How it is in the new semester / lunar year

* I was halfway to the subway this morning, walking with the groggy half-formed intention to go to the gym, when I realized I'd forgotten my shoes. Decided that was a sign that I should go to the gym later in the afternoon instead.

* I always forget about the difficulties of building a rapport with a class in the first week. Duh. But I think they will be good. It's the first time I've ever taught two classes in a semester, though when the dust of registration settles, I'll probably have about as many students as I had in my first year at Erstwhile Teaching College. Nevertheless, it's a weird sensation to go through everything twice and I'm sure I'm going to end up both repeating myself and forgetting what I've told which class.

* J. came over on Monday night. It was okay. We were able to explain some things to each other that made the past less uncomfortable. There's still a bruise that hurts if I brush across it the wrong way--denoting something like the state of noncoincidence that I feel like I write about a lot--that neither one of us was in a position, a place, a time, that allowed us to be anything like our best. I'm trying to trust that reading.

* J. was supposed to have come over on Sunday, but he never got in touch with me and I decided I'd rather talk on the phone with the guy I haven't met yet but who keeps sending me the fantastic emails. The phone conversation was similarly pleasant. I wish I didn't know all the things that could go wrong here. And yet: I give myself over to these missives--in part, perhaps, because I feel like he's also doing the same and I rarely ever feel that kind of parity. And the emails are just so damn charming, and it's been awhile since I've had a correspondent who can kind of pull me up like that. Even if it only ends up lasting for ten days, that's something.

* I am trying to trust the present moment. This is something I said to myself at the beginning of last semester, too, but it was knowledge that never reached the level of realization. Trying to get closer to realization this time around--which means, among other things, going to the zendo in today's disgusting weather.

* I keep having dreams about moving and about amateur spectacles. Usually I'm not the one doing the moving, but last night I had a dream where I broke up with The Ex all over again, but it was actually much easier and we lived in a sort of 50s-style midtown apartment complete with twin beds. I wonder if there's some displacement that I'm not dealing with.

* I've started listening to KCRW a lot.

* I fear that I've lost the thread of my dissertation over the last three weeks. This disturbs me. Need to address that. Also need to write a conference paper for March. Augh.

* On the plus side, I'm getting a surprisingly large paycheck from Not-NYU this week. I may try to buy new pants.

I clearly don't do guarded optimism

I've never had a correspondence quite like this one. The rest of Nerve bores me. I listened to his voicemail three times.

And next week at this time, I will either be ridiculously, foolishly happy (with the bittersweet task of once again telling The Poet we should see other people, not long after he was talking about how he'd totally come see me in Duluth if I got a job there)....or I will be banging my head against my desk, failing to focus on prep, and wondering why I once again let myself get textually invested in someone before meeting him in real life.

Mid-January funk

Yeah, so that New Year's resolution lasted about as long as Robert Browning's one about writing a poem a day in 1853, except for the part where he wrote "Childe Roland" on the third day. (I've been doing somewhat better at the weekly project I've undertaken at the place where I blog under my own name.) I think a lot of it was just the reality check I had last weekend when I realized that the start of the spring semester was a lot closer than I thought it was--and this is a really intense prep this time around. (New course, new material, not a topic I know much about.) I spent a lot of last week going back and forth between the library and the adjunct office at Not-NYU so I could use the photocopier, it's been ridiculously cold, and my shoulders are still in a lot of pain. I don't have the huge amounts of emotional angst that I had last January, but I don't feel grounded or productive or engaged--not like I did in the first week, but I wasn't really working efficiently then either. I've done really nothing dissertation-related since the latest draft of my fellowship application; I was going to do another draft today but just never really got around to it. My syllabus is due on Wednesday. It's closer than it was, but there's a lot that's still vague and unread, some holes that still need to be addressed. A bunch of offices have been moving at Not-NYU and I don't know what the tech situation will be this week.

Being on Nerve has been a bust so far, though at least I got to see an interesting play. Have been on two dates that went nowhere and that were clearly going nowhere from the first half hour, though for different reasons. The highlights of last week lay elsewhere. Mostly having to do with The Poet. I sent him an email when I got home last night that basically said, I wish I'd been able to know you at 40. I don't indulge in that feeling often, but I had been feeling this powerfully as my eyes glazed over while reading the profiles of all these dudes who are just that--dudes--not men. I know that some forms of masculinity get a bad rap, but I want to believe that being a douchebag is not the same thing as being a man.

