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.
11.14.2008
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.
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.
11.12.2008
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.
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.
11.11.2008
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.
* 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.
11.09.2008
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.
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.
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.
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