was more or less the affective stress of being on Nerve. There's a certain addiction to it, a not-so-secret narcissistic indulgence. Getting in a loop of clicking to see who's been looking at me, not that I have any intention of meeting most of them, not that I write most people back. Sometimes there's a sense of regret in this, since it's not like I do a particularly good job of picking the people I do end up with--it all feels like a kind of willed randomness sometimes, undermining the sense that I think I'm getting better at all this.
I wasn't on the site long enough in January before I met D. to remember what this was like. It's only this week that the frenzied loops have come back, that I feel my schedule closing up, a kind of running running running and most of the time it never gets past that point. It's not entirely ideal to be doing this during the semester, especially when I have two writing projects on, but to some extent I know this is all related, that there is a necessity here, that this right now is part of the path in some sort of crazy and occasionally sordid way. After the whole thing with D. collapsed, the weekend I spent convinced that I was going to move to St Louis in less than two months, the weird convergence of various academic rockstar stuff, and going back on the site--at some point I feel like my entire sense of identity broke open and suddenly I'm asking myself questions about who I am, who I want to be with--basic things that I more or less try to ignore are suddenly pressing on me with a kind of urgency, and the thing that I realized about Nerve this weekend is that this is part of it, that I'm more or less trying out different identities in conflict with different people, trying to figure out who I want to be, trying to articulate some kind of sense of who I am--not so much in the sense that I have to be with someone to be anyone but more in the sense that being with different people helps me work out where I can find myself.
I'm not sure that makes any sense. But, then again, I'm not sure what I'm doing makes any sense. Not internet dating per se as much as the weird extremes my dating life in general seems to swing to, where I can go from The Poet to D. and learn what I gain and what I give up--and the truth is, I haven't decided yet, would like not have to decide, who I'm going to be. Suffice it to say there's a very big difference from being the 28-year-old woman with the 57-year-old man and being the 28-year-old chick with the 34-year-old guy and that some of these differences are irreconcilable. (Though this may help explain why I'm most comfortable with guys who are in their early 40s, even though this may also end up being a less happy medium.)
There are things about all this that I can only say elliptically. This is largely an attempt to empty out my own head, but keep the specifics to myself, the idea being to focus on a proposal related to my MLA panel tomorrow and so on. So I went out on dates Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The dude from Friday night was like many of the dates I remember from before. Very cute (in a kind of hipsterish, of course you live in Bushwick kind of way) with a lot in common with me on paper. We had a perfectly cordial and chemistry-less conversation over drinks and dinner, went our separate ways on the subway.
The guy I went out with on Thursday was in his mid-40s, runs a for-profit cultural organization out of his apartment. He's tall, big, kind of goofy-looking (think a more fit version of Jack Black, perhaps), and exactly as brash and unapologetic as you'd think a guy like this would be if he were also Australian. (As a result of this last thing, though, it's possible that I'd be willing to talk on the phone with him forever.) He was a little intense when I first met him, but we had a good time together. He turned out to be really nice. But not in that pushover nice-guy way. More in the way that The Poet is nice. Like, kind. I wasn't sure what to do with it all immediately afterwards. There were some complications, as there always are. But I found myself thinking about him (well, when I wasn't thinking about D. or The Poet) for a lot of the rest of the weekend. I sort of wish I'd been able to swing my own work to see him tonight; in a way it might have been comforting, though I know it's better to go to bed here relatively early, go to the gym so I can continue to fit into my skinny black jeans, head to the zendo to focus, and then work on everything else ever instead tomorrow.
Yesterday...yesterday is one of those days I probably won't ever talk about with anyone. If nothing else, it proved that I'm still capable of doing things that are kind of twisted and not all that enjoyable in the end. And it reminded me of something I really had blocked out about Nerve--the possibility of ending up meeting someone who, over the course of a day and several beers, brings out some of the worst things about you, who pushes you to something without even having to try, who under other circumstances you'd be indifferent to, but the right day, the right mood....And you will always be the crazy chick with the Snoopy tattoo for him to talk about and the next morning you're still a bit shaky, but it's mostly because--well, as I said before, it reminds me of what kind of things I'm capable of doing--and not in a good way. I am trying to let it be instructive. Fortunately, this doesn't happen to me often, but...wow.
Starting to line up a couple of other things for next week. One guy's really on the young side...I think he's okay, but I'm going to have to be more on guard than I'd like. I think I'm pretty much going to stay away from guys under, say, 38, for a bit...the younger ones tend to bring out the crazy.
Right now I'd very much like someone with decently broad shoulders to lean on. That I know for sure.
Showing posts with label identity formation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label identity formation. Show all posts
4.12.2009
2.16.2009
In the archive of the evanescent
"...a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume....A sudden light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing-fan, the dust in the barn door. A moment--and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again." -- Walter Pater, "Joachim du Bellay," from The Renaissance
It's probably a travesty of modern literary studies that people think that all you have to read of Pater is the Introduction and Conclusion to The Renaissance. This last line to me seems to be worth a hundred gemlike flames and I'm not sure we understand that either.
A few days into our correspondence, I told him that I was writing a secret dissertation motivated by the question of walking on water. This is true. It has already developed here, it is still developing--and I am slowly, belatedly, beginning to find it everywhere in Browning. It is the place where my life and my work--very long estranged, breached by teaching and other alienations--strain back to touch each other, promising the kind of coherence that I used to take as a kind of birthright, back when life looked a lot easier because we didn't know a damn thing about it. It's something with moments, like the Browning sonnet I posted last month, to get beyond asserting and against...I am sitting at my desk right now and looking at the quote I wrote out from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind a few months ago, the quote about "losing its balance against a background of perfect balance." The right to a beginner's mind not entirely recognized where I am, except in matters that are convenient to others. (A brush with triggermemories of the Worst Job I Ever Had this morning reminds me that I will never volunteer to organize an academic conference if I can help it.) And yet. Finally clearing spaces, a few at least, and this is all I can do for now. Withdrawing from the world, from excuses to spend money taking car services instead of just walking in silence, a withdrawal from talking to people all the time so that I can come back to my archive of the evanescent, to start thinking again.
"And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom....For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?" -- Pater, "Wincklemann"
1.01.2009
Facing Janus: Resolving to Resolve / Praying to be able to execute (and apologies to STC)
The lake outside the cabin was frozen over, and I walked a bit away from the group constituted by my father, brother, sister-in-law, and their dog, to look at the stars at midnight. You could see the milky way above us and the stars glistening with a kind of diamond clarity intensified by the still cold cloudless winter night. Looking north up Long Lake, standing on the water beyond what would be the dock edge in summer, we could see the northern lights glowing and changing in the distance, impossible, ultimately, to confuse with the yellow domes of light pollution from Three Lakes and Eagle River.
It was a kind of personal sublime, made more searing by the fact that opportunities like this ended up being rare last week--my brother and his wife and dog weren't part of the package when we made these plans, which I had seen all along as a chance to spend time with just my parents, to relax at the end of a year has been all about my brother and his wife, to recover from some of the abyssal loneliness and isolation and general invisibility that was especially present this past year. (Not that 2008 had the soul-sucking drama of 2007; it was more just a general slog, walking uphill, trying not to trip over every damn thing.) The kind of abyss that swallowed me whole a couple days before Christmas, especially on the day I turned in all my grades but everyone was already out of town and it was clear I wasn't going to get to see The Poet again any time soon (we still don't know when we'll be able to even get a drink), and I was so tired and already stressed out about New Year's and wanted to celebrate but instead I cried on the phone with The Poet about nothing in particular then drank a bottle of wine and watched some movies on Hulu. The night before I realized I was going to have to take a half-Xanax when my heart started racing as soon as I tried to go to bed and I had the sensation of falling through the ice on the lake and no one noticing in time. And all that was before I found out about the change in the Wisconsin plans--that I didn't know until my parents picked me up from the airport on Christmas Day and I made the mistake of trying to repress the panic and the disappointment--coming out first as anger after the family party, then as something more akin to a nervous breakdown. And my mother did apologize for not telling me sooner and for allowing them to come in the first place. My father thanked me for being transparent about my feelings (the trigger of the nervous breakdown was something that seems too minor on the surface to even go into yet isn't, for other complicated reasons) which is actually kind of a big step for us all because a year ago I probably would not have pushed back on the trigger issue and it would have poisoned the entire trip in such a way that I wouldn't ever have been able to go back to the cabin. Which was part of what compounded the panic attack. I didn't want to break down like I did (but it wasn't controllable in the end), but in a weird way it's a step forward to be able to do so.
And it worked out okay in the end, more or less, except that I didn't get as much of the quiet time that I was planning for--my brother and SIL just kind of hung around all the time and the dog was there and people were always talking so I didn't get a really decent period of quiet zazen until a day when I stayed in for a half hour while everyone else was playing outside in the snow with the dog. Though I suppose there's something to be said for staying in the room, as it were (it was too cold in the bedrooms to really hang there by myself anyway), for the amount of laughter generated by our attempts to remind ourselves how to play Clue (and for my ability to win three of the four games while drunk), and for the fact that we probably wouldn't have gotten outside as much as we did if it hadn't been for them.
