Solstice

The comforting thing about the Winter Solstice is, of course, the reminder that the nights can only get so dark, that no matter what, at some measurable, identifiable point, it will start to get lighter again. And I am trying to take comfort in facts like these today, when it's gray outside and the rain is washing away all of the snow and everything is sort of damp and dampened. And I still feel like I am losing control of my life. Not in the huge, dramatic, at-least-it-makes-for-a-good story ways of 2007 and certain moments of 2008, but more like a kind of erosion whereby those piles of crap on the floor that were meant to be a temporary solution turn out to have a kind of permanence, where one day of not exactly forgetting to sit zazen turn into two days of not sitting, where opportunities slip through my fingers, where I spend too much money and don't have enough fun, where the meals seem constantly to come from restaurants and include fries (in spite of much money spent on healthy options at the farmers market), and so on and so forth. Work is not getting done. I should really grade the papers that came in on Thursday before I get the papers that will come in on Tuesday. I should read more Browning. I should try again to face my fellowship application. I should clean my apartment.

This is how it's been for weeks now. I'm getting by, of course, because I always do, and in many ways I'm better off (or look to be so) than I was last year at this time. 2008 did not destroy me the way 2007 did, and I did heal...and yet: I feel as if in some cases the healing took a weird turn. Like I'm back together but maybe not all the bones set right. Or that I reentered the world too quickly, without a long enough convalescence. (As if any of us ever have long enough for that.) Which is all to say that this time around, it's all almost frustratingly subtle and elusive, and nothing adds up to why I suddenly found myself crying on the train last night.

But then again. I have more friends, and stronger friendships, than I did last year. Occasionally, this makes me sad, too, even though I'm well aware of how pointless that kind of thinking is. (The kind of thinking where I remember how I had to go through all the really bad stuff more or less alone, except for people like K and the Professor coming into my life precisely when they damn well pleased or needed me for something.) I wish I could say that friendship could be enough, that it would keep the cosmic, gaping loneliness at bay, but of course it doesn't. Nevertheless, it's helped me salvage a few nights recently, and that's not all bad. And outwardly, I am so, so, so much better, I am impeccably successful and my not-NYU students now want to be Facebook friends with me, and I'm letting them as long as they aren't registered for my class next semester. (Incidentally, about 1/4 of my students and 3/4 of my best students are transferring out of not-NYU after one semester, for many of the same reasons why other not-NYU students put the institution in the news last week.)

The accidental trajectory of this post is a good example of the ways that reflection remains a treacherous proposition for me, an activity that I know I have to undertake, that eventually I will have to undertake without as many guardrails at some point soon. This fact is somewhat tangentially behind my desire to go to San Francisco this summer, but I don't know if it will be able to wait. Which is why I need to sit zazen like mad until the end of the year. If that can even work.

I have been at odds with other people--mostly strangers--to an unusually damaging degree lately. I've always hated tourists, but now I yell at them, or at least mutter things loudly as I walk past them as they block entrances and staircases. Being on the subway makes me want to gouge my own eyes out. West Village Coffeeshop is almost impossible, and I've been driven out of the library through sheer claustrophobia. You'd think this would be less of an issue since I live alone, but of course when I'm home I just futz around and wish I had someone to hang out with. But this sort of constant anger at strangers in the world is exhausting, and I don't like the kind of person it makes me. I'm sure I did this for years without thinking about it--I suppose Zen practice kind of takes the fun out of directing one's self-hatred outwards.

I can already see that things with The Poet--his situation and mine--are moving back to something like the situation we were in around June and July. I can't go back to that, so I know that there will have to be some letting go on my part soon. This time it bothers me less that I care about him and about seeing him--I'm more comfortable knowing that I do love him--and perhaps it helps too that for various reasons he's less marginal to the rest of my life than he was when we first got together, that I no longer have to defend him as a person, a fellow student, that I don't have to worry that my eyes are somehow clouded when it comes to him. Nevertheless. I expect that we're going to be breaking up again soon, who knows for how long or what the outcome will be, and that this time I don't exactly have someone like J. (oh, he of the laceratingly hot Facebook profile pictures) lined up to write me notes and make me swoon about more or less age appropriate dating again. I mean, the plan was always to do some online dating in January. But I worry about the emotional stress of "putting myself out there," as it were. Though, if 2007's foray into the whole thing was any indication, it's not like I had to do much work beyond the profile. And I'm not going to chase people.

I did, of course, find myself doing my Christmas shopping on Wednesday afternoon with a dude who probably is going to need his own pseudonym (and probably a whole host of changed personal details) at some point. I may have mentioned him in the last post, but for various reasons I can't give too many details because it could be even more quickly revealing than most things I post here. (Let's just say that he's really easy to Google and I don't really want to make that easier. Also I feel like I've been incredibly burned and somewhat manipulated by this kind of thing recently and by the idea that the development of a kind of information ethics is long overdue.) So, um, yeah. There's this dude. I met him a couple of months ago when I made a scheduling change on Wednesdays. We have good conversations and occasionally lunch, and this week lunch stretched into some leisurely holiday shopping that I had been planning to accomplish anyway. He's really nice. He plays a musical instrument and is quite good at it. I am actively trying to leave things at that, if only because I have a feeling that he is far too good / healthy / spiritual for me--and his only interactions with me have come at the point in my week when I am most at peace, kind of blissed out and relaxed and cleansed and all that. And because I did not make this particular schedule change in order to meet dudes. Nevertheless.

I've probably been writing this for too long; it certainly isn't solving any of my performative-constative writing conflicts. But perhaps the Solstice demands it. Let the darkness of the night reach its fullness, stretch out to what seems to be an interminable length, let it be what it has to be. After all, it's perhaps useful for me to remember how close I live to the abyss. The morning has slipped away, though perhaps not entirely unproductively, since I don't feel tired and I've written this post, and there is still a lot of day ahead of me. I want to go to the Brooklyn Museum at some point for a final round of shopping (I kind of want to get these candelabras both for myself and my mother). I need to get this place cleaned up before my party on Wednesday. I can sort through my papers from the semester and before. I will perhaps grade some papers, read some poetry, allow myself to think, reflect, perhaps write some more. But first--it's time to go sit on the cushion, as I haven't done since Thursday.

Where was I...?

Yeah, so it's been awhile. I don't know why I fell silent here...I've been doing slightly more consistent writing in my paper journal and elsewhere, but everything that I could have put here seems to have become deflected in some weird way. And I wouldn't know where to begin to describe the last month. There was St Louis, the news that my sister in law is pregnant already, the party my parents threw for her and my brother, the displacement of seeing a bunch of people for the first time in ten years, and the ultimate of feeling like an asshole because I was too drunk to enjoy most of my reunion. Also, the realization while sitting zazen in my childhood bedroom that I'd positioned myself in the same place, facing the same direction even, as I do when I'm sitting zazen at home. (To the right of the door, facing south.)

For some reason after I came back from St Louis I felt absolutely lethargic. I still sometimes feel that way--chalking it up to it being the end of the semester and just being run down from all these 8:00 classes and the fact that I'm now getting up in total darkness. (Might be time to invest in a sun lamp.) Somewhere along the way my prospectus got approved, but really I feel like I've been phoning things in, that I have these brief moments of clarity and energy that disappear before I can realize they're happening. I want to get back to a moment I had a couple weeks ago when I was sitting at the zendo and halfway through the second half hour everything just clicked into clarity and it was amazing. But then I had to go meet with a student and all of the sudden it was Saturday and I was exhausted and dissipated and having Thursday night existential crises where I was beginning to feel constrained by my friendships and all this encouragement to drink and stay out when I just wanted to go home on my own. And it's all more complicated than this, but that's the basic part.

Oh, and right before I went to St Louis I saw Synecdoche, New York and it just about broke my heart.

I don't really know what to say, what to tell you, what to tell myself. I feel like I've wasted another day, even though I did get a few things done. I want to do the whole Paterian gemlike flame and burn continually and just feel engaged with all this and be able to trust myself in the world. All these things are connected. The weather is doing this weird thing where it's 20 degrees one day and 55 the next. I wore these red Prada shoes with 4-inch heels to my department party--I bought them back when I was living with my ex years ago and only just pulled them out this weekend. I didn't go out with everyone after the party. I feel so old. I feel like I'm missing something. I wish I could shake this sense of dissatisfaction--but I'm beginning to realize that this may be zazen doing its work, showing me what needs to change in my life. I no longer feel like going out and partying with everyone every night. Or drinking a bottle of wine on my own. But there's so much to change. I don't even know where to start.

K. made a brief appearance back in my life a couple weeks ago, just in time for his birthday. We never did manage to get together. Maybe that's for the best. The Poet tells me he loves me, and I believe it, and it's okay, but I'm not sure we're destined to live in the same state ever. But I am grateful for his presence this year. The last person I ever dated on Nerve called me up last week on a slim pretext wanting to hang out. We had a nice phonecall, but that part was never the problem. I accepted a Facebook friending from some dude I've never met but who knows a friend of mine. I spent $9.99 at iTunes downloading the latest album by this other guy I've met recently and...augh.

When I first started blogging it was performative rather than constative. It's been constative for a long time. I miss performative. It's probably time to go to bed.

My favorite piece of gym equipment has always been the elliptical machine

Something unexpected (at least, to me) happened on Friday night. It's proved to be disruptive on a number of different levels, some of which are very vintage 2007, others of which threaten whatever semblance of balance I am occasionally able to attain in my life. It happened, as these things often do, with someone else, and in this case there are some complications related to that, too. (Though not the usual ones that I have--I know what you're thinking.) And for all these reasons--the sheer unexpectedness, the complications provided by the circumstances of how we met in the first place--I need this person to say, simply, "yes, that thing happened." That's all. But this confirmation has not yet occurred, and it's left me feeling epistemologically and phenomenologically abandoned at a time when things would be hard enough without it.