J. seems to want to get back into my life, but I told him I wasn't going to have these text-message exchanges again.

I haven't been as good about going to the gym as I could be. I also seem to have very little lunch-appropriate food in my apartment, so I ate brussels sprouts at like 2:30 and now I'm starving and I still haven't read The Craft of Research and my shoulders and upper arms hurt, and I gave up on zazen today and it's hot in here and I'm going out in 45 minutes. So what I'm probably going to go do now is make a to-do list and marvel that this is the last night of the Bush presidency.

Where frustration and watching Private Practice online while drinking white wine leads:

I rewrote and then reactivated my Nerve profile. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Epigraphical poem of the day

(Presented in full and without much comment because--well--just because, I think. This is the best I can get in words from a day like today and I'm simply trying to read and work so I have one less reason to feel frustrated, thwarted, and alone by the end of the day.)

Robert Browning, "Now" (1889)
Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,--so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present,--condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense--
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me--
Me--sure that despite of time future, time past,--
This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet--
The moment eternal--just that and no more--
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!

--

I kind of just wish I could figure out what I'm doing wrong, why I can't work and focus, while I'm always tired no matter what I do, why certain reversals and changes of plans still bother me and wreak a kind of bodily sensation of being dragged down. I want to break out of all this for more than a couple hours at a time. I'm afraid of it catching up with me and then this entire charade is up.

"The small becomes the dreadful and immense"

Browning, "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium'" (1864)

(It's over 1,500 lines long, so I think this can make up for the fact that yesterday got away from me before I could read a poem, much less read and post. And, hey, I kept my resolution as long as Browning kept his, yo.)

This is one of those ridiculously capacious Victorian poems--not exactly In Memoriam, to be sure, but able to pack in quite a bit of material. Most of which I'm not actually going to talk about here because I need to accomplish something else today other than the Poem of the Day post. Briefly, however: I know that this is supposed to be Browning's great indictment of the spiritualist movement and in particular the medium that had counted Elizabeth Barrett Browning among his disciples. And, yeah, it works at that, with the American connection being a nice twist on it all--the notes in my edition of the poem (Penguin Classics) mention that this is Browning's only dramatic monologue that features an American speaker. Sludge's construction of his credulous, status-obsessed, exploitative patron is also kind of interesting, especially since there are a couple of points in the confession where we seem to veer towards the epistemological concerns of nineteenth-century (British and American) philanthropy--basically, Sludge taunts his patron with the view that, if the patron exposes Sludge as a fraud, then the patron is also exposing himself as someone who has been taken in by a fraud. And so everyone (we get the sense) ends up affirming belief so as not to look stupid. (And they create philanthropic institutions to figure out who's really deserving of charitable aid. The modern equivalent is the ads on the subways that discourage people from giving to panhandlers and recommend charitable contributions as an alternative....)

Definitely something going on with issues of class and epistemology here...something I wasn't expecting, but perhaps there's something in this idea of the "medium" as a stand in for a kind of ascendant middle class who simply gives their customers what they're asking for, regardless of whether they believe it or not....but, see, I'm already not doing a good job here--I felt throughout the poem that I was being kind of twisted around. I know some of this is rhythmic, having to do with the way that Browning is using caesuras and dashes within the blank verse line, but it also has to do with the structure of argumentation, which has the effect, more or less, of shutting down the experimental narrative--for Sludge, you test him and he seems to succeed! There's an interesting discourse here around the idea of what someone can or can't know: what Sludge's observers read as his supernatural powers is really just a symptom of their own dullness in underestimating (misunderestimating?) him: they assume he "can't know" what he knows, when in fact, he can. This seems like a discussion I want to pursue a bit further, especially as Sludge also talks about reading / observing the world in a way that evokes both the figure of the poet in Browning's earlier poem, "How It Strikes a Contemporary" (and, indeed, Sludge twice remarks that his own discourse seems to be falling into poetry) and the opening sections of Foucault's The Order of Things. And I wonder if one of the things that makes the "medium" (at least in this rendering) such a frustrating figure is precisely his resemblance to poets, philosophers, artists--indeed, to anyone else who aims to remake the world in a meaningful way. And I'm not sure that makes a whole lot of sense, but I'm going to leave this for now to allow myself to keep working this one out in my own head. I made many more notes than I'm sharing here, of course.