(And I should interject that I do genuinely enjoy hanging out with my extended family and--most of the time--my parents, so I'm not one of those people for whom the holidays are just an exercise in barely-concealed contempt and drinking too much and feeling shamed for who you are. Highlights of this Christmas at my aunt's house included the success of my pointy red shoes and a long conversation about philosophy, Eastern religion, and literature with a cousin of mine who is also in a PhD program and who is trying to move back to New York. Also catching up with various aunts about my crazy personal life--not an enormous amount of detail, of course, but still--and the opportunity just to help out, hang out, and laugh.)
But to return to the lake, to midnight, the snow around my shins, the diamondedge stars, and the northern lights silhouetted against black outlines of pine trees. It touched something in my soul, something that I hadn't known was there in such a piercing way before. Call it, perhaps, a specifically northern sublime, bringing together any number of feelings I have when I am there in any season--catching the sunlight over the lake at a certain angle, the sunrise over the trees in the morning, coming around a bend in the road or over a hill that reveals a kind of absolute wildness, isolation--even when there are vacation homes all around. (And some of these have the same effect as well.) The feeling of being in Rhinelander at dusk the winter I lived up there seven years ago, over on the edge of town where all the shitty big box stores are, yet noticing the trees towering above the strip malls, and the prairie edge sunsets throwing swaths of color over the sky. All of this is in my soul. And I realized that any man I truly love will need to be able to look at the northern lights with me and understand this without my having to explain it at all.
It's always hard to come home. At least Chicago functioned as a buffer between two incompatible worlds--it's brutal to wake up in the cabin and go to sleep the same night in Brooklyn, but the traveling itself wasn't easy. And it's only been in the last couple of hours tonight that the relentless assault of bass from the apartment upstairs (and I mean it when I use the word "assault"--I ended up sleeping for part of the morning on the floor of my living room just to get away from it) has finally let up. For how long I don't know. The assault started on Christmas morning about an hour before I left for the airport and was in full swing when I came home yesterday afternoon. Something similar happened last year at this time, so I hope that it's seasonal. Nevertheless, I'm on edge a bit, even as I write this now. (Much in the same way as I was when I first moved here and spent two and a half months worried that I'd made a horrible decision.)
And so I want to return again to the night on the lake. I'm not going to think in terms of "resolutions" for this new year--rather, in terms of decisions--gathering as much performative force as I can from the speech act. My decision for 2009, most simply, is this: to live for myself. This isn't to say that I want to live selfishly--quite the opposite, in fact. I want to break away from the D.I.Y. Medsua thing I have going on all too often, where I become paralyzed by the spectacle of my own suffering. Neither is the idea to live for myself indulgently--especially when so many of those very indulgences backfire and sap my energy or worse. What I mean is something like taking control, but mostly in the sense of cultivating intentionality and presence, not allowing myself to waste time, and working on making the kinds of decisions that are best for me--rather than continuing with the narrative of things just kind of happening to me, of being pulled around, helpless, invisible. Perhaps, too, this is a way of saying that I will begin treating myself the way I would like other people to treat me. I want to live generously, to communicate energy to myself and others.
Some of this is prompted by the simple recognition that a lot of the next year (and the year after) is going to be taken up by things I do for others in the form of obligations such as those related to teaching and keeping friendships and also by a number of professional hoops that are going to involve a certain amount of subjective violence, inconvenience, long nights, and writing. I will need to write the bulk of my dissertation this coming year. I will be applying for jobs in the fall. I will (hopefully) be continuing to teach at Not-NYU, which likely means that I will also be continuing to teach 8 a.m. classes. And none of my other problems are going to magically disappear because it's 2009. It's easy for me to see how this could shape up to be a kind of miserable, sloggy, lonely, frustrating year. But I don't want it to be. For one thing--it's not sustainable. It just won't work if I'm exhausted all the time, if I can't find some joy in something related to my dissertation. And it won't work if I'm not working because I'm too tired, or too depressed, or whatever. My time management has gone to shit lately, but I don't think it's just a matter of staying off of Facebook. Something else has to happen, a decision to live better all around, to rethink the things that I do, to recapture one of the best things E ever did for me, which was give me a reason to work all the time so that I could be ready to do crazy things spontaneously. I want to regain some of that sense of flexibility where it doesn't seem like just fucking around when I should be doing something else.
Speaking of what happens when I should be doing something else. What both zazen and teaching have in common is the fact that when I am doing either one of those things, I am fully present to that activity, time has been blocked out for it that isn't invaded by other things I could be doing--it isn't even a question. (This is more true, of course, about sitting zazen with other people, though I try to take the same attitude at home. One of my great accomplishments of 2008 was adopting a meditation practice and sitting for fifteen minutes every morning I taught.) So much of my life isn't like that. It's a symptom of massively wasted time, of continually missed opportunities. So, in living for myself, one of the central ideas is that I will try to spread the sense of presence and energy from teaching and zazen to other parts of my life--to make decisions that allow me to feel as good about the other things that I do, as present, as intentional. It means valuing the time that I have alone to think / read / write / meditate regardless of when it comes and under what circumstances. (Ergo, obsessing less about boys, and all of that.) And also being a bit more aware of what I'm doing in terms of eating and drinking. One of my friends announced today (from my futon, where she'd spent the night) that she was going to quit drinking entirely in 2009--I don't want to go that far, but I also want to make sure drinking remains fun and doesn't consistently result in days (like this one) lost to hangovers. What's encouraging here is only that I began 2008 with a cold and didn't have many of those this past year; hopefully, beginning 2009 with a hangover means that they will be similarly rare. Hopefully.
And of course, I'm likely undervaluing the very good things of 2008 as well. I did accomplish an enormous amount professionally, though I'm probably hyperaware of the costs. I got what is, in the end, a fantastic adjunct job as adjunct jobs go. I have grown a lot by being with The Poet in whatever form. I have more or less succeeded in getting The Ex out of my life and resisting his attempts to continue to influence me. I am fully over The Professor. As I mentioned above, I began a meditation practice, and even though the changes it has caused have been subtle, they are noticeable to me and they're important. I am slowly turning my apartment into a livable home. I have closer female friends than I've had in awhile, even though they aren't the same ones I was in the process of losing a year ago. There's not so much hugely catastrophic drama going on. I no longer feel the need to tell perfect strangers fucked-up stories about myself. I'm writing a dissertation, whether I think I'm ready or not. I have prowled the Brooklyn Museum by myself and walked to the southern end of Prospect Park. I didn't have no one-night stands, but I had fewer one night stands than I did in 2007.
And so. This is an unwieldy post, but I'm mostly writing for myself right now. And that's something I'll be thinking about, too, how to get back to a more fluid and performative writing that's actually useful in my own life.
For now, though, I think sleep (if my bedroom's not vibrating) will be the good plan.
It was a kind of personal sublime, made more searing by the fact that opportunities like this ended up being rare last week--my brother and his wife and dog weren't part of the package when we made these plans, which I had seen all along as a chance to spend time with just my parents, to relax at the end of a year has been all about my brother and his wife, to recover from some of the abyssal loneliness and isolation and general invisibility that was especially present this past year. (Not that 2008 had the soul-sucking drama of 2007; it was more just a general slog, walking uphill, trying not to trip over every damn thing.) The kind of abyss that swallowed me whole a couple days before Christmas, especially on the day I turned in all my grades but everyone was already out of town and it was clear I wasn't going to get to see The Poet again any time soon (we still don't know when we'll be able to even get a drink), and I was so tired and already stressed out about New Year's and wanted to celebrate but instead I cried on the phone with The Poet about nothing in particular then drank a bottle of wine and watched some movies on Hulu. The night before I realized I was going to have to take a half-Xanax when my heart started racing as soon as I tried to go to bed and I had the sensation of falling through the ice on the lake and no one noticing in time. And all that was before I found out about the change in the Wisconsin plans--that I didn't know until my parents picked me up from the airport on Christmas Day and I made the mistake of trying to repress the panic and the disappointment--coming out first as anger after the family party, then as something more akin to a nervous breakdown. And my mother did apologize for not telling me sooner and for allowing them to come in the first place. My father thanked me for being transparent about my feelings (the trigger of the nervous breakdown was something that seems too minor on the surface to even go into yet isn't, for other complicated reasons) which is actually kind of a big step for us all because a year ago I probably would not have pushed back on the trigger issue and it would have poisoned the entire trip in such a way that I wouldn't ever have been able to go back to the cabin. Which was part of what compounded the panic attack. I didn't want to break down like I did (but it wasn't controllable in the end), but in a weird way it's a step forward to be able to do so.
And it worked out okay in the end, more or less, except that I didn't get as much of the quiet time that I was planning for--my brother and SIL just kind of hung around all the time and the dog was there and people were always talking so I didn't get a really decent period of quiet zazen until a day when I stayed in for a half hour while everyone else was playing outside in the snow with the dog. Though I suppose there's something to be said for staying in the room, as it were (it was too cold in the bedrooms to really hang there by myself anyway), for the amount of laughter generated by our attempts to remind ourselves how to play Clue (and for my ability to win three of the four games while drunk), and for the fact that we probably wouldn't have gotten outside as much as we did if it hadn't been for them.
(And I should interject that I do genuinely enjoy hanging out with my extended family and--most of the time--my parents, so I'm not one of those people for whom the holidays are just an exercise in barely-concealed contempt and drinking too much and feeling shamed for who you are. Highlights of this Christmas at my aunt's house included the success of my pointy red shoes and a long conversation about philosophy, Eastern religion, and literature with a cousin of mine who is also in a PhD program and who is trying to move back to New York. Also catching up with various aunts about my crazy personal life--not an enormous amount of detail, of course, but still--and the opportunity just to help out, hang out, and laugh.)