I wonder what it will take for me to feel safe in the world. I wonder what it can possibly mean to be gracious with these stories, to be gracious with myself.

In brief

I want to coincide with someone.

There are too many people in my life who could be my great love, if not for some constellation of extenuating circumstances, mine and theirs. K., J., The Poet, even to some extent E, though I never see him--all of these, under slightly different circumstances, could be the great partnership. As evidenced by the fact that I've kissed every single one of them goodbye the last time I saw them. (J. being like 10 minutes ago and oh by the way now we're Facebook friends.) But none of us can coincide.

What would it be like, to coincide? I said to J, and he agreed, that this wasn't the way our story was supposed to go. K. always said if he were 15 years younger and single--The Poet, too. And I vowed not to live in those what ifs, not to go to Hoboken, as it were.

And yet. I'll be okay tonight. I've been up since 6 and it's almost 2--I won't have trouble sleeping. I'll work in the morning, I'll see people in the afternoon. I won't squander Saturday or Sunday. Monday I will tell the girls about this--C and L, but not the same C who reads this. Tuesday I'll introduce my students to Derrida. Wednesday I will sit zazen and maybe more. And so on. I'll sit every day, I'll see The Poet on Thursday. I could have gone to DC tonight and I didn't. I'll be okay. I'll sit with my present, I promise. I'll try to at least coincide with myself. It's better this way. I'll take myself back to the period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. No one's ever there, especially not, as I found today, on a rainy Thursday. I won't obsess. I'll have good news to report to the guy I had the conversation about distraction with yesterday.

I promise I'll be good this time.

Just promise me something in return.

Writing about not writing -- hopefully there will be fewer posts like this in the future

(Excerpted from something I wrote for myself this morning. I feel a little bit like Charlie Brown complaining to Linus about feeling disconnected from Christmas...)

I want to be guided by something that Charles Schulz said in a clip from that old Lee Mendelson documentary: namely, that when he has a good idea for a strip, there’s no place he’d rather be than at his drawing table. Lately, it seems that I’m just the opposite, that even when I find I have something that’s good, I’d rather be doing something else—sleeping, eating, watching tv, drinking, etc. Not that these are bad, but I fear that I’m running the risk of confusing indulging my laziness and procrastination in the name of being kind to myself—but this isn’t really kindness at all, drinking a huge beer and falling asleep on the futon at 8:00 at night to It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a show I don’t even like. And that’s to say nothing of the emotional entanglements I’ve let myself get into this semester. There’s always something or someone I can blame for holding me back. Some of these things are legitimate cases of my needing to take time for me. But as I’m about to celebrate a year in this apartment, a year that included a prestigious conference and two forthcoming publications, not to mention the passing of my orals—I need to keep going at that pace. Just now I put the timer on pause and went to look at my course enrollment for my spring classes, which of course turned into a huge time suck, checking my email addresses, looking at an email that Brian sent me this morning—it’s these kinds of places where my time goes, these kinds of abysses from which I need to rescue my productivity. There’s no reason, when I’m only teaching one class and don’t have any coursework obligations, that I should be so constantly tired and putting things off until the next day, the afternoon, the evening, the weekend. This weekend coming up, of course, I have a huge mountain of teaching work to do. Seven papers to grade (though that is almost laughably nothing, isn’t it? It was just last year that I would be home grading 20 essays that were much less interesting than this. But I also have to figure out how to teach them Derrida, most likely during a teaching observation. I’m not worried about this, but I wish that I could be more excited. Or not even that. I’m excited in the abstract because it’s such a crazy thing to do and I think I can do it. It’s these kinds of things that I end up thinking about on my cushion a lot—and teaching in general—I still haven’t figured out why. But that doesn’t translate into greater productivity when I’m sitting in front of the computer, whether it’s at home, school, or work. I don’t do well practicing my tasks in the present. It’s so easy to deflect and take detours, searching for inspiration I tell myself but really just practicing avoidance. And it’s funny because I don’t come off like that to other people—everyone else seems to think I’m fine—but I don’t feel fine—I don’t feel excited.

I guess in my ideal world, I’m so excited about the ideas I’m working with in my dissertation and the writing of the dissertation itself that I remain focused on my teaching work simply so I can get through it and get back to the writing. Or I’m sufficiently invested in my teaching to give it the time it needs-—joyously. The problem right now is basically that I’m giving things a lot of time, but mostly in the form of procrastination. It takes me an hour to grade a paper because I suddenly look at a paragraph and realize I need to read the last 20 posts on Gawker. And it’s almost worse having fewer papers to work on—it’s so easy to get lazy—-it shouldn’t take me as long to grade seven or eight papers as it took me to grade 20 and yet somehow it does or at least gets close and I – okay I just did it again, this time with a long detour through someone else’s Facebook album. What the hell is wrong with me?

The funny thing is that I don’t want this to be a journal of just whatever—I intend this as a project journal, one where I set aside an hour a week to chart my progress on the dissertation. Not much else. Except that perhaps I need to get some of the emotional and mental background out here—possibly so I can let go of it, or get to the root of it. (That’s a good metaphor—I’m clearly not pulling these weeds out by the roots since they keep coming back.) I mean, it’s not like I can’t write for this hour and then go check the enrollment for my spring classes—why am I actually willing to stop the clock and procrastinate?

I know that some of this is the state of being a little bit between projects, with no imminent deadlines looming. One of the next big things to address will be fellowship application season. For a number of reasons, I’m going to have to pretty substantially revise my prospectus so it first the institution's guidelines, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do that before I get the prospectus approved by the department. And it would be nice to work out the theoretical background in more detail as well, if only so I can articulate it as clearly as possible in the proposal. (Went off the clock again just now to put moisturizer on my face. This is turning into a long hour and I’m only about halfway through, based on the timer.) The proposal for the fellowship is going to have to be a lot shorter and more concise—it will also need to speak to nonliterary people. This may be something I decide to work on when I’m in St Louis for Thanksgiving and can show it to my mom. The other big thing about the proposal is that applying for these fellowships means that I’m basically proving I can / promising to finish by Spring – Summer 2010. I think that’s doable, but it means I can’t have any more wasted semesters. Not that this one has been, but it’s not been as productive as I’d like. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I’ll be teaching two classes in the spring, but that part at least means money and I do think my life will become a bit more open to my work if I don’t have to worry about money as much. Very Virginia Woolf of me.

Energy seeking, in bullet form

* I've felt increasingly stable emotionally, but I feel like I'm missing a connection with my work. I'm still doing a lot of futzing. There's not a lot of time for futzing. I need to figure out how to regain focus on both teaching and on my own research.

* I wonder if some of the lack of intellectual energy has to do with the change in the ways and contexts in which I talk about my work. I don't have the same kind of aspirational emotional investment in the people I talk about work with these days that I had with, say, The Professor--and part of that is because I'm no longer a still-in-coursework grad student trying to impress some guy I really liked with my knowledge of iterability. I talk about some of these things with friends and with The Poet, but the relationships have shifted. At the same time, I don't really want to get into the same kind of thing I had with The Professor with someone else. So a more substantial identity shift needs to take place.

* I did have a nice conversation this afternoon (completely unexpectedly) with a girl who I've known since I started in the program, but had never talked to her. I had been sort of casually suspicious of her for years, mostly based on stories that I heard about her, but as I've lived through a lot more--well, let's just say I understand how those kinds of rumors and things get started. She's much more settled than her previous repuration suggested, and I really enjoyed talking with her. I need more conversations like this.

* As I was leaving school, I saw K. from across the lobby. We waved, but that was it. It wasn't until I was on a Q train much closer to 14th Street that I realized what I should have done.

* It was one of those days: had I not gone home when I did, I could have seen The Poet. As things stand, we don't get to see each other until next Thursday.

* J both texted and emailed me first. I answered the text, and then he wrote back with something that didn't really move the conversation forward. Then I went home and saw his email. After some agonizing (okay, more like futzing) I sent a couple lines back to that, seeing if it's easier. I didn't really feel anything either way. And I have no idea what I want.

* I thought about going to the MeditateNYC open house at the Boundless Mind Zendo in Park Slope, but inertia and fajitas set in. There's another sangha I may try on Sunday. But the thing is that evening mediation is always going to be hard for me, especially on days when I teach--that 6 to 8 slot is a prime time for my wanting to nap. I really like the midday zazen thing. But we'll see.

* I think my teaching observation is going to coincide with my attempting to lecture on Derrida. You will recall that I am teaching freshman comp.

