[...]

I would say that the weather makes me lonely. But I got lonely on Saturday and Sunday, too.

The turn that April's cruelty and general weirdness (particularly in both my academic worlds) have taken is to leave me feeling incredibly fragile, yet still, somehow, unable to tear myself away from, say, Nerve, where I still see D. in the "who's online now!" section almost every day (why can't I block just one person...they should give you that, I think, as long as you don't waste it on garden variety awkwardness, as long as you save it for the person who kind of broke your heart even if you didn't know him that well) and which generates mostly time-consuming dates that don't make me feel better even when they seem to be okay. I really liked the guy from Friday, but he hasn't gotten in touch with me and I'm always the one who seems to like the other person more than they like me, so I don't email him. I spent Thursday night with the Australian and now nothing. I mean, I know he had a friend in town over the weekend and all, but a quick email to make plans, maybe? I sent him a couple sentences last night but it didn't go anywhere. And I'm sure that if I emailed him right at this moment saying I wanted to sleep over tonight, that would happen. But I don't want to have to send that email; it feels like a ploy.

Oh, and my old LiveJournal account got hacked and deleted. Just some other fun thing to make me feel insecure. Seriously, all of this is like being hollowed out, or slashed to shreds with a million papercuts.

And all of this keeps ripping me apart, but I can't stop doing it; it's hard to stay off the internet and I somehow have to get this article rewrite done at an incredibly busy time of the semester and I'm scared and my friends are annoying me but it's not their fault and I wish something here didn't have to be this damn hard.

But of course sometimes it's fine and validating and all that and so much stupid hope. I probably have to break the Nerve habit again soon, though. Two weeks seems to be my limit.

I'd be lying to say that your band sucks, but I am an academic rockstar

Deciding that this will be the week of some kind of rebound--not that I'm going to go trolling specifically to get laid or anything, but only that I will be focusing on awesomeness and focus. Admittedly, it hasn't started out quite like that. Didn't go to the gym as planned this morning because I was in a lot of pain, and I've been futzing on the internet for most of the weekend, only barely getting the teaching stuff done. Nevertheless. The zendo is now open on Mondays for midday meditation. I owe far less money in taxes than I'd been assuming I did. The decision about St Louis is no longer contingent on my mental state on May 1: at this point, I'm prepared to make whatever move makes sense based on the funding situation. Writing fellowship, I stay. Dissertation year fellowship or no funding, I go. Simple as that. I mean, not simple. But less fraught than it's been.

And I'm not saying it wasn't incredibly exciting to wake up yesterday morning to an email from the scholar who has perhaps been most influential on my work over the last five years--inviting me to contribute a longer version of my MLA paper (which was accepted, but the panel still has to be) to an essay collection. The collection proposal is uncannily similar to my dissertation proposal, and it dawned on me that--against all odds and without setting out to do this explicitly--I may have just actually read the field correctly.

I had my recurring dream about K. last night, the one where his wife is always finding me or in danger of finding me. It's weird to be having these dreams now: we haven't even been alone in a room together since last September, and it's been almost two years since everything happened. I saw him last about six weeks ago at school and have had this dream twice in the last three. Strange.

D. did finally break up with me on Friday, which I can't remember if I mentioned here or not. There were some things about it all that were shady, especially the part where I saw him online on Nerve last night. But I've archived his email, poured out the half and half, thrown away the hot chocolate, and that's all there was. I still can't quite walk past the Brooklyn Museum (managed to avoid it in everywhere I went this weekend), and sometimes I hear one of his band's songs in my head. But all the knifethrusts went on last week; Friday was just the last stage in it all. It's something that'll make me sad in the back of my mind for a long time, but I got a kickass conference paper out of it, I rediscovered something about myself as an artistic writer (though I always work better with an audience, alas), and it all provided the occasion (albeit painful) for rethinking several of my personal narratives--including the one about how I *have* to write my dissertation in New York.

And so. On with the rainy day.

Friday miscellany

I saw David Cromer's production of Our Town with Caroline last night. We sat on the stage since the tickets were $40 cheaper or so and--wow. I only have fuzzy memories from seeing this performed a couple times in my childhood (and from the episode of My So-Called Life where Rayanne tries out for Emily's part), so it was in many ways a mostly new play to me. The house really is set up for a kind of proximity--I was going to say intimacy, but I think that would be the wrong word--not only with the actors but with the rest of the audience, which I think is an incredibly interesting choice. And it did take me back a little bit to some theatre experiences I stumbled into when I was much younger, like the night I saw The Caretaker at the St Mark's Theatre--probably the first time I'd been even remotely close to the action of a play and all of the sudden it's taking place three feet away. Our Town really is an incredibly meditative play. The last twenty minutes seemed to accomplish everything that Synecdoche, New York was struggling with over two hours to achieve, and it did so much more elegantly, without the elaborate machinery that was Caden Cotard's self-centeredness--the point being here that even good people are blind. (And in this sense we care in a way that we don't in the film.) Had I not been right on stage, I probably would have started crying--the only other time this happens to me is at the end of the Axis Company's Hospital series.

The play was also quite a wonderful illustration of Coleridgean suspension of disbelief at its best--particularly the part about transferring from these shadows of the imagination a human interest and a semblance of truth--but in a way that, I think, complicates any sort of "live for today" message at the end. It's possible that the blindness isn't a tragedy after all.

Other things. It's my last weekday of spring break. I've accomplished very little and it's snowing. I need to go to the gym, sit zazen, put in several hours with Browning and get my life back in order. Was in Charlotte visiting family last week at this time; the weather was awful and my aunt got the stomach flu (which I am still worried about coming down with, since it seems to appear about a week after you think you should have gotten it) so there was a lot of sitting around, but in many ways this was perfectly fine. I didn't really have to think. Just thought that by the time I got back to New York I'd be ready to do that again. Not so much. Not sure where these days have gone...possibly too much fuzting and a bit too much drinking on Wednesday. By tomorrow I'm going to have to switch back into teacher mode and prep virtually the entire rest of the semester. Of course I am not looking forward to this.