But to return to the lake, to midnight, the snow around my shins, the diamondedge stars, and the northern lights silhouetted against black outlines of pine trees. It touched something in my soul, something that I hadn't known was there in such a piercing way before. Call it, perhaps, a specifically northern sublime, bringing together any number of feelings I have when I am there in any season--catching the sunlight over the lake at a certain angle, the sunrise over the trees in the morning, coming around a bend in the road or over a hill that reveals a kind of absolute wildness, isolation--even when there are vacation homes all around. (And some of these have the same effect as well.) The feeling of being in Rhinelander at dusk the winter I lived up there seven years ago, over on the edge of town where all the shitty big box stores are, yet noticing the trees towering above the strip malls, and the prairie edge sunsets throwing swaths of color over the sky. All of this is in my soul. And I realized that any man I truly love will need to be able to look at the northern lights with me and understand this without my having to explain it at all.
It's always hard to come home. At least Chicago functioned as a buffer between two incompatible worlds--it's brutal to wake up in the cabin and go to sleep the same night in Brooklyn, but the traveling itself wasn't easy. And it's only been in the last couple of hours tonight that the relentless assault of bass from the apartment upstairs (and I mean it when I use the word "assault"--I ended up sleeping for part of the morning on the floor of my living room just to get away from it) has finally let up. For how long I don't know. The assault started on Christmas morning about an hour before I left for the airport and was in full swing when I came home yesterday afternoon. Something similar happened last year at this time, so I hope that it's seasonal. Nevertheless, I'm on edge a bit, even as I write this now. (Much in the same way as I was when I first moved here and spent two and a half months worried that I'd made a horrible decision.)
And so I want to return again to the night on the lake. I'm not going to think in terms of "resolutions" for this new year--rather, in terms of decisions--gathering as much performative force as I can from the speech act. My decision for 2009, most simply, is this: to live for myself. This isn't to say that I want to live selfishly--quite the opposite, in fact. I want to break away from the D.I.Y. Medsua thing I have going on all too often, where I become paralyzed by the spectacle of my own suffering. Neither is the idea to live for myself indulgently--especially when so many of those very indulgences backfire and sap my energy or worse. What I mean is something like taking control, but mostly in the sense of cultivating intentionality and presence, not allowing myself to waste time, and working on making the kinds of decisions that are best for me--rather than continuing with the narrative of things just kind of happening to me, of being pulled around, helpless, invisible. Perhaps, too, this is a way of saying that I will begin treating myself the way I would like other people to treat me. I want to live generously, to communicate energy to myself and others.
Some of this is prompted by the simple recognition that a lot of the next year (and the year after) is going to be taken up by things I do for others in the form of obligations such as those related to teaching and keeping friendships and also by a number of professional hoops that are going to involve a certain amount of subjective violence, inconvenience, long nights, and writing. I will need to write the bulk of my dissertation this coming year. I will be applying for jobs in the fall. I will (hopefully) be continuing to teach at Not-NYU, which likely means that I will also be continuing to teach 8 a.m. classes. And none of my other problems are going to magically disappear because it's 2009. It's easy for me to see how this could shape up to be a kind of miserable, sloggy, lonely, frustrating year. But I don't want it to be. For one thing--it's not sustainable. It just won't work if I'm exhausted all the time, if I can't find some joy in something related to my dissertation. And it won't work if I'm not working because I'm too tired, or too depressed, or whatever. My time management has gone to shit lately, but I don't think it's just a matter of staying off of Facebook. Something else has to happen, a decision to live better all around, to rethink the things that I do, to recapture one of the best things E ever did for me, which was give me a reason to work all the time so that I could be ready to do crazy things spontaneously. I want to regain some of that sense of flexibility where it doesn't seem like just fucking around when I should be doing something else.
Speaking of what happens when I should be doing something else. What both zazen and teaching have in common is the fact that when I am doing either one of those things, I am fully present to that activity, time has been blocked out for it that isn't invaded by other things I could be doing--it isn't even a question. (This is more true, of course, about sitting zazen with other people, though I try to take the same attitude at home. One of my great accomplishments of 2008 was adopting a meditation practice and sitting for fifteen minutes every morning I taught.) So much of my life isn't like that. It's a symptom of massively wasted time, of continually missed opportunities. So, in living for myself, one of the central ideas is that I will try to spread the sense of presence and energy from teaching and zazen to other parts of my life--to make decisions that allow me to feel as good about the other things that I do, as present, as intentional. It means valuing the time that I have alone to think / read / write / meditate regardless of when it comes and under what circumstances. (Ergo, obsessing less about boys, and all of that.) And also being a bit more aware of what I'm doing in terms of eating and drinking. One of my friends announced today (from my futon, where she'd spent the night) that she was going to quit drinking entirely in 2009--I don't want to go that far, but I also want to make sure drinking remains fun and doesn't consistently result in days (like this one) lost to hangovers. What's encouraging here is only that I began 2008 with a cold and didn't have many of those this past year; hopefully, beginning 2009 with a hangover means that they will be similarly rare. Hopefully.
And of course, I'm likely undervaluing the very good things of 2008 as well. I did accomplish an enormous amount professionally, though I'm probably hyperaware of the costs. I got what is, in the end, a fantastic adjunct job as adjunct jobs go. I have grown a lot by being with The Poet in whatever form. I have more or less succeeded in getting The Ex out of my life and resisting his attempts to continue to influence me. I am fully over The Professor. As I mentioned above, I began a meditation practice, and even though the changes it has caused have been subtle, they are noticeable to me and they're important. I am slowly turning my apartment into a livable home. I have closer female friends than I've had in awhile, even though they aren't the same ones I was in the process of losing a year ago. There's not so much hugely catastrophic drama going on. I no longer feel the need to tell perfect strangers fucked-up stories about myself. I'm writing a dissertation, whether I think I'm ready or not. I have prowled the Brooklyn Museum by myself and walked to the southern end of Prospect Park. I didn't have no one-night stands, but I had fewer one night stands than I did in 2007.
And so. This is an unwieldy post, but I'm mostly writing for myself right now. And that's something I'll be thinking about, too, how to get back to a more fluid and performative writing that's actually useful in my own life.
For now, though, I think sleep (if my bedroom's not vibrating) will be the good plan.
12.21.2008
Solstice
The comforting thing about the Winter Solstice is, of course, the reminder that the nights can only get so dark, that no matter what, at some measurable, identifiable point, it will start to get lighter again. And I am trying to take comfort in facts like these today, when it's gray outside and the rain is washing away all of the snow and everything is sort of damp and dampened. And I still feel like I am losing control of my life. Not in the huge, dramatic, at-least-it-makes-for-a-good story ways of 2007 and certain moments of 2008, but more like a kind of erosion whereby those piles of crap on the floor that were meant to be a temporary solution turn out to have a kind of permanence, where one day of not exactly forgetting to sit zazen turn into two days of not sitting, where opportunities slip through my fingers, where I spend too much money and don't have enough fun, where the meals seem constantly to come from restaurants and include fries (in spite of much money spent on healthy options at the farmers market), and so on and so forth. Work is not getting done. I should really grade the papers that came in on Thursday before I get the papers that will come in on Tuesday. I should read more Browning. I should try again to face my fellowship application. I should clean my apartment.
This is how it's been for weeks now. I'm getting by, of course, because I always do, and in many ways I'm better off (or look to be so) than I was last year at this time. 2008 did not destroy me the way 2007 did, and I did heal...and yet: I feel as if in some cases the healing took a weird turn. Like I'm back together but maybe not all the bones set right. Or that I reentered the world too quickly, without a long enough convalescence. (As if any of us ever have long enough for that.) Which is all to say that this time around, it's all almost frustratingly subtle and elusive, and nothing adds up to why I suddenly found myself crying on the train last night.
But then again. I have more friends, and stronger friendships, than I did last year. Occasionally, this makes me sad, too, even though I'm well aware of how pointless that kind of thinking is. (The kind of thinking where I remember how I had to go through all the really bad stuff more or less alone, except for people like K and the Professor coming into my life precisely when they damn well pleased or needed me for something.) I wish I could say that friendship could be enough, that it would keep the cosmic, gaping loneliness at bay, but of course it doesn't. Nevertheless, it's helped me salvage a few nights recently, and that's not all bad. And outwardly, I am so, so, so much better, I am impeccably successful and my not-NYU students now want to be Facebook friends with me, and I'm letting them as long as they aren't registered for my class next semester. (Incidentally, about 1/4 of my students and 3/4 of my best students are transferring out of not-NYU after one semester, for many of the same reasons why other not-NYU students put the institution in the news last week.)
The accidental trajectory of this post is a good example of the ways that reflection remains a treacherous proposition for me, an activity that I know I have to undertake, that eventually I will have to undertake without as many guardrails at some point soon. This fact is somewhat tangentially behind my desire to go to San Francisco this summer, but I don't know if it will be able to wait. Which is why I need to sit zazen like mad until the end of the year. If that can even work.
I have been at odds with other people--mostly strangers--to an unusually damaging degree lately. I've always hated tourists, but now I yell at them, or at least mutter things loudly as I walk past them as they block entrances and staircases. Being on the subway makes me want to gouge my own eyes out. West Village Coffeeshop is almost impossible, and I've been driven out of the library through sheer claustrophobia. You'd think this would be less of an issue since I live alone, but of course when I'm home I just futz around and wish I had someone to hang out with. But this sort of constant anger at strangers in the world is exhausting, and I don't like the kind of person it makes me. I'm sure I did this for years without thinking about it--I suppose Zen practice kind of takes the fun out of directing one's self-hatred outwards.