* I love Boston Legal, but I'm pissed off by their treatment of abortion in the most recent episode. This whole mushy liberal discourse of "it changes you forever" is incredibly condescening bullshit, and I was disappointed to see it voiced by Candace Bergen's character. All kinds of things have the power to change a given person forever, and to privilege this as the one thing that is so powerful that a woman can't be trusted to make the decision--I call bullshit, and I do so as a woman who had an abortion and does not think that it was the worst thing that has ever happened to her. The show itself eventually (more or less) affirmed abortion, but the qualifications they put on it (pro-choice arguments in the mouth of a headstrong 15 year old girl who may or may not have been engaged in a gender-selection abortion) were incredibly insulting. It triggered for me the memory of the "I'm pro-choice but I get squicked out by certain kinds of women having abortions for certain kinds of reasons (generally 'birth control')" meme that was going around the internets (especially those areas populated by female academic bloggers) a couple of months ago. That made me want to scream because, from a number of perspectives, my abortion was basically birth control, even though it only happened once. My life wasn't in danger. I wasn't a teenager. I suppose that if I really wanted to have a baby, I could have convinced E. to be on board with it, and we'd either have some sort of resentful partnership or I'd have moved back in with my parents or something. But I didn't do that. And I'm not sorry. Sure, there were things about the experience that were traumatizing, but they have more to do with the atmosphere at the clinic and the ways in which The Ex and The Professor both (at different times afterwards) responded to it. (The Ex: "Let me tell you how your abortion affected me." The Professor: "If it were mine, I would have wanted you to keep it. But I wouldn't have been with you or anything.") But it wasn't the most traumatizing or destructive thing that's ever happened to me in my life. And even if it was, to legislate with that in mind would be disgusting.

* I did not mean to make this into a post about my abortion, but it's possible that some of my immediate listlessness tonight was related to watching Boston Legal while consuming my dinner. And maybe now it's time to curl up in bed with Anne of Windy Poplars. For the record, I'm mostly excited about going to St Louis for Thanksgiving so I can retrieve the rest of the Anne of Green Gables books and Little House on the Prairie.

Learning to Weekend

The great thing about teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays is that it takes the pressure off of Sunday. There was work I probably could and should have done today, but nothing that had to be done that couldn't be figured out tomorrow or really at any time between now and Thursday. I can't always do this, but I'm glad I could today.

Prospect Park was lovely. Came in at Grand Army Plaza as per usual, walked all the way down past Wollman Rink to the southernmost end of the lake. The sky was beautiful. What I like about Prospect Park--and what puts it over Central Park for me--is that there are places where you really can feel like you're somewhere else other than New York. And there's something incredibly soothing for me in watching the last light of the sunset play on watersurfaces. Wandered back up along the eastern edge of the park, past the Lefferts House and the Zoo. It was almost dark when I got back to Grand Army Plaza and I could look in all the apartments without feeling as alienated as I sometimes do. I'm more or less always in one of two frames of mind when I leave Prospect Park: either I'm asking myself why I don't go there more often, or I'm feeling crushed and alone because of all the people there with other people. Today it was the former, and I'm glad of it.

On my way home I stopped at one of the wine shops on Vanderbilt because I just didn't think it was right to drink white wine with the lamb I was planning to make. I think this was a good move.

And, finally, because I haven't dinner blogged in so long: tonight I roasted a tiny leg of lamb I got from one of the Greenmarket stands--it's pretty awesome that they sell them in less than 1/2 pound cuts, and even with that I still have enough for a second meal. I roasted it with a red wine / olive oil / worcheshire sauce with onions, garlic, cumin, and dried cranberries and left it pretty rare. Yummy. Complimented it with a variation on my usual sauteed Brussels sprouts that included apples, some smashed blue potatoes (not my favorite way to prepare them, I decided, but tasty), and half an acorn squash. I'm going to have to get a bigger and sharper knife if I'm going to continue to make squash a part of my life.

And now I think maybe this can be an early night, that maybe I'll be ready to get back to work for real in the morning.

Did I mention that I handed in my prospectus last Wednesday? I handed in my prospectus last Wednesday.

On Rewriting Stories and Being-Nobody

Last Tuesday was the second time I've had the privilege of voting for Barack Obama, the first being his Senate primary in Illinois back in the very beginning of 2004. And I have a vivid memory of sitting on the floor of my bedroom in Chicago, taking apart my futon in preparation for my move back to New York with The Ex, and listening to Obama's keynote at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

A few days later, while The Ex and I were driving our moving truck full of books to Astoria, the trumped-up terrorist threats began in preparation for the Republican Convention. We saw people nearly get arrested for participating in (and watching) capoeria in Union Square. When we were in Pennsylvania, NPR was talking about vehicle searches in the tunnels and I wondered if I was putting The Ex in danger by allowing him to come to New York with me. I started my graduate coursework the week of the Republican convention.

We watched the 2004 election returns at the Bowery Poetry Club and the bar next door that had just opened, and because I'd moved out of New York right at the beginning of 2002, I still wasn't really used to the smoking ban and Derrida had died a few weeks earlier and I wasn't really used to that either. I think we went home before the full results were in--it didn't look good, but they hadn't called it yet. So it didn't hit us until the morning, and it was kind of like the day after 9/11 in a lot of ways, except that it wasn't a surprise or spectacle in the way that the attacks were--just a lot of bitter, bitter disappointment. There was a Victorian group meeting at school that night and only like four people came, but I remember it vividly, in part because it was the first time I went to the dinner afterwards. And it really did seem like the end of the world in some ways, especially when you're having a mediocre hamburger and watery pint with people in their late 60s who are telling you that it is.

The Ex, of course, spent the next year hating New York and saying he was allowed to do so because I had a psychological breakdown in Chicago. He came around by the midterm elections in 2006, but that was my first semester of teaching and I was broken in all kinds of other ways.

The events of this past week truly feel like the beginning of a new story. I'm not trying to overpersonalize or otherwise appropriate the events I talk about here, especially since I come across as rather less political than I really am on this blog. But it makes an interesting heuristic if nothing else, another way of understanding my life in New York and my life in grad school particularly, and it allows for certain forms of awareness that I'm not sure I would have had otherwise. I don't know if I'd call it a metaphor, exactly, especially not after reading a bunch of de Man yesterday, but there's certainly a shared affective field here, if nothing else. (Good lord, here I go...) The political weight that has been lifted is substantial, but it's also more than political, at least for me, and no doubt in part to its convergence with making it through the wedding (which was fine, even fun, and clearly not worth the amount of angst I put into it but we all knew that already, right?) and letting go (mostly) of the J situation.

Right up until the end, I refused to believe it. Refused to get my hopes up again (but, as in all of these situations, the hopes were up and in some ways stronger and less flexible because they were denied on some level) because I knew I couldn't take another 2004. With the distance of a few days, it's easy (easier) to see the extent to which all that was driven by a very specific personal story, having to do with the things I believe about myself and the events that I choose to make the defining moments in my life. Hence the personal / political palimpsest of the first several paragraphs and also a hint of vertigo that comes less from displacement but from a more complete un-placing--a reminder (if I can be Hegelian for a second) that we don't actually know where we are in our own stories or even whether we're in the story that we think we're in.

There's also the issue of expectations. This is probably the way in which I cause the most suffering for myself. I've always tried to keep my expectations low, dark, and cynical as a way of bracing myself for disappointment. Much of my inner life operates on this logic. In certain ways, it makes sense, especially in the business I'm in, where I know I can't count on getting a job or whatever. But, in general, this kind of thinking almost always leads to disaster--it was, I think, at the heart of my disaster with J. It's a disaster because the more I lower my expectations on one level, the more desperately I want to be proved wrong in those negative expectations, so that anything less than a complete, almost fairytale like reversal becomes another kind of disappointment. For a long time I've thought that the answer was simply to try harder to manage my expectations, to trust people less or to try in other ways to limit their influence over me. And this, too, was part of the disaster with J (and is related as well to the periods in which my relationship with The Poet has caused me pain as well)--I tend to turn my disappointment back on myself in the form of self-loathing--I don't allow myself, most of the time, to experience even justified / normal feelings when someone does, legitimately and indisputably, disappoint me. My usual m.o. is to get mad at myself for having expected anything of that person in the first place, to get mad at myself for feeling disappointed and for not being able to switch gears back into working and forget about it.

The question always turns on the management of expectation, on how not to get my hopes up. In practice, I think, this means that I hold back from caring about things--at least consciously. There's so much I'm working for in my own life that could go to shit, the last thing I want to do is go all in on trusting someone else who could disappoint me. Which means that the extent of my emotional investments often goes unacknowledged, which in turn means that I'm not always particularly good about choosing the sites of those investments because I'm not making them anyway, right? Or I try to throw out all these structures and place everything on one person, etc. etc.

You're getting the picture. And even when it works it doesn't because there's all that worrying over nothing.

In the past few days I've been trying to think about things at least a little differently. See, my initial reaction to Obama's victory (well, besides getting a thrill every time I think about the words "President Obama") was something like, hey, maybe I should have been more optimistic, maybe I shouldn't have kept my expectations so low, etc. etc. Not a bad reaction, but I don't think it gets to the heart of the issue. I sat midday zazen on the day after the election, and it suddenly hit me while I was walking up Broadway: the problem is the structure of expectation itself. Which isn't to say that hope and optimism are bad things, but rather to point out (at least to myself) that those things need to be part of the way I constitute the present moment and need to feed into the continuation of my learning how to trust each moment and each situation--without having expectations for how things should be or for how they could go wrong.

Some of this was crystallized for me on Thursday night, when I went to see Norman Fischer give a talk--mostly on his recent book (a Buddhist-oriented interpretation of the Odyssey). A lot of it focused on the relationship between being somebody and being nobody and the importance of practicing the latter. That struck me in a very particular way at the time, especially this idea of "allowing" yourself to be nobody...this seems to me to be a huge struggle for academics as a group, especially grad students, as we build up our names and CVs. (Ironically, the working group meeting we had on Friday was precisely on the question of CV design and now I need to redo mine.) We're always supposed to be "on," to be thinking only about our projects and our careers--or at least this is what we think people expect of us. The person other than The Poet who has been extremely supportive about my desire to go to San Francisco next summer has been Fabulous Committee Member. And I think the pressure to be somebody (and to be a stable, legible somebody) is compounded by growing up in an evangelical tradition, which constructs the self in a very specific and often negative way--the being-nobody that Norman Fischer was talking about is something, obviously, very different from the self-denial or self-annihilation (in Christ, in one's husband if one is a woman) preached in the places where I first grew up spiritually. Though I haven't fully worked out those different kinds of being-nobody for myself yet.