On the other hand, I'm finally (mostly) over the cold I had for two weeks and I have my voice back. I'm also not as miserably run down as I was during the first two weeks of March. So this is good. The downside is that while I was sick and not going to the gym for 2 1/2 weeks, I ate a lot of takeout and then just ate a lot of food in general in North Carolina. So I'm feeling pudgy. Disappointing, too, because I lost like three pounds in February and have certainly gained that back. And I've certainly not been doing well with food this week. The whole thing is annoying, but I'll go to the gym after this and I should be able to get in at least four days next week. I need to keep up confidence here, just saying.

Saw The Poet on Tuesday for the first time in two months. Mixed feelings. Don't really want to be back with him, but very much want to be his friend. I'm not sure he has friends like me and it became clear over the course of our conversation that he is, in many ways, extremely isolated right now. And he would switch back and forth between these crazy future plans of how we're going to end up together in a couple of years living in some cute place in Hoboken or something and talking about our relationship in this weirdly extreme past tense. I have a feeling that there's a lot of this that's being displaced from other things going on in his life. I hope I can continue to be there for him in some way, though.

Saw D. the Tuesday before I left. He drove out to Brooklyn on one of those nights where I had more or less lost my voice. Did my best to function in the fog. We had a really great phone conversation on Wednesday, and I haven't heard from him since so now I'm all nervous again. It's the nervousness of a relationship (such as it is) that's pretty much non-fucked up and I do tend to worry that I'm nothing without the sense of the sordid. But I also worry about seeming to put demands and expectations on him--which I'm not, except that I really do like seeing people I'm sleeping with at least once a week. Which has been difficult for us lately for various reasons. Also, I ended up talking a lot with C. about her stuff last night which meant that I kind of unconsciously started obsessing over D., which is never good. But I do know that if I continue to not hear from him today, it's going to be distracting.

Had my recurring dream about K. earlier in the week. Still, everything's less wretched than last March. And with that, I should probably get ready for the gym so that eventually I can make spring break mean something productive. It's never too late to hit the ground running--right?

(By the way, I signed up for a Twitter account, for no apparent reason. It's my firstname/middle initial/lastname.

On the pleasures of the textual exchange

I don't have time to go into this right now--I need to get to Not-NYU well before 5:00 to make copies of a handout I have not yet created, et cetera--but I wanted to note this nonetheless...

I know there was that big article last year about the whole ritual of looking over the bookcase of a potential lover. Fine, of course. I've been judging people on the merits of their books my entire sexual life. However, at least for a certain type of people, there's another, more intimate exchange: the part where you begin to exchange texts that you've written--ones that are not explicitly addressed to the other person, but examples of whatever you're working on, whether it's creative, critical, or some combination of the two. There are a couple ways this can be presented, depending on what kind of feedback you want. There's the already-written move, where you send a lover something you've published in one form or another, looking more for a reaction or discussion than anything else. Many times this is posturing (especially when two academics are involved), but possibly not in every case.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is the work in progress submitted--at least ostensibly--to the lover and looking for feedback and critique. This is the more fraught situation, of course, for both parties, but particularly for the lover (or, I should say, potential lover) who is asked to respond. First, you have to determine whether they really want feedback, how serious it should be, how much criticism they can take. And then, of course, it's your critical skills on display....

Anyway. You know where I'm going with this. There's an intimacy in all this that really goes beyond the email thing, and I know that I'm probably (or was probably) more likely to sleep with someone than solicit his feedback on something. I'm beginning to think that this marks a specific milestone--at least in a certain kind of relationship--this moment of editing, or of textual exchange more generally. It was pretty much the hottest thing that The Professor and I ever did with each other, especially when we were both still dating other people. The Poet sent me all kinds of things he wrote, almost right away, too, and as our relationship went on he'd have me read things for school. Every now and then I'd reciprocate, but more in terms of "oh, this is what I did today."

And now, D's doing it. I spent the first part of my morning ripping up and restructuring something he sent me, this brilliant and funny hybrid piece. We talked about what he wanted me to do and I did it, with more confidence than I usually have at this point in a pseudo-relationship...mostly moving things around, leaving the sentences for him to play with. And it feels momentous, in a certain way...he's also sent me a poem and a song, but I don't read that kind of thing as critically. (It's a policy I have with the work of my friends in general.) It's a kind of intimacy that helps make up for not having seen him in awhile. (Though hopefully that changes tomorrow night.)

In return, I sent him a copy of the conference paper I gave on Friday. Obviously, not an entirely equal exchange, but one that I think helps make us even, where I'm exposing myself in the midst of What I Do and How I Think.

Also, I do sort of loosely follow his occasional online writing, mostly on sites attached to his band. It's kind of fun to see the things we've talked about (too crazy and too specific to discuss here) get transmuted into his prose; there's an intimacy in that too and I may be slowly figuring out how he thinks.

-----

In completely unrelated news, I haven't taken a shower today because there is a large roach in it. I'm pretty sure it's dead (hello, morning's epistemological debate!) but I'm still traumatized from having come face to face with it near my desk at 1:00 this morning. It's too big to vacuum and I really don't want to look at it. I'm out of paper towels. I'm wondering whether it will go down the drain if I poke it with a long stick. Augh.

Also, in spite of my best intentions, no gym today. Partially a time crunch with prep, but also continuing congestion and rundownness; would rather be reasonably healthy to teach and see D. tomorrow. And I realized that I'm not sure I'd really want to use a treadmill after myself today.

