In spite of my efforts to go to bed at hours more suited to the reality that, beginning next week, I will have to be up at 6:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm not doing a particularly good job of falling asleep--my mind tends to race, sometimes for hours. Hopefully a strategically deployed combination of zazen and Xanax will start to address that. I'm going to try to sit some evenings, too, since I won't have time on the mornings that I teach.

But see, that last sentence was just the problem--I need to be more careful about how I relate to the future, to reserve my limited energy for what can be done in the present. And that's what I'm focusing on today--dealing with the present as I find it, not as I want it to be nor how I think it will be next week or next month.

And I may have to break down and buy an umbrella while I'm at it.

Zen and the art of--what?

This was a hard day. I knew it would be. So I cleaned and watched TV and listened to podcasted dharma talks and took a nap and at the last of the apple sage sausages from last week's trip to the Flying Pigs Farm stand (they weren't there today, which was one of many reasons why the market wasn't as much fun as it usually was).

But I think what's really made me feel better is sitting zazen a couple of times and watching a bunch of last season's Gossip Girl episodes.

My iPod is the soundtrack for a simpler time

You know, I don't get all those bloggers who are professors who talk about the start of the academic year like it's this great fresh start and new beginning. What I learned this summer is that it never really ends, it's just that the paychecks let up for awhile.

I'm not sure I was ever happier or more optimistic than I was last year at this time.

Considering everything that happened last fall, maybe it's better this way, to begin the semester exhausted, broken, shattered, and fighting back tears on the 4 train, trying to decide whether to go with the half-Xanax or two beers to get to sleep...the Xanax may be more reliable, but it's easier to replenish the beers.

It's not like I had a lot of expectations last fall. But still. I was so happy.

The problem is that it's not like I have nothing left to lose, either. I would say, there's nowhere to go but up but that isn't true. There's so much farther down it isn't funny; best case scenario I'm still force to have to be thinking in years when I don't know how I'm going to survive November.

And I have to keep pressing forward.

Is it wrong to want a knight in shining armor? And why are the most harmless fantasies published so brutally, as if the fate of the entire world rests on whether or not you think you can be happy on your own. (This, for me, is one of the questions raised in my hundredth reading of Tennyson's Maud.)

(I can only react; I can't initiate. I can only hope that someone will be passing by. And you know it, more than anyone--no matter how badly you wanted to see me, you never would have come to Brooklyn if I had picked up the phone and called you. And you're the only person I've called my best friend in ten years.)

All this time I've been worried that having someone love me and telling him I loved him back would be scary. But it isn't that at all. All I want is a tiny space of stability, something easy.

Or, failing that, a reason to go for Xanax or beer and possibly fewer bugs.

Awesomeness of the day

The Guardian has a slideshow of Bush at the Olympics with LOL cat captions.

It is awesome.



As seen on my lunchtime browsing of Jezebel.

Fourteen minutes in

One of the things they say about sitting zazen is that it allows you to clear a space in which you can start to recognize the stories that you have been telling yourself about yourself.









My story is that I'm not scared.

Short rant because I'm not doing as well today as I was hoping I would.

I really do understand why showing people the soles of your feet is considered insulting in certain cultures. I finally just had to pick up and switch computers entirely because the guy sitting across from me has had his feet up all day, pretty much at my eye level, so that every time I looked at the screen, I could see his feet more or less in my face.

Seriously, if you're looking for a place to be *that* comfortable, then maybe the library (or public space in general) isn't it. He's also engaged in another library pathology that I hate, which is sitting at a computer but using his laptop. Douchebag.

Because I need to get on with my day

A public note to myself:

And now the plans have changed again. It's not his fault, really, but then again it never is. I am dealing with this better now than I was in June, but it's still going to fuck up my approach to this week, to managing my time therein, just as it's already disrupted my working day today. And my response to rescheduling will simply be this: not unless he's spending the night, and I'm not changing the plans I had for either Saturday or Sunday afternoons. Beyond that, what happens happens. It's not revenge, it's simply setting out what I need, what I have a right to ask for, especially since I have been virtually nothing but flexible.

