5.23.2008

Crossing (another) bar

I passed my orals on Wednesday, with distinction. I'm happy, but still pretty exhausted. Lots of socializing that night, and an amazing time with The Poet last night and this morning. But people today told me I looked more relaxed, so perhaps not reading for my orals is agreeing with me.

I ran into The Professor in the Strand, which is funny for reasons I'm not going to write about here. This was good--I was able to make sure he wasn't mad at me.

The fears have lifted, at least for now. A lot's still up in the air about the summer, the fall, and all the rest, but the tired is just tired, not scared, not frustrated. I don't have to keep my arms wrapped so tightly around my body. And one of the really amazing things about the last few days--the last week and a half, even, was being reminded of friendships and people wanting to be my friend, and being able to be friends to people. Even if it's just a matter of some strategic Facebooking. It makes me feel less isolated, and though it doesn't keep all the demons and desires back, it makes a nice break occasionally. (Interlude: I worked in the library on Monday and walked past K there. I didn't talk to him, but I felt his presence in my entire body. It was the most vivid physical sensation I had all week.) Oh, and it was actually really cool that E. remembered my exam and emailed to check in on Thursday--I mean, I know he had to put it on some calendar, but even so--I'd only mentioned it in passing when we were emailing around his birthday.

I'm off to Wisconsin in the morning. I should really pack for that, but instead I'm trying to sort through several enormous piles of paper while watching Dirt online. I should probably also sleep. I'm trying to make this a real rest / vacation--while I do need to hit the ground running when I get home, I don't have anything that has to be done before the end of the month, so I'll let the ideas come slowly. I'm not even taking any theory with me--just the first volume of Richard Holmes' biography of Coleridge, a book on Zen practice that The Poet gave me, and the last two issues of the New York Review of Books. Okay, I may get jittery and throw in some Trollope. But, seriously--I'm not bringing anything crazy like de Man or Nancy. That's huge.

The other thing I will be doing--probably not so much when I'm in the woods, of course--is beginning to repair some of the relationships that got crushed under the juggernaut of reading and other stress. There are phone calls to return, Facebook messages to reply to, and hanging out to be done. Hopefully the summer will be good for that.

I'm also turning 28 tomorrow--well, in about 10 minutes, actually. I hope that being 28 is less stressful than being 27.

5.17.2008

A quick sigh

I'm about to read a couple of chapters out of D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police for my impending orals.

I wish I could tell The Professor, and I hope he'll still be my friend when all of this is over.

Also, briefly: am pretty sure I made it through the dept. party last night without doing or saying anything untoward (at least not that anyone will remember). With that being said, I am pretty sure I met a few people whose existence I only knew about from Facebook--you know, the people who know like 30 of the same people that you do, but you have no idea who they are--and that might have been creepy. I know I told a handful of people I was sleeping with The Poet, but no one who I think would super-care. I'm not sure how I ended up with a bottle of wine at the end of the night, since I was mostly drinking whisky. It was a good party, but an encounter I had in the library right before reminded me of how much of this is a play of surfaces. Was also reminded of that when I saw that I didn't make either of the committees I was running for. (I'm the alternate for one that was actually reasonably competitive, but the people who made it aren't the types to flake.) There is an element of the races I was in that felt like a bit of a beauty contest, but I'm trying not to care too much. After all, I do run my own club and can be pretty sure that I will do so unchallenged until I graduate. And lots of good people got other good spots. But, yeah, there was that brief high school moment when they posted all that.

Also, I woke up today with that tickle in my throat and the utter exhaustion of an impending cold. So it's been rather terrifyingly unproductive in these parts today (hence the sitting down to read Miller at 11:00)--it's too bad that "blogs that recap the Babysitters Club and other YA series with plenty of snark" is not one of my three lists, as I did quite a bit of that today. I am sure I will be fine on Wednesday regardless of what happens, even if I stopped reading now. But I won't, and I do really want to get to the rest of Excitable Speech and at least read the periperformative chapter from Sedgwick's Touching Feeling, and I haven't braindumped the vast majority of my poetry readings. Ideally, all I will do on Wednesday before my exam at 4 will be to grade my students' papers, turn in grades, and just think and outline my preliminary remarks. Though I have a feeling I might be re-reading Jude The Obscure instead.

