Icy Stabs

As I was sitting in the front yard, pulling weeds from the lawn and minding my own business, I heard an advertisement for an interview local NPR personality Larry Mantle had with one Ms. Sonia Nazario. If you want to listen, the link is here. Otherwise, here is the abstract from the KPCC website:

LA Times journalist Sonia Nazario joins Larry Mantle to talk about her new book Enrique's Journey, the riveting true story of a Honduran boy who braved hardship and danger to reunite with his mother in the United States. The book is based on Nazario's Los Angeles Times series for which she traveled to Honduras and followed the same perilous route that Enrique took north, riding on freight trains, hitchhiking and interviewing people Enrique had encountered. The series won Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing and photography.

That's right: Pulitzer PrizeS, plural (as in multiple Pulitzers). Sure, Nazario undertook a "perilous" trek across multiple countries, endured extreme weather conditions, risked physical danger to her person, and exposed herself to egregious, debilitating diseases unknown to residents of the developed world. Ok, so her muckraking journalism unearthed an apropos story, and offered a human face to the nameless statistics of legal and illegal immigrants. Yes, she sacrificed her time to bring public awareness to the fact that "48,000 children, some as young as 7, make the journey alone each year, along the way risk[ing] their lives and their freedom as they face predatory smugglers and trolling immigration authorities." So what? Does that entitle her to our nation's most prestigious journalistic awards of excellence? What, are we just giving away PulitzerS these days?

Adding more insult to (perceived) injury, Terry Gross interviewed Ms. Nazario about her Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times series, and subsequent book. [Link here.] Why all this sudden attention to a woman whose work has already earned Pulitzer PrizeS, plural (as in multiple Pulitzers)? A nod from NPR will give a healthy boost to anyone's book; two (or more ) NPR interviews will catapult a book through the publishing stratosphere, as they've done for Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, or Steven Levitt's Freakonomics. Does she really need the royalties to soothe the pangs of her Pulitzer PrizeS, plural (as in multiple Pulitzers)?

As I reflected on Sonia Nazario's Pulitzers, and her basking in the NPR lime light--not to mention the royalties she would soon be cashing in--two words entrenched themselves into my mind: icy stabs.

Icy stabs, now whence did this curious phrase come? I had to think a moment, because I knew that I had not generated these words myself, but was making some subconscious allusion to something I had heard or read. "Ah, yes," I told myself, "Sandra has icy stabs."

Sandra is, of course, Sandra Tsing Loh, and she referenced icy stabs in her book A Year in Van Nuys. In a visit to her therapist, she confesses that she feels these icy stabs of insecurity. Originally in the context of writer's block, the stabs are extended to all sources of personal discontent:

"I shouldn't feel like an utter human zero, but I do. Why? Because I am not a well-loved female sports commentator on ESPN 2. I'm not the eleventh guy from the left in the bar of Cheers. I'm not some lovable Man on the Street in a funny FedEx ad. The View!" I careen suddenly sideways. "The women on The View! What is that show about? Why are those women on there? Lisa Ling? What are her credits? And now why is she in these Old Navy commercials? Dancing, dancing, dancing with those pants? And the swingy hair?" This has become less of therapy session and more of a colonic purging--all one can do is look on from the sidelines and wanly remark, "Look at that...corn." My mouth widens, Roman mask-like, into a bitter howl. "Why why why not me me me me me me me me me me?"

[Later on, Sandra is accosted by the icy stabs when she sees her ex-grad school classmate Monica Veerklausen on tv accepting an Academy Award for best feature-length documentary for her film about Kosovo.]

And that is how I feel. As of today, I have been rejected from UCLA and Cornell. Someone said that graduate schools tend to reject their own undergrads to shoo their fledglings out of the comforts of the academic nest, so the UCLA decision was not a big downer. Cornell, however, was the second rejection, and the whole of this rejection duo is greater than the sum of its parts.

Where are my Pulitzers? Heck, where is my Pulitzer, singular (as in just one, one tiny Pulitzer!) Right now, I'd even settle for having won the Clara E. Hastings scholarship, the UCLA English department undergraduate award for excellence--for which I was nominated, but ultimately not selected. (Always a bridesmaid...) Where are my NPR interviews with Larry Mantle, Terry Gross, or even Ira Glass? Where is my book deal, and subsequent exorbitant royalities? All these accolades have evaded my grasp, and have, instead, been substituted by...

Icy stabs!