Being-nobody, he said, is part of what allows us to see our own stories as flexible and based on infinite choices rather than as fixed or typed. I've always, I think, been aware of the flexibility of stories to some extent, but I've really only experienced that on the level of being myself / being someone else--which is a false choice since it still includes an irreducible selfhood. Or, it's the difference between rewriting a story and starting a new one. (There was always something of the subjective suicide in my moving to the Midwest, and I've now been in New York continuously for longer than I've ever been before and there's a part of me that thinks things would be easier if I just left town again. But I can't, not until 2010 or so at the earliest.) But there is something powerful in the process of becoming aware of the memories and perceptions that we've arbitrarily chosen to privilege as formative in the process of becoming-ourselves. (In a way, of course, I'm sure blogging compounds this problem, though this isn't an archive in the traditional way.) And to think that we could change them, start from a different point that says something different from what the so-called formative moment says.

I'm sure that a lot of this hit me in this way because one of the things that brought me to practice was this divide between how I talked about my life and how I experienced my life--or, of just feeling the pressures of being somebody, particularly when that "somebody" was expected to drink a lot, date married dudes, have huge personal crises, and be a little bit intimidating and scary. And I think it does ask a lot of people (thinking here again of J) to expect them to see through my own self-presentation. (Though if anyone was able to do this, it's been The Poet.)

Of course, once you start thinking about all your determining narratives, it gets pretty overwhelming. I think there are a few I can start practicing with, though. One is the "thwarted" narrative, one that governs nearly every aspect of my life and is largely responsible for the enormous amount of hostility I bring to the world. In its archetypal form, it's simple: trying to be good, doing the right thing, expecting a thousand times more of yourself than you ask of anyone else or anyone asks of you, following authority, doing your homework and still getting screwed over, blocked, bag searched on the subway, annoyed by the first thing that crosses your path or upsets your composure, your heart broken by the first guy you meet when you're trying to take a break from your old married boyfriend who got you into Buddhism in the first place. And so on.

It has its roots a couple of places, but I think this is the important one: I was convinced from the time that I was eight or so that if God had actually wanted me to be a Christian (in that kind of Calvinist-elect way) he would have given me a sibling I could love or no sibling at all. Every single time I tried to accept Jesus and make resolutions to live a better life, to listen to more Christian radio, to take notes on the sermon, and so on--all of that collapsed as soon as my brother did something to throw me into a rage. Which was pretty much every day until high school. And sometimes after that. This isn't why I ended up leaving the church or finally moving to New York so I could distance myself from it, but it's one of the most vivid and persistent things that I remember about growing up.

I'm not sure right off the bat how one begins to rewrite a narrative like this one. I still haven't fully untangled the threads. I know, for instance, that this is another thing that collapses into anger with myself--why can't I be better, why can't I love my brother, why can't I be normal and not crazy so that someone other than The Poet will love me...So getting out is hard. I may have to start by focusing on the places where I've begun to rewrite certain manifestations of this narrative already, spiritual practice being a significant one. I'm still surprised to find myself on my cushion every day, especially on the days I teach. That's a huge lifestyle shift for me, and I shouldn't let myself minimize it.

The other site of rewriting is the one suggested by the narrative that began this very long post. I'm no longer the scared first-year grad student I was in 2004. All of the things that seemed impossible to me then--teaching, publishing, living without The Ex, having a President-Elect Barack Obama, and so on--are happening now almost imperceptibly and have somehow come to pass without a kind of apocalyptic rupture, have come about gradually, through a series of moments that will themselves pass away.

And for now I am going to try to trust that. I'm also going to go for a walk in Prospect Park this afternoon, regardless of how much prep work I get done in the next hour or so.

Most of the time...

I'm not wretched in the way that I was on Sunday or most of Monday. I thought I should say that here because there are a few of you out there reading and caring and commiserating, and that's actually meaningful for me. So, thank you.

In fact, it's been something of a quiet week. Not a huge amount of productivity, but I'm between projects anyway. So I've poured myself into interacting humanely with my students and taken some time to focus on myself, though in what's hopefully a less obsessive way. Went back to the midday zazen on Wednesday, which was rejuvenating. And I feel almost calm, which is strange partly because I know that a lot of the crappiness of my situation is directly traceable to my having acted like an idiot on a couple of levels. And I wonder--is this really me, being able to recognize my own issues but not doing the whole self-recrimination thing? It feels weird.

But I'm going to try to practice with that for now and try to get a few hours sleep before it's time to go. Have decided that if I'm not checking a bag, I probably don't need to get to the airport two full hours before the flight, so I can leave more or less at the same time I would to teach. And being able to trust that is even something.

I'm hoping the weather will be nice and that the fall colors will be out. I do actually want to see the extended family. I have my travel zafu. And The Poet will be there to pick me up when I get home. So I guess I start here.

Postscript

...and of course, it's not him that I'm mad at. It's not him that I hate. It's me. Because I wasn't up to the task of this particular interaction. Because he said he wouldn't destroy me and I let him. Because there's nowhere else for the disappointment and the anger to go. Because I clearly want too much even when I don't think I want anything at all. Because I honestly do not think that anyone even remotely age appropriate or unmarried will ever actually love me or work to make me love them. At least not anyone that I can love back.

I know that I'm not supposed to be internalizing this, but if I'm going to be the crazy bitch, this is the way to do it that doesn't get people sending messages to your department chair about you and it also doesn't end up hurting anyone else.

That last part, of course, is a legacy of growing up evangelical and female: you do whatever you can to avoid hurting or inconveniencing other people, even if it means driving a knife into your gut.

It's not so much the way you hurt me, it's more like the way you make me want to hurt myself

Whatever J and I had is over.

He talks about wanting to be friends. I don't really care. And I told him I wouldn't make plans with him more than an hour in advance of anything.

I feel sick. I want to claw my own eyes out.

And most of all, I hate myself, I hate my own reactions to this, I hate the crazy, and I hate the fact that no matter how low I think my expectations are, I still manage to get so cripplingly disappointed.

I hope someone responds to my Facebook message.

I guess I can give my dad the CDs I burned of the new Dylan album.

At least The Poet still loves me. And that's not entirely horrible.

I hate this so much. I need to get out of the house, but I don't know where to go. I was hoping that if I called J before zazen it would be better, but now I don't know how I'm going to get on that cushion or what will happen when I get up.

And I think what makes me angriest of all is the fact that the week I met J was really a turning point of my being in the world, that it was the week I felt that things were changing for me, that I'd made some progress, that I could finally stop getting so hung up on specific people and really be grounded enough to face the world.

What a fucking joke that was.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. How am I supposed to work today? What am I supposed to do? How am I going to get through this wedding?

I kind of want to throw up. Or...I don't know. Buy cigarettes. Something. Erase everything good I've said about him during the past few months so my friends don't think I'm a complete fucking idiot.

Oh, and it's not just that this weekend was the weekend before the wedding. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my abortion. It's not that big of a deal in itself, but it did cause me to mourn what I could have had with E, if we'd managed to stay together longer. So the double abandonment. Yeah, not a whole lot of fucking fun.

I wonder if I should go back on Nerve when I get back from the wedding. That'll at least make for fun fucked up stories to shock people at my h.s. reunion.

I kind of wish I were on the market this year so I'd have something else to care about other than the stupid, quixotic, should-know-better-by-now attempt to try to make a decent life for myself here. After 10 years I should probably get the fucking hint.

Fuck. Just fuck. I wish I had a place I could scream.

Oh, and he was totally making it about the sex. Douchebag. Fucking douchebag.

And I think now I just let The Poet love me.

Citational: from J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading. Also other things.

It is impossible to get outside the limits of language by means of language. Everything we reach that seems to be outside language, for example sensation and perception, turns out to be more language. To live is to read, or rather to commit again and again the failure to read which is the human lot. We are hard at work trying to fulfill the impossible task of reading from the moment we are born until the moment we die. We struggle to read from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night, and what are our dreams but more lessons in the pain of the impossibility of reading, or rather in the pain of having no way whatsoever of knowing whether or not we may have in our discursive wanderings and aberrancies stumbled by accident on the right reading?

...there's something almost comforting about old-school deconstruction on a grey Saturday afternoon.

Yeah, so. It's been awhile. I guess the short version goes something like this: there was the week where all I did was sleep and do the minimum I needed to do to get through teaching. And then got the stomach flu. And then there were some more disappointments, and a large-scale freakout about my brother's wedding, but more about the fact of my attending by myself and feeling like an enormous loser for it. But then snapping out and finishing the damn prospectus, save for another nip and tuck revision and possibly the addition of a paragraph.

There was the night The Poet and I went to Hoboken and made up stories about alternate lives for ourselves. There was the brunch I went to where I ended up having one of those conversations where some dude who is not a literary scholar tries to tell me how to do my job as a literary scholar and you can tell that he mostly feels authorized to do it because he's a dude and you're not. Extra bonus points for his being the older brother of someone who I had a very awkward night with at one of the absolute low points of last December. Though I don't think he knew that.


I did midday zazen at the Village Zendo last Wednesday. Just an hour of sitting. Amazing. I'm going to try to make that a weekly thing.

