Philadelphia Weekly

Here I am in the faculty lounge again, watching the tight-lipped barman wipe down the counter for the 300th time. After our weekly research seminar, all of us English postgrads lump down here to toast the lecturer and enjoy the free drink, which usually turns into three free drinks and several more paid-for ones. As for me, I'm four deep at 5:30 in the afternoon, and I feel like I could cry.

It takes me a good 40 minutes to get to campus on the bus, which is okay, really. Everyone laughs at me for being on the notoriously late and circuitous No. 17 bus line, but I like riding the bus. I like being "en route"-you're not at home, miserable, and you're not where you're going, miserable, either. Which is a funny, sage saying I stole from a loony, hilarious friend of mine from high school who later turned out to be bipolar.

"I found out the cause of my infinite weirdness," she wrote me a few years after we graduated on carefully torn-out notebook paper. "I'm actually crazy!"

On the trip to campus I sit up on the second level, in the back, where you can get a nice panoramic. I usually have some required reading in my lap-a novel or a book of poems, or the hateful, convoluted new-modernist theory we're supposed to wedge inside the novels and poems-but like my American computer plug, these U.K. outlets just won't fit (and likewise, could cause a system shutdown or a small explosion).

I saw my first magpie out the window of the 17 bus. He was marching around the edge of an otherwise empty field, his chest puffed out like a rangy teenage boy's. Up until then I think I thought these birds existed only in fairy tales.

One other afternoon a skinny girl in army pants got on and joined her boyfriend a few seats in front of me. I watched her long hair move on her back while she talked to him, all these shiny copper-colored tangles that I realized, with a stomach twinge of envy and something almost like desire, was the most beautiful hair I'd ever seen. The low sun, always low, gave her a dusty halo and set the magnificent hair on fire. Maybe she's from a fairy tale too.

Regardless, now I'm drunk. The guest lecturer is over by the bar, smiling, probably also drunk. He's some English guy who talked about Finnegans Wake and the passage of time, or something-something that sounds more interesting than it was. I'd positioned my pen over my notebook the whole time he talked, more out of politeness than anything else. All I wrote after an hour of trying to listen was: "The Wake: time v. imp."

I'm standing with my modern lit classmates, and apparently I've just said something that prompted little 20-year-old Niamh to launch into the litany of American words she finds funny: "Cookies! Candy! Movie theater! Sweater!"

She's a jackass, but she's good at this lit crit stuff. Or at least it suits her. One day in class she read aloud a list she'd made of nouns that appear at least twice in Lynn Hejinian's bizarre book-length prose poem/memoir My Life, which certainly never would've occurred to me to bother doing.

Everyone else in this little lounge seems to belong here too. There are the three Ph.D. candidates in their usual clutch-the haughty one, the punk rock one, the Indian one. I give a little wave, but they're too busy talking to notice.

Another classmate, Emma, is on a corner couch with the head of the department. They aren't facing each other, but they take turns inclining their heads sideways as the other talks. Emma laughs. I should go over there.

This is the time to discuss thesis topics, to schmooze, to find out what's so fucking funny. I take a good big swallow of wine and prepare to head over.

But in the end I can't do it, and I just stand there like a statue, the statue of What's the Use. I don't trust myself to talk about books with these people, to even act halfway normal these days.

One night we all went to a house party, and on the cab ride home this shaved-bald hipster named John from the American lit master's program, tried-innocently enough-to talk to me about Frank O'Connor, which I was unable to do because I'd eaten a gigantic chocolate-chip-and-hash cookie (first bite accidentally, second bite on purpose) while standing over the sink.

There was also the fact that I've never read Frank O'Connor. But rather than just saying so, I shouted, "Frank O'Connor!" in what I hoped sounded like a knowing and ironic tone before-I was later told-I pitched forward onto our friend Emily's lap and fell asleep.

I wish the writer-in-residence, the playwright, were here. Him I'd try to talk to. He's on the teaching faculty, though I've never had him for a class, and he's exactly what you'd expect an Irish playwright to look like: big and burly, blustery and bearded, with a fly that's never zipped.

I recently read one of his short stories, this angry flight of fancy about an Irish emigre who comes home to Dublin for his father's funeral. It was truthful, fantastical, beautiful, unreproduceable.