I also probably need to raise a posse for Wednesday after the exam, as The Poet double-booked himself and won't be able to see me until Thursday, most likely. (This too is slightly irritating because there was something else I wanted to do then, but it involves school people and judging from people's reactions last night I think doing something deliberately where we will be seen together may be more trouble than it's worth. I mostly just hope the cold clears up.

I'm turning 28 a week from today and will be in Wisconsin when that happens. Butterburgers and fruit wine will be involved. Mostly, I'm just hoping that being 28 is better than being 27, as being 27 has pretty much sucked all around.

(Speaking of birthdays: because I have no sense of my own best interest ever, I did end up emailing E. on Monday. He seemed genuinely happy to hear from me--I was willing for it to be a 2-email exchange, but he kept asking questions. We may get together in June.)

Okay, Miller. Sigh.

5.16.2008

Another Friday, in disjointed form

I'm feeling better today than I've felt on recent Fridays. Possibly the big change being that I woke up to a mouse poop-free kitchen this morning. The Poet helped me pull out the stove yesterday morning to figure out where the mice were coming from, and I sealed up the hole with some tinfoil and about a gallon of caulk. (Left over from when my mom was here and the soap dish fell off the wall in the shower.) And, at least for now, this is holding. That was easier than I expected it to be, but it's still the kind of thing that needed another person and a leveler head than mine to force me to deal with it. I mean, I would have figured something out eventually, but I'm sure this would have ended up being a huge, distracting, and stressful issue.

And that, my dears, is why I need people in my life.

If I can stay in this mood--not exultantly great, but not churningly miserable--for the next five days until my exam, then I should be okay. The exam itself will probably be anti-climactic, but I do feel a little bit crunched with the Victorian lists, in terms of secondary and theoretical sources. I'm also somewhat regretting my decision to put Robert Elsmere on my list, but finishing it seems (irritatingly) central to my Victorianist street cred. So I press onward with Mrs. Humphrey Ward.

The big intellectual realization of the last couple of days has been a sense that I'm entering a new (and smarter) phase in my relationship to theory. Like, all of the sudden it's fun in all kinds of new ways because I have a better working knowledge of Hegel and Kant. And so de Man and Bataille suddenly make sense. That was kind of cool. I'm also really enjoying Judith Butler's Excitable Speech. I've--embarrassingly, perhaps--managed to get four years into an English PhD without ever reading Butler until now--I mean, certainly, I get the whole performativity thing--but this book is pretty damn good so far. And I can feel the ideas starting to take shape in my head: the dissertation, the articles that I have to start on when I get home from Wisconsin, and so on. It feels good, but everything I do is also edged with a bit of fear and doubt, too. Self-doubt: not so much that I lack the ability to carry this out but more that I don't trust my brain not to keep turning against me, not to collapse like it has so many times recently, not to get distracted. Fear: what if none of the paying jobs for the summer and fall work out? I can't get through the summer on $2500. I hate worrying about money, worrying about the logistics of feeding myself sometimes. (One of the best things I did for my work this past week was order a pizza that I ate for a couple of days--but I'd like to not get fat this summer.) And so on. I'm not going to dwell. I need to get back to work soon--I don't have a lot of time today, since I have to leave for school around 2:30-3:00.

It's the department party tonight. Last semester, I made a big deal about being very careful not to get drunk and do anything stupid--I even skipped all the afterparties--and that's the night I met The Poet because I told him I liked the poem he'd read. Which is either the most or the least stupid thing I've ever done at one of these things.

He was very kind to me on Wednesday. But there are times when I think the strain will be too much. But this is a better Friday than I've had lately. He's sending me some beginning Zen books to read while I'm in Wisconsin.

I sometimes wish I could love him--that's what that was, last month, almost an attempt at a performative, a self-projection. On a certain level, this would all be so much easier if I loved him. It would help explain why I'm doing all of this. Maybe I will find at some point that I do love him, and that realization will help at least to retroactively transform some of the darkness of this past couple of months. Sometimes I come close when I am with him, but I am never fully off the razor edge. It's still lacerating to admit that I did love K.--and you can say all you want about how of course I would love him because he's the super-inaccessible married guy and of course that's what I always go for: if I think back to the submerged moment, back in October, where all of this became possible, when I felt something drop in my stomach: it was before I knew he was married, and my biggest worry was still, ugh, I can't be with anyone who's a student here.

But of course, if he really wanted to do me a favor he would have left me alone.

I'm not going down this road today. I have to write out some questions for the Romanticism portion of the exam, and do a bunch of Victorian poetry stuff. I wish the weather were less disgusting so I could wear my dress.