And today I've been reading, mostly. Which has kind of been nice, though not as nice as seeing J. Who I haven't seen for like two weeks. Again. But how do I tell him that he needs to work harder to get me away from The Poet?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of being kind to oneself. And about how much of what I allow to pass as a kindness to myself (often in the form of drinking, several hours at a time of stupid television, poor food choices) are really not kindnesses at all but indulgences that redouble my own reasons for being unkind to myself.

I've been having fun with my students. It has been amazingly fun teaching them a text that I love. At least the ones who are actually doing the work.

I bought the latest Bob Dylan album, Tell Tale Signs, off of iTunes a couple weeks ago. (An unusual event in my world.) It's amazing and you should download it immediately. I have been doing this thing where I listen to the version of "Most of the Time" that's on this album and then listening to the Sophie Zelmani cover from the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack right afterwards.

I got my travel zafu in the mail this week. It's basically a beach ball with a cloth cover. But it's kind of awesome. I'll also be bringing Xanax to Indiana with me because even though I'm not as actively stressed out by the wedding as I was last week at this time (and boy was I rocking the word vomit at this one party--I'm sure anyone who's seen me in the last ten days, my students included, is tired of me talking about hits), I still think it's better to be safe than drinking too much and saying something unintentionally nasty or angry.

I've been practicing with what it means to trust the present, to trust others, to trust myself. What I think made that midday zazen so great for me was that I realized, most of all, that I could trust my posture, that I could trust myself to know how to sit, that what I did at home was also what I was doing there.

And I'm trying to believe that I don't have to be my own worst enemy.

The aforementioned prospectus post

...which I can no longer afford to delay, now that I've finally read the last couple pages of "The Angel in the House." (Seriously, I don't know why more people don't read this poem. It's amazing in its ability to generate wtf? moments. I have a post about this up at the group blog where I use my own name, should anyone be interested.)

Okay.

I need to pick up the threads on my prospectus, which have been completely dropped since I crashed midweek. Before that, though, I was actually doing okay. I didn't do a lot of writing last week, but I did put in some intensive work on my bibliography, which mainly meant sorting out several stacks of files into piles that made sense--one stack for theory, one for general articles on the field (including both periodization and state of the field articles as well as ones that treat multiple authors or non-poetic texts) and finally, one for critical articles on individual poets. There's a lot on the bibliography that I will probably never look at, but I decided that it's easier to take things off the list than put them on there later on. And, for what it's worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of things I had looked at and did know about. (A lot of these particular files were from when I wrote the fake prospectus for a class in the spring of 2007.)

The bibliography thing also had the advantage of helping jog my memory about the state of the field. It's lucky for me that the big journal in my field published two issues devoted basically to self-reflection within the last five years, though I do wonder if the field is almost too-self-reflective to the point of being almost paralyzed. And in some ways, skimming through a couple of the articles (especially the ones that are calling for a greater attentiveness to language and performativity) helped me better understand the contribution that my article is going to make to the field and the kind of intervention that VIE was steering me towards. While I continue to see myself as a theorist more than a historicist, I've gotten to the point where I can deploy the historical strategically when I need to. And I'm beginning to think, too, that what I got in the habit of calling "historicism" (after The Professor) is probably closer to an untheorized materialism, the kind of scholarship that makes book reports from the archives. (I ran across a particularly egregious example of this recently, where the author was basically making a very basic argument about a certain poet, with the only real contribution being that s/he had OMG touched the book!) But I'm beginning to think, too, that in order to get anywhere, the field is going to have to get even more comfortable with explicitly theoretical gestures rather than crypto-theoretical arguments that attempt to erase their provenance. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can't totally do that here.) I think that my committee member who says that deconstruction has largely become an uncontroversial part of the tools of close reading; I'd say the same for gestures of attentiveness to historical context and the situatedness of the text. Where we go from there--as a field, as a profession, seems up for grabs.

It's possible that one of the reasons I've had such trouble getting the actual prospectus down on paper (as opposed to notes and paragraphs and sets of disjointed ideas) is that I was trying to start with the texts when I needed to start with the field. When I did the fake prospectus, I began with Tennyson, Arnold, and Wilde--now that it's for real, I realize that I may have to begin with the recent work in the field more generally. For some reason, this feels like a capitulation to...something: I mean, shouldn't my dissertation be coming directly out of the texts from day 1? There's a very specific place in Coleridge that sparked all of this: shouldn't my prospectus begin with that? I'm finding the answer to be no. What I realized when I was going through my files (especially those reflective issues of the journal in which I will soon be published) is that my thinking on this topic has always been directed, at least to a certain degree, towards making an intervention in the field. But I think my project makes more sense in that context. And that feels like a weird place to be. What I need to do today (one of the many things I need to do today) is to push back against that weirdness and just write the way it works. I think I'll be a lot better off when I get that down.

One of my other big realizations of early last week is that I've been a Victorianist all along, despite the forays into Romanticism. At least for dissertational purposes. I mean, I do still plan to talk a lot about Coleridge and a few others. But I don't feel compelled to talk a lot about, say, Shelley or Keats. (I managed to get through my orals with a Romanticism list that had no Keats on it.) On the other hand, I do still want to talk about things like the sublime, and I'm worried that there's going to be a huge time gap that I will need to somehow justify from a thematic perspective. Possibly by applying de Quincey. I'm suddenly aware of the ways that my interest in the Long Nineteenth Century is spread rather unevenly....I'm all about, say, the 1790s and the mid-1810s Coleridge. And then I don't really care about anything until the 1850s. I'm slowly inching into the 1860s and, with Augusta Webster, touching barely on the 1870s. And then there are several female poets of the late 1880s and 90s that I love but really can't justify writing about here. Ditto for Wilde. This leaves huge swaths of uncharted decades that are making me ever so slightly nervous. I may simply just have to atone for it all by promising to write my second book on the 1830s and 40s.

I've been walking around for several weeks saying that I'm going to write my chapters on concepts and themes rather than on a single poet or text. While I'm not going to discard that right away, I may do single-author chapter breakdowns. I can't really see past chapter 1 and whatever chapter the article becomes right now. And I'm not sure I'm really going to know what I'm writing about until I do the first chapter. This is a bit scary. But this is the point at which I should probably remind myself that the prospectus is less a document for planning the dissertation as it is the creation of a projected document that people would want to give you money to work on. Meaning that I don't necessarily have to write the dissertation that gets prospectused. If I can keep that in mind, I should be able to get it done fairly quickly, as I'm sort of frustratingly good at writing documents that predict interesting projects that I don't really intend to write. Of course, this makes me miserable later on, but it gets you through. And then I can go back to reading for a little while and perhaps coming up with an abstract or two.

I think I'm always looking for things in academic books that literary criticism is no longer able to deliver. And, as I begin my own project, it's possible that I'm beginning to realize the impossibility of my being able to live up to my own expectations.

On the plus side, the summer's article writing experiences seem to have had the effects of making me a more generous reader. Not in the uncritical "this is published so it must be good" way that I was when I started grad school, but in a way that nonetheless tempers the tendency to go into every article ready to rip it apart or be disappointed. That's probably a necessary stage to go through in grad school, and it's no doubt a side effect of certain seminar assignments, but in my case it was probably taken to more of an extreme because I was hanging around with The Professor so much. Cultivating a bit of generosity has, at least, begun to make my intellectual life a bit more rewarding.

I kind of just want to put off writing for another day and curl up with something old school like The Ethics of Reading, but I'm not going to.

Realization: my approach to my prospectus thus far has been plagued by the same problems as my approach to my personal improvement. Both of these projects have been undertaken with something less than the strategic organization that they require and as a result I've been wasting energy trying to think along too many different lines at once, forgetting what I already know, and having very little to show for the effort. I've also been worrying about the wrong things a lot of the time. I finally revisited the assignment sequence for the dissertation prospectus in our department's required course and realized the value of that kind of process and of at least revisiting it selectively to build on the work I completed a year and a half ago. Would that there were an assignment sheet for fixing one's life and not being all about the negative attention getting.

Anyway. Probably time to start working with the specifics that I can't post here. Either that or grading. (Shudder.)

Guarded optimism and second chances

Around the beginning of the semester--which of course was also around the time I met J.--I spent a lot of time writing around a problem that I was beginning to notice in my personal life: namely, a huge disjunction between the way I experienced my life and the way I represented my life. One of the immediate triggers for this awareness was a conversation with K. where he kept trying to tell me I was an alcoholic and I realized that while I wasn't one, I was talking to him like I was. And I couldn't come up with a reason why that would be a good idea under any circumstances. In a broader sense, this was on my mind because the new school year seemed really to mark a new leaf for me professionally and academically--leaving the institutional fold of Erstwhile Teaching College for Not-NYU, being finished with coursework and orals, and having two forthcoming articles in hand. Moreover, I was coming up to the year anniversary of the semester that just about did me in, the shitstorm that came down before I had the chance to heal from my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. Mostly, I've told those stories and don't really need to go back.

And there, my friends, was the problem. Is the problem, more likely. I looked around at the beginning of the Fall of 2008 and realized that I was still the girl with all the fucked up stories, the girl sleeping with the married guy and probably more famous than she wanted to be for sharing the more sordid of her stories. In a sense, I started listening to myself a bit more and realized that I sounded kind of nuts.

For whatever reason, not much of this made the blog. I started to get into it in a couple of posts that I abandoned as they got increasingly complicated or whatever. Maybe I just didn't want to admit to some of it. And I think that when things seemed really good with J., it was easiest just to pretend that the rest of it never happened, that from now on everything was going to be fine &c.