Not sure I'm doing it right

Well, okay, no. There's one thing that I know went right this week--I gave the best fucking conference paper of my life on Friday morning. It's not something that would have come about any other way than how it did, and every time I've thought back to it since I'm kind of amazed by it. Just in terms of the convergence of events, how I would never have had enough confidence to give this paper in this way at anywhere other than a grad conference at my own institution--but also, I think, in the sense that I both wrote the paper the day before the conference (in a particularly dismal/socked in exhausted six hours in the department lounge after a dismal and frustrating day of teaching) and that I had been writing it for the last two and a half years, more or less. The frame--autobiographical but not marked as such--was something I decided on the week before, a risk undertaken precisely because of the situation of the conference and feeling like I had nothing to lose. It was related to something I told D. before we met but also to a set of experiences I had last summer and an idea I blog about quite frequently. It turned out to be a disturbingly successful metaphor and frame. (I only wish K could have been there. We'd run into each other in the cafeteria a few days before and managed to have a nice conversation about a number of things, including this idea...but no such luck.)

The last conference I'd been to before this one was the one in Toronto last April, and I was struck by how much I *miss* conferencing without even knowing it. Even when no one says anything wildly earthshattering, it's still inspiring to think alongside new people, to spend an entire day or so thinking mostly about books and ideas. It's mentally regenerative even though it's physically exhausting--and, in this case, physically exhausting on top of the worst cold I've had in three years and one of the most horrible and draggeddown weeks I've had in ages--two of them actually, and I'm not sure next week is going to be any better. (More on that anon.) It was enough to make me think, in this horrible, paradoxical, "oh my god I really am an academic and in this economy that's seriously going to fuck up my life" kind of way, that many of my frustrations of the past few months can be traced to having gone to Wisconsin (where I experienced a lot of lethargy and frustration when I actually did want to think) instead of to MLA.

The conference, though, was wonderful, in spite of the fact that I had pretty much lost my voice by the end of the night. Sometime in the afternoon, D. sent me a piece he'd been working on....something crazy and brilliant that I read through instead of listening fully to the faculty panel. This made me grin, especially since he wants me to give him some feedback. (Also, he wrote me a song, he said, and sent the lyrics.) On the downside, I haven't seen him since we went to Edgar's show two weeks ago, and I'm going out of town on Thursday. This is precisely the sort of thing that makes me all stressy. But I'm realizing, though, that my saying last week that I didn't want to go back to The Poet was important, so I don't have to look to D. to provide a reason not to be with The Poet. I did actually talk to The Poet for awhile on the phone yesterday and got a better sense of what's going on in his head and his life--and all of this rather affirmed the fact that it's best I'm just a friend right now, and that he's using my breaking up with him as a way of thinking around something else that's actually much worse.

The rest of this week pretty much sucked, hardcore. I got everything done that I needed to, but it was miserable, sloggy, frustrating. I was almost in tears all day on Wednesday, feeling jerked around by stupid requests from professors treating me like a secretary rather than a colleague (too many flashbacks to my first job in Chicago), frustrated with my students, exhausted from the performance of engagement, too sick to go to the gym, everyone around me seemed to be dragging me down. I almost didn't go to zazen, though that at least temporarily made me feel better, even though I had to start running again right afterwards. I do not want people telling me that I am supernecessary for one group or another to succeed. If I ask you to do final proofreading on something, I do not want to get the okay to do the final copy and then hear three days later that there are changes that need to be made. And so on. I skipped my monthly field seminar on Wednesday night for the first time since I started grad school, was still in the library until after 7:00 grading papers, and so on, so on. The week before was like this too--just as busy but slightly less miserable--this past week--which was all supposed to be about doing my best to get everything done, suddenly had me on the rack.

The teaching thing is especially frustrating and overwhelming: this is the part where I have to keep telling myself: UR NOT DOING IT RIGHT. Basically, I feel like I'm back in my first semester at Erstwhile Teaching College, where I'm spending insane amounts of time on this thing with absolutely no payoff and then when the lesson plan fails because no one can be bothered to do the reading or, if they've done the reading, to talk about it, things only get more frustrating. I realized that part of the reason why I have an aversion to grading papers is that they seem, unlike drafts or even homework assignments, to be a kind of referendum on my ability as a teacher. Which is completely bullshitty, just not so much that I can believe it's not partially the case. And that, in turn, is clearly not helping my mood. I keep feeling like I'm failing this particular group of students and I don't know what's going wrong. Partially, it's teaching too many things I'm not familiar with, but--still. I think I'm better at first-semester comp than I am at second semester comp. But this, too, seems like it's emanating from self-centered reasons: I feel more secure when I know my students don't have anyone else to compare me to. So I think I get all weird in the spring. (Then again: the first spring semester I ever taught was the semester when I broke up with The Ex and got raked over the emotional coals with The Professor. And last spring I taught the fall version of the class, which made it the easiest semester ever. So perhaps it's time to give myself, and my students, a break.)

Right now the idea is basically to get better and get to spring break. The week is going to be pretty much running uphill. Today is grading, midterm evaluations, and the letter of recommendation for one of my fall students. Tomorrow is prep, hopefully being well enough to go to the gym (I haven't been in over a week and feel tubby--I'm sure this is also one of the reasons why this past week was so unremittingly miserable), getting a few stupid things done at school. Conferences all week, and somehow finding the time to do laundry, pack, maybe buy some cute shoes for spring. And then--down to Charlotte to hang out with one contingent of my extended family. And spring break, which is already being filled in for me, but I have to believe that things will get better after that, that I will eventually stop being sick, that D and I will get many walks through Prospect Park and that things will be okay for a little while.

I hope. Now zazen. Then grading.