I haven't talked to The Professor since Sunday. I feel bad about this because for once it wasn't totally about him. (Though it was a little bit, just not the initial thing that made me angry / sad.) I keep wanting to email him again, but at this point I may just have to wait until my exam is over, keep working without hanging out with him.

I kind of miss my students already, but not enough to grade their final papers today.

5.14.2008

Brilliant




I've started to read XKCD more and more often and have, of course, been slowly falling in love with it. One of the quirks that I didn't realize at first was that there's always a message/punchline/commentary when you hover the mouse over the image. But that seems to only work if you look at it on the actual site, at least unless you possess greater html skills than I do. So I'll just give you the hidden text in this one: "The question with Lucy and the football was always whether, on some level, she believed the things she said."

Awesome.

See also: Jealousy and Journal #2 for more of why I love this.

Today would have been reasonably okay if I hadn't come home after my committee member meeting to find a bunch of mouse shit in my kitchen. I'm horrified by the whole thing, but I can't really lay out a trap or anything unless I have someone on speed dial who will come over and take care of it for me. There are a lot of things I can deal with reasonably calmly. Vermin is not one of them. Like so many things in my life, this is something that both isn't my fault and feels like my fault.

5.12.2008

"I keep making these to-do lists but nothing gets crossed out"

In that spirit, two passages I will try to live by, at least until my orals are over.

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air your breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.” --John Stuart Mill, Autobiography


“The moment the innocence or authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into question, a far from harmless process gets underway. It may start as a casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unraveled and comes apart. The whole process happens at an unsettling speed.” --Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality"


I am trying to be better today. It's another one that's all cold and gray and pissing rain; at least this time I'm not going outside much, maybe just to the bodega-like grocery story a block away because I could use soy milk and more coffee and probably some lunch.

I want creative work that's something more than self-immolation as performance art.

5.11.2008

With less than ten days to go before my exam, I fail miserably at pulling myself together

You know those days that kind of lull you into a false sense of security that makes you think that--even if you know the goodness is only temporary, you don't have to know it in a conscious sense--so you start to relax a bit and have a couple of good thoughts and start to process everything that's gone on in your head and your heart and then all the sudden the day just turns on you and you're on the train crying on your way home?

This was one of those days.

As per my Facebook status of the past few days, I don't really want to talk about it. What's the point, really? It's not that there's much that can be done, when it comes down to it. It's mostly just having to face the reality of my not being particularly good friendship material. In a lot of senses. I'm good at being marginal, the person you see every now and then, I'm apparently great at being the mistress, as well as the girl you'll hang out with until you get an actual girlfriend and then you can't hang out with me anymore. When it happens, it won't be the first time. And you, like K. and E. and so many people I knew when I was in college, will have the satisfaction of waking up to her every morning and looking around and knowing that you did the right thing even though it was hard at the time and no hard feelings, etc. And the story ends with you living happily ever after and I, as K put it in an email to me this week, go on to "negotiate [my] other ethically questionable relationships." Because somehow, as The Professor said and didn't mean to say but kind of did because it sounded so right didn't it--if it happened twice, then it must be my fault.

I was already kind of depressed and a little bit angry, but that's the thing that made me cry.

Do I break up with The Poet simply because I realized this week that I'm not in love with him, and because he's married and all of that? But he calls in to check with me to see how I am. I think he might love me and maybe that's enough right now--at any rate, it's all I can muster--I can barely return phone calls, when they come--especially with the time of the semester and the time of my orals.

Here's my paradox: I'm not hot enough to be your girlfriend, but I'm too hot to be your friend. The "you" here isn't referential--it's the same paradox I've been caught in for years, minus the five-year suspension when I was in an increasingly abusive relationship with someone who was constantly berating me to have more confidence while trying to undermine the things I did have confidence in. So excuse me if I'm a little bit fucked up about this right now.

What I will miss about K is not the sex. That only happened a handful of times; I knew I wasn't going to sleep with him on Monday, and I didn't and it's fine. What I'll miss is the chance to put my head on his shoulder and watch the local news. And that's something you can't do on the first date.