Hopefully I will feel better once I post this.

I discover what my problem is.

Well, okay, perhaps not in a cosmic sense or anything. But, see, yesterday was another day of basically just huge frustration with the Victorian project--possibly even more frustrating since I had a really incredible zazen session in the morning--at least in the sense that I finally broke through the barrier of constantly wondering what time it was and really beginning to feel like I was starting to constitute a present that was something other than the usual mindracing of past/present. But that didn't translate into better writing, and when I headed off to the party last night, I was more than a little frustrated with the two paragraphs I had in the new version, and also just generally feeling like I was losing touch with the purpose of my work again--kind of coming back to the place I was emotionally with all this back at the beginning of July when I had lunch with FCM, a place where I do actually know that I'm no longer approaching this correctly, but can't get myself back together on my own. I need a pep talk, I thought to myself.

And that's when it hit me. Talk. Talking. Like, to people. In person. When was the last time I had a meaningful face to face conversation, I asked myself? I had been at home, except for my whirlwind trip to the Greenmarket (orange cherry tomatoes, more summer squash, peppers, a wheat baguette, ground turkey), all day. Friday I also worked from home. Thursday I went to the library but the only person I saw there was K, and I didn't talk to him. Wednesday I had been coming home from FCM's apartment and...worked from home. Tuesday I had worked at FCM's apartment, since I'd been planning to see The Poet Tuesday night, and when that feel through, I stayed in, talked to him on the phone, and watched Bring it On on Hulu. The last face to face conversation I've had that didn't involve a food / drink purchase was, I calculated, Monday night when I ran into my friend S. at West Village Coffeeshop.

Whoops. No wonder I was going a little bit crazy. No, crazy isn't even the right word, really. Except for being disappointed when I couldn't see The Poet, my solitude had largely been of my own making. I like taking advantage of FCM's place when I have the chance to, and I was also grateful to be back in my own home. Thursday was not a particularly productive day in the library, and I thought that maybe taking a break for a few days would help. I'm actually kind of proud of myself that I don't take every chance to talk to K.--in a way, this makes me feel better about the situation. And I'm really happy I stayed here on Friday, even if it wasn't super productive. But, even for me, this was kind of an excess in alone time, even in the summer.

Needless to say, I was really glad that I had a place to be last night, to be with a large part of my favorite people from my program in a setting that wasn't quite as debauched as usual. It's not like I felt the need to talk about my project per se, but more the sound of hearing my own voice and the voices of others that was regenerating. I had an especially nice talk with a guy who was in a seminar with me a couple of years ago--it had been a class that affected a lot of people deeply and long afterwards, and I was glad to be able to compare experiences. All in all, there was something oddly affirming about the whole night: everyone looked *spectacular*, people seemed happy and rested or at least not actively stressed out, L. brought cranberry wine from Three Lakes, and (at least in terms of the conversations that I had with people), there seemed to be far less of the general gossip about other people that occasionally makes me feel bad when it's over. And I was also able to reestablish what I hope will become a practice of not drinking so much that I'm completely out of it for two days.

Which is not to say that I've gotten much done yet today. I slept in, shot some emails back and forth with The Poet, sat, had some food, listened to some podcasts from the San Francisco Zen Center, and took a nap. Now, obviously, I am blogging. But I don't feel as twisted up as I have for the last couple of weeks, and I've finally remembered that there was nothing in VIE's email to me that said, "Start from zero with your article and redo the whole thing"--this was my idea. And even my revision, while it does involve some rewriting, was never supposed to be that.

To wit (and this is in some ways the impetus of this post, as far as externalizing something like this helps me get it done), the parts of the article that need actual writing rather than tweaking are:

* The intro, though this involves mostly moving up and combining the three or four paragraphs about the passage that are currently scattered on pages 6-13.

* What comes immediately after the intro, for obvious reasons. This will involve the insertion of criticism and a greater engagement with Adviser's work on Poe and my author.