We see, of course, how that turned out.

A lot of things happened in the last 36 hours or so. When the Xanax and zazen combination didn't work, I went to the bar on the next block for some $4 happy hour pints and read more of "The Angel in the House" and realized in the middle of all of it that sleeping with The Poet on Thursday had been a horrible, horrible mistake in part because I had been thinking about J. the whole time and after two beers I decided that I needed to text J. and tell him that. I saw it as a last ditch effort. What I couldn't get past all yesterday (Friday-yesterday) was the sense that I had done a horrible thing when I called him on Thursday and that I was engaged in an acute form of self-sabotage without even really knowing why. And not long after that I went home to eat junk food for dinner and catch up on my Thursday night TV and just forget about the whole thing. If nothing else, I told myself, I've learned that being with The Poet no longer solves all of my problems, and as much as I'd like to think differently (because he is kind, because he cares, because after the last six or seven months we achieved a very wonderful coexistence), he would never be able to be the person I need him to be.

But he did text me back, and with no small sense of trepidation and outright panic, I went to meet him on the Lower East Side at 1:00 in the morning.

It was a strange conversation and a stranger couple of hours. Probably one of the hardest conversations I've ever had to have with someone I barely know. I did a lot of apologizing and I don't think it was unjustified. I don't really want to go into the specifics (since that would, ironically, reinscribe and reproduce many of the impulses that got me here in the first place), but suffice it to say that I learned a lot of things about how I appear to other people (especially those who don't know me) and I also realized that I have a long way to go in figuring out how to deal with relationships. And a lot of what he called me out for can be related back to the problems I was writing about at the beginning, the experience vs. representation divide in my own life, and habits of speech and thought that have become kind of disturbingly entrenched over the last year and a half. It wasn't just the high awfulness of Thursday night, but things that were there from the very beginning, things that got exposed in part because that cleavage was there, that I had long since ceased to talk about myself in the way that I wanted to be.

But he came out to meet me anyway (and I him). I'm not sure either one of us knows why. And there's still a long way to go in any of this, and there were a lot of things that had to take place last night that were scary (beyond even the scariness of having someone call you out for everything you'd been feedback looping the self-recrimination about for the past three weeks), but I went through with it because I wanted to be with him. And it seems right and good and we've made some deals with each other (I hate to call them promises, exactly, not because they aren't but because that word seems overdetermined in this context) and I'm left just trying to do the best I can, holding on, relaxing, watching my speech, and trying to put myself back together again from these last couple of days. He's going to Montreal again this week, which means that I have no excuse for not writing my prospectus, prepping the next unit of my class, and all those other things that haven't been getting done. Also, of course, putting things right with The Poet in terms of not getting back together with him.

During the calling out, J. said to me, "You don't know how beautiful you are." But in a way that's almost impossible to parse. It wasn't meant to be flirtatious, it was almost sad and completely heartfelt, and that's one of the things that makes me nervous. It was nicer than when The Ex used to kind of browbeat me into confidence (which only succeeded in hollowing me out), but still...this moment sticks in my throat a little bit.

He's wonderful to fall asleep with, though. I was restless the first couple of times just because I'm used to mostly sleeping alone (and I almost never slept well with E. or The Poet), but it turns out that I can actually fall asleep while he's holding me. At least for a couple of hours. This in itself is immensely comforting, and I want it to bode well for something. Like I want to be my best self for him, to stop overcompensating for the hurts and traumas of 2007 and beyond. Even thought it's not going to be easy.

I don't know if I'll see him before he leaves for Canada. But I'm going to try to deal either way. And I'm still determined to go to the Village Zendo on Monday.

I may begin tomorrow with an eminently skippable prospectus-related post. Really must get back on track with that. And grading.

The shorter version

Hebrews 11:1 tells us that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

My problem is not that I lack faith.

It's that I don't know what to hope for.

Beyond

Occasionally when I am sitting zazen I burst into tears and the thought is always some variation on this: I want it all to stop hurting so much. What I have learned, however, is that it's nearly impossible to cry if you are in the proper zazen posture. And all of what I am about to write is aimed at facing the suffering of the past few weeks and getting myself back into a posture that allows me to live my life with the openness that I was beginning to cultivate a couple of weeks ago.

The most haunting, horrible thought of the past weeks is the idea that everything I had been trying to cultivate over the summer, all the healing that I'd achieved at no small cost, all of the effort, all of the progress I thought I was making--indeed, all of the suffering of the last several years--that all of this could be swept away by a stranger, swallowed by that dark part of my mind that has always been set against my general well-being, and that I am worse of than before for having a very hard-won hopefulness destroyed not two weeks out of the gate.

The day after the breakdown and bridgeburning (is it bridgeburning? Do I have a choice? Do I want the choice?) is always a difficult one, so I'm grateful for a Friday with no expectations of my presence in the city, no need to be at School or Not-NYU, no desire to go to West Village Coffeeshop--the original plan, since the beginning of the week, was to use this day to stay in and write the prospectus that is still not done. Of course the plans have changed a bit. It's almost 12:30 in the afternoon; I've been up for about two hours (got up at 7 because that's sort of what my body's set at these days, but I changed my mind); I still haven't sat zazen in part because I decided that I need to write first; but I clearly haven't done much of that either. I have, of course, checked my email several times and rented a car for my brother's wedding.

And looked at a bunch of zen websites, thinking that since there's no new Gossip Girl this Monday night, I may be better served by skipping out on the evening with the girls and finally going to the Village Zendo for beginner's instruction. There is something about this decision that terrifies me immeasurably and all of the sudden I want to cling even more tightly to my single cushion facing the unpainted wall near my door and dig in to the very personal, isolated practice I've built up over the past few months because I'm terrified that the people there will be all judge-y, that my posture will be wrong, that I'll get fidgety (as I often do at home but it's okay there) or that it will be weird to sit without my coffee or that they will try to make me join a bunch of stuff and that I will be so beaten down by whatever ends up happening this weekend that I might just give in. Or that they will find out who I learned zazen from and then that will get all complicated.

But I've made this decision and I am going to try to stick to it because I feel that I am reaching a certain limit in my personal practice, a limit I was trying to explain to The Poet last night, that I have been trying to think through here and in my paper journal, writing notes to myself that make me cry and sometimes it comes out and then I end up deleting the posts that are screaming into the void and replacing them with Rumi poems that are largely aspirational--suffice it to say that last night I didn't just welcome the sorrows in, I went out and did some hard core promotional work to seek them out and cram them all into this guesthouse so that when J. called there was no room for him and even if there was, should I have let him in? The Poet says no, that I shouldn't blame myself, that I should just ignore him and that was how I reacted when J. called, but what I realize now that I'm no longer drunk and exhausted from crying is that The Poet obviously has his own interests in play here, he wants to get me back, and part of me wants to go but then another part, the part that won't shut up, the part of me that scowls back from the mirror and says you stupid pathetic bitch--that's the part that tells me what I already know, which is that The Poet, though he is the kindest man I know and possibly the one who has loved me more than anyone else, can never be who I need him to be, can never go to the Greenmarket with me on a Saturday morning (I need, of course, to be less obsessed with this particular formulation because all it basically does is mean that my organic local produce now comes with a bonus side of the potential for excruciating psychic pain--which may be why I haven't been able to get much done on Saturdays), can never be the person I end up building a life with.

Tangential voices: you don't get to build a life with anyone, so just focus on your career and your friends and shut the hell up already. Alternatively: maybe you need to refocus what you mean by building a life and maybe you and The Poet are going to end up together in some way and that wouldn't be the worst thing in a lot of ways because he loves you and is willing to let you cry when the guy that you dumped him for isn't the person you need him to be.

To put it simply, the sorrows came, but the furniture is also still here.

The other thing I've done this morning was Google the Heart Sutra, which has been the subject of a number of the dharma talks I've been listening to lately. I copied it out for myself as well--the English translation, that is. Perhaps I should try to learn the Japanese, but I'd need someone to say it so that I can hear it. They tend to cut that part out of the San Francisco Zen Center podcasts--sometimes part of it is recited in the context of a dharma talk, but I need something like a language tape. Maybe that's part of what's covered at the Village Zendo. I thought that I had more to say about what's drawing me to the Heart Sutra right now--I mean, besides all of the foregoing here--it has something to do with my wanting to internalize the teachings of emptiness and void (which, yes, is a weird way to say that)...I don't know.

The thing about J. is that he always comes through right after I've given up hope and resolved not to care. Like the email I got on Tuesday right after I'd written him off here in a (now deleted) post. Or like last night when I get this text from him after The Poet left and told me I should just ignore him and I'd finally drunk enough white wine to stop crying and was kind of dozing off to Boston Legal and J. was all like "do you want to play tonight?" and I called him and for once he actually picked up the phone and I was just like "why are you making me so miserable?" and brought up the two weeks ago thing again which probably wasn't fair and then told him I was really drunk and tired and what I wanted to say but didn't was, "thanks, but I've already had sex tonight and no you can't hear about it," and he said he'd call me this weekend. But then when I hung up I got angry at myself again and wished that it had all been different, that I hadn't gone out with The Poet last night and had instead been out with people from School, so that when I got that text I would have been in a good mood and probably up for it and then this morning everything would have been okay. So like ten minutes after that I called him back and he didn't pick up this time so I left a message that said I'm not really crazy and I'm sorry I keep seeming like it and for some reason I always end up feeling like I'm throwing myself at you even when I'm not really and maybe this would all be easier if I knew what you want. Or, even knowing that you don't know what you want would be okay--but I didn't get to say that because his voicemail cut me off.