I can already see that things with The Poet--his situation and mine--are moving back to something like the situation we were in around June and July. I can't go back to that, so I know that there will have to be some letting go on my part soon. This time it bothers me less that I care about him and about seeing him--I'm more comfortable knowing that I do love him--and perhaps it helps too that for various reasons he's less marginal to the rest of my life than he was when we first got together, that I no longer have to defend him as a person, a fellow student, that I don't have to worry that my eyes are somehow clouded when it comes to him. Nevertheless. I expect that we're going to be breaking up again soon, who knows for how long or what the outcome will be, and that this time I don't exactly have someone like J. (oh, he of the laceratingly hot Facebook profile pictures) lined up to write me notes and make me swoon about more or less age appropriate dating again. I mean, the plan was always to do some online dating in January. But I worry about the emotional stress of "putting myself out there," as it were. Though, if 2007's foray into the whole thing was any indication, it's not like I had to do much work beyond the profile. And I'm not going to chase people.
I did, of course, find myself doing my Christmas shopping on Wednesday afternoon with a dude who probably is going to need his own pseudonym (and probably a whole host of changed personal details) at some point. I may have mentioned him in the last post, but for various reasons I can't give too many details because it could be even more quickly revealing than most things I post here. (Let's just say that he's really easy to Google and I don't really want to make that easier. Also I feel like I've been incredibly burned and somewhat manipulated by this kind of thing recently and by the idea that the development of a kind of information ethics is long overdue.) So, um, yeah. There's this dude. I met him a couple of months ago when I made a scheduling change on Wednesdays. We have good conversations and occasionally lunch, and this week lunch stretched into some leisurely holiday shopping that I had been planning to accomplish anyway. He's really nice. He plays a musical instrument and is quite good at it. I am actively trying to leave things at that, if only because I have a feeling that he is far too good / healthy / spiritual for me--and his only interactions with me have come at the point in my week when I am most at peace, kind of blissed out and relaxed and cleansed and all that. And because I did not make this particular schedule change in order to meet dudes. Nevertheless.
I've probably been writing this for too long; it certainly isn't solving any of my performative-constative writing conflicts. But perhaps the Solstice demands it. Let the darkness of the night reach its fullness, stretch out to what seems to be an interminable length, let it be what it has to be. After all, it's perhaps useful for me to remember how close I live to the abyss. The morning has slipped away, though perhaps not entirely unproductively, since I don't feel tired and I've written this post, and there is still a lot of day ahead of me. I want to go to the Brooklyn Museum at some point for a final round of shopping (I kind of want to get these candelabras both for myself and my mother). I need to get this place cleaned up before my party on Wednesday. I can sort through my papers from the semester and before. I will perhaps grade some papers, read some poetry, allow myself to think, reflect, perhaps write some more. But first--it's time to go sit on the cushion, as I haven't done since Thursday.
This is how it's been for weeks now. I'm getting by, of course, because I always do, and in many ways I'm better off (or look to be so) than I was last year at this time. 2008 did not destroy me the way 2007 did, and I did heal...and yet: I feel as if in some cases the healing took a weird turn. Like I'm back together but maybe not all the bones set right. Or that I reentered the world too quickly, without a long enough convalescence. (As if any of us ever have long enough for that.) Which is all to say that this time around, it's all almost frustratingly subtle and elusive, and nothing adds up to why I suddenly found myself crying on the train last night.
But then again. I have more friends, and stronger friendships, than I did last year. Occasionally, this makes me sad, too, even though I'm well aware of how pointless that kind of thinking is. (The kind of thinking where I remember how I had to go through all the really bad stuff more or less alone, except for people like K and the Professor coming into my life precisely when they damn well pleased or needed me for something.) I wish I could say that friendship could be enough, that it would keep the cosmic, gaping loneliness at bay, but of course it doesn't. Nevertheless, it's helped me salvage a few nights recently, and that's not all bad. And outwardly, I am so, so, so much better, I am impeccably successful and my not-NYU students now want to be Facebook friends with me, and I'm letting them as long as they aren't registered for my class next semester. (Incidentally, about 1/4 of my students and 3/4 of my best students are transferring out of not-NYU after one semester, for many of the same reasons why other not-NYU students put the institution in the news last week.)
The accidental trajectory of this post is a good example of the ways that reflection remains a treacherous proposition for me, an activity that I know I have to undertake, that eventually I will have to undertake without as many guardrails at some point soon. This fact is somewhat tangentially behind my desire to go to San Francisco this summer, but I don't know if it will be able to wait. Which is why I need to sit zazen like mad until the end of the year. If that can even work.
I have been at odds with other people--mostly strangers--to an unusually damaging degree lately. I've always hated tourists, but now I yell at them, or at least mutter things loudly as I walk past them as they block entrances and staircases. Being on the subway makes me want to gouge my own eyes out. West Village Coffeeshop is almost impossible, and I've been driven out of the library through sheer claustrophobia. You'd think this would be less of an issue since I live alone, but of course when I'm home I just futz around and wish I had someone to hang out with. But this sort of constant anger at strangers in the world is exhausting, and I don't like the kind of person it makes me. I'm sure I did this for years without thinking about it--I suppose Zen practice kind of takes the fun out of directing one's self-hatred outwards.
I can already see that things with The Poet--his situation and mine--are moving back to something like the situation we were in around June and July. I can't go back to that, so I know that there will have to be some letting go on my part soon. This time it bothers me less that I care about him and about seeing him--I'm more comfortable knowing that I do love him--and perhaps it helps too that for various reasons he's less marginal to the rest of my life than he was when we first got together, that I no longer have to defend him as a person, a fellow student, that I don't have to worry that my eyes are somehow clouded when it comes to him. Nevertheless. I expect that we're going to be breaking up again soon, who knows for how long or what the outcome will be, and that this time I don't exactly have someone like J. (oh, he of the laceratingly hot Facebook profile pictures) lined up to write me notes and make me swoon about more or less age appropriate dating again. I mean, the plan was always to do some online dating in January. But I worry about the emotional stress of "putting myself out there," as it were. Though, if 2007's foray into the whole thing was any indication, it's not like I had to do much work beyond the profile. And I'm not going to chase people.
I did, of course, find myself doing my Christmas shopping on Wednesday afternoon with a dude who probably is going to need his own pseudonym (and probably a whole host of changed personal details) at some point. I may have mentioned him in the last post, but for various reasons I can't give too many details because it could be even more quickly revealing than most things I post here. (Let's just say that he's really easy to Google and I don't really want to make that easier. Also I feel like I've been incredibly burned and somewhat manipulated by this kind of thing recently and by the idea that the development of a kind of information ethics is long overdue.) So, um, yeah. There's this dude. I met him a couple of months ago when I made a scheduling change on Wednesdays. We have good conversations and occasionally lunch, and this week lunch stretched into some leisurely holiday shopping that I had been planning to accomplish anyway. He's really nice. He plays a musical instrument and is quite good at it. I am actively trying to leave things at that, if only because I have a feeling that he is far too good / healthy / spiritual for me--and his only interactions with me have come at the point in my week when I am most at peace, kind of blissed out and relaxed and cleansed and all that. And because I did not make this particular schedule change in order to meet dudes. Nevertheless.
I've probably been writing this for too long; it certainly isn't solving any of my performative-constative writing conflicts. But perhaps the Solstice demands it. Let the darkness of the night reach its fullness, stretch out to what seems to be an interminable length, let it be what it has to be. After all, it's perhaps useful for me to remember how close I live to the abyss. The morning has slipped away, though perhaps not entirely unproductively, since I don't feel tired and I've written this post, and there is still a lot of day ahead of me. I want to go to the Brooklyn Museum at some point for a final round of shopping (I kind of want to get these candelabras both for myself and my mother). I need to get this place cleaned up before my party on Wednesday. I can sort through my papers from the semester and before. I will perhaps grade some papers, read some poetry, allow myself to think, reflect, perhaps write some more. But first--it's time to go sit on the cushion, as I haven't done since Thursday.
11.11.2008
Energy seeking, in bullet form
* I've felt increasingly stable emotionally, but I feel like I'm missing a connection with my work. I'm still doing a lot of futzing. There's not a lot of time for futzing. I need to figure out how to regain focus on both teaching and on my own research.
* I wonder if some of the lack of intellectual energy has to do with the change in the ways and contexts in which I talk about my work. I don't have the same kind of aspirational emotional investment in the people I talk about work with these days that I had with, say, The Professor--and part of that is because I'm no longer a still-in-coursework grad student trying to impress some guy I really liked with my knowledge of iterability. I talk about some of these things with friends and with The Poet, but the relationships have shifted. At the same time, I don't really want to get into the same kind of thing I had with The Professor with someone else. So a more substantial identity shift needs to take place.
* I did have a nice conversation this afternoon (completely unexpectedly) with a girl who I've known since I started in the program, but had never talked to her. I had been sort of casually suspicious of her for years, mostly based on stories that I heard about her, but as I've lived through a lot more--well, let's just say I understand how those kinds of rumors and things get started. She's much more settled than her previous repuration suggested, and I really enjoyed talking with her. I need more conversations like this.