Possibly not unrelatedly, however, is the sense I've had today of simply needing to be open to things and present to them. It's an okay place to be in for January at least. Must keep working now, though.

A quick poem of the day

Robert Browning, "Apparent Failure" (1864)

Looking at suicides in the Paris morgue--this would have been interesting to have come across when I was in my premature burial phase last summer. The speaker, at least as far as I'm concerned, seems to reflect a kind of obnoxiously narrow view of what might motivate someone to commit suicide, though I realize that may be part of the point of calling the poem "Apparent Failure"--it begins with an epigraph related to the tearing down of the building and the speaker's seemingly quixotic vow to save it.

The poem ends thus:

It's wiser being good than bad;
It's safer being meek than fierce:
It's fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God bless once, prove accursed.

--and it's these kind of moments in Browning (orthodoxy flirting with tautology yet also possibly sincerity) that I find most disturbing.

----

In other news, I joined a gym, worked out for two hours, and got a haircut. Let the 2009 model begin.

"'Tis only a duplicate, / A thing of no value! Take it, I supplicate!"

Robert Browning, "A Likeness" (1864)

Deserves more attention than I'm able to give it at this very moment, but resonates with "Youth and Art" at least to the extent that it expresses a similar situation of investing objects, images, people, with a significance or other meaning that they can't possibly have. Expressing also something the weirdness of a culture where images are commodified, where you could buy a portrait of a complete stranger and hang it on your wall, as in the first stanza:

Some people hang portraits up
In a room where they dine or sup:
And the wife clinks tea-things under,
And her cousin, he stirs his cup,
Asks, 'Who was the lady, I wonder?'
' 'Tis a daub John bought at a sale,'
Quoth the wife, -- looks black as thunder:
'What a shade beneath her nose!
Snuff-taking, I suppose, --'
Adds the cousin, while John's corns ail.

This would be a fun poem for thing theorists, since it contains one of those eminently Victorian lists of objects that make up a bachelor's home...and there's a certain sadness that surrounds the scene. I wonder if this is a sadness somehow particularly linked to the awareness of referential instability--even the poem's title has that built in.

----
I'm having mouse drama in my apartment again. Basically, the odor that I thought was coming from the stinky cheese I'd saved from Christmas Eve lingered long after the cheese had been disposed of, and around 3:00 yesterday afternoon I had the sudden horrible thought of the glue trap in the kitchen. Fortunately, the building's handyman was coming up to look at something else, so I asked him to check that, too. Apparently, there were like four dead mice on the thing. Ew. Nevertheless, my apartment began to smell better immediately.

The drama didn't end, though. As I was relating the story on the phone to my father later, I saw--from the other end of my apartment--yet another mouse out for a stroll on my kitchen floor. This displeases me, and mice are one of the few things that I remain incredibly squeamish about--in any form.

Fortunately, the handyman should be coming back today to repair the hole in my shower and patch the one under my sink where I think the mice are coming in. And hopefully that will defer the drama a bit longer. At least I'm coping better this time than I did in May.

I'm also really going to try to do some actual work today. I probably didn't need to watch Private School on Hulu last night, did I?

Things that are not the poem of the day

Yesterday (Jan. 2) was an anniversary of sorts, being one year to the day when I first went out with The Poet. We met for a drink at the KGB Bar and accidentally found ourselves at a poetry reading that seemed to be dominated exclusively by awkward, skinny dudes in their early 20s reading mediocre poems about Nebraska and Times Square. And at one point, The Poet leaned over to me and said, "It's awful to be a young man. If one has to be young, one should be a woman." I still think this is kind of awesome and hilarious.