Thoughts on a day that was less productive than I would have liked

Enlightenment and clarity of the mind occur only in response to the sustained effort of study and practice. Endeavoring in the way ripens the conditions of your practice. It is not that the sound of the bamboo is sharp or the color of the blossoms is vivid. Although the sound of the bamboo is wondrous, it is heard at the moment when it's hit by a pebble. Although the color of blossoms is beautiful, they do not open by themselves but unfold in the light of springtime. Studying the way is like this. You attain the way when conditions come together. Although you have your own capacity, you practice the way with the combined strength of the community. So you should practice and search with one mind with others.

A stone is turned to a jewel by polishing. A person becomes a sage by cultivation. What stone is originally shiny? Who is mature from the beginning? You ought to polish and cultivate yourself. Don't diminish yourself. Don't be lazy in your study of the way.

--from Enlightenment Unfolds: The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Dogen, trans. Kazuaki Tanahashi

I think I am slowly learning things about myself, belatedly, perhaps, about the way I work, about the knots that I will have to untie. I ran myself ragged in my teaching week--Tuesday I was "going" for about 18 hours--woke up at six as usual, then teaching, looking at drafts, going back to Brooklyn to run errands then go to the gym then do laundry, then look at more drafts, answering personal emails then finally sleeping a bit after midnight. Wednesday it was hard to do anything except sit zazen and have lunch. Thursday was much like Tuesday, without the gym and with seeing Caroline later. I have three major, unbreakable deadlines next week in addition to all the teaching stuff. While I haven't exactly pissed away the last two days I don't think I've exactly rocked them either. I understand that I need to rest. I'm not sorry I had some time to myself finally. And yet--

I miss D. Already. It's stupid how fast I got used to seeing him regularly--even when he went upstate, I'd seen him Thursday, but nothing this weekend, not even an email since Thursday. I know he's going through a lot--more than I can imagine--and yet...I miss him. I missed having someone here, just to break up the work. I think I have sort of a base level of productivity for a weekend, and it would be nice to see him. It's much easier to be self-sufficient during the week; I feel like the writing I'm doing would be more interesting if I had somehow been able to be in his presence. We talked on the phone a bit Thursday night. It was the first time I ever called first. I know he's just going through a lot. I wish we'd made firmer plans. I'm not obsess-y, yet, really, not like I was with J., but still...I get unsettled. I start to doubt. I start to overcompensate for the doubt. This time, I can see it happening. I've tried to sit with it. I've tried to walk with it. I've tried to write with it, to read Dogen with it, to cook with it, and to drink mediocre white wine that I will not be purchasing again with it. And still. Jittery. Spending so much energy calming down my own restlessness and gnawing loneliness that I can't do anything. Feeling the edge of missing The Poet. And it's not like we even had plans--it's just...I get used to good things fast. I know that in some sense I always wish I could start in the middle, skip this part. I said this with J., too: I'm fun on a first date and I'm a very good girlfriend. I am horrible at the part that comes in between. I'm trying to be careful with him. I am trying to sit with this, to do the nonattachment thing, to not invite all the usual worries to sit down to tea with me. My apartment's pretty damn clean. I made a good dinner tonight. I had some inspiration yesterday, but my classes for the week are not prepped, the MLA abstract due on Monday is not finished, the statement of interest for fellowships that I am not interested in but must apply for anyway by Wednesday has very few complete sentences in it, and the paper I am giving on Friday will be fine by then but is not fine now.

Perhaps needless to say, I will be going to school tomorrow to try to deal with all this somewhere other than my apartment.

And I guess I'm learning something about myself. At least I can see it all happening now, and not completely confuse some of my work/life balance issues with either being madly in love with someone or rejected by that same someone.

I hope this all works. And I kind of hope he calls me first tomorrow. I think we really complement each other and that I could be much shinier with him around. But I worry that I'm going to trip over his neuroses, or he mine. And that's a hard place to start from.

I do think I must like him, though. For what that's worth.

My funny Valentine needs a pseudonym

But nothing seems right just yet. Perhaps because so much of our interactions involve the invention of monikers for ourselves and each other, because these move quickly, because he comes up with the best ones--and so, anything I attempt to pull out of the current will be rendered almost immediately obsolete. It will never make sense and it will leave me feeling a tiny bit guilty for writing behind his back. (He has a blog, tied to his band's website, where he writes things that are impersonal and crazy and funny and beautiful. He's only written one post since I met him--it is based on a conversation we had over email and in person over the last week, and it includes a reference to something that I said, which makes me rather weak-kneed and butterfly-stomached--and all of it is completely surreal and nonsensical. He doesn't have a Facebook account.)

For now, then, he'll just be D.--the biggest box I can put him in, as non-signifying as possible.

He's beautiful, funny, and smart--a madman to be sure, but not one that raises redflags. He is changing the way I think about presence and the present. He spontaneously started reading from De Profundis when I was at his house on Friday morning. We share certain neuroses about noise and sleep and our fighting for mental and emotional space. I managed not to lead with all my traumas this time.

In short, I could get used to this, to this being able to smile without being obsessive, to getting phone calls at thoughtful times and mindspinning emails that make me laugh or empathize or--perhaps most of all--think and create. I could get used to holding hands in Prospect Park, to mornings in the suburbs, complete with a schoolbus and a hausfrau waving in sweatpants and overcoats. I could get used to white noise and not drinking so much I get hung over and to the ability to put uncertainty and stress into a box that doesn't take over my life. Yes--and I hope I get the chance.

For the moment, though, I am working through Browning, finally, trying to deal with the enormous amount of work that has piled up while I have been grinning into greenbrowngrey eyes over brunch tables and museum exhibits. Jeff Buckley's cover of "Hallelujah" is on Radio Paradise. I decided this week that it's stupid to even think of going on the market in the fall, and that stressed me out for the rest of the day but now I feel better. I am trying to remember that impermanence and uncertainty has to be welcomed even when it seems like a bad, destructive thing, and that I need to keep practicing even when I don't think I need to.