* The discussion of the "signs of death" debate needs to be streamlined and tied more closely to the poem and to issues of reading and signification.

* The fiction pieces I'm using along with Poe need to be discussed separately in terms of their relation to ideas, not discussed randomly in the middle of the piece.

* I need to extend the discussion of the sleep / death articulation in the section on knowledge in a way that brings it back to linguistic signification and the signs of death debate.

* The final section on the governing metaphor in the broader Victorian literary context needs to be expanded substantially and brought back to issues of reading at the end.

This all looks like a lot, but it's different from actually rewriting the article. And I should be able to at least tell VIE where things are tomorrow even if it does take me a couple more days to whip things into shape. Though I should probably get on that about now.

----

The Poet sent me an email this morning asking me what I thought of the John Edwards thing and telling me that his wife had been forwarding him the NY Times articles, but that she'd attached a note saying, "It's okay, you know that you have the green light from me for your affairs." (Or something like that.) My general feeling, to the extent that I've given it much thought, is that it annoys me when people are aghast at the idea that adult life and adult relationships are complicated, and I think we'd be a lot better off as a society if we approached relationships with less of a one size fits all mentality and recognized that there are many ways of not conforming to the norm that don't necessarily make them less ethical. I'm speaking here mainly from my experience as being increasingly pegged as "that chick who dates old married dudes" and from feeling like I'm just kind of tired of talking about the whole thing. With that being said, it doesn't seem to me like Edwards was being particularly ethical about the whole thing, and he was also being stupid. Given that he was running for president in the United Fucking States, this would have been a good time, methinks, to keep it in his pants or at least have used protection. It does infuriate me, as a Democrat who has always kind of liked the guy, that he could have gotten the nomination and then had this story break, which would basically have fucked us all over in the country for at *least* another four years--in a way that even the Bill / Monica thing didn't have the power to do.

Anyway. Back to work, I think.

Sometimes I think that the thing I do best is writing about not writing

I'm getting nervous about the Victorian project again. I've frozen up so many times on this project (more than I've recorded here) and I always seem to freeze up in the matter of beginnings and structure. Even since its humble beginnings as an abstract last fall, my idea about this particular section of this particular poem has resisted my attempts to frame and situate it. Somehow, I managed to muddle through and get the abstract selected. Then there was the conference paper--same problem. I ended up writing a lame-ish intro just to get it done and figured that since I was the first paper on the morning's first panel on the last day of the conference, no one would really remember it anyway. And I think I was mostly right in this and was much praised afterwards--except for when Adviser told me later that someone had said to him that things were a little slow at the beginning. Two months ago, when I was writing up a pitch of sorts to VIE--same problem, and this time a fraught conversation with The Professor in West Village Coffeeshop ensued. (He was good at that particular function, when I could get him to actually help me with it rather than tell me to go reread a certain book which works better for him than for me because he never really understood what I was asking.) And so I threw something up.

Now, obviously, since I'm in a revision stage at the moment, based on a number of incredibly generous and thoughtful suggestions from VIE (seriously, dude is *amazing* and I never would have believed a year ago that I would be on a somewhat still starstruck and tentative first-name basis with him....), I have an introduction, right? But I'm not happy with it. Thematically, it privileges one part of my argument over all the others, and it's somewhat embarrassing that the name of the poet I'm discussing doesn't appear until page 6. (Did I mention that, if all goes well, this is appearing in a bicentennial issue of this particularly important journal for said poet?) Not okay. So there's the part where, from a structural standpoint, I need to raise certain issues earlier like, you know, the section I'm discussing. And then there's the fact that the intro that I'm trying to write my way out of was the result of some spectacular time-wasting on Google Books--lots of impressive sleuthing and a surprise encounter with Mrs. Gaskell ensued, but I'm a little bit wary of presenting this to the audience of this journal and people who are actually seasoned Victorianists without doing some archival work that I don't have the time or ability to do. The whole thing was basically a heuristic, and I kind of got seduced enough by it in the last draft to leave it in. But now I'm scared, and the several days that I've spent rereading and making notes on the 33-page original have convinced me that all it does anyway is set me up for some really annoying repetitions about 15 pages in. (Of course, when I mentioned to VIE that I was planning to redo the introduction, he was all like "Don't kill [anecdote] too quickly! It's representative of [idea that is interesting but increasingly beside the main point of my argument." So I'm thinking footnote.)

