Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?

How old am I going to be before I outgrow Airplane, I wonder. And on a completely unrelated note, please enjoy this photo of me and my pal, Chopper, relaxing on the head of the devil on this 6/6/06, most metal of Tuesdays.

So I'm sitting on my porch, laptop perched atop the GRE study book that is spread open across my lap, wondering why I didn't major in math. Math is so soothing---if I work carefully enough and concentrate, I will arrive at the correct answer. Once I've reached the answer, I can double check my work to make sure I've completed the necessary equations correctly. I can study, do well in my classes, ace the GRE, and send evidence of my abilities off to a program director who will measure it quantitatively and determine whether or not my skill level merits acceptance into the program. The admissions committee will not ask me to submit an equation and then judge it for its originality of voice. The admissions committee will not say, "While the quasi-nihilism of her logarithm betrays the influence of French Symbolism, her inconsistently applied cubing of a set of x real numbers is grounded in the bardic tradition of early Norse epic. And we've already filled our quota of bi-symbolist Nordicologists this semester."

I certainly don't mean to suggest that math is easier than writing; it's not. I just find it soothing to know that I am working toward a single correct answer or set of answers. Sitting here, taking the math section of my practice GRE, I feel myself unwinding from the day's events (which involved a lengthy discussion of the relative merits of a film titled, The Gods Must Be Horny---have I mentioned I work in the booming queer/feminist-adult-entertainment-and-sexual-health industry?) and, in some demented fashion, actually enjoying myself. I wish there were a poetic analog: Wouldn't it be wonderful to write and workshop and revise and write and workshop and then check your work? Better still, wouldn't it be relieving to know when to stop solving a problem?

It would certainly be a relief to me, because lately I've been obsessively revising and chopping and rewriting and chopping some more. I fear I'm going overboard like my old roommate, who would feverishly pluck her eyebrows into two thin and jaggedly uneven commas above her eyes. Stepping back from the mirror enough to notice her mistake, she would set out to remedy the situation by plucking more and more from each eyebrow until she was left with little more than three sadly waving hairs protruding from two angry red swaths of forehead. Similarly, just when I've had a breakthrough on one poem, I find glaring inadequacies in the "final draft" of another. Before long, I'm slashing away at said final draft until I'm left with about four words floating in a sea of red slashes. That's not progress, folks. That's obsessiveness.

How do I stop doing this and let things breathe? I think I have to impose a mandatory waiting period between revisions of a given poem---say one look/revision session every 3 weeks---and hope that'll do the trick. Because at the rate I'm going, come November I'll be sending off a packet of shredded paper dripping with red ink.

And just like my old roommate's eyebrows, it won't be pretty.