Master Calvin

So, I graduated on Sunday. It was pretty awesome. I didn't feel like going to Commencement, but I did go to the English department Convocation. Pretty straight forward. Walked in, sat down, listened, crossed a stage, shook a hand, sat down, listened, ate, and left.

Only six of the Master's degree candidates walked: three of us poets (Ashley, Lisa, and Yours Truly) and three of the MA students. We got first-row seating and when we originally came into the Metcalf Auditorium Ashley (who was leading everyone) took a wrong turn for a second. It was hilarious.

So, yeah, I have a master's degree. Pretty crazy. Pics:

We did a lot of clapping.

As Lisa put it, "Mormon boy meets Jewish girl.The rest is history."

Couldn't resist.

The random man we asked to take our picture has a hard time with point-and-shoot cameras from Walmart.

An amazing, terrible, and amazingly terrible picture of me and Ross. We have hat hair. Master's hat hair.

The traditional Olsen heel-click pic. I love me some 236 Bay State Road.

Trying to figure out how to wear one's master's hood. And still don't get the danglies on the arms.

I figured it out. They don't call me Master Calvin for nothing. Harry Potter, anyone?

I Googled Me

My pet dinosaur, Morgan, in a pic you'll find by following the links I've included.

So my friend Jenne the other day said that she Googles herself from time to time. She said that she does it to make sure she doesn't need to "do any damage control."

Honestly, I have no idea what she means. But I Googled myself anyways. Not a whole lot comes up unless you know what you're looking for (which, surprisingly, I do). So I thought I'd take a second to share with the world a few places I've carved out a niche for myself on the internet.

Here's what I'll be doing in about two weeks (click on me, bottom left):
http://www.blogs.bu.edu/world/2011-global-fellows/

Here's the collaborative blog I'm part of. (You can ask what days I'm not a big fan of).
http://www.thesevenblog.com/

Here's my hilarious bio for the first poetry reading I ever gave (I'm at the bottom. Best for last):
http://www.breakwaterreadingseries.blogspot.com/2011/01/friday-january-21-brookline-booksmith.html

Here's the first poem I ever published. (Two disclaimers: (1) it sucked in the first place and has become beautiful, and (2) they screwed with my line breaks [To use an understatement, Inscape is a joke].)
http://inscape.byu.edu/fall2009/poetry/olsen_elk.php

Here's a dating blog contest I took 3rd place in. (Shoulda won. Politics.) Julia now writes full-time for the website, and I'll admit that her stuff is good.
http://www.mormontimes.com/article/2112/Blogger-Brawl-Calvin-Olsen-v-Julia-Shumway

I wonder if any of these will be around forever. Probably.

Chad is Married.

Nuff said. Pics:

 Groomsmen

 Yay, Aunt Tammy!

 Chad and Kristy Olsen. I may never get used to saying that.

 I got the pre-kiss but saved you from the actual thing.

 Kristy made that dress herself. And, um, I made Chad's suit.

 Baby brother hug. Kid is huge.

 Lee likes to rock the party. And if none of y'all have eaten Hmong egg rolls, you haven't lived.

 Sacramento LDS Temple

 I can't tell you how happy we were when pictures were done.

KC, Gage, Chase, and Lee. All still single. For some reason.



Esto Perpetua: An Olsen/Anger Production

 A book I helped make. Read on.

Over the course of the semester each of us poets were randomly assigned an artist from the visual art MFA program. We all made collaborative projects with our artists, and last Monday (May...9th) they unveiled their final projects and we got to see them.

My artist was Kyle Anger. How about that for the coolest name in the freaking world? Here's a very poor picture of both of us:

Kyle decided to use a few of my Idaho poems and he responded to them with ink prints that illustrated/interpreted/made awesome the subject matter I had chosen to include in my work. He made the cover out of dirt (dirt! so rad) and each of the poems is followed by one or two of his ink prints. Anyways, here's the pics I took of it.

