Saturday thoughts

"For it is with this world that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned." -- Browning, "Essay on Shelley"

This might be the year we all become famous. So far, I've had two friends' shows get fantastic (and well-deserved) reviews in the NY Times Arts section. Another friend is in what's apparently a major off-Broadway revival of a classic play. Yet another is having a play he staged several years ago (and which, at the time, I thought was one of the very best things I'd ever seen) mounted at another major off-Broadway theater. And, though it's not quite as big or artistic as these, I'm about to have my first article published in a major (in my field) academic journal.

Yes, this might be our year, as the world begins to collapse, no longer just the crumbling around the edges that we noticed for years before. (What happened in my hometown just over a year ago now becomes readable as a kind of harbinger, a very particular kind of despair--half-triumphed-over in the election of Obama, but also lingering unredressed.) It's a strange precipice. At times it feels sublime, but then again everything does if you stare at it long enough to let your eyes unfocus. Which I almost have to do when I stare at the parts of the NY Times that are not the Arts section, when I think about the post-May future, trying to inhabit moments of wall staring meditation. I've been doing these intensive cardio workouts that have me at the gym for nearly an hour and a half. Yesterday it was treadmill / elliptical / then back on the treadmill. I don't even read magazines there anymore; it slows me down. Sometimes podcasts. San Francisco Zen Center and The Moth. Or music, but so much of what is on my iPod isn't particularly helpful for keeping up the pace. I'm not sure why I started doing this, but I do know that I was furious when I ended up not being able to do it on Thursday--going to the gym only to find all the machines taken, waiting around until they were supposed to be free and having my face lied to instead--I snapped like I haven't snapped in months--a kind of sputtering and shaking and all this stored energy of pulling myself through the exhaustion of a teaching week comes out on the Nevins Street subway platform and I hold myself to myself and try to make it home but everything's slow and it's one of those nights where I hate Brooklyn or more specifically being poor in it, though eventually some beer (Karma Ale, natch) and spontaneous company pulls me back up--that and a phone call from D., as he drove home from some show in East Williamsburg.

My days are busy but more or less stable otherwise; it's my dreams that are ominous. I had hoped that the cardio workouts would help me sleep better, especially when I want to go to bed earlier before days I teach. I thought I would crash at 10:30 on Wednesday night and instead am up using the bathroom at 11:15, 11:25, and 12:04. I wake up at 5:00 on Thursday morning after an intensely realistic dream in which I lose my keys and engage in an extended and somewhat violent self-recrimination. This morning, only half sleeping with D. in the bed next to me, I start yelling at security guards at some airport-like checkpoint for entry into not-NYU, complete with metal detectors and no one will tell me where to go....this afternoon, napping on the futon in the sun, I am staring at my torn-up face in the mirror and I don't know what happened. I am afraid that this is anticipatory deja-vu; otherwise I am happy and solid and working (kind of--I've been tired today and just trying to get my bearings again after the intellectual sinkhole of Tuesday-Thursday and living for others) and it's getting lighter earlier and staying lighter later and I don't understand why I sleeping to scream.

We both have trouble sleeping, and these problems have been intensified the three times we've shared a bed. I worried a lot, in that first year after breaking up with The Ex, that I was going to lose the ability to share a bed with someone else. Even now when I'm alone I tend to sleep only on one side of the bed, nearly falling off the edge. And it's true that I don't sleep especially well with other people. Of course you're only going to sleep fitfully on a one-night stand, and it occurred to me today that, up until last Thursday when I went to D.'s house, the last time I'd been in someone else's bed when it wasn't a one-night stand was with K., right before I moved to my current apartment. I never slept particularly well with E (the lawyer) or The Poet. D. is actually somewhat easier, at least to the extent that he doesn't snore and I can at least doze a bit when I'm really close to him, which tends not to be the case with a lot of other people. And the thing is--I like having him here, I like being with him at his place. Even the exhaustion has its sweetness, though of course this is of somewhat limited utility. He's possibly the first person I've wanted to sleep well with me.

I watch him move, I watch him interact with other people. Some of it I understand. This kind of cultivated unpredictability--I start to wonder where it comes from. I admire it. I wish my mind could move that quickly, could make these kinds of jumps. There's a softness to it. It's not the Shelley-esque assault that The Ex used to perpetrate--he's never out to annihilate the other person. But there's so much about it that seems opaque to me right now. I suppose this is okay. It's hard to remember that we've known each other for basically three weeks. Four dates, three nights spent together, one brunch and a walk in Prospect Park. If we make it to Spring Break, I'll turn off my Nerve profile. I want to believe that we could work and write together--not collaboratively, necessarily, but simply that we could find each other's company in a shared space helpful as we work on our very different projects. Could we hope to work in the same room if we can't sleep well in the same bed? I don't know. In some ways he seems incredibly young (he's about six years older than I am, which makes him younger than The Ex and there's no point in talking about either K. or The Poet in this context)--this is both exhilarating and terrifying. At some point I will have to tell him the things I haven't yet.

I want to write a story or a poem about using numbers as metaphors.

My brother sent me a bunch of drunk text messages from the Mardi Gras parade in St Louis. In retrospect, I realize he was doing this because my SIL probably didn't want to hear it while she was at home and pregnant and certainly my mother's not interested. I hadn't realized it was that time of year. No doubt my Catholic grandparents would spin in their graves to know that their Protestant granddaughter would be going to a Buddhist zendo on Ash Wednesday. But one thing that practice has allowed me to do as of late is appreciate certain kinds of Christian rituals from a slightly more formal standpoint and I find the idea of Lent to be kind of compelling right now. Not so much in the renunciation department. While I've certainly cut back on drinking lately, I'm not interested in a vow of sobriety, nor am I interested in becoming vegan for a month or giving up caffeine. (These being the sort of stupid and decontextualized ways that we talked about Lent in the church youth group.) What I find appealing is the intention to clear a space in your life to allow something else to come in--something as unexpected, perhaps, as the resurrection itself. Spring cleaning in the being-human guest house, to distend a metaphor from Rumi. It's possible that I've started that work a bit early this year; I want to take the opportunity in the next couple of days to form that work into a more deliberate intention. And all of this seeming especially powerful since the period of Lent (if we're meteorologically fortunate, of course) takes us from winter into spring--a sense that this space may potentially get easier to maintain as each day passes, that we can look back over this period of weeks and see a progressive loosening of tensions, relaxing of preconceived notions, letting go of distractions.

Something like that is my prayer for the next few days.