I was not, I should say, treating this as a date at the time. I was just coming off the several months of drama that had been my online dating experience, I'd done enough digging to know more or less how old he was and feel like that was possibly too old, and I was still very committed to not sleeping with anyone in my department (having previously reneged on my resolution not to sleep with anyone who went to my school at all). The vicious cold that I'd brought back from MLA with me was just insurance. We went to dinner after the poetry reading at a restaurant that we've been to many times since, though it was located for me in what was, at the time, something of a Bermuda Triangle of trauma. (My route from the subway to the bar had taken me, unexpectedly, past the hotel bar where E. broke up with me--a bar which later came into tabloid headlines as a major hangout for Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson. I can, fortunately, joke about that now, too.) I remember not being able to taste the lasagna because I was so congested. And I was kind of surprised when he emailed me later in January. I hadn't been sparkling, nor had I wanted to be, necessarily.

Of course, now it's a year later, and he's one of the best things that happened to me on a personal level in 2008.

I spent January 2, 2009, tearing up Chinatown with one of my favorite people ever who is also an avid reader of this blog so I don't really need to go into details except to reiterate that *she's* the one who should be writing a novel, not me.

I'm still getting stuck in these really slow and unproductive mornings. I guess it's kind of forgivable since it was Saturday and I was skipping the Greenmarket in order to attend to the food I already had in my freezer. But I'm still letting all this time slip away. It was telling that when I got home from the bank with the half of my rent that I pay in cash, the first thing I did before even taking off my coat was sit down at the laptop and see what was going on on Facebook. These are the kinds of things I need to be more aware of. This didn't, of course, stop me from watching four episodes of Arrested Development (all of which I have seen before) during a two-hour "lunch." Augh. Am trying to slowly cross some things off the old to-do list this evening.

Robert Browning, "Youth and Art" (1864)

"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, --been happy."

A young man and a young woman live in the same street (probably in a neighborhood a bit like my own) as they pursue their artistic vocations--his as a sculptor, hers as a singer. She's telling the story: "You wanted a piece of marble, / I needed a music master" and "For air we looked out on the tiles, / For fun watched each other's windows." An unspoken intimacy develops, though neither one ever talks to the other. Yet even in spring, the time of year when birds of a feather flock together, as it were (and I take the image from the poem itself), they never really intersect, no sign is given, no connection made--as if genre and gender are impassible, allowing only these sorts of passive-aggressive performances that have her singing "in a playful mood" to the "foreign fellow" of a piano tuner as revenge for the models she sees going into his studio, "some minx / Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles."

It should have been different, of course. They should have gotten together, swept each other away to heights of artistic achievement. But our young artists aren't "rash" and they grow up and sell out instead. He becomes academically respectable, she marries "a rich old lord," their old rivals still stand unchallenged:

And nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever:
This could but have happened once,
And we missed it, lost it forever.

This one strikes quite close to home, particularly in the stubborn suggestion that the intimacy might be all in Kate's head as she recalls this time in her life, a time whose poverty is marked not only by the images of picking at crusts but also by the way in which intimacy is fashioned from absences, from the missed possibilities of encounter in a shabby street, and from a kind of romanticization of the camaraderie of struggling artists in the city. How easy it is, in these kinds of situations, to begin to look out of your window as people go about their lives across the street in their own homes and to think that maybe they're looking back and thinking as hard about you as you are about them. (And it's not just starving young artists in the city--isn't this one of the fantasies that gets played out in American Beauty? and other movies, I'm sure.)

The text of the poem is here.

Bonus epigraph, for something

Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

--Browning, "Two in the Campagna," stanzas XI and XII

A poem a day and other more specific resolutions

In spite of my decision to do rather than to resolve that I outlined last night (right before the awful bass started up again, prompting me to make two trips upstairs to have my knocking on the door ignored, and nearly necessitating another night of sleeping on the floor of my living room and much angst), I am also thinking in terms of some more specific ideas for supporting my overall intention to live for myself. Many of these take the form of more traditional "resolutions"--for instance, I'm joining the gym my friend Caroline goes to on Monday and we are going to be responsible for helping each other get back in the habit of going. (Personally, I think that once the semester starts I'll be shooting for a minimum of twice a week, since it's not somewhere I can walk to.) I let my membership at the Erstwhile Teaching College gym lapse once I wasn't teaching there and no longer could keep my workout clothes in my desk--plus, it became really out of the way when I started teaching at Not-NYU, which doesn't have its own gym facilities. And I do feel better when I'm going to the gym at least occasionally. There are also things about keeping my apartment in better shape, buying a few things that will improve my life in concrete and necessary ways (one of those alarm clocks that gradually makes the room brighter, an external hard drive for my Mac, an electrostatic mop so I don't have to keep buying Swiffer sheets, and so on).