 "Geography"

 "Amalgamated Sugar Company"

 "Cascade"

 "Timber"

"Lightning"

Esto perpetua, my beloved Idaho.

Low Brow, High Brow

 Layover in the Denver airport. Time for today's second update.

Last Thursday (May…7th) was my low-brow/high-brow entertainment day in Boston.

In the morning, I was bored and sick of thesis-ing, so I sent out a mass text to see if anybody wanted to go to the Red Sox game with me. Two church friends answered the call/begging for company: Brad Huggins and Mary Nielson, two of my favorite people.

 My boy Dustin Pedroia

I wanted to hit up games for all of the professional sports teams before leaving. I’ve been to a Celtics game and a Bruins game, but not a Sox game. Technically the Patriots are New England and not Boston, so they don’t count. Which is good, because ticket prices are through the roof and their stadium is built in the middle of nowhere.

I bought a flat-bill hat (my first) and Brad and I got some $7 Polish sausages (so good) while we waited for Mary. Mary decided it was a good idea to drive (it’s not) and had walked in the wrong direction for about half a mile, but she we got in just in time.

Polish dog in a flat-bill

Our tickets were legit. We were behind home plate about, oh, 25 or 30 rows back, which meant that we were under the overhang. Being under the overhang is a great idea, especially when the game has a two-hour rain delay after the second inning. Lucky for us, it didn’t get rained out completely. Anyhew, we beat the Minnesota Twins 4-0 and it was a grand afternoon.

 An easy reason to make fun of baseball

The game was over at 6pm, then it rained pretty hard. I took the T home, showered, changed into my dress clothes, and headed to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I probably should have taken a date, but it was easier to take TJ, who is prettier than most girls anyway. We met there.

 Warming up

So I guess a cool rich dude decided it would be philanthropically assertive to subsidize Boston Symphony Orchestra ticket prices for patrons under 40 years of age. I decided to take the cool rich dude up on his offer, so our seats were $20 and legit. They played Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette. The music was beautiful, with a full orchestra and a solid 80 or 90 person choir. I’m glad I remember some French, because the English translation they had in the program sucked (TJ thought so, too, I’m not just uppity).

 My surroundings at the Symphony

Anyways. We were in like the third row, but since the stage curves we were just about as close as you can get. I could have stood up and bit the violinist playing in front of us, and I made a game of staring angrily at the second-chair cello-ist (is that a word?) who could just barely see me out of the corner of his eye. I don’t know if I threw him off, but he noticed me a few times. Hilarious.

 Random old dude who did nothing but came out and got some flowers anyways.

After that we went next door to the Symphony Eat to watch the Celtics game and, well, eat. Then I went home and went to sleep.

Good day.

My Friend Tiff and My Baby (No Relation, Fortunately and Unfortunately)

It happened a few weeks ago (April...19th I believe), but my dear friend Tiffany Jones came to see me for a day. I took her to a few sweet places, including the Holocaust Memorial near Quincy Market—powerful to say the least—and as usual, the freedom trail. Here's my favorite picture from the trip:

So that post has been waiting to happen for a while. Tiff's on her mission in Washington, D.C. now and who knows when the next time I'll see her is? Not too worried about her, though. I’ve been so busy lately it’s not even funny. Ok, it’s kind of funny now that it’s passed.

Who would have thought that finishing up your one-year masters program early would be so much work? Not this guy. Here’s the beautiful thing I created over the last eight months:

 I swear it looks just like me.

So, yeah, my thesis has been approved by two of the most (perhaps the two most) famous and decorated living poets in America and is officially in the hands of the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Took a lot out of me, but I’m done.

I turned the thesis in on Monday, and yesterday I didn’t really know what to do with myself, so I went to campus after waking up and compiled all of the translations I did. For my translation course I needed to translate five to seven poems for my final project. When all was said and done, my translation of Alberto de Lacerda’s poetry collection, Exile, weighed in at 91 pages. That’s a little more than twice as big as my thesis. Talk about a project. I loved doing it, and I’ll spend a lot of my time in Europe translating the other book of his that I was able to get my hand on.