Except with E, who I've been thinking about a bit more lately. (Hey, what's a few more dredged up traumas while we're at it?) Because I think we did watch a movie that first night, and that was usually a part of things. That sounds dumb, too much like a routine, and maybe that's why I wasn't the one he fell in love with. But at the time it was wonderful, and the only other person I did that with--have done that with, in a long time, was K. E is turning 40 tomorrow--I recently removed this from my Google calendar, but it's hard to forget the person who got you pregnant and happens to be exactly 12 days and 12 years older than you are. Once when we were in bed he asked me if it was going to be weird when he was 40 and I was 28 and I said I didn't think he was planning on keeping me around that long.

I should pretty much stop talking, ever.

I have so much work to do before the 21st. So much actual thinking. And I need to be not wretched to do it, or I have to find a way to work through the wretchedness. I'll start by finishing Oliphant's autobiography before I got to bed. This is an oddly appropriate choice, though readable only to those of you familiar with her novels.

Virtual bookmarking--Bataille on erasure

I'm copying this as it's quoted in Writing and Difference (266) so I don't forget to go find it in Inner Experience when I take up Tennyson again. Just go with me here.

If one goes to the end, one must erase oneself, undergo solitude, suffer harshly from it, renounce being recognized: one must be there as if absent, deranged, and submit without will or hope, being elsewhere. Thought (because of what it has at its base) must be buried alive.


Mostly better today. Brunch with The Professor and working at school. I think I've been more productive in the last hour today than I was all of yesterday.

5.10.2008

Telegraphic: Bataille on Hegel on sovereignty. Also, shoes and the radio.

“The essential thing is that one cannot attain it consciously and seek is, because seeking it distances it.” --Georges Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice"

This comment feels rather widely applicable right now. It also somewhat misrepresents how I've spent my day. I was pretty listless, took a long nap even though I had already slept for eight hours or more the night before. Did too much poking around on Facebook. (I'm now friends with someone who works for Focus on the Family--how crazy is that?--But he's an old friend of mine, someone from camp who was really, really cool back in the day--or at least I thought so 10 or 12 years ago.) So I decided to drag myself over to Atlantic Center to use the two DSW certificates I had that were about to expire. I think I'm taking one pair of shoes back, as they aren't fitting as well at home as they were in the store. A much better (and, as I cannot help myself from saying, fiercer) purchase were these. I'm not sure the picture does them justice. The heels are about 2in, which is still a little high for me, but they don't feel as high as my other pair in that height--possibly because of the slingback thing.

This may seem like an entirely frivolous post, except for the fact that a year and a half ago, I didn't have any shoes with more than a 1-inch heel that weren't platforms. This might be a transformation worth thinking about at more length at a time that isn't now.

One of my greatest pleasurs of staying in on a Saturday to work (besides not having to be around a bunch of yobbos and frat boys) is listening to Danny Stiles on WNYC.

Speaking of that work, I think it's time to move on to some Derrida. As you might have guessed, I have not even gotten near De Man yet.

My conversation with The Professor, &c.

(Scene: yesterday, at West Village Coffeeshop.)

"But at one point, you were talking about love [with The Poet]."

"Yeah, but I pulled back from that--all of the sudden, I was like, wait a minute, what the fuck am I doing even entertaining the idea of that?"

"So that cryptic post wasn't about [The Poet]?"

"No, it was about K."

"Then he's the one you're in love with."

And that's when I started to cry.

----

I don't really remember much about yesterday after I met with my committee chair, a meeting that was mostly about my exam in 11 days but I kept slipping, almost schizophrenically, into these other modes--I will have to pull myself together before the actual exam, stop taking all of these poems so damn personally. (Seriously, though, Augusta Webster is *amazing*: "The Castaway" is what did me in on Thursday night.) It makes me a good Victorian, but possibly gets in the way of my being Victorianist. And then it was back in the lounge and there were all these people there (there always are around that time on Fridays, but still) and people were showing these amazing art projects and it was all very warm and fuzzy and smart but I was feeling a bit shredded. Somehow managed to stay and have a long conversation about Mary Wollstonecraft and madhouses with a guy from my program who I don't know that well and then to dinner with more people I don't know that well, and I know I was *not* entertaining because all of the sudden my life doesn't feel all that entertaining; it hurts and it hurts bad and I know there isn't anyone I can really blame, but tell me: how can you really control who you fall in love with? If I could, I absolutely would...and I've tried, don't you realize? I vowed I would never love anyone like I loved The Professor (and I've even told him that before), and I have stuck to that. But there are apparently a thousand wrong ways to fall in love (and to be loved) and the odds of hitting upon the right one and the consequences of more and more wrong ones--what's a girl to do? How do you go back? I'm not sure I can. I wouldn't know how to be first in someone's life. Even with my ex, I always played second to him. It almost seemed safer just to go along with K or The Poet--trying to live out a certain always already, but that's clearly failing too and I'm no longer sure that I like The Poet enough to go through all of this, to risk so much, to put up with so much. But what do I do? I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to keep myself in the game rather than curled up shaking in a corner.