And I wouldn't tell you that my life is perfect. School is hard for a number of reasons. My computer is dying and I'm worried about money perpetually. My work habits have been embarrassing. I know that there are a lot of loose ends right now and I don't know how that's going to shake out.

But what I will say is this--I looked back here at the archives for last February, and I am grateful to have many of the same problems without the feeling of abject wretchedness.

And so, happy Valentines day indeed.

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.

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.

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.

The aforementioned prospectus post

...which I can no longer afford to delay, now that I've finally read the last couple pages of "The Angel in the House." (Seriously, I don't know why more people don't read this poem. It's amazing in its ability to generate wtf? moments. I have a post about this up at the group blog where I use my own name, should anyone be interested.)

Okay.

I need to pick up the threads on my prospectus, which have been completely dropped since I crashed midweek. Before that, though, I was actually doing okay. I didn't do a lot of writing last week, but I did put in some intensive work on my bibliography, which mainly meant sorting out several stacks of files into piles that made sense--one stack for theory, one for general articles on the field (including both periodization and state of the field articles as well as ones that treat multiple authors or non-poetic texts) and finally, one for critical articles on individual poets. There's a lot on the bibliography that I will probably never look at, but I decided that it's easier to take things off the list than put them on there later on. And, for what it's worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of things I had looked at and did know about. (A lot of these particular files were from when I wrote the fake prospectus for a class in the spring of 2007.)

The bibliography thing also had the advantage of helping jog my memory about the state of the field. It's lucky for me that the big journal in my field published two issues devoted basically to self-reflection within the last five years, though I do wonder if the field is almost too-self-reflective to the point of being almost paralyzed. And in some ways, skimming through a couple of the articles (especially the ones that are calling for a greater attentiveness to language and performativity) helped me better understand the contribution that my article is going to make to the field and the kind of intervention that VIE was steering me towards. While I continue to see myself as a theorist more than a historicist, I've gotten to the point where I can deploy the historical strategically when I need to. And I'm beginning to think, too, that what I got in the habit of calling "historicism" (after The Professor) is probably closer to an untheorized materialism, the kind of scholarship that makes book reports from the archives. (I ran across a particularly egregious example of this recently, where the author was basically making a very basic argument about a certain poet, with the only real contribution being that s/he had OMG touched the book!) But I'm beginning to think, too, that in order to get anywhere, the field is going to have to get even more comfortable with explicitly theoretical gestures rather than crypto-theoretical arguments that attempt to erase their provenance. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can't totally do that here.) I think that my committee member who says that deconstruction has largely become an uncontroversial part of the tools of close reading; I'd say the same for gestures of attentiveness to historical context and the situatedness of the text. Where we go from there--as a field, as a profession, seems up for grabs.

It's possible that one of the reasons I've had such trouble getting the actual prospectus down on paper (as opposed to notes and paragraphs and sets of disjointed ideas) is that I was trying to start with the texts when I needed to start with the field. When I did the fake prospectus, I began with Tennyson, Arnold, and Wilde--now that it's for real, I realize that I may have to begin with the recent work in the field more generally. For some reason, this feels like a capitulation to...something: I mean, shouldn't my dissertation be coming directly out of the texts from day 1? There's a very specific place in Coleridge that sparked all of this: shouldn't my prospectus begin with that? I'm finding the answer to be no. What I realized when I was going through my files (especially those reflective issues of the journal in which I will soon be published) is that my thinking on this topic has always been directed, at least to a certain degree, towards making an intervention in the field. But I think my project makes more sense in that context. And that feels like a weird place to be. What I need to do today (one of the many things I need to do today) is to push back against that weirdness and just write the way it works. I think I'll be a lot better off when I get that down.

One of my other big realizations of early last week is that I've been a Victorianist all along, despite the forays into Romanticism. At least for dissertational purposes. I mean, I do still plan to talk a lot about Coleridge and a few others. But I don't feel compelled to talk a lot about, say, Shelley or Keats. (I managed to get through my orals with a Romanticism list that had no Keats on it.) On the other hand, I do still want to talk about things like the sublime, and I'm worried that there's going to be a huge time gap that I will need to somehow justify from a thematic perspective. Possibly by applying de Quincey. I'm suddenly aware of the ways that my interest in the Long Nineteenth Century is spread rather unevenly....I'm all about, say, the 1790s and the mid-1810s Coleridge. And then I don't really care about anything until the 1850s. I'm slowly inching into the 1860s and, with Augusta Webster, touching barely on the 1870s. And then there are several female poets of the late 1880s and 90s that I love but really can't justify writing about here. Ditto for Wilde. This leaves huge swaths of uncharted decades that are making me ever so slightly nervous. I may simply just have to atone for it all by promising to write my second book on the 1830s and 40s.

I've been walking around for several weeks saying that I'm going to write my chapters on concepts and themes rather than on a single poet or text. While I'm not going to discard that right away, I may do single-author chapter breakdowns. I can't really see past chapter 1 and whatever chapter the article becomes right now. And I'm not sure I'm really going to know what I'm writing about until I do the first chapter. This is a bit scary. But this is the point at which I should probably remind myself that the prospectus is less a document for planning the dissertation as it is the creation of a projected document that people would want to give you money to work on. Meaning that I don't necessarily have to write the dissertation that gets prospectused. If I can keep that in mind, I should be able to get it done fairly quickly, as I'm sort of frustratingly good at writing documents that predict interesting projects that I don't really intend to write. Of course, this makes me miserable later on, but it gets you through. And then I can go back to reading for a little while and perhaps coming up with an abstract or two.

I think I'm always looking for things in academic books that literary criticism is no longer able to deliver. And, as I begin my own project, it's possible that I'm beginning to realize the impossibility of my being able to live up to my own expectations.

