is not about myself.

If the past, present and future all exist in one dimension, and if it's a fiction that they occupy chronological spaces in our perception, then my futuring is basically a part of my present, which are both simultaneously parts of my past. I like that idea a lot, so I think I'm going to highlight it and stick to it, like a neon-yellow post-it would.