The larger problem I think is that I love the re-envisioning part of revision. Seriously, I've spent like three days writing ideas on the paper copy of this article (which is 33 pages, though somewhat less on screen after I inputted VIE's edits), going over the criticism that I need to work in, crossing things out, making questions in the margins--almost as if I was looking at someone else's work entirely. And of course that's kind of the case. I am able to distance myself from my work pretty quickly (except, of course, when The Professor was reading it, but we've solved that problem)* and I'm also fairly good at putting off decisions to the future self who will be writing. Thus, it's very easy for me to forget that I'm also going to have to be the one who puts all of these ideas into motion, into writing. (Unrelatedly, I'm sure this is both symptomatic and constitutive of why I'm a fairly good composition teacher.) So Friday's self is not particularly pleased with Wednesday's self--or even my afternoon self who was so thrilled to discover a parallel in theological discourse that would go so well with a discussion about knowledge and language. And, see, the problem that Writing Self has with Revising Self is often that my instincts in revision about what needs to be done are right.

And I have had moments with this project where I have been on top of things, really feeling like I'm engaged in hard core academic work, something really substantial. And it's exciting. But if I'm thinking carefully, these moments aren't the ones where I'm actually writing. Then, I start to get nervous, start reading blogs, drink a beer to loosen up, get tired, wonder if I'm too groggy to think. And it's sometimes hard for me to tell what's going on with myself.

This is actually something I'm trying to make room to examine through sitting zazen--not in a fully purposeful way, of course, since that's not really the point of this kind of meditation, but in the sense that one of the things I've realized even at this super-early stage of the practice of sitting still for 15-20 minutes first thing when I get up is just how fucked up my relationship to time really is. Like I can sometimes be very protective of it to the point of being ungenerous (especially for things like calling my parents) or of adding stress to my own life (I worry about it obsessively when planning trips to the city, going to the gym, and so on). And it was even a concern when I started thinking about taking up this practice, what it would do to my mornings, whether taking the time to do that would slow me down elsewhere. But then I started noticing that even though 15 minutes of sitting often has me wondering what time it is, whether I actually set the timer correctly or not (in my first attempt to sit, this question became so obsessive that I finally got up after like three minutes, verified that I had indeed set the timer correctly and then had to start over), I can still drop 30 minutes like *that* futzing around on the internet--I mean not even blogging, just clicking around, looking for something to read, something to do, hoping for an email that will rouse me for like three seconds and that I will probably put off responding to anyway. This is almost like a lower form of doing nothing...and I want something more.

But even though I've tried to actually be very aware of what I've been doing today and, if not prevent a lot of these driftings away, at least hold them in check, I'm still frustrated. It's very hard to stay in the present moment, to not have my mind racing over everything else I have to do--mainly, planning for my new class because it involves making a course packet that will probably take some time to process. But there's really nothing I can do on that until midweek anyway. Right now I should be grateful to be working with a generous editor at a prestigious journal and getting this opportunity before even writing a prospectus--but these are also all the things that make the beginning part really fraught, that make it a lot easier to scribble notes on the last draft and wonder if I need to go back and reread some more criticism just to be sure. (On that last point, I know I don't. I spent a couple of days doing some very focused reading and I know where my interventions need to be made.)