The weather was horrible yesterday, in part because that cold, pissing rain makes it impossible to maintain one's dignity of appearance, and that's all I had going for me yesterday. But the consolation prize is that you can explain a lot away by having walked there in the rain without an umbrella.

I'm hoping that today will be better. Got all of my TV watching over when I got home last night. And then even watched a movie (The Usual Suspects--damn, Gabriel Byrne is hot), which I never do. So hopefully all the goofing off is over in one blow. Today and tomorrow I'm doing a big theory push: Bataille's "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality" (which I'm hoping to be able to actually understand), and three Derridas: "From a Restricted to a General Economy" (great theory, hard way to live, as The Professor and I also noted yesterday), "Psyche: Invention of the Other" (an all-time favorite with me), and "No Apocalypse, Not Now." It's hard not to be cheered by this list, which will allow me to put off grading, thikning too hard about Aurora Leigh and hopefully will let me get the churning in my stomach under control. I'm supposed to get some important medication today as well, but I' not entirely optimistic since it's coming via UPS and I've had really bad luck with UPS in this neighborhood. But maybe.

I have a feeling The Poet will call. He often does on Saturdays, while he's running errands or just done surfing or something. I don't know yet what I'll tell him. I don't have the mental strength to break up with him right now.

I did a lot of snooze button pushing this morning and ended up waking up to this Weekend Edition story on Charlie Brown. When they post the audio, I want to listen to the beginning to figure out what the occasion for it was. It was kind of a sweet piece, nothing too offensive, but now that I'm looking at the website, I'm a bit troubled by their pitching it as "Authenticity and Honesty." I think even for Charlie Brown, it's more complicated.

5.09.2008

On the plus side...

I saw a Fresh Direct truck parked on Bedford Avenue on my way to the laundromat this morning. And my investigations turn out to be true--Fresh Direct is finally delivering to my zipcode. With this plus the greenmarket, I could potentially cut the shitty-ass Key Food on Washington out of my life entirely.

On breaking even as a pyhrric victory

You could say, I suppose, that I played my cards the best I could this week, that I succeeded in what I had set out to do, minimize risk, not doing anything that would jeopardize the shred of a relationship I do have--breaking even, at least--no worse off at the end of the semester than I was at the beginning. And maybe running into K. in the library will be less awkward now and even though The Professor and I haven't talked since last Friday and he's clearly not going to Indiana with me in the fall I will still be able to send him my articles as I write them. And the poet will be around most weeks to spend a night in Brooklyn and leave again in the morning back to Jersey and the rest of his life. And I'll fix the stupid health issue that I've let go on too long already, and eventually the school I want to adjunct at in the fall will let me know about that, and my friend's husband and I will work out my working at his firm, and I'll go to the library on the days I'm not there and I'll write my articles like I said I would. And the summer will pass this way--maybe I really will go shopping at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket on Saturdays and start going back to the Cafe on Sundays and keep up the gym going even when / if my ID card doesn't let me keep my gym bag in my desk. And perhaps I will learn to play by the rules again and maybe--well--I don't know. I'm done hoping for right now, I'm done asking, and I say these things knowing I'm not. But I'm so tired of living like a Liz Phair song and all the books and poems I'm reading tonight remind me that it's one thing to become disillusioned with the straight path that life has to offer, but it's another thing to let go of those illusions, and I've never claimed to like this only to accept it, but in the end it may not matter how much I set out trying to do the right thing, how much I tried to suspend judgment and take what was there, not trying to ask for more.

Right now I am playing for the present, playing to avoid the return of the abyss of a couple of weeks ago, playing to avoid being as wretched as I was in January and February because I will not be able to write a dissertation under those conditions. When my life works, as it did, in various fleeting moments over the past three weeks or so, it was wonderful, inspiring, exciting. But these things collapse so fast. And it's all quicksand. There is a part of me that wants to play for keeps, that maybe wants a reason to consider staying in New York once I graduate, something more than all of this, than being the other woman. But it's hard to go back. I don't have much more to risk--I don't want to let go of what I have, even if it's basically a 56-year-old guy with a wife in New Jersey. At least he cares enough not to make promises he can't follow through on, not to be so rigorous in pushing me away.

