A brief artist’s statement. A cover letter. Time-management skills.

He talks for twenty minutes about the Mongolian invasions and how this developed the ideology of nomad. Life is a travel, and so is art. His films are international in tenor—one in the States, one in France, one planned for every other continent. He wants to cross the lines, to blur. He sets up strong narratives and then runs them through the subjectivity of characters whose language he cannot understand. After the session, he gives me a copy of his movie. I think he has a crush.

Me, I’m figuring out a new distillation.

How to sell yourself. How to do the research and couch it in humble narcissism. The gentle way she sits in her seat. The smiles after they leave. Something excited in them.

I think the best I can do is have them leave that way. Smiling, running to the secretary to set up another meeting. Energy suffused in their walks, something higher and lifted in them. The best rising and lifting them like helium.

My tutoring philosophy is love. My philosophy is passion.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. How am I supposed to help someone time-manage? I can barely get myself out of bed in time for class. I do my homework the night before and waste the rest of my time on the internet, scanning around for inspiration and connection.

Tall and lanky, she sits in stained corduroy pants and her teeth stick out a little. Endearingly, not buckily. She gets awfully quiet and it’s hard to tell if she’s buying the paper handouts we give her to fill out her schedule. Will she chart herself? Will she manage to examine time itself? I try a different technique: I tell her about stress and deadlines. How time-management takes place more in the struggle to set up appropriate stress and friend-driven deadlines. Paint for others, I tell her. Let them be your pressure. Cultivate a culture of entertained audience.

I think about the card my brolaw drew for me. “A Guide to Pacific Coast Bottom Dwellers” with halibut, cod, long-liners, and captains with beer in the hand. On the inside, an “aging hippy” with “dried-up eggs” and two, no make that one, turtles on a string. The message written on the inside: where is your novel? When is it coming? This, I want to tell her, is time-management.

She leaves without setting up another meeting, and ah well, I admitted what I did and didn’t know, and that’s the other part of my philosophy. Never lie about knowledge.

So, I try to help with artist statements, cover letters, essays on art.

A Korean girl comes in worried about her grammar on an essay about a picture from the Art Institute. It is a beautiful still, a slice cut directly from time and poised in black and white. I read her description and it is perfect. So is her imaginative interlude. And then her interpretation shifts past the details into cliché and I love this girl, because when I tell her this, she laughs and says, “wow, I spent hours looking at that picture and in five minutes you saw things I never did.” And this isn’t about my powers of observation, but about observation itself. Her details obeserved. My details a flash. When they bring in their essays, I try to see them whole in thirty minutes and offer an interpretation.

Another girl brings in an essay about failure, in which she has left out all but the bones of occurrence. This is incredible, I tell her, but you cheated.

-Yeah, she says. I didn’t want to talk about it.

-But you did, I say. It’s right there, and on the page you haven’t earned your revelation, but I get the sense that off the page you did. So, if you want this essay to be about communication, you have to allow your readers to experience the pathways you passed along.

-But I don’t want to talk about it, she says. It’s just the same old story. Everyone has to go through it sometime or another.

-That’s okay, I say. You’re talking about something important. Failure isn’t something to let go of because it scares you.

-I’ll think about it, she says. She smiles too.

-Don’t cheat, I tell her.

What I love is that she knows exactly what I’m talking about. I can say it, and she can let out a sigh of relief because it wasn’t just her. Someone else knew what she was striving for, but couldn’t allow herself to write. She doesn’t cry because I tell her she wimped out on the important stuff. Instead, she laughs, happy I’m not going to talk about grammar.

Another girl translating from Polish to English. Ah, I say, this sentence is really awkward, but I can see your struggle. You want to keep in the eye metaphor to connect with the next sentence, but the syntax goes off because it doesn’t translate exactly. She nods her head, and we re-arrange to keep the essence without losing the sense.

It’s amazing, translation. I knew it was hard, but I’ve never seen the process, so I’ve never had to develop strategy. How to keep to the intentions, keep to the wordplay, keep to the idea, keep the beauty while inhabiting a world where the structural framework of intention, wordplay, idea and beauty is completely different. How to translate an apartment into a yurt.

Maybe that’s my job, in a way. All the translations that go on inside that office. It’s so new for me. I love a job where learning languages is mandatory.