I don't know what to wish for, except for a return to that place I was in two and a half weeks ago where I.wasn't.crazy.

The Poet thinks that J. is a player because he works in bars and it's New York and whatever. But he didn't start out doing things that were player-like. At least I don't think. Fine, so I'm not the best person to judge my own sexual self-interest and of course the fact that I was even having this conversation with my old married ex-boyfriend lends an insurmountable sense of irony to the whole thing. But do you spend the day talking with a girl if you're a player? Do you tell her when you fall asleep that you don't want to destroy her because she is clearly worried about that?

The reason I keep going back to two weeks ago is that I still don't understand how we got from affectionate text messages and plans for dinner and a movie to "I can't hang out tonight after all because I have to work but why don't we fantasize about you having sex with another guy while I watch." And that's the rupture that keeps bothering me.

I could possibly just be the most naive person in the world. Thinking, for instance, that there would be any guy who was single, under the age of 45, not an idiot, ugly, or an enormous douchebag who would want to date me, right?

I know that my obsession with my own craziness is a feedback loop. The amount of written text that I've generated this week that is related neither to my dissertation prospectus nor to the abstract I'm writing on Coventry Patmore to avoid my prospectus is testament enough to that. This is the Medusa thing again. But I still think that the problem is mainly with me and my expectations and assumptions.

But I can see the loop starting again. And I was trying to break it here. My friend C. told me I should focus on the things I have accomplished, regardless of the personal life parts.

I've sat zazen every day since mid-July, even on days when I teach my 8:00 class. I've deepened friendships with several women in my program. I took care of the detail stuff for my brother's wedding and I'm trying on my bridesmaid's dress on Tuesday. I've made some fantastic dinners from the Greenmarket. I didn't write my prospectus, but I did do a lot of sustained thinking on it this week. I came up with an idea for a conference abstract in about an hour and it could turn into a dissertation chapter, too. Last week my adviser asked me if I wanted to be on his panel at a super-prestigious conference in the summer. I have a good haircut and great new boots.

Yesterday I saved a class that could have turned into a disaster, and I did it without anyone but the students involved having to know that I was floundering. A lot of that situation happened very late on Wednesday night--had this been even last semester, I think I would have agonized and gotten angry or stayed up all night doing alternate lesson plans--this time, I was humane with the students and deployed a few easy backup plans. It was actually incredibly gratifying and gave me a couple of hours (until--yep, you guessed it, a confusingly mediated conversation with J.) of thinking I was back on my game. Last week, I met a guy from the Urban Studies department in the Part Time Faculty room and we exchanged email addresses.

I survived having drinks with The Ex on Monday. I cleaned my apartment this week. When I had my crash on Tuesday night, I didn't drink so much that I passed out and even did a little bit more work. My student meetings went well. I am genuinely enjoying the perversity of "The Angel in the House." I am an academic success, if nothing else.

What next? Absolutely the next thing right now is to get on that cushion and try to go for a half hour or so. Then I finally take a shower, make my bed, tidy up and get back to work on the prospectus / abstract. Perhaps I'll make some more coffee. If I get stuck, I'll go back to reading Patmore. At some point, I will make an effort to find something to do tonight. I will send Facebook messages and possibly even make phone calls. I will not spend all night wondering about J. If he contacts me, I will do whatever I feel like doing about that and I will stick by it. I will smile when I leave the house. I will remind myself that it's hard to cry in zazen posture, and that is something that can be generalized.

Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodi svaha!
(Loose translation: go, go, go beyond, go far beyond--awaken--hail!)

In short, I will try to lose myself today, to let go of some of the jagged edges that are most likely to rip, tear, and make things bleed.

"Meet them at the door laughing..."

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

--Rumi

Recomposition

I've been in a dark, dark, dark place since Saturday. I've analyzed it obsessively in my paper journal, so I'm not sure how much needs to come out here. Suffice it to say that in some ways (many ways, perhaps) I look much more whole, healed, and strong than I actually am. Which is a dangerous place to be at any time, but probably more so when dealing with a person who I like but who doesn't know me particularly well. I'm well aware that at least 85% of this is my shit, in my own head, or it's stuff that no one is really responsible for. The problem is, of course, that I still spent the better part of the last four days feeling incredibly wretched and not doing things like working on my prospectus. (Although I think I might have written some decent prospectus-related paragraphs at like 2:00 on Monday morning during this bizarre and ultimately weird and frustrating text message exchange I had with J....)

I think the main problem of the last several days was simply finding out how far I still have to go in terms of healing. It's frustrating that I crumbled like this, and it's worse because I've come far enough that I also spent a lot of time over the past four days knowing that all of this was completely ridiculous and dangerous but not being able to use that knowledge to hold back the way I responded to everything. Then there's the cycle where I wonder if all of my talk about getting better and meditating and calming down a bit was just a really complex lie. I don't think it is, if only because I'm not sure that zazen admits that kind of distinction, but it still gave me pause. This is a very familiar cycle, of course, going back all the way to childhood and the whole born-again-until-my-little-brother-comes-into-the-room thing that I went through over and over again. (Hm. On the plus side, thanks to the latest bout of wretchedness, I'm no longer obsessing over my brother's wedding.) I'm still sitting, though. And I've been talking to The Poet a lot this week. And I miss him. A lot. Mostly because he is kind. And I can't really explain it more than that.

One of the upshots of this is that I don't know anything about anything with J. and I feel like an enormous idiot for caring. I haven't seen him since the 11th, we haven't had a conversation that wasn't on text message, and now he's in Montreal until Monday. A lot of this started because he canceled plans with me twice this past weekend (which itself was supposed to be the rescheduling of the previous weekend's failed plans), which is the kind of thing that can really fuck up my work schedule, whether or not I'm actually mad about it. I think it's the text message thing that bothers me most. And I like him. And he likes me. None of this was ever about that. But still. I'm really good at first dates and one night stands. I'm actually a pretty decent girlfriend. But all of that middle space...yeah, not so much.

On Sunday when we weren't hanging out, J. told me that he had a dream where he was watching me have sex with another guy and it was really hot, etc. I don't have a problem with knowing that per se. I do think it's obnoxious to start throwing around ideas for threesomes with someone you've only seen naked twice and are in danger of never seeing naked again if you don't get your schedule together. Also, it would have been nice to have known that he was okay with me being with other guys on, say, Thursday. Nevertheless. I'm trying to be good. Like, potentially monogamous with someone who is not married to other people good. And, yeah, okay. Good to know that if things happen with other people, that's okay. I mean, fine. My life works like that a lot of the time. But. It would maybe be nice to have a guy who was more turned on by the thought of having sex with me than by the thought of me having sex with other people.

Thus. My life is still stupid and exhausting. Maybe it will get better. The fact that I am writing any of this means that I'm slowly crawling out of the dark place, as it were. Now I need to write my prospectus for a few hours.

Nuancing my internal dialogue (or ranting so I can get back to my prospectus)

...it's not that I'm mad. Not really, not at you. It's just that every time you change plans on me, it ends up disrupting my day. And I have to be very protective of my time right now. But I like you. And I don't want to have to get mad about this. I'm not taking it personally, it doesn't make me think that you don't like me or something. And it doesn't really make me judge you one way or the other. But in order to keep this equilibrium, I have to be able to protect my time, even if it means that I'm quite serious when I say that, if you can't make it work tonight, then we can't really make plans for awhile--you just have to call me half an hour or an hour before and take your chances or, better yet, come find me in West Village Coffeeshop or whatever. (I once told The Poet the same thing, namely, don't tell me you're coming over unless you're getting off the PATH train already. Because while I've gotten a lot better about this, I still can't ride out these kinds of changes as well as I'd like. This is how I manage.)

The only thing I'm specifically annoyed about is this: when you text me on Tuesday to suggest going out on Saturday night (rescheduling from the previous Sunday), I shouldn't have to text you at 5:30 on Saturday afternoon in order to find out that you can't make it. But I feel like this is an issue easily enough called out and solved. As I plan to do. If I ever see you again. Which I would like to. Because I like you.

I got very used to these kinds of last minute changes and just general uncertainty when I was dating married guys. It was one of the things that was really, really, really exhausting about dating married guys. Though it did lower my general expectations in terms of hanging out with dudes. Nevertheless. I had sort of a lot riding on the idea that I was finally getting to go out with a guy I liked on an actual Saturday. Because even with E, I never got him on a weekend. Hell, I hardly ever got my Ex on a weekend. And I know that's why I crashed a bit yesterday. Some of this probably needs to be expressed, too.

Seriously, though, isn't the whole point of dating dudes not married to anyone else that they can actually, you know, make plans and keep them? Argh.

I'm trying to not let this get all triggering-like. And part of it is a reminder to work as hard as I possibly can at every moment so that I can maintain some kind of flexibility. Nevertheless.

I do feel slightly better now that I've ranted, though. The big news of the week was seeing K and renewing our passionate love-hate relationship. We didn't act on anything. I'm trying to be good after all. It would be nice, however, to have some help in this.

On the other hand, I'm at Cafe Naico right now and just saw some dude spill his salad on the floor. Which puts my day somewhat in perspective. Now to get back to the prospectus, I guess.

ETA: It doesn't help that it is almost painfully loud in here right now. The kind of loud that I would be willing to put up with if I knew I had something to look forward; the kind of loud that causes a certain physical doubling-over when I don't. It leaves me feeling stranded, incapable of making effective decisions, overwhelmed by the sensation of backsliding and knowing that two and a half months of sitting zazen is no match for 28 years of just sheer angst and frustration. I want to see him tonight. I want him to get back to me first before I text him again. I want to not feel desperate. I want the prospectus to be written. Or to have more time for it. I want this to be easy. I want him to be easy. It started out easy. I need someone easy. I know that I only want to cry right now because it's so loud and I can't handle it, but I don't like being this way.