* As I was leaving school, I saw K. from across the lobby. We waved, but that was it. It wasn't until I was on a Q train much closer to 14th Street that I realized what I should have done.
* It was one of those days: had I not gone home when I did, I could have seen The Poet. As things stand, we don't get to see each other until next Thursday.
* J both texted and emailed me first. I answered the text, and then he wrote back with something that didn't really move the conversation forward. Then I went home and saw his email. After some agonizing (okay, more like futzing) I sent a couple lines back to that, seeing if it's easier. I didn't really feel anything either way. And I have no idea what I want.
* I thought about going to the MeditateNYC open house at the Boundless Mind Zendo in Park Slope, but inertia and fajitas set in. There's another sangha I may try on Sunday. But the thing is that evening mediation is always going to be hard for me, especially on days when I teach--that 6 to 8 slot is a prime time for my wanting to nap. I really like the midday zazen thing. But we'll see.
* I think my teaching observation is going to coincide with my attempting to lecture on Derrida. You will recall that I am teaching freshman comp.
* I love Boston Legal, but I'm pissed off by their treatment of abortion in the most recent episode. This whole mushy liberal discourse of "it changes you forever" is incredibly condescening bullshit, and I was disappointed to see it voiced by Candace Bergen's character. All kinds of things have the power to change a given person forever, and to privilege this as the one thing that is so powerful that a woman can't be trusted to make the decision--I call bullshit, and I do so as a woman who had an abortion and does not think that it was the worst thing that has ever happened to her. The show itself eventually (more or less) affirmed abortion, but the qualifications they put on it (pro-choice arguments in the mouth of a headstrong 15 year old girl who may or may not have been engaged in a gender-selection abortion) were incredibly insulting. It triggered for me the memory of the "I'm pro-choice but I get squicked out by certain kinds of women having abortions for certain kinds of reasons (generally 'birth control')" meme that was going around the internets (especially those areas populated by female academic bloggers) a couple of months ago. That made me want to scream because, from a number of perspectives, my abortion was basically birth control, even though it only happened once. My life wasn't in danger. I wasn't a teenager. I suppose that if I really wanted to have a baby, I could have convinced E. to be on board with it, and we'd either have some sort of resentful partnership or I'd have moved back in with my parents or something. But I didn't do that. And I'm not sorry. Sure, there were things about the experience that were traumatizing, but they have more to do with the atmosphere at the clinic and the ways in which The Ex and The Professor both (at different times afterwards) responded to it. (The Ex: "Let me tell you how your abortion affected me." The Professor: "If it were mine, I would have wanted you to keep it. But I wouldn't have been with you or anything.") But it wasn't the most traumatizing or destructive thing that's ever happened to me in my life. And even if it was, to legislate with that in mind would be disgusting.
* I did not mean to make this into a post about my abortion, but it's possible that some of my immediate listlessness tonight was related to watching Boston Legal while consuming my dinner. And maybe now it's time to curl up in bed with Anne of Windy Poplars. For the record, I'm mostly excited about going to St Louis for Thanksgiving so I can retrieve the rest of the Anne of Green Gables books and Little House on the Prairie.
* I wonder if some of the lack of intellectual energy has to do with the change in the ways and contexts in which I talk about my work. I don't have the same kind of aspirational emotional investment in the people I talk about work with these days that I had with, say, The Professor--and part of that is because I'm no longer a still-in-coursework grad student trying to impress some guy I really liked with my knowledge of iterability. I talk about some of these things with friends and with The Poet, but the relationships have shifted. At the same time, I don't really want to get into the same kind of thing I had with The Professor with someone else. So a more substantial identity shift needs to take place.
* I did have a nice conversation this afternoon (completely unexpectedly) with a girl who I've known since I started in the program, but had never talked to her. I had been sort of casually suspicious of her for years, mostly based on stories that I heard about her, but as I've lived through a lot more--well, let's just say I understand how those kinds of rumors and things get started. She's much more settled than her previous repuration suggested, and I really enjoyed talking with her. I need more conversations like this.
* As I was leaving school, I saw K. from across the lobby. We waved, but that was it. It wasn't until I was on a Q train much closer to 14th Street that I realized what I should have done.
* It was one of those days: had I not gone home when I did, I could have seen The Poet. As things stand, we don't get to see each other until next Thursday.
* J both texted and emailed me first. I answered the text, and then he wrote back with something that didn't really move the conversation forward. Then I went home and saw his email. After some agonizing (okay, more like futzing) I sent a couple lines back to that, seeing if it's easier. I didn't really feel anything either way. And I have no idea what I want.
* I thought about going to the MeditateNYC open house at the Boundless Mind Zendo in Park Slope, but inertia and fajitas set in. There's another sangha I may try on Sunday. But the thing is that evening mediation is always going to be hard for me, especially on days when I teach--that 6 to 8 slot is a prime time for my wanting to nap. I really like the midday zazen thing. But we'll see.
* I think my teaching observation is going to coincide with my attempting to lecture on Derrida. You will recall that I am teaching freshman comp.
* I love Boston Legal, but I'm pissed off by their treatment of abortion in the most recent episode. This whole mushy liberal discourse of "it changes you forever" is incredibly condescening bullshit, and I was disappointed to see it voiced by Candace Bergen's character. All kinds of things have the power to change a given person forever, and to privilege this as the one thing that is so powerful that a woman can't be trusted to make the decision--I call bullshit, and I do so as a woman who had an abortion and does not think that it was the worst thing that has ever happened to her. The show itself eventually (more or less) affirmed abortion, but the qualifications they put on it (pro-choice arguments in the mouth of a headstrong 15 year old girl who may or may not have been engaged in a gender-selection abortion) were incredibly insulting. It triggered for me the memory of the "I'm pro-choice but I get squicked out by certain kinds of women having abortions for certain kinds of reasons (generally 'birth control')" meme that was going around the internets (especially those areas populated by female academic bloggers) a couple of months ago. That made me want to scream because, from a number of perspectives, my abortion was basically birth control, even though it only happened once. My life wasn't in danger. I wasn't a teenager. I suppose that if I really wanted to have a baby, I could have convinced E. to be on board with it, and we'd either have some sort of resentful partnership or I'd have moved back in with my parents or something. But I didn't do that. And I'm not sorry. Sure, there were things about the experience that were traumatizing, but they have more to do with the atmosphere at the clinic and the ways in which The Ex and The Professor both (at different times afterwards) responded to it. (The Ex: "Let me tell you how your abortion affected me." The Professor: "If it were mine, I would have wanted you to keep it. But I wouldn't have been with you or anything.") But it wasn't the most traumatizing or destructive thing that's ever happened to me in my life. And even if it was, to legislate with that in mind would be disgusting.
* I did not mean to make this into a post about my abortion, but it's possible that some of my immediate listlessness tonight was related to watching Boston Legal while consuming my dinner. And maybe now it's time to curl up in bed with Anne of Windy Poplars. For the record, I'm mostly excited about going to St Louis for Thanksgiving so I can retrieve the rest of the Anne of Green Gables books and Little House on the Prairie.
11.09.2008
On Rewriting Stories and Being-Nobody
Last Tuesday was the second time I've had the privilege of voting for Barack Obama, the first being his Senate primary in Illinois back in the very beginning of 2004. And I have a vivid memory of sitting on the floor of my bedroom in Chicago, taking apart my futon in preparation for my move back to New York with The Ex, and listening to Obama's keynote at the 2004 Democratic Convention.
A few days later, while The Ex and I were driving our moving truck full of books to Astoria, the trumped-up terrorist threats began in preparation for the Republican Convention. We saw people nearly get arrested for participating in (and watching) capoeria in Union Square. When we were in Pennsylvania, NPR was talking about vehicle searches in the tunnels and I wondered if I was putting The Ex in danger by allowing him to come to New York with me. I started my graduate coursework the week of the Republican convention.
We watched the 2004 election returns at the Bowery Poetry Club and the bar next door that had just opened, and because I'd moved out of New York right at the beginning of 2002, I still wasn't really used to the smoking ban and Derrida had died a few weeks earlier and I wasn't really used to that either. I think we went home before the full results were in--it didn't look good, but they hadn't called it yet. So it didn't hit us until the morning, and it was kind of like the day after 9/11 in a lot of ways, except that it wasn't a surprise or spectacle in the way that the attacks were--just a lot of bitter, bitter disappointment. There was a Victorian group meeting at school that night and only like four people came, but I remember it vividly, in part because it was the first time I went to the dinner afterwards. And it really did seem like the end of the world in some ways, especially when you're having a mediocre hamburger and watery pint with people in their late 60s who are telling you that it is.
The Ex, of course, spent the next year hating New York and saying he was allowed to do so because I had a psychological breakdown in Chicago. He came around by the midterm elections in 2006, but that was my first semester of teaching and I was broken in all kinds of other ways.
The events of this past week truly feel like the beginning of a new story. I'm not trying to overpersonalize or otherwise appropriate the events I talk about here, especially since I come across as rather less political than I really am on this blog. But it makes an interesting heuristic if nothing else, another way of understanding my life in New York and my life in grad school particularly, and it allows for certain forms of awareness that I'm not sure I would have had otherwise. I don't know if I'd call it a metaphor, exactly, especially not after reading a bunch of de Man yesterday, but there's certainly a shared affective field here, if nothing else. (Good lord, here I go...) The political weight that has been lifted is substantial, but it's also more than political, at least for me, and no doubt in part to its convergence with making it through the wedding (which was fine, even fun, and clearly not worth the amount of angst I put into it but we all knew that already, right?) and letting go (mostly) of the J situation.