On the plus side, the summer's article writing experiences seem to have had the effects of making me a more generous reader. Not in the uncritical "this is published so it must be good" way that I was when I started grad school, but in a way that nonetheless tempers the tendency to go into every article ready to rip it apart or be disappointed. That's probably a necessary stage to go through in grad school, and it's no doubt a side effect of certain seminar assignments, but in my case it was probably taken to more of an extreme because I was hanging around with The Professor so much. Cultivating a bit of generosity has, at least, begun to make my intellectual life a bit more rewarding.

I kind of just want to put off writing for another day and curl up with something old school like The Ethics of Reading, but I'm not going to.

Realization: my approach to my prospectus thus far has been plagued by the same problems as my approach to my personal improvement. Both of these projects have been undertaken with something less than the strategic organization that they require and as a result I've been wasting energy trying to think along too many different lines at once, forgetting what I already know, and having very little to show for the effort. I've also been worrying about the wrong things a lot of the time. I finally revisited the assignment sequence for the dissertation prospectus in our department's required course and realized the value of that kind of process and of at least revisiting it selectively to build on the work I completed a year and a half ago. Would that there were an assignment sheet for fixing one's life and not being all about the negative attention getting.

Anyway. Probably time to start working with the specifics that I can't post here. Either that or grading. (Shudder.)

Beyond

Occasionally when I am sitting zazen I burst into tears and the thought is always some variation on this: I want it all to stop hurting so much. What I have learned, however, is that it's nearly impossible to cry if you are in the proper zazen posture. And all of what I am about to write is aimed at facing the suffering of the past few weeks and getting myself back into a posture that allows me to live my life with the openness that I was beginning to cultivate a couple of weeks ago.

The most haunting, horrible thought of the past weeks is the idea that everything I had been trying to cultivate over the summer, all the healing that I'd achieved at no small cost, all of the effort, all of the progress I thought I was making--indeed, all of the suffering of the last several years--that all of this could be swept away by a stranger, swallowed by that dark part of my mind that has always been set against my general well-being, and that I am worse of than before for having a very hard-won hopefulness destroyed not two weeks out of the gate.

The day after the breakdown and bridgeburning (is it bridgeburning? Do I have a choice? Do I want the choice?) is always a difficult one, so I'm grateful for a Friday with no expectations of my presence in the city, no need to be at School or Not-NYU, no desire to go to West Village Coffeeshop--the original plan, since the beginning of the week, was to use this day to stay in and write the prospectus that is still not done. Of course the plans have changed a bit. It's almost 12:30 in the afternoon; I've been up for about two hours (got up at 7 because that's sort of what my body's set at these days, but I changed my mind); I still haven't sat zazen in part because I decided that I need to write first; but I clearly haven't done much of that either. I have, of course, checked my email several times and rented a car for my brother's wedding.

And looked at a bunch of zen websites, thinking that since there's no new Gossip Girl this Monday night, I may be better served by skipping out on the evening with the girls and finally going to the Village Zendo for beginner's instruction. There is something about this decision that terrifies me immeasurably and all of the sudden I want to cling even more tightly to my single cushion facing the unpainted wall near my door and dig in to the very personal, isolated practice I've built up over the past few months because I'm terrified that the people there will be all judge-y, that my posture will be wrong, that I'll get fidgety (as I often do at home but it's okay there) or that it will be weird to sit without my coffee or that they will try to make me join a bunch of stuff and that I will be so beaten down by whatever ends up happening this weekend that I might just give in. Or that they will find out who I learned zazen from and then that will get all complicated.

But I've made this decision and I am going to try to stick to it because I feel that I am reaching a certain limit in my personal practice, a limit I was trying to explain to The Poet last night, that I have been trying to think through here and in my paper journal, writing notes to myself that make me cry and sometimes it comes out and then I end up deleting the posts that are screaming into the void and replacing them with Rumi poems that are largely aspirational--suffice it to say that last night I didn't just welcome the sorrows in, I went out and did some hard core promotional work to seek them out and cram them all into this guesthouse so that when J. called there was no room for him and even if there was, should I have let him in? The Poet says no, that I shouldn't blame myself, that I should just ignore him and that was how I reacted when J. called, but what I realize now that I'm no longer drunk and exhausted from crying is that The Poet obviously has his own interests in play here, he wants to get me back, and part of me wants to go but then another part, the part that won't shut up, the part of me that scowls back from the mirror and says you stupid pathetic bitch--that's the part that tells me what I already know, which is that The Poet, though he is the kindest man I know and possibly the one who has loved me more than anyone else, can never be who I need him to be, can never go to the Greenmarket with me on a Saturday morning (I need, of course, to be less obsessed with this particular formulation because all it basically does is mean that my organic local produce now comes with a bonus side of the potential for excruciating psychic pain--which may be why I haven't been able to get much done on Saturdays), can never be the person I end up building a life with.

Tangential voices: you don't get to build a life with anyone, so just focus on your career and your friends and shut the hell up already. Alternatively: maybe you need to refocus what you mean by building a life and maybe you and The Poet are going to end up together in some way and that wouldn't be the worst thing in a lot of ways because he loves you and is willing to let you cry when the guy that you dumped him for isn't the person you need him to be.

To put it simply, the sorrows came, but the furniture is also still here.

The other thing I've done this morning was Google the Heart Sutra, which has been the subject of a number of the dharma talks I've been listening to lately. I copied it out for myself as well--the English translation, that is. Perhaps I should try to learn the Japanese, but I'd need someone to say it so that I can hear it. They tend to cut that part out of the San Francisco Zen Center podcasts--sometimes part of it is recited in the context of a dharma talk, but I need something like a language tape. Maybe that's part of what's covered at the Village Zendo. I thought that I had more to say about what's drawing me to the Heart Sutra right now--I mean, besides all of the foregoing here--it has something to do with my wanting to internalize the teachings of emptiness and void (which, yes, is a weird way to say that)...I don't know.