I do rather wish that prep didn't take so damn long. It's my own fault for lingering over their homework assignments, but still. Hopefully this will be the last time for a fall or two that I have to reinvent all my handouts. And all of this is another testament to why it was good to do some prospectus work in the morning.

Tomorrow: Laundry (has to be done) and finishing prep for the week. Maybe I'll take my computer to West Village Coffeeshop. I'm trying to be better about using the resources at my two institutions for things related to that institution, but it's tempting to print a lot of stuff at school because it's more familiar than Not-NYU (which is going to be the pseudonym for the location of my new teaching gig). But, really, I should be rocking out with the photocopying at Not-NYU.

Speaking of which, one of the perks of Not-NYU is access to the NYU library system. Which is going to make prospectusing so much easier because I will actually be able to look at the books I need. And check them out for more than the three (!!!) weeks at a time that I get at School. These are things I did not appreciate when I was an undergraduate at NYU. So I suppose that I can't really grumble too much about the time I need to invest in Not-NYU.

Holding things lightly (more to come)

Did what I had to do on Wednesday. We ended on affectionate terms and with few regrets. And that was the point of it all, of course. So that we can still stand by each other as essentially good people, still reflect on the time we had together as something that was, on balance, a good thing for the both of us. I don't think I could have healed the way I did in the past couple of months without him.

And so. Spent the day and night with J. on Thursday. Liking him a lot. For something that started as a shot in the dark on his part, we've turned out to have a lot in common. His ability to read me is occasionally unnerving, but it's not the same kind of connection I had with, say, The Professor, that kind of has its destructive potential built in. So that's good. And his eyes--! (That was my 14-year-old moment, for those of you keeping score.)

We were supposed to hang out today, but he had to cancel. Which turns out to be fine for me, since yesterday got swallowed up by my first (exhausting) foray into the procurement of a bridesmaid's dress. Which is apparently incredibly belated as the wedding is in six weeks. It would be quicker to get a fucking passport. (Part of the exhaustion is no doubt due to my own ambivalence about my brother, which I want to work out in another post.) So all I did yesterday was that, the Greenmarket, and an epic nap, followed by epic Grey's Anatomy watching. With my plans for the day cancelled, I have been able to stay home, wear clothes that never leave this apartment, be on my period in peace, not wear makeup, and keep the pimple on my cheek to myself. I've also been able to make this the first full day of work that I've had since finishing the Victorian project. Spent just over 4 hours on my prospectus (*finally*) and am about to sit zazen again by way of transitioning into thinking about teaching stuff. I'm definitely glad I decided when I woke up to do the prospectus time first--I have a feeling that prep would have become an all-day project as it does all too often. Something to keep in mind for the coming weeks.

So I've given myself a deadline of 10/1 for articulating a topic and coming up with chapter headings. Would like to have a full draft shortly thereafter. I'll probably be blogging that more specifically on the site where I use my real name. (If you Google me and my main institution you should be able to find it.) I'm glad that we're about to come up on the workshop days in my class--far less prep for me and grading that can be done more or less immediately. This means more time for the prospectus and for staring at the cute boy that I like.

Which is pretty much where I need to be right now, holding lightly, and practicing with the present. And with that being said, I think it's time to sit for a few minutes. Perhaps I'll say more on some of these things later.

Hedgetrimming

And I try to hold on to all of this lightly, but I still feel the visegrip of the second week of September closing in. Yesterday I sat in West Village Coffeeshop and watched it rain and it seemed like the same rain that came down outside Cafe Naico last year at this time, while I was there on the phone with my mother and searching for flights to Chicago at the end of the week for my grandmother's funeral and Rosh Hashanah was like two weeks earlier last year, which was lucky because I don't think I would have been able to teach the day after. I suppose that, regardless of how drunk I am by the time my free minutes kick in tomorrow night, I should call my father.

And I try to hold on to all of this lightly, but it's so easy to get so tired so fast and I haven't been sleeping through the night so well and when I do sleep I don't always feel rested. I ground to a halt yesterday afternoon and stayed up past midnight watching episodes of Studio 60 online and getting drunk for no good reason and wishing K. would call me back, just because at this one moment, this one point, I needed to hear what I already know said back to me by someone else, someone like him, but of course he didn't call and finally I couldn't keep my eyes open. I need a sign, I said to Facebook, and some girl from my program wrote back this incomprehensible and slightly menacing message about someone else in the department. I kept the phone by my bed just like The Poet asked me to but he didn't call so I guess he made it through the night sleeping in the chair in his wife's hospital room. The surgery went well, he told me yesterday. And on the phone acting like everything was going to be fine again, she'd just have to go back on chemo, and he can come to Brooklyn tomorrow night after all and I am thinking I can't have him in Brooklyn anymore I can't wake up with him on the morning of the day I'm supposed to spend walking around New York with someone new and it's hard enough to get up at 6 to teach as it is and I can't be on this roller coaster just last week you came within two inches of breaking up with me out of not-unjustified guilt.

But I can't say this on the phone. I do the verbal equivalent of nodding. Because I really didn't think he was going to be able to spend the night with me under any circumstances and I just am not prepared. I have to break up with him tonight. Only a bit because of J (the guy from the coffeeshop). I mean, that's not completely irrelevant. I do want to give this thing a chance, if only because I don't remember the last time I clicked so much with someone based on a completely random encounter. And maybe I wouldn't be at this point with The Poet otherwise. Okay, it's pretty sure that I wouldn't be. But still. I guess I don't want to make it too much about J in case we end up hating each other tomorrow and then I'll still be broken up with The Poet and all of this was always at some level about hedging my bets because I told The Poet I would never break up with him unless there was someone else. But these transitions are broken up close and there is going to be an abyss. Maybe only a small one, fifteen hours or so, but an abyss nonetheless, big enough at least for the earth to open up and swallow the Twin Towers, long enough to rip my life apart. (As if those things are in any way equivalent.)

I should probably get to work, including reading next Tuesday's homework assignment so there are no more surprises.

"Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance..."*

And somehow, the writing flickered back and then slipped away again, I kept having to pour myself into projects and planning, and I've been trying to focus on this whole idea of living in the present, of making a conscious effort to live in the world as it is, this world of impermanence, the world as I find it instead of the world I want it to be--and this is not something that comes at all naturally to me--my earliest memories are of wanting to be someone else, somewhere else, some other time, and at a certain point that allowed me a very simplistic misreading of Nietzsche, Derrida, et al., that I'm slowly beginning to address--and in the meantime I am trying to learn how to live in a world that I can't control, to do things as simple as talk to the neighbors and not take every roach in my kitchen personally. And slowly I am beginning to get better at this as I keep sitting zazen and remembering to focus on my breath and to practice with losing balance.

What I have begun to find, what I have found over the past week or two is, in general, an enormous sense of gratitude. In spite of the nadir of exhaustion that came towards the end of August, I am immensely grateful that the school year has started again. Somehow it's less of a psychological effort to be in grad school than it was a week ago. I'm excited and energized about my new teaching gig, about having a class full of women, and even about the chance to remember what Manhattan looks like at 7:30 in the morning when I'm not either up too late or waking up at someone else's home. And somehow this feels very close to a real job--not that working within my own institution wasn't real (and in many ways this new gig is much more rarefied), but more that part-timers have a different place in this culture and I feel like I've left the nest a little bit. I am very, very, very lucky that this almost just fell in my lap, and it's a good reminder for me about the relationship between lemons and lemonade, considering that this all started because Erstwhile Teaching College caused me so much grief back in December.

And then there is the cute boy from the coffeeshop, the one who passed me a note and missed his bus for me and killed the mouse in my bathtub at 5:45 in the morning, the guy who has had me grinning like an idiot all weekend and no doubt disgusting all of my friends with the sudden glowy-ness, and I feel like I've told the story so many times this weekend that if I tell it one more time or write it down I'm going to completely jinx this. But all I know is that it's been a long time since I've felt this way about a guy--there are shades of E (the Lawyer Dude of the old blog, who I actually had a couple of emails with today and who is totally rooting for me), but with a lot more confidence on my part. I feel like I'm 14, but I never actually had this much fun when I was 14.

(And I haven't told The Poet much about this, but I do plan to have some kind of talk about this during the week. I'm hoping that it will be okay because I do care about him, but he's been saying a lot of things over the past week that are making it clear to me that he's beginning to worry about the ethics of our relationship in a way that wasn't necessary even a month ago--or maybe it was, but just less overtly--so I think this might even help him not have to feel bad about stranding me in some way. But there are a couple of things that could go awry this week.)

At one level, all of this makes me incredibly nervous. In the cycle of my year, the second week of September is always somewhat treacherous, especially when I think things are going well. 2001 is the obvious example, but last year was kind of a doozy as well--one night, I'm celebrating the end of my PhD coursework and the start of a year that looks nothing but promising with a hot lawyer at one of my favorite restaurants, and the next morning my grandmother's dead and I'm pregnant and don't know it yet and it's pretty much all downhill from there. So I am trying to hold all of this lightly right now, to take care of the people around me the best I can, to take care of myself, to stay on top of things and to practice with composure. And, of course, to hope the mice don't come back unless the cute boy from the coffeeshop does too.




* From Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which is arguably the most important book I read this summer.