Rereading the question, I realize I neglected to answer most of it. Oh, well.

"Tell us about your educational history, work experience, present situation, and plans for the future. Please make sure to address why you consider yourself a nontraditional student, and have chosen to pursue your education at the School of General Studies of Columbia University."


I have never been a traditional student. It’s not something I set out to do as part of some stubborn, defiant nonconformism; it’s just the way things happened. To be sure, there have been hiccups of normality from time to time, but nothing severe, and inevitably I find myself cured by the injection of a new passion which demands, absolutely demands my immediate attention. When I do find myself snared by an attraction to something, whether a person, place or thing, I give myself over to it entirely. It’s automatic, reflexive, unconscious: all of a sudden it becomes very important that I inhale all the data I can, that I learn this thing inside and out. I’ve been told that when starting from point A, I tend to skip points B and C, because I can see point D is right there, and why bother with the deathly banality of “order of operations” or “the scientific method” when all I have to do is jump a little bit farther? I never crawled. I scooted around on my derrière, and then one day, at nine months, just stood up and walked. And ever since then I’ve taken steps two at a time. This policy is not, however, without its hazards.
I have attended school in three countries, and this summer in China will make it four. The original deviation from traditional education, and with it traditional childhood, happened in 1992 when I was six going on seven, when my parents hauled my little brother and me out of school, city and country, and moved to France. We lived for six months in a tiny village of 900 people in Haute-Provence. I went to the little two-room school in the village, three grades per room. I started with no French whatever, struggling to stay afloat at the deep end of the pool. But it turns out six year-olds learn languages at a frightening speed. I figure it has something to do with the tenuous grip they have on their own language. They also absorb the accent absurdly fast; a month or two in and I was babbling right along with the other village kids. I even won the composition contest one week. Of everyone in the family, I had the easiest time integrating myself fully into the culture (with the exception of their punctiliousness à table, which was and is something I never grasped all that well), developing a circle of friends, some of whom I remain in close contact with today. My parents’ rationale for the sudden uprooting was simple: they wanted us to a) become bilingual, and b) understand that we were not tied down to New York, to America, to any sense of “home” as a fixed and unmoving locus. Home was wherever we wanted to be. We were now free to move about the planet.
They succeeded on both fronts. We returned every summer for years (in 1994, we went back for another six months, to the same school), and made sure I kept my French from year to year. I remain bilingual, but I’ll concede that my accent will never again be as good as it was when I was nine, which absolutely kills me every time I go back. It makes every other language easier to learn, too. I coasted through Columbia’s Italian summer intensive in 2001 (the Italian has suffered somewhat over time, and I should like to have it back). Greek and Old English, for all their skull-cracking inscrutability, were nevertheless less foreign than they would have otherwise been. Chinese, the new target, is coming swiftly and uncomplainingly. And as for the ties that bind, well, transatlantic travel is not more complicated to me now than the Fung Wah bus to Boston. I move through countries calmly, with practiced ease.
It began back in high school. The seven years at Horace Mann School (6-12) were certainly the most normal years I’ve had, though I wouldn’t for a moment call the education they’re dealing out there “traditional.”
It was in eighth grade that I discovered an itch for writing. The timing was propitious; my unequivocal uselessness in mathematics had been discovered years before. As high school progressed, my lopsidedness became more and more pronounced. In ninth grade I started a literary magazine with a friend, a magazine devoted to serialized fiction called “Percolation.” Literature and language came largely to dominate my life. And then in tenth grade, I brought A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on a theatre company trip to Ireland. That was a terrible mistake.
Ensorceled by the magic of encountering firsthand the very race whose uncreated conscience was fast being forged within the pages of my book, I fell in love with Ireland, and in short order Portrait gave way to Finnegans Wake, which gave way to full-bore obsession. I read a biography of Joyce which quoted him as saying “the English-speaking world can have its language back when I have finished with it,” and in retrospect I think that may have been the point of no return. I read another biography. Then another. Then criticism. I read everything, absolutely everything I could about both James Joyce and Ireland--a curious mix, really, because the more one learns about Joyce, the more skeptical of Ireland one ought to become. In the summer of 2002, with the help of Columbia professor Michael Seidel, I enrolled in two Columbia summer school courses: Modernism and James Joyce. That only aggravated the problem. I was seeing Joyce everywhere, connecting everything, language, sound, color, back to his books. There was no other real writer in my life; what was the point? Anything worthwhile that any other writer had to say, Joyce had stolen to put in Ulysses. I also cultivated an impossibly broad repertoire of drinking songs. As senior year began, it became clear I had to exorcise my Hibernian hobgoblin. It took a one-two punch: I started a novel which began entirely in the style of Ulysses. After twenty pages I started to find the whole enterprise very silly, but by the time I’d reached twenty pages, I’d already applied to Trinity College Dublin.