And now, of course, I'm at that liminal point in my night where I've been working pretty much for 12 hours (with admittedly varying degrees of productivity), where I'm not quite tired enough to sleep, wondering if I should pull an all nighter, worried about the effect it'll have on tomorrow if I do. There is obviously the Greenmarket, which will be a quick and strategic trip, as I have some food at home already and will be more oriented towards portable lunches, since I am racking up the drinking nights for the coming week--all the more reason why this edit needs to be more or less in shape by sometime on Monday. I'm also going to a party for a grad school friend in the evening...hopefully it will be small enough (if Facebook tells the truth) that I will not feel the need to get more drunk than the six pack of beers that I am bringing and talk inappropriately about The Poet and that I will be home early enough to get work done on Sunday. The Poet also said he'd call me tomorrow...he's in Puerto Rico for work (nice life, he has). Things are okay with us again. Minor adjustments.

On a happier note, today really seemed like early fall. I know that's kind of a perverse thing to say--the other way I could put it would be to observe that it was a really good day to work inside, by which I mean inside with the windows open and a lovely breeze with no need for the air conditioner to be on and storms rolling through and none of that humidity that makes thinking such an enormous pain in the ass. It may be a sign of my lack of full socialization into the academic profession that I don't dread August yet. It's obviously busy (though I get a reprieve, since New Teaching College starts a week later than my own institution), but there's a sense of possibility in the air (it is the new year, after all) and something shifts so that I no longer feel like I'm the only person in the world who's working. It's easier to concentrate this way.

Now if only I could produce the brilliant revision portended in the notes to my draft.

Oh, and the vaguely inappropriate dreams about people I know? Still continuing. Thanks, unconscious, for making me feel like a dirty old man instead of simply dating one.


*In the interest of fairness, I should mention that he did send me a text about 10 days ago apologizing for causing some of my recent meditations here. I sent back a reply that said basically, "it's okay, I think I know what my deal was now," and we haven't talked since.

Oh, right, so I have this blog...

Yeah. So. Really haven't been doing much of interest lately. Well, got the Romanticism Project sent off on Friday, so that was good. But it seems like a long time ago and I've already put it out of my head so I can focus on everything else. Also, I did a lot of drinking and goofing off for about 48 hours after that. Mostly fun, but also a long recovery. House/cat-sat for Fabulous Committee Member. Hoping I didn't kill her husband's tomato plant. Threw together the beginnings of the syllabus for the fall class. And went back to the Victorian Project. It needs a big overhaul. I think I can do it, but it's daunting. I'm sort of debating at the moment whether to push myself to start that tonight or just take a (not entirely deserved) night off and go to bed early. (Which I may not be able to do, since I keep having trouble falling asleep at like 2.) I could compromise and read more.

Had a number of dreams about people I knew while housesitting for FCM. Most of these could be described as vaguely to entirely inappropriate. I also had a dream where the premise was that everything of the last year and a half was the dream and I was still with my ex. That one had me shaking a bit when I woke up.

Also while at FCM's apartment, I read Gary Shteyngart's Russian Debutante's Handbook on a whim. It was kind of awesome. I don't read much fiction published after, say, 1900 and almost nothing of the last ten years, beyond some Murakami (and even that might be older) and whatever's in the New Yorker. But maybe I should start. I mean, I do only have one of Trollope's Palliser novels left for my before-bed reading.

I feel like it's been kind of a frustrating week with The Poet. I don't really want to go into much detail right now. I mean, in a way it's just kind of your basic *relationship* stuff...which of course generates its own drama because I get thrown back into worrying about having a relationship. Not the way I was in June, but somewhat similar. Without the need for Xanax. In a way, I'm trying to look at some of this as a blessing in disguise, where circumstances step in to hold things in check a bit right at the point where I get ready to let go a little bit too much. If that makes any sense. I think this is all of a piece with the walking on water thing.

As the fall semester starts, I'm going to be co-blogging (under my real name) at a field-specific blog that one of my colleagues has started. It's listed on my Facebook profile if you're interested.

Sometimes I have these really great moments where I really feel like I'm getting somewhere. Clearly, however, these moments are not currently connected to this blog. Perhaps when I'm not starting down 10,000 words of my own making and wondering how to make them make sense.