One thing I just thought of this morning, however. One of the more famous stories about Robert Browning is that he made a New Year's resolution to write a poem a day in 1853. He kept this resolution for roughly three days, but one of the poems that came out of it was "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. I don't write poetry, but I do--of course--write about poetry. I tell people that I got into the field I did because it made me happy; that's something I feel like I've lost sight of over the past couple of years as I've started to go pro, as it were, with the exception of a few emotionally fraught late-night recitations of Maud and "Dejection: An Ode." So my version of Browning's resolution is this: I will read a new poem every day in 2009, starting now. Obviously, many of these will be poems related in some way to my work, and there will be days when I no doubt will read many new poems for reasons other than this resolution. But I want this to be somewhat separate, even as I leave room for it to serve multiple ends. The only reason for doing this is to stay in touch with the reasons why I'm doing this in the first place, beyond the specific instrumentality of the dissertation. I'm also going to try to record this here--even if it's just noting the name of the poem and a brief description, as I'm probably going to do today. Probably the quickest way to fail in this would be to expect to have brilliant close readings about everything.

I'm starting with a Browning poem, because I'm reading a lot of Browning these days anyway. ("A Death in the Desert" was incredibly haunting--possibly in ways that will make me rethink the basic chapter proposal.) And so:

Robert Browning, "Confessions" (1864--originally in Dramatis Personae). Short poem of 36 lines in nine stanzas...speaker is a man on his deathbed talking to his confessor, remembering the world not as a "vale of tears" but recalling instead trysts with a girl in his youth, evading the eyes of everyone in her house to meet her in the lane...joys of evasion, perhaps? (The dying man as a recurring scene for RB--of course there's "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's" and "A Death in the Desert" but also an image in "Childe Roland"....) Most interesting, perhaps is the speaker's use of the line of "physic bottles" on a nearby table to evoke the "suburb lane"--mentioning the Ether bottle twice, the second time in a way that somewhat collapses the referential levels: "As she left the attic, there, / By the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,' / And stole from stair to stair."

Facing Janus: Resolving to Resolve / Praying to be able to execute (and apologies to STC)

The lake outside the cabin was frozen over, and I walked a bit away from the group constituted by my father, brother, sister-in-law, and their dog, to look at the stars at midnight. You could see the milky way above us and the stars glistening with a kind of diamond clarity intensified by the still cold cloudless winter night. Looking north up Long Lake, standing on the water beyond what would be the dock edge in summer, we could see the northern lights glowing and changing in the distance, impossible, ultimately, to confuse with the yellow domes of light pollution from Three Lakes and Eagle River.

It was a kind of personal sublime, made more searing by the fact that opportunities like this ended up being rare last week--my brother and his wife and dog weren't part of the package when we made these plans, which I had seen all along as a chance to spend time with just my parents, to relax at the end of a year has been all about my brother and his wife, to recover from some of the abyssal loneliness and isolation and general invisibility that was especially present this past year. (Not that 2008 had the soul-sucking drama of 2007; it was more just a general slog, walking uphill, trying not to trip over every damn thing.) The kind of abyss that swallowed me whole a couple days before Christmas, especially on the day I turned in all my grades but everyone was already out of town and it was clear I wasn't going to get to see The Poet again any time soon (we still don't know when we'll be able to even get a drink), and I was so tired and already stressed out about New Year's and wanted to celebrate but instead I cried on the phone with The Poet about nothing in particular then drank a bottle of wine and watched some movies on Hulu. The night before I realized I was going to have to take a half-Xanax when my heart started racing as soon as I tried to go to bed and I had the sensation of falling through the ice on the lake and no one noticing in time. And all that was before I found out about the change in the Wisconsin plans--that I didn't know until my parents picked me up from the airport on Christmas Day and I made the mistake of trying to repress the panic and the disappointment--coming out first as anger after the family party, then as something more akin to a nervous breakdown. And my mother did apologize for not telling me sooner and for allowing them to come in the first place. My father thanked me for being transparent about my feelings (the trigger of the nervous breakdown was something that seems too minor on the surface to even go into yet isn't, for other complicated reasons) which is actually kind of a big step for us all because a year ago I probably would not have pushed back on the trigger issue and it would have poisoned the entire trip in such a way that I wouldn't ever have been able to go back to the cabin. Which was part of what compounded the panic attack. I didn't want to break down like I did (but it wasn't controllable in the end), but in a weird way it's a step forward to be able to do so.

