Solstice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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