The thing about J. is that he always comes through right after I've given up hope and resolved not to care. Like the email I got on Tuesday right after I'd written him off here in a (now deleted) post. Or like last night when I get this text from him after The Poet left and told me I should just ignore him and I'd finally drunk enough white wine to stop crying and was kind of dozing off to Boston Legal and J. was all like "do you want to play tonight?" and I called him and for once he actually picked up the phone and I was just like "why are you making me so miserable?" and brought up the two weeks ago thing again which probably wasn't fair and then told him I was really drunk and tired and what I wanted to say but didn't was, "thanks, but I've already had sex tonight and no you can't hear about it," and he said he'd call me this weekend. But then when I hung up I got angry at myself again and wished that it had all been different, that I hadn't gone out with The Poet last night and had instead been out with people from School, so that when I got that text I would have been in a good mood and probably up for it and then this morning everything would have been okay. So like ten minutes after that I called him back and he didn't pick up this time so I left a message that said I'm not really crazy and I'm sorry I keep seeming like it and for some reason I always end up feeling like I'm throwing myself at you even when I'm not really and maybe this would all be easier if I knew what you want. Or, even knowing that you don't know what you want would be okay--but I didn't get to say that because his voicemail cut me off.

I don't know what to wish for, except for a return to that place I was in two and a half weeks ago where I.wasn't.crazy.

The Poet thinks that J. is a player because he works in bars and it's New York and whatever. But he didn't start out doing things that were player-like. At least I don't think. Fine, so I'm not the best person to judge my own sexual self-interest and of course the fact that I was even having this conversation with my old married ex-boyfriend lends an insurmountable sense of irony to the whole thing. But do you spend the day talking with a girl if you're a player? Do you tell her when you fall asleep that you don't want to destroy her because she is clearly worried about that?

The reason I keep going back to two weeks ago is that I still don't understand how we got from affectionate text messages and plans for dinner and a movie to "I can't hang out tonight after all because I have to work but why don't we fantasize about you having sex with another guy while I watch." And that's the rupture that keeps bothering me.

I could possibly just be the most naive person in the world. Thinking, for instance, that there would be any guy who was single, under the age of 45, not an idiot, ugly, or an enormous douchebag who would want to date me, right?

I know that my obsession with my own craziness is a feedback loop. The amount of written text that I've generated this week that is related neither to my dissertation prospectus nor to the abstract I'm writing on Coventry Patmore to avoid my prospectus is testament enough to that. This is the Medusa thing again. But I still think that the problem is mainly with me and my expectations and assumptions.

But I can see the loop starting again. And I was trying to break it here. My friend C. told me I should focus on the things I have accomplished, regardless of the personal life parts.

I've sat zazen every day since mid-July, even on days when I teach my 8:00 class. I've deepened friendships with several women in my program. I took care of the detail stuff for my brother's wedding and I'm trying on my bridesmaid's dress on Tuesday. I've made some fantastic dinners from the Greenmarket. I didn't write my prospectus, but I did do a lot of sustained thinking on it this week. I came up with an idea for a conference abstract in about an hour and it could turn into a dissertation chapter, too. Last week my adviser asked me if I wanted to be on his panel at a super-prestigious conference in the summer. I have a good haircut and great new boots.

Yesterday I saved a class that could have turned into a disaster, and I did it without anyone but the students involved having to know that I was floundering. A lot of that situation happened very late on Wednesday night--had this been even last semester, I think I would have agonized and gotten angry or stayed up all night doing alternate lesson plans--this time, I was humane with the students and deployed a few easy backup plans. It was actually incredibly gratifying and gave me a couple of hours (until--yep, you guessed it, a confusingly mediated conversation with J.) of thinking I was back on my game. Last week, I met a guy from the Urban Studies department in the Part Time Faculty room and we exchanged email addresses.

I survived having drinks with The Ex on Monday. I cleaned my apartment this week. When I had my crash on Tuesday night, I didn't drink so much that I passed out and even did a little bit more work. My student meetings went well. I am genuinely enjoying the perversity of "The Angel in the House." I am an academic success, if nothing else.

What next? Absolutely the next thing right now is to get on that cushion and try to go for a half hour or so. Then I finally take a shower, make my bed, tidy up and get back to work on the prospectus / abstract. Perhaps I'll make some more coffee. If I get stuck, I'll go back to reading Patmore. At some point, I will make an effort to find something to do tonight. I will send Facebook messages and possibly even make phone calls. I will not spend all night wondering about J. If he contacts me, I will do whatever I feel like doing about that and I will stick by it. I will smile when I leave the house. I will remind myself that it's hard to cry in zazen posture, and that is something that can be generalized.

Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodi svaha!
(Loose translation: go, go, go beyond, go far beyond--awaken--hail!)

In short, I will try to lose myself today, to let go of some of the jagged edges that are most likely to rip, tear, and make things bleed.

I do rather wish that prep didn't take so damn long. It's my own fault for lingering over their homework assignments, but still. Hopefully this will be the last time for a fall or two that I have to reinvent all my handouts. And all of this is another testament to why it was good to do some prospectus work in the morning.

Tomorrow: Laundry (has to be done) and finishing prep for the week. Maybe I'll take my computer to West Village Coffeeshop. I'm trying to be better about using the resources at my two institutions for things related to that institution, but it's tempting to print a lot of stuff at school because it's more familiar than Not-NYU (which is going to be the pseudonym for the location of my new teaching gig). But, really, I should be rocking out with the photocopying at Not-NYU.

Speaking of which, one of the perks of Not-NYU is access to the NYU library system. Which is going to make prospectusing so much easier because I will actually be able to look at the books I need. And check them out for more than the three (!!!) weeks at a time that I get at School. These are things I did not appreciate when I was an undergraduate at NYU. So I suppose that I can't really grumble too much about the time I need to invest in Not-NYU.