And it worked out okay in the end, more or less, except that I didn't get as much of the quiet time that I was planning for--my brother and SIL just kind of hung around all the time and the dog was there and people were always talking so I didn't get a really decent period of quiet zazen until a day when I stayed in for a half hour while everyone else was playing outside in the snow with the dog. Though I suppose there's something to be said for staying in the room, as it were (it was too cold in the bedrooms to really hang there by myself anyway), for the amount of laughter generated by our attempts to remind ourselves how to play Clue (and for my ability to win three of the four games while drunk), and for the fact that we probably wouldn't have gotten outside as much as we did if it hadn't been for them.

(And I should interject that I do genuinely enjoy hanging out with my extended family and--most of the time--my parents, so I'm not one of those people for whom the holidays are just an exercise in barely-concealed contempt and drinking too much and feeling shamed for who you are. Highlights of this Christmas at my aunt's house included the success of my pointy red shoes and a long conversation about philosophy, Eastern religion, and literature with a cousin of mine who is also in a PhD program and who is trying to move back to New York. Also catching up with various aunts about my crazy personal life--not an enormous amount of detail, of course, but still--and the opportunity just to help out, hang out, and laugh.)

But to return to the lake, to midnight, the snow around my shins, the diamondedge stars, and the northern lights silhouetted against black outlines of pine trees. It touched something in my soul, something that I hadn't known was there in such a piercing way before. Call it, perhaps, a specifically northern sublime, bringing together any number of feelings I have when I am there in any season--catching the sunlight over the lake at a certain angle, the sunrise over the trees in the morning, coming around a bend in the road or over a hill that reveals a kind of absolute wildness, isolation--even when there are vacation homes all around. (And some of these have the same effect as well.) The feeling of being in Rhinelander at dusk the winter I lived up there seven years ago, over on the edge of town where all the shitty big box stores are, yet noticing the trees towering above the strip malls, and the prairie edge sunsets throwing swaths of color over the sky. All of this is in my soul. And I realized that any man I truly love will need to be able to look at the northern lights with me and understand this without my having to explain it at all.

It's always hard to come home. At least Chicago functioned as a buffer between two incompatible worlds--it's brutal to wake up in the cabin and go to sleep the same night in Brooklyn, but the traveling itself wasn't easy. And it's only been in the last couple of hours tonight that the relentless assault of bass from the apartment upstairs (and I mean it when I use the word "assault"--I ended up sleeping for part of the morning on the floor of my living room just to get away from it) has finally let up. For how long I don't know. The assault started on Christmas morning about an hour before I left for the airport and was in full swing when I came home yesterday afternoon. Something similar happened last year at this time, so I hope that it's seasonal. Nevertheless, I'm on edge a bit, even as I write this now. (Much in the same way as I was when I first moved here and spent two and a half months worried that I'd made a horrible decision.)

And so I want to return again to the night on the lake. I'm not going to think in terms of "resolutions" for this new year--rather, in terms of decisions--gathering as much performative force as I can from the speech act. My decision for 2009, most simply, is this: to live for myself. This isn't to say that I want to live selfishly--quite the opposite, in fact. I want to break away from the D.I.Y. Medsua thing I have going on all too often, where I become paralyzed by the spectacle of my own suffering. Neither is the idea to live for myself indulgently--especially when so many of those very indulgences backfire and sap my energy or worse. What I mean is something like taking control, but mostly in the sense of cultivating intentionality and presence, not allowing myself to waste time, and working on making the kinds of decisions that are best for me--rather than continuing with the narrative of things just kind of happening to me, of being pulled around, helpless, invisible. Perhaps, too, this is a way of saying that I will begin treating myself the way I would like other people to treat me. I want to live generously, to communicate energy to myself and others.

