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.