Right up until the end, I refused to believe it. Refused to get my hopes up again (but, as in all of these situations, the hopes were up and in some ways stronger and less flexible because they were denied on some level) because I knew I couldn't take another 2004. With the distance of a few days, it's easy (easier) to see the extent to which all that was driven by a very specific personal story, having to do with the things I believe about myself and the events that I choose to make the defining moments in my life. Hence the personal / political palimpsest of the first several paragraphs and also a hint of vertigo that comes less from displacement but from a more complete un-placing--a reminder (if I can be Hegelian for a second) that we don't actually know where we are in our own stories or even whether we're in the story that we think we're in.
There's also the issue of expectations. This is probably the way in which I cause the most suffering for myself. I've always tried to keep my expectations low, dark, and cynical as a way of bracing myself for disappointment. Much of my inner life operates on this logic. In certain ways, it makes sense, especially in the business I'm in, where I know I can't count on getting a job or whatever. But, in general, this kind of thinking almost always leads to disaster--it was, I think, at the heart of my disaster with J. It's a disaster because the more I lower my expectations on one level, the more desperately I want to be proved wrong in those negative expectations, so that anything less than a complete, almost fairytale like reversal becomes another kind of disappointment. For a long time I've thought that the answer was simply to try harder to manage my expectations, to trust people less or to try in other ways to limit their influence over me. And this, too, was part of the disaster with J (and is related as well to the periods in which my relationship with The Poet has caused me pain as well)--I tend to turn my disappointment back on myself in the form of self-loathing--I don't allow myself, most of the time, to experience even justified / normal feelings when someone does, legitimately and indisputably, disappoint me. My usual m.o. is to get mad at myself for having expected anything of that person in the first place, to get mad at myself for feeling disappointed and for not being able to switch gears back into working and forget about it.
The question always turns on the management of expectation, on how not to get my hopes up. In practice, I think, this means that I hold back from caring about things--at least consciously. There's so much I'm working for in my own life that could go to shit, the last thing I want to do is go all in on trusting someone else who could disappoint me. Which means that the extent of my emotional investments often goes unacknowledged, which in turn means that I'm not always particularly good about choosing the sites of those investments because I'm not making them anyway, right? Or I try to throw out all these structures and place everything on one person, etc. etc.
You're getting the picture. And even when it works it doesn't because there's all that worrying over nothing.
In the past few days I've been trying to think about things at least a little differently. See, my initial reaction to Obama's victory (well, besides getting a thrill every time I think about the words "President Obama") was something like, hey, maybe I should have been more optimistic, maybe I shouldn't have kept my expectations so low, etc. etc. Not a bad reaction, but I don't think it gets to the heart of the issue. I sat midday zazen on the day after the election, and it suddenly hit me while I was walking up Broadway: the problem is the structure of expectation itself. Which isn't to say that hope and optimism are bad things, but rather to point out (at least to myself) that those things need to be part of the way I constitute the present moment and need to feed into the continuation of my learning how to trust each moment and each situation--without having expectations for how things should be or for how they could go wrong.
Some of this was crystallized for me on Thursday night, when I went to see Norman Fischer give a talk--mostly on his recent book (a Buddhist-oriented interpretation of the Odyssey). A lot of it focused on the relationship between being somebody and being nobody and the importance of practicing the latter. That struck me in a very particular way at the time, especially this idea of "allowing" yourself to be nobody...this seems to me to be a huge struggle for academics as a group, especially grad students, as we build up our names and CVs. (Ironically, the working group meeting we had on Friday was precisely on the question of CV design and now I need to redo mine.) We're always supposed to be "on," to be thinking only about our projects and our careers--or at least this is what we think people expect of us. The person other than The Poet who has been extremely supportive about my desire to go to San Francisco next summer has been Fabulous Committee Member. And I think the pressure to be somebody (and to be a stable, legible somebody) is compounded by growing up in an evangelical tradition, which constructs the self in a very specific and often negative way--the being-nobody that Norman Fischer was talking about is something, obviously, very different from the self-denial or self-annihilation (in Christ, in one's husband if one is a woman) preached in the places where I first grew up spiritually. Though I haven't fully worked out those different kinds of being-nobody for myself yet.
Being-nobody, he said, is part of what allows us to see our own stories as flexible and based on infinite choices rather than as fixed or typed. I've always, I think, been aware of the flexibility of stories to some extent, but I've really only experienced that on the level of being myself / being someone else--which is a false choice since it still includes an irreducible selfhood. Or, it's the difference between rewriting a story and starting a new one. (There was always something of the subjective suicide in my moving to the Midwest, and I've now been in New York continuously for longer than I've ever been before and there's a part of me that thinks things would be easier if I just left town again. But I can't, not until 2010 or so at the earliest.) But there is something powerful in the process of becoming aware of the memories and perceptions that we've arbitrarily chosen to privilege as formative in the process of becoming-ourselves. (In a way, of course, I'm sure blogging compounds this problem, though this isn't an archive in the traditional way.) And to think that we could change them, start from a different point that says something different from what the so-called formative moment says.
I'm sure that a lot of this hit me in this way because one of the things that brought me to practice was this divide between how I talked about my life and how I experienced my life--or, of just feeling the pressures of being somebody, particularly when that "somebody" was expected to drink a lot, date married dudes, have huge personal crises, and be a little bit intimidating and scary. And I think it does ask a lot of people (thinking here again of J) to expect them to see through my own self-presentation. (Though if anyone was able to do this, it's been The Poet.)
Of course, once you start thinking about all your determining narratives, it gets pretty overwhelming. I think there are a few I can start practicing with, though. One is the "thwarted" narrative, one that governs nearly every aspect of my life and is largely responsible for the enormous amount of hostility I bring to the world. In its archetypal form, it's simple: trying to be good, doing the right thing, expecting a thousand times more of yourself than you ask of anyone else or anyone asks of you, following authority, doing your homework and still getting screwed over, blocked, bag searched on the subway, annoyed by the first thing that crosses your path or upsets your composure, your heart broken by the first guy you meet when you're trying to take a break from your old married boyfriend who got you into Buddhism in the first place. And so on.
It has its roots a couple of places, but I think this is the important one: I was convinced from the time that I was eight or so that if God had actually wanted me to be a Christian (in that kind of Calvinist-elect way) he would have given me a sibling I could love or no sibling at all. Every single time I tried to accept Jesus and make resolutions to live a better life, to listen to more Christian radio, to take notes on the sermon, and so on--all of that collapsed as soon as my brother did something to throw me into a rage. Which was pretty much every day until high school. And sometimes after that. This isn't why I ended up leaving the church or finally moving to New York so I could distance myself from it, but it's one of the most vivid and persistent things that I remember about growing up.
I'm not sure right off the bat how one begins to rewrite a narrative like this one. I still haven't fully untangled the threads. I know, for instance, that this is another thing that collapses into anger with myself--why can't I be better, why can't I love my brother, why can't I be normal and not crazy so that someone other than The Poet will love me...So getting out is hard. I may have to start by focusing on the places where I've begun to rewrite certain manifestations of this narrative already, spiritual practice being a significant one. I'm still surprised to find myself on my cushion every day, especially on the days I teach. That's a huge lifestyle shift for me, and I shouldn't let myself minimize it.
The other site of rewriting is the one suggested by the narrative that began this very long post. I'm no longer the scared first-year grad student I was in 2004. All of the things that seemed impossible to me then--teaching, publishing, living without The Ex, having a President-Elect Barack Obama, and so on--are happening now almost imperceptibly and have somehow come to pass without a kind of apocalyptic rupture, have come about gradually, through a series of moments that will themselves pass away.
And for now I am going to try to trust that. I'm also going to go for a walk in Prospect Park this afternoon, regardless of how much prep work I get done in the next hour or so.
A few days later, while The Ex and I were driving our moving truck full of books to Astoria, the trumped-up terrorist threats began in preparation for the Republican Convention. We saw people nearly get arrested for participating in (and watching) capoeria in Union Square. When we were in Pennsylvania, NPR was talking about vehicle searches in the tunnels and I wondered if I was putting The Ex in danger by allowing him to come to New York with me. I started my graduate coursework the week of the Republican convention.
We watched the 2004 election returns at the Bowery Poetry Club and the bar next door that had just opened, and because I'd moved out of New York right at the beginning of 2002, I still wasn't really used to the smoking ban and Derrida had died a few weeks earlier and I wasn't really used to that either. I think we went home before the full results were in--it didn't look good, but they hadn't called it yet. So it didn't hit us until the morning, and it was kind of like the day after 9/11 in a lot of ways, except that it wasn't a surprise or spectacle in the way that the attacks were--just a lot of bitter, bitter disappointment. There was a Victorian group meeting at school that night and only like four people came, but I remember it vividly, in part because it was the first time I went to the dinner afterwards. And it really did seem like the end of the world in some ways, especially when you're having a mediocre hamburger and watery pint with people in their late 60s who are telling you that it is.
The Ex, of course, spent the next year hating New York and saying he was allowed to do so because I had a psychological breakdown in Chicago. He came around by the midterm elections in 2006, but that was my first semester of teaching and I was broken in all kinds of other ways.