So I’m done with my first shot at grad school. Getting good vibes that my grades will rock, and I’m off to Europe on the 28th.

End.

One Month Later

Been a while since I updated. I'm sure some of this will be repeats from things I talked about before, but I don't care.

First things first: a map. One month from tomorrow (the 28th) I will be leaving Boston for here:

Boo ya Iberian Peninsula. I received a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. I'll be doing some translating, some out-of-print document location, and a bunch of sight seeing. I'ma start in Lisbon, then move to northern Portugal, then hit Madrid, (hopefully) run with the bulls in Pamplona, spend a few days in the tiny, tiny country of Andorra, then Barcelona. I pulled strings to fly out of Rome, so Italy is on the list as well. I'm half tempted to put a change of clothes and a camera in a backpack and just wing it for ten weeks, but we'll see. To use an understatement, it's gonna be epic.

~

That up there is a fancy tilde-denominated section break, if I do say so myself.

Tonight after our weekly student-only poetry workshop Danielle Dobson and I went to Snappy Sushi to eat some, well, snappy sushi. She told me her tradition is to get a few things that sound disgusting. I highly approve of that idea, so we got two: octopus and sea urchin. Octopus didn't taste like much and I kinda thought it was fun to eat (really gummy). She wasn't a fan of the texture. And sea urchin, well, that's somethin' else. Basically, it looks like crap and tastes like the ocean smells when it's at its worst. In other words it's highly disgusting, but totally worth trying because now I can say I ate sea urchin and I never have to do it again. We washed it down with lots of ginger and then got ice cream.

~

Yet another sweet section break brought to you by the shift key and its partners. 

So...since all but shaving my head a few months ago, I have decided that I want to try growing my hair out for a year. I've trimmed my neck once or twice (gotta do that) but that's kinda it. It's to the point where I have to deal with it, which I'm not a fan of, but it also wings around the back of my trusty BSU cap (Go Broncos) so I'm a little bit okay with it. I haven't grown my hair out long enough for it to be curly for a while, so we'll see how long it lasts. Maybe I'll tell people that I want to grow it out long enough to be able to donate it. That makes it charity (which never faileth). I'm also thinking about not shaving while I'm in Europe, which will make me look amazing by the time I get back. I'll be an all star.

~

I think this tilde thing is gonna be my new thing for a while.

I'm nearing the end of my semester, and consequently nearing the end of my time at BU, which is absolutely insane to me. It's amazing how fast time passes, but I'm ready to not be super-worried about writing and school for a little bit. I've compiled everything that will be going in my thesis, and I've revised about 15 of the 35-40 pages to the point that I'd like to. I have met one-on-one with both of my professors now, which is probably something I should have started doing before the last two months of my program, but I think it's for the best. A few Sundays ago I dropped by Robert's house (I still am amazed that I kick it with Robert Pinsky...and I'll never get sick of name dropping) after church to go over a few poems. It was a good experience. I met his cat, Bobo, who is a beautiful but sheddy animal. We chatted for a while and then went over three of my poems. As usual, he had some great insight. He told me that he finds that one of my characteristics he sees in my poetry is deflection. He said that I deflect seriousness with my wit, which might be more true in my life overall than I'd like to admit. Either way, I did write down my favorite thing he said word for word (mostly). He told me, "My reaction to your work is always admiration, followed by a burning desire to force you to be more serious." I took both as compliments.

~

I have a feeling you'll get sick of the tildes well before I do.

So, yeah, things are progressing nicely. Chad gets married two weeks from this Friday, I taught my last day of class with my creative writing kids this afternoon (we acted out their one-act plays: hilarious), I rocked my second-ever poetry reading last night at the Boston Playwrights' Theater (hooray for the Writers at the Black Box series and my 25+ friends who came just to see me), I can almost bench 2/3 of my weight again (boo surgery), my thesis is getting where it needs to be, and I have no freaking clue what I'll be doing with my life come August 7th. But I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

Life is good.