I can safely blame James Joyce for delivering me to Dublin, and I can safely thank him for then delivering me from it. He’s not the only reason I went--by the time I was writing applications, fantasies of flitting fairies, dizzying reels and bobbing pints of Guinness were already loose in my head, all colluding to paint a misted mural of the country--but he was the catalyst. It came down to a decision between the University of Chicago and Dublin (the acceptances arrived the same day). As I remember, my careful, assiduous reasoning at the time went like this: “why the hell not?”
No one from Horace Mann had gone abroad for college in seven years. No one knew anything about Trinity, who were themselves being delightfully coy about releasing information. What I did know is that I wanted the British educational model: one subject. English literature, nothing else. I had known for years what I did and didn’t want to be doing: for example, in eleventh grade, having fulfilled my language requirement in tenth, and there being only one English course open to juniors, I elected to take three history classes at once and chuck science altogether. I also decided, on a lark, that I was going to spend the summer before 11th grade teaching myself ancient Greek, thus passing into Greek II without taking the beginner class. When the all-seeing, all-knowing college office found out, it seemed to make them a little queasy. I was told by the head of the office that I had the strangest schedule he had seen in decades, and was shamelessly proud of myself.
It was a good idea at the time. I neither regret going to Dublin, nor do I regret leaving it.. It’s an example of the hazards of bypassing points B and C on the way to point D: I effectively went from high school directly into grad school. But the benefits of those two years vastly outweigh the damage. The first year was satisfactory. The second year was cataclysmic. Let me be clear: I left because I hated it. The only thing that really kept me going was my job: I bartended 25-30 hours a week in this very posh, trendy hotel (by way of comparison, I was in college twelve hours a week). Bartending is another one of those things I latched onto vampirically, feeding off it. I read cocktail and spirit books assiduously and maintained a bar in my apartment which I kept excellently stocked with specialty liquors from around Europe and the US (Chartreuse, George Dickel, Ricard, Ouzo, etc.) which I used to invent all manner of cocktails. I took notes on the dynamic of various types of bars and recorded the parade of characters I’d meet every night. Functionally speaking, I was financially independent of my parents throughout the entire year, paying my own rent, utilities, food, etc., an experience which I consider invaluable. But the job, in the end, was not nearly enough to keep me there.
I did not know what I was going to do when I left, but whatever it was, it had to be better than sticking around. I had trusted Trinity because I believed in their reputation and their alumni: Swift, Burke, Wilde, Beckett, all notably dead. But between government cutbacks, abysmal facilities, disregard for undergraduates and a classful of distracted Oxford/Cambridge-rejects, the place has fallen, hard. The trouble with Trinity’s British-model policy of having students apply to their major, and study it exclusively, became very clear: the vast majority of 18-year olds haven’t made up their minds yet. This is why the liberal arts system cranks out more lively students. But I hadn’t wanted to go the liberal arts route at the time because I knew exactly what I wanted: immersion. It hadn’t occurred to me that the English department was rivaled only by the history department in its infestation with variously clever students who either happened to score high on the English section of their leaving cert exams, or, not knowing yet what they wanted to do with themselves forever, figured, why not study English for a while? The result was a tremendous gap between those of us for whom language was an absolute passion, our raison d’être, and those who thought it a bagatelle, just another class. There was much to redeem Trinity: rightly respected academics, a splendid campus (bar the 1978 concrete gulag called the Arts Block, a Nazi bunker of a building where I had all my classes), a broad and intensive curriculum. It was a good school. But it was the students that dragged it through the rot.
I repent of ever having turned my nose up at the liberal arts, and wonder at what I must have been thinking. How is one to write if writing is the only thing one knows? What a terribly boring book that would be!
The killing blow came one grey and drizzly day, a day like any other. I was sitting in my apartment when all of a sudden it hit me: I felt exactly the way Stephen Dedalus does at the end of Portrait. “Away, away!” he writes. With few exceptions, every great Irish writer had to quit Ireland before he produced anything lasting. It was time to go the same way, time to leave that college he calls “a great dull stone set amid a cumbrous ring.”
I finished the academic year in Ireland and came galloping home. All I knew about the year to come was, it was going to involve as much travel as the bank account could stand. First I had to fill that account, though. If there was one thing that country taught me, it was how crucial my identity as a New Yorker is. Returning here was like refueling. I took a job at a swank restaurant on the Upper West Side, and to fill the rest of the day started Tae Kwon Do classes, which I’d always wanted to do. I discovered that thanks to my background in dance, coupled with a happy facility for movement, martial arts came marvelously easily. Tae Kwon Do soon complemented bartending as the gôuts du jour (happily, my interest has only grown by several orders of magnitude since then, and I now attend up to ten classes a week). In this idyll, I spent a couple of months happily hooked up to the pump, and by the time August rolled around, it was time to take off again.
A number of my friends were in China--somehow, the bulk of them turned out to be China scholars, for one reason or another--on the Columbia in Beijing program. I decided to go visit them. But that felt somehow inadequate, anticlimactic. Then it occurred to me that since I was already headed halfway around the world, why not go all the way?