The events of this past week truly feel like the beginning of a new story. I'm not trying to overpersonalize or otherwise appropriate the events I talk about here, especially since I come across as rather less political than I really am on this blog. But it makes an interesting heuristic if nothing else, another way of understanding my life in New York and my life in grad school particularly, and it allows for certain forms of awareness that I'm not sure I would have had otherwise. I don't know if I'd call it a metaphor, exactly, especially not after reading a bunch of de Man yesterday, but there's certainly a shared affective field here, if nothing else. (Good lord, here I go...) The political weight that has been lifted is substantial, but it's also more than political, at least for me, and no doubt in part to its convergence with making it through the wedding (which was fine, even fun, and clearly not worth the amount of angst I put into it but we all knew that already, right?) and letting go (mostly) of the J situation.
Right up until the end, I refused to believe it. Refused to get my hopes up again (but, as in all of these situations, the hopes were up and in some ways stronger and less flexible because they were denied on some level) because I knew I couldn't take another 2004. With the distance of a few days, it's easy (easier) to see the extent to which all that was driven by a very specific personal story, having to do with the things I believe about myself and the events that I choose to make the defining moments in my life. Hence the personal / political palimpsest of the first several paragraphs and also a hint of vertigo that comes less from displacement but from a more complete un-placing--a reminder (if I can be Hegelian for a second) that we don't actually know where we are in our own stories or even whether we're in the story that we think we're in.
There's also the issue of expectations. This is probably the way in which I cause the most suffering for myself. I've always tried to keep my expectations low, dark, and cynical as a way of bracing myself for disappointment. Much of my inner life operates on this logic. In certain ways, it makes sense, especially in the business I'm in, where I know I can't count on getting a job or whatever. But, in general, this kind of thinking almost always leads to disaster--it was, I think, at the heart of my disaster with J. It's a disaster because the more I lower my expectations on one level, the more desperately I want to be proved wrong in those negative expectations, so that anything less than a complete, almost fairytale like reversal becomes another kind of disappointment. For a long time I've thought that the answer was simply to try harder to manage my expectations, to trust people less or to try in other ways to limit their influence over me. And this, too, was part of the disaster with J (and is related as well to the periods in which my relationship with The Poet has caused me pain as well)--I tend to turn my disappointment back on myself in the form of self-loathing--I don't allow myself, most of the time, to experience even justified / normal feelings when someone does, legitimately and indisputably, disappoint me. My usual m.o. is to get mad at myself for having expected anything of that person in the first place, to get mad at myself for feeling disappointed and for not being able to switch gears back into working and forget about it.
The question always turns on the management of expectation, on how not to get my hopes up. In practice, I think, this means that I hold back from caring about things--at least consciously. There's so much I'm working for in my own life that could go to shit, the last thing I want to do is go all in on trusting someone else who could disappoint me. Which means that the extent of my emotional investments often goes unacknowledged, which in turn means that I'm not always particularly good about choosing the sites of those investments because I'm not making them anyway, right? Or I try to throw out all these structures and place everything on one person, etc. etc.
You're getting the picture. And even when it works it doesn't because there's all that worrying over nothing.
In the past few days I've been trying to think about things at least a little differently. See, my initial reaction to Obama's victory (well, besides getting a thrill every time I think about the words "President Obama") was something like, hey, maybe I should have been more optimistic, maybe I shouldn't have kept my expectations so low, etc. etc. Not a bad reaction, but I don't think it gets to the heart of the issue. I sat midday zazen on the day after the election, and it suddenly hit me while I was walking up Broadway: the problem is the structure of expectation itself. Which isn't to say that hope and optimism are bad things, but rather to point out (at least to myself) that those things need to be part of the way I constitute the present moment and need to feed into the continuation of my learning how to trust each moment and each situation--without having expectations for how things should be or for how they could go wrong.
Some of this was crystallized for me on Thursday night, when I went to see Norman Fischer give a talk--mostly on his recent book (a Buddhist-oriented interpretation of the Odyssey). A lot of it focused on the relationship between being somebody and being nobody and the importance of practicing the latter. That struck me in a very particular way at the time, especially this idea of "allowing" yourself to be nobody...this seems to me to be a huge struggle for academics as a group, especially grad students, as we build up our names and CVs. (Ironically, the working group meeting we had on Friday was precisely on the question of CV design and now I need to redo mine.) We're always supposed to be "on," to be thinking only about our projects and our careers--or at least this is what we think people expect of us. The person other than The Poet who has been extremely supportive about my desire to go to San Francisco next summer has been Fabulous Committee Member. And I think the pressure to be somebody (and to be a stable, legible somebody) is compounded by growing up in an evangelical tradition, which constructs the self in a very specific and often negative way--the being-nobody that Norman Fischer was talking about is something, obviously, very different from the self-denial or self-annihilation (in Christ, in one's husband if one is a woman) preached in the places where I first grew up spiritually. Though I haven't fully worked out those different kinds of being-nobody for myself yet.
Being-nobody, he said, is part of what allows us to see our own stories as flexible and based on infinite choices rather than as fixed or typed. I've always, I think, been aware of the flexibility of stories to some extent, but I've really only experienced that on the level of being myself / being someone else--which is a false choice since it still includes an irreducible selfhood. Or, it's the difference between rewriting a story and starting a new one. (There was always something of the subjective suicide in my moving to the Midwest, and I've now been in New York continuously for longer than I've ever been before and there's a part of me that thinks things would be easier if I just left town again. But I can't, not until 2010 or so at the earliest.) But there is something powerful in the process of becoming aware of the memories and perceptions that we've arbitrarily chosen to privilege as formative in the process of becoming-ourselves. (In a way, of course, I'm sure blogging compounds this problem, though this isn't an archive in the traditional way.) And to think that we could change them, start from a different point that says something different from what the so-called formative moment says.
I'm sure that a lot of this hit me in this way because one of the things that brought me to practice was this divide between how I talked about my life and how I experienced my life--or, of just feeling the pressures of being somebody, particularly when that "somebody" was expected to drink a lot, date married dudes, have huge personal crises, and be a little bit intimidating and scary. And I think it does ask a lot of people (thinking here again of J) to expect them to see through my own self-presentation. (Though if anyone was able to do this, it's been The Poet.)
Of course, once you start thinking about all your determining narratives, it gets pretty overwhelming. I think there are a few I can start practicing with, though. One is the "thwarted" narrative, one that governs nearly every aspect of my life and is largely responsible for the enormous amount of hostility I bring to the world. In its archetypal form, it's simple: trying to be good, doing the right thing, expecting a thousand times more of yourself than you ask of anyone else or anyone asks of you, following authority, doing your homework and still getting screwed over, blocked, bag searched on the subway, annoyed by the first thing that crosses your path or upsets your composure, your heart broken by the first guy you meet when you're trying to take a break from your old married boyfriend who got you into Buddhism in the first place. And so on.
It has its roots a couple of places, but I think this is the important one: I was convinced from the time that I was eight or so that if God had actually wanted me to be a Christian (in that kind of Calvinist-elect way) he would have given me a sibling I could love or no sibling at all. Every single time I tried to accept Jesus and make resolutions to live a better life, to listen to more Christian radio, to take notes on the sermon, and so on--all of that collapsed as soon as my brother did something to throw me into a rage. Which was pretty much every day until high school. And sometimes after that. This isn't why I ended up leaving the church or finally moving to New York so I could distance myself from it, but it's one of the most vivid and persistent things that I remember about growing up.
I'm not sure right off the bat how one begins to rewrite a narrative like this one. I still haven't fully untangled the threads. I know, for instance, that this is another thing that collapses into anger with myself--why can't I be better, why can't I love my brother, why can't I be normal and not crazy so that someone other than The Poet will love me...So getting out is hard. I may have to start by focusing on the places where I've begun to rewrite certain manifestations of this narrative already, spiritual practice being a significant one. I'm still surprised to find myself on my cushion every day, especially on the days I teach. That's a huge lifestyle shift for me, and I shouldn't let myself minimize it.
The other site of rewriting is the one suggested by the narrative that began this very long post. I'm no longer the scared first-year grad student I was in 2004. All of the things that seemed impossible to me then--teaching, publishing, living without The Ex, having a President-Elect Barack Obama, and so on--are happening now almost imperceptibly and have somehow come to pass without a kind of apocalyptic rupture, have come about gradually, through a series of moments that will themselves pass away.
And for now I am going to try to trust that. I'm also going to go for a walk in Prospect Park this afternoon, regardless of how much prep work I get done in the next hour or so.
10.31.2008
Most of the time...
I'm not wretched in the way that I was on Sunday or most of Monday. I thought I should say that here because there are a few of you out there reading and caring and commiserating, and that's actually meaningful for me. So, thank you.
In fact, it's been something of a quiet week. Not a huge amount of productivity, but I'm between projects anyway. So I've poured myself into interacting humanely with my students and taken some time to focus on myself, though in what's hopefully a less obsessive way. Went back to the midday zazen on Wednesday, which was rejuvenating. And I feel almost calm, which is strange partly because I know that a lot of the crappiness of my situation is directly traceable to my having acted like an idiot on a couple of levels. And I wonder--is this really me, being able to recognize my own issues but not doing the whole self-recrimination thing? It feels weird.
But I'm going to try to practice with that for now and try to get a few hours sleep before it's time to go. Have decided that if I'm not checking a bag, I probably don't need to get to the airport two full hours before the flight, so I can leave more or less at the same time I would to teach. And being able to trust that is even something.