But on the other hand, I don't see him as a friend in the way that K and the Professor were. Our relationship is sex, literature, and drinking--with some humanity mixed in. (After all, he did bring me a drink token from the night he spent at the L&L talking to me on the phone.) But it doesn't have that same stomachdrop excitement to it. And of course I'd have to trace longer genealogies here that I don't have the time for--K is a distinct improvement on The Professor in that he actually finds me attractive and pursued me for it--there's just that huge other glaring problem. And he's right, in a way, that him 10 years younger and single probably would be a good match for me.

Somebody please find me that man and make me fall in love with him.

Yet in terms of the spring semester at least I am no worse off than I was when I started, not really. Some wasted efforts of course, but not all lost in that they carried me through those long middle sections--The Professor and I renewed our friendship just long enough for him to read my conference paper and K probably kept me from going insane while my mom was here. So I try to stay thankful for these tiny things even though right now they hurt, hurt badly. But this was the game I was playing. I wish I wasn't playing it.

And the rules don't work in the subjunctive, so I do what I have to do again, pull myself together for another hour of reading and the meeting I have to plan for tomorrow. Take a deep breath and tell myself that my orals reading will all get done. Wonder if I should tear those last couple of pages out of my journal. Send one last email to say, yeah, we'll see each other in the library, and it'll be fine and that's how we'll be friends and it won't make me miserable this time, I promise.

Do I sound self-pitying? I'm not trying to, actually. But I have been reading a lot of Victorian women poets lately, and am probably overidentifying. Suffice it to say that Aurora Leigh, even as it reasserted itself as perhaps my favorite 19th century long poem, was also very much behind that collapse at the end of Spring Break.

And I still think back to my "September 10th" moment--literally, though perhaps disingenuously--but, really--the last time I was entirely happy was on September 10, 2007. It was the first day of German class, and the most perfect date I had with E. It was the night I got pregnant, and in the overnight my grandmother died. And everything's been out of joint since then. I wouldn't even know how to put this all back together again.

5.06.2008

The details I will want to remember later on

Coming back to your house, but the first time I've ever been there from the train, or from this apartment.

The first time I let my head fall against your shoulder again.

The one thing I didn't tell you.

Next time we'll try to do what we said we would, and not do what we said we wouldn't.

We are always, have always been, doing the impossible, at least since the night I returned your glance.

Wondering what it would be like to love someone and not have it be too late.

Driving back to my place along Ocean Ave. and "Onward Christian Soldiers" and long Bible reading past the Museum and on to Eastern Parkway. Anyone but the two of us would have changed it.

Perhaps I can't really love anyone unless it is impossible. Which isn't to say--

It would have been different if I'd had my space.

While writing the line about the next time I had the sense that I had already written this post in a dream--because nothing saves a cryptic, telegraphic blog post like a reference to deja vu.

It's not that I don't want everything to align in one person, or anything like that. But that's not what's coming my way right now--so I try to put together what I do have the best I can. But there aren't even comparisons to make.

I didn't do a lot of reading today; I should try to finish some Ruskin before bed. I need more time than I have, but at least my mother is going home--after eight days--tomorrow.

5.01.2008

Somebody said they saw me swinging the world by the tail

I recovered from last week well enough to cope with the rest of my weekend--a day of grading, another of working, trying to prep the rest of the semester, and cleaning this place up. Then my mother came on Monday. The plan was that she was going to be there until Friday, but through a chain of events involving a mistake with the calendar, she's actually not going home until next Tuesday. This is a long time. It's not particularly helpful for my orals being in three weeks. Or for just my being myself. It's the wrong kind of interaction with other people--I haven't really been alone at any point--even if my mother's out, I still have to be on the line for stuff.

Meanwhile, back in St Louis, my little brother got his appendix out last night.

It's okay, I guess, and I'm getting a few things out of it--mainly a new bed, hopefully--but still. It's disruptive. I like to be able to choose my disruptions better.