I had 90 days. I built my trip around where my friends were. A friend in Tokyo, and the promise of a floor to sleep on, was enough to talk me into a 48-hour layover en route to Beijing. China was the big adventure, as I ricocheted around Beijing, Shanghai, Yunnan province and Chengdu. Total train and bus time logged in China: 80 hours (total transit time of the whole trip, buses, planes and trains: 224 hours). The longest train ride, from Shanghai to Dali, lasted 50 hours. That leg I did with my best friend, who had just arrived in China, and whose Chinese was woefully rusty. We were, naturally, the only laowai (foreigners) on the train, and therefore minor celebrities. We spoke with countless people on that train, though when I say “we,” I mean “he.” I had no Chinese at all. But because he was still kicking off the rust, he was relegated to having the same inane conversation dozens of times. And that’s how I started learning. Pronouns, verbs and sentence structure started to crystallize. I had a phrasebook, and I started reading it obsessively. By the time I reached Chengdu, well on my own by then, I felt none of the terror I’d experienced back in Beijing, when I could scarcely be left alone. From Chengdu, I flew to Tibet, and the language accelerated. Of course, there wasn’t much else to do but read the phrasebook and whatever other cast-off reading material I could scavenge from guesthouses and restaurants (which is how I came to own my sixth copy of Ulysses), because the altitude in Lhasa (3700m) is such that the oxygen level is at 68%, and for the first few days, one does nothing but lie in bed and hope someone will be along to put you out of your misery.
After a week in Lhasa, three other travelers (two Japanese, one Dutch) found me, knowing I was interested in hiring a land cruiser and a driver to take us to Kathmandu (from where I was to fly to Cairo). The drive took five days, passing through the most heartstopping, impossibly beautiful landscapes in the world, all the while driving over roads equally distinguished, but for opposite reasons. These were not, in fact, roads. You think of a “road,” you conjure the image of pavement, grading, or at least a demarcated path distinct from the surrounding countryside. What we were driving over might be charitably described as rippling convulsions of the earth. More often than not, the driver made his own road. It built character, and the brilliantly clear, if unbreathably thin air at Everest Base Camp (5220m) was worth the hours upon hours of stumbling switchbacks we endured to get there.
After Tibet, which might I add also boasts the foulest toilets in the entire world, bar none, Kathmandu was like paradise. English-speakers everywhere, western toilets, pavement, lovely temperate climate (Tibet’s climate is extraordinarily mercurial, so much so that it’s generally ten degrees warmer in the sun than it is in the shade, and wearing layers is de rigeur), food not based exclusively on barley flour and yak, etc. Kathmandu is how one unclenches after the travails of Tibet.
And Egypt is how one clenches right up again. I spent ten days in Cairo and Luxor with a friend from Brown, who was taking his year abroad in Cairo and Jerusalem, and ten days were more than enough. Something in that country didn’t sit well with me. Exploring ancient Egypt was thrilling, certainly, and galloping horses along the Nile in Luxor, and then out into the desert at Giza--these are experiences beyond compare. But I didn’t click with Egypt the way I clicked with China. I felt a hostility that doesn’t exist in China, where the stares are full of benign curiosity, and the volleys of “Hello!” are friendly and cheerful. The glares in Egypt are neither benign nor friendly. I never got around the treatment of women, either. I know it’s a liberalized country, but the sight of women swathed to the eyes in full black burkha under the blazing desert sun, trailing five paces behind their master and keeper, is an image I will never clear from my memory.
From there I moved into Europe, and everything got smoother. I left Egypt at 3:45am and flew to Greece. My love affair with ancient Greece stretches back to the age of three: for years, my favorite book was D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. I read it hundreds of times over, and still remember all my mythology. I took up Greek in high school because I had ambitions of reading Homer in the original. But all I had was a nine-hour layover: just enough time to make it to the Acropolis. Not having slept in over twenty-four hours, I reached the Parthenon, whereupon I simply burst into tears.
Rome, Florence, Bologna, Nice. Bourgeois decadence and incandescent art. But coming home to Provence for the first time in years was the perfect finish. The place had not changed: it is fixed in my memory precisely as it was when I was nine. I was chez moi, a child again. It was November, and the smells were as vivid as they ever were, even if the lavender was grey and dying with the autumn refrain, "the skreak and skritter of evening gone." The phantom scents living on as though unaware of their own passing will never change; it is for me, to borrow another phrase from Wallace Stevens, “the kindom where nobody dies.”
I remember, when I came home to New York, feeling I was still seeing with traveler’s vision, that special kind of vision that imbues a place with the uncanny radiance of the new. The street I’d lived on all my life took on a vibrance it had never known. I noticed details in buildings I’d never seen before. For those two weeks after I came home, there was an electricity living in this city that I am dying to feel again. But this time, I don’t think I need to go round the world again to make that happen. Moving two miles uptown and going back to college should be more than enough.