Holding things lightly (more to come)

Did what I had to do on Wednesday. We ended on affectionate terms and with few regrets. And that was the point of it all, of course. So that we can still stand by each other as essentially good people, still reflect on the time we had together as something that was, on balance, a good thing for the both of us. I don't think I could have healed the way I did in the past couple of months without him.

And so. Spent the day and night with J. on Thursday. Liking him a lot. For something that started as a shot in the dark on his part, we've turned out to have a lot in common. His ability to read me is occasionally unnerving, but it's not the same kind of connection I had with, say, The Professor, that kind of has its destructive potential built in. So that's good. And his eyes--! (That was my 14-year-old moment, for those of you keeping score.)

We were supposed to hang out today, but he had to cancel. Which turns out to be fine for me, since yesterday got swallowed up by my first (exhausting) foray into the procurement of a bridesmaid's dress. Which is apparently incredibly belated as the wedding is in six weeks. It would be quicker to get a fucking passport. (Part of the exhaustion is no doubt due to my own ambivalence about my brother, which I want to work out in another post.) So all I did yesterday was that, the Greenmarket, and an epic nap, followed by epic Grey's Anatomy watching. With my plans for the day cancelled, I have been able to stay home, wear clothes that never leave this apartment, be on my period in peace, not wear makeup, and keep the pimple on my cheek to myself. I've also been able to make this the first full day of work that I've had since finishing the Victorian project. Spent just over 4 hours on my prospectus (*finally*) and am about to sit zazen again by way of transitioning into thinking about teaching stuff. I'm definitely glad I decided when I woke up to do the prospectus time first--I have a feeling that prep would have become an all-day project as it does all too often. Something to keep in mind for the coming weeks.

So I've given myself a deadline of 10/1 for articulating a topic and coming up with chapter headings. Would like to have a full draft shortly thereafter. I'll probably be blogging that more specifically on the site where I use my real name. (If you Google me and my main institution you should be able to find it.) I'm glad that we're about to come up on the workshop days in my class--far less prep for me and grading that can be done more or less immediately. This means more time for the prospectus and for staring at the cute boy that I like.

Which is pretty much where I need to be right now, holding lightly, and practicing with the present. And with that being said, I think it's time to sit for a few minutes. Perhaps I'll say more on some of these things later.

"Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance..."*

And somehow, the writing flickered back and then slipped away again, I kept having to pour myself into projects and planning, and I've been trying to focus on this whole idea of living in the present, of making a conscious effort to live in the world as it is, this world of impermanence, the world as I find it instead of the world I want it to be--and this is not something that comes at all naturally to me--my earliest memories are of wanting to be someone else, somewhere else, some other time, and at a certain point that allowed me a very simplistic misreading of Nietzsche, Derrida, et al., that I'm slowly beginning to address--and in the meantime I am trying to learn how to live in a world that I can't control, to do things as simple as talk to the neighbors and not take every roach in my kitchen personally. And slowly I am beginning to get better at this as I keep sitting zazen and remembering to focus on my breath and to practice with losing balance.

What I have begun to find, what I have found over the past week or two is, in general, an enormous sense of gratitude. In spite of the nadir of exhaustion that came towards the end of August, I am immensely grateful that the school year has started again. Somehow it's less of a psychological effort to be in grad school than it was a week ago. I'm excited and energized about my new teaching gig, about having a class full of women, and even about the chance to remember what Manhattan looks like at 7:30 in the morning when I'm not either up too late or waking up at someone else's home. And somehow this feels very close to a real job--not that working within my own institution wasn't real (and in many ways this new gig is much more rarefied), but more that part-timers have a different place in this culture and I feel like I've left the nest a little bit. I am very, very, very lucky that this almost just fell in my lap, and it's a good reminder for me about the relationship between lemons and lemonade, considering that this all started because Erstwhile Teaching College caused me so much grief back in December.

And then there is the cute boy from the coffeeshop, the one who passed me a note and missed his bus for me and killed the mouse in my bathtub at 5:45 in the morning, the guy who has had me grinning like an idiot all weekend and no doubt disgusting all of my friends with the sudden glowy-ness, and I feel like I've told the story so many times this weekend that if I tell it one more time or write it down I'm going to completely jinx this. But all I know is that it's been a long time since I've felt this way about a guy--there are shades of E (the Lawyer Dude of the old blog, who I actually had a couple of emails with today and who is totally rooting for me), but with a lot more confidence on my part. I feel like I'm 14, but I never actually had this much fun when I was 14.

(And I haven't told The Poet much about this, but I do plan to have some kind of talk about this during the week. I'm hoping that it will be okay because I do care about him, but he's been saying a lot of things over the past week that are making it clear to me that he's beginning to worry about the ethics of our relationship in a way that wasn't necessary even a month ago--or maybe it was, but just less overtly--so I think this might even help him not have to feel bad about stranding me in some way. But there are a couple of things that could go awry this week.)

At one level, all of this makes me incredibly nervous. In the cycle of my year, the second week of September is always somewhat treacherous, especially when I think things are going well. 2001 is the obvious example, but last year was kind of a doozy as well--one night, I'm celebrating the end of my PhD coursework and the start of a year that looks nothing but promising with a hot lawyer at one of my favorite restaurants, and the next morning my grandmother's dead and I'm pregnant and don't know it yet and it's pretty much all downhill from there. So I am trying to hold all of this lightly right now, to take care of the people around me the best I can, to take care of myself, to stay on top of things and to practice with composure. And, of course, to hope the mice don't come back unless the cute boy from the coffeeshop does too.




* From Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which is arguably the most important book I read this summer.

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

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

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

I discover what my problem is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

Anyway. Back to work, I think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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