Other things. It looks like I'm getting an article out of the conference paper I gave, as I have gotten a couple very charming emails from the very important scholar in my field since then. This means I'm basically writing two articles this summer. I have to keep in mind that I'm not working from scratch, that one is basically a revision (albeit an extensive one) and the other is more or less a chance to work up everything I cut out of the conference paper. But, in order to be able to eat, I'm also trying to get a job at the law firm where the husband of a friend of mine is a partner. Best case scenario would be that I work there 2-3 days a week, spend 10 hours in the library on the other days. This kind of arrangement scares me, though, and that was partly what last Friday's meltdown was about. I say that only because I combined the working / paper writing thing during my first grad school summer and I remember it being miserable and lonely. But I'm trying to convince myself that the structure wasn't the problem and that I was miserable and lonely because my ex (then boyfriend) was making it so. Also, I really do think the first summer of grad school is awful. So I'm hoping this will be better. Also hoping that I get the class(es) at Not My School for the fall, since that would allow me to make some decent money for what will in a lot of ways be different and hopefully slightly less frustrating work.

The Poet has been in Chicago for the last couple of days on a business trip partially scheduled to coincide with my mother's visit. I sent him to the L&L a couple nights ago, and he called me from there. Somewhat ironically, the fact that he's in Chicago means that we can actually talk on the phone at night, which we can't do when he's home. It's nice to be able to do this, gives me the closest thing I've had to private space this week. I think he's coming back to New Jersey today, though, and it's still going to be almost a week before I see him. Needless to say, I have been pretty quiet on the issue of this whole relationship while my mom's been here--I've said merely that he lives in Jersey, is in my department but also has a real job, on a business trip this week too bad you can't meet him. Oh, and he makes me happy. In the meantime, we had dinner with The Professor last night and have made tentative (and work-killing!) plans to go to the Cloisters / Upper West Side with him on Sunday. My mother pronounced him charming but didn't seem to be too disappointed that we aren't a couple.

Also, K. called me on Tuesday night and we talked for awhile. That was the one real bright spot / personal-life accomplishment of Spring Break--becoming friends with K. again. I can thank Facebook for providing the space to let that happen. Well, Facebook and my being drunk enough to finally resolve just to add him as a friend and see what happens. But it was good. We exchanged several emails that allowed us to establish a kind of common narrative about what happened--a nice change of pace from recent experiences with that. And, if nothing else I think we're finally moving past the whole slightly hurtful stressy non-encounters in the library, maybe even figuring out how to be friends. I think to some extent our friendship will always involve a bit of playing with fire, but maybe that's okay. I'll probably have a little bit of a crush on him for awhile. But I can live with that. We're tentatively planning to hang out next week when my mother is finally gone. But I kind of want to see The Poet more. That's how things probably should be.

I read a lot of Shelley for my committee member meeting yesterday. I'm in a very different place with Shelley than I was two years ago. I found it very hard to get past the biographical elements of "Epipsychidion"--in part because I feel like there's an enormous ethical problem with turning women into heavenly bodies. And even as I knew that my response was incredibly simplistic in a lot of ways and tried to fight it (I spent a lot of time reading Shelley when I was in coursework, so I do *know* more or less what I'm supposed to get out of a sympathetic reading of him), I couldn't really feel comfortable with a lot of it. (Oddly, I still really love Prometheus Unbound in some ways.) A lot of this has to do with my ex, who really does have a Shelley complex--this sort of totalizing visionary existence, where anyone who resists you on anything can't ever be doing it for legitimate logical or ethical reasons, rather they must be stupid or perverse or fearful. I had that feeling while reading Shelley this week and it really did bring me back to that relationship. And I'm sure it's not a coincidence that I loved Shelley most when I loved D. the most.

On the other hand, I reread Frankenstein kind of reluctantly, but have never loved it more--in part because I'm finally at the point where I can geek out on the romanticist intertexts.

I'm actually done with all the primary texts on that list. Not so the others, and it doesn't help to not really have time to myself this weekend. Tomorrow is the big Victorian conference that my department holds every year. I'll be moderating the afternoon session and am apparently going to have to find the bios of the people myself. Should probably get on that while I can still print them.

I'm sure it will all be fine, and that next week at this time I'll have a real-person mattress and will be with The Poet.

Unrelated side note (because everything else in this post has been so coherent). There's an actual real live bar in my neighborhood--like a block away. This is the most lovely news I've gotten about this place in awhile. Who needs a decent grocery store when you can stop at the beer garden on the way home from the crappy grocery store? This news somewhat mitigates the fact that the soap dish in my bathroom fell off the wall while my mother was in the shower. I may have perhaps been overzealous in scrubbing the tiles last weekend--all that cheap white paint really is holding this place together.