Some of this is prompted by the simple recognition that a lot of the next year (and the year after) is going to be taken up by things I do for others in the form of obligations such as those related to teaching and keeping friendships and also by a number of professional hoops that are going to involve a certain amount of subjective violence, inconvenience, long nights, and writing. I will need to write the bulk of my dissertation this coming year. I will be applying for jobs in the fall. I will (hopefully) be continuing to teach at Not-NYU, which likely means that I will also be continuing to teach 8 a.m. classes. And none of my other problems are going to magically disappear because it's 2009. It's easy for me to see how this could shape up to be a kind of miserable, sloggy, lonely, frustrating year. But I don't want it to be. For one thing--it's not sustainable. It just won't work if I'm exhausted all the time, if I can't find some joy in something related to my dissertation. And it won't work if I'm not working because I'm too tired, or too depressed, or whatever. My time management has gone to shit lately, but I don't think it's just a matter of staying off of Facebook. Something else has to happen, a decision to live better all around, to rethink the things that I do, to recapture one of the best things E ever did for me, which was give me a reason to work all the time so that I could be ready to do crazy things spontaneously. I want to regain some of that sense of flexibility where it doesn't seem like just fucking around when I should be doing something else.

Speaking of what happens when I should be doing something else. What both zazen and teaching have in common is the fact that when I am doing either one of those things, I am fully present to that activity, time has been blocked out for it that isn't invaded by other things I could be doing--it isn't even a question. (This is more true, of course, about sitting zazen with other people, though I try to take the same attitude at home. One of my great accomplishments of 2008 was adopting a meditation practice and sitting for fifteen minutes every morning I taught.) So much of my life isn't like that. It's a symptom of massively wasted time, of continually missed opportunities. So, in living for myself, one of the central ideas is that I will try to spread the sense of presence and energy from teaching and zazen to other parts of my life--to make decisions that allow me to feel as good about the other things that I do, as present, as intentional. It means valuing the time that I have alone to think / read / write / meditate regardless of when it comes and under what circumstances. (Ergo, obsessing less about boys, and all of that.) And also being a bit more aware of what I'm doing in terms of eating and drinking. One of my friends announced today (from my futon, where she'd spent the night) that she was going to quit drinking entirely in 2009--I don't want to go that far, but I also want to make sure drinking remains fun and doesn't consistently result in days (like this one) lost to hangovers. What's encouraging here is only that I began 2008 with a cold and didn't have many of those this past year; hopefully, beginning 2009 with a hangover means that they will be similarly rare. Hopefully.

And of course, I'm likely undervaluing the very good things of 2008 as well. I did accomplish an enormous amount professionally, though I'm probably hyperaware of the costs. I got what is, in the end, a fantastic adjunct job as adjunct jobs go. I have grown a lot by being with The Poet in whatever form. I have more or less succeeded in getting The Ex out of my life and resisting his attempts to continue to influence me. I am fully over The Professor. As I mentioned above, I began a meditation practice, and even though the changes it has caused have been subtle, they are noticeable to me and they're important. I am slowly turning my apartment into a livable home. I have closer female friends than I've had in awhile, even though they aren't the same ones I was in the process of losing a year ago. There's not so much hugely catastrophic drama going on. I no longer feel the need to tell perfect strangers fucked-up stories about myself. I'm writing a dissertation, whether I think I'm ready or not. I have prowled the Brooklyn Museum by myself and walked to the southern end of Prospect Park. I didn't have no one-night stands, but I had fewer one night stands than I did in 2007.

And so. This is an unwieldy post, but I'm mostly writing for myself right now. And that's something I'll be thinking about, too, how to get back to a more fluid and performative writing that's actually useful in my own life.

For now, though, I think sleep (if my bedroom's not vibrating) will be the good plan.