I'm hoping the weather will be nice and that the fall colors will be out. I do actually want to see the extended family. I have my travel zafu. And The Poet will be there to pick me up when I get home. So I guess I start here.
In fact, it's been something of a quiet week. Not a huge amount of productivity, but I'm between projects anyway. So I've poured myself into interacting humanely with my students and taken some time to focus on myself, though in what's hopefully a less obsessive way. Went back to the midday zazen on Wednesday, which was rejuvenating. And I feel almost calm, which is strange partly because I know that a lot of the crappiness of my situation is directly traceable to my having acted like an idiot on a couple of levels. And I wonder--is this really me, being able to recognize my own issues but not doing the whole self-recrimination thing? It feels weird.
But I'm going to try to practice with that for now and try to get a few hours sleep before it's time to go. Have decided that if I'm not checking a bag, I probably don't need to get to the airport two full hours before the flight, so I can leave more or less at the same time I would to teach. And being able to trust that is even something.
I'm hoping the weather will be nice and that the fall colors will be out. I do actually want to see the extended family. I have my travel zafu. And The Poet will be there to pick me up when I get home. So I guess I start here.
10.05.2008
Guarded optimism and second chances
Around the beginning of the semester--which of course was also around the time I met J.--I spent a lot of time writing around a problem that I was beginning to notice in my personal life: namely, a huge disjunction between the way I experienced my life and the way I represented my life. One of the immediate triggers for this awareness was a conversation with K. where he kept trying to tell me I was an alcoholic and I realized that while I wasn't one, I was talking to him like I was. And I couldn't come up with a reason why that would be a good idea under any circumstances. In a broader sense, this was on my mind because the new school year seemed really to mark a new leaf for me professionally and academically--leaving the institutional fold of Erstwhile Teaching College for Not-NYU, being finished with coursework and orals, and having two forthcoming articles in hand. Moreover, I was coming up to the year anniversary of the semester that just about did me in, the shitstorm that came down before I had the chance to heal from my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. Mostly, I've told those stories and don't really need to go back.
And there, my friends, was the problem. Is the problem, more likely. I looked around at the beginning of the Fall of 2008 and realized that I was still the girl with all the fucked up stories, the girl sleeping with the married guy and probably more famous than she wanted to be for sharing the more sordid of her stories. In a sense, I started listening to myself a bit more and realized that I sounded kind of nuts.
For whatever reason, not much of this made the blog. I started to get into it in a couple of posts that I abandoned as they got increasingly complicated or whatever. Maybe I just didn't want to admit to some of it. And I think that when things seemed really good with J., it was easiest just to pretend that the rest of it never happened, that from now on everything was going to be fine &c.
We see, of course, how that turned out.
A lot of things happened in the last 36 hours or so. When the Xanax and zazen combination didn't work, I went to the bar on the next block for some $4 happy hour pints and read more of "The Angel in the House" and realized in the middle of all of it that sleeping with The Poet on Thursday had been a horrible, horrible mistake in part because I had been thinking about J. the whole time and after two beers I decided that I needed to text J. and tell him that. I saw it as a last ditch effort. What I couldn't get past all yesterday (Friday-yesterday) was the sense that I had done a horrible thing when I called him on Thursday and that I was engaged in an acute form of self-sabotage without even really knowing why. And not long after that I went home to eat junk food for dinner and catch up on my Thursday night TV and just forget about the whole thing. If nothing else, I told myself, I've learned that being with The Poet no longer solves all of my problems, and as much as I'd like to think differently (because he is kind, because he cares, because after the last six or seven months we achieved a very wonderful coexistence), he would never be able to be the person I need him to be.
But he did text me back, and with no small sense of trepidation and outright panic, I went to meet him on the Lower East Side at 1:00 in the morning.
It was a strange conversation and a stranger couple of hours. Probably one of the hardest conversations I've ever had to have with someone I barely know. I did a lot of apologizing and I don't think it was unjustified. I don't really want to go into the specifics (since that would, ironically, reinscribe and reproduce many of the impulses that got me here in the first place), but suffice it to say that I learned a lot of things about how I appear to other people (especially those who don't know me) and I also realized that I have a long way to go in figuring out how to deal with relationships. And a lot of what he called me out for can be related back to the problems I was writing about at the beginning, the experience vs. representation divide in my own life, and habits of speech and thought that have become kind of disturbingly entrenched over the last year and a half. It wasn't just the high awfulness of Thursday night, but things that were there from the very beginning, things that got exposed in part because that cleavage was there, that I had long since ceased to talk about myself in the way that I wanted to be.
But he came out to meet me anyway (and I him). I'm not sure either one of us knows why. And there's still a long way to go in any of this, and there were a lot of things that had to take place last night that were scary (beyond even the scariness of having someone call you out for everything you'd been feedback looping the self-recrimination about for the past three weeks), but I went through with it because I wanted to be with him. And it seems right and good and we've made some deals with each other (I hate to call them promises, exactly, not because they aren't but because that word seems overdetermined in this context) and I'm left just trying to do the best I can, holding on, relaxing, watching my speech, and trying to put myself back together again from these last couple of days. He's going to Montreal again this week, which means that I have no excuse for not writing my prospectus, prepping the next unit of my class, and all those other things that haven't been getting done. Also, of course, putting things right with The Poet in terms of not getting back together with him.
During the calling out, J. said to me, "You don't know how beautiful you are." But in a way that's almost impossible to parse. It wasn't meant to be flirtatious, it was almost sad and completely heartfelt, and that's one of the things that makes me nervous. It was nicer than when The Ex used to kind of browbeat me into confidence (which only succeeded in hollowing me out), but still...this moment sticks in my throat a little bit.
He's wonderful to fall asleep with, though. I was restless the first couple of times just because I'm used to mostly sleeping alone (and I almost never slept well with E. or The Poet), but it turns out that I can actually fall asleep while he's holding me. At least for a couple of hours. This in itself is immensely comforting, and I want it to bode well for something. Like I want to be my best self for him, to stop overcompensating for the hurts and traumas of 2007 and beyond. Even thought it's not going to be easy.
I don't know if I'll see him before he leaves for Canada. But I'm going to try to deal either way. And I'm still determined to go to the Village Zendo on Monday.
I may begin tomorrow with an eminently skippable prospectus-related post. Really must get back on track with that. And grading.
And there, my friends, was the problem. Is the problem, more likely. I looked around at the beginning of the Fall of 2008 and realized that I was still the girl with all the fucked up stories, the girl sleeping with the married guy and probably more famous than she wanted to be for sharing the more sordid of her stories. In a sense, I started listening to myself a bit more and realized that I sounded kind of nuts.
For whatever reason, not much of this made the blog. I started to get into it in a couple of posts that I abandoned as they got increasingly complicated or whatever. Maybe I just didn't want to admit to some of it. And I think that when things seemed really good with J., it was easiest just to pretend that the rest of it never happened, that from now on everything was going to be fine &c.
We see, of course, how that turned out.
A lot of things happened in the last 36 hours or so. When the Xanax and zazen combination didn't work, I went to the bar on the next block for some $4 happy hour pints and read more of "The Angel in the House" and realized in the middle of all of it that sleeping with The Poet on Thursday had been a horrible, horrible mistake in part because I had been thinking about J. the whole time and after two beers I decided that I needed to text J. and tell him that. I saw it as a last ditch effort. What I couldn't get past all yesterday (Friday-yesterday) was the sense that I had done a horrible thing when I called him on Thursday and that I was engaged in an acute form of self-sabotage without even really knowing why. And not long after that I went home to eat junk food for dinner and catch up on my Thursday night TV and just forget about the whole thing. If nothing else, I told myself, I've learned that being with The Poet no longer solves all of my problems, and as much as I'd like to think differently (because he is kind, because he cares, because after the last six or seven months we achieved a very wonderful coexistence), he would never be able to be the person I need him to be.
But he did text me back, and with no small sense of trepidation and outright panic, I went to meet him on the Lower East Side at 1:00 in the morning.
It was a strange conversation and a stranger couple of hours. Probably one of the hardest conversations I've ever had to have with someone I barely know. I did a lot of apologizing and I don't think it was unjustified. I don't really want to go into the specifics (since that would, ironically, reinscribe and reproduce many of the impulses that got me here in the first place), but suffice it to say that I learned a lot of things about how I appear to other people (especially those who don't know me) and I also realized that I have a long way to go in figuring out how to deal with relationships. And a lot of what he called me out for can be related back to the problems I was writing about at the beginning, the experience vs. representation divide in my own life, and habits of speech and thought that have become kind of disturbingly entrenched over the last year and a half. It wasn't just the high awfulness of Thursday night, but things that were there from the very beginning, things that got exposed in part because that cleavage was there, that I had long since ceased to talk about myself in the way that I wanted to be.
But he came out to meet me anyway (and I him). I'm not sure either one of us knows why. And there's still a long way to go in any of this, and there were a lot of things that had to take place last night that were scary (beyond even the scariness of having someone call you out for everything you'd been feedback looping the self-recrimination about for the past three weeks), but I went through with it because I wanted to be with him. And it seems right and good and we've made some deals with each other (I hate to call them promises, exactly, not because they aren't but because that word seems overdetermined in this context) and I'm left just trying to do the best I can, holding on, relaxing, watching my speech, and trying to put myself back together again from these last couple of days. He's going to Montreal again this week, which means that I have no excuse for not writing my prospectus, prepping the next unit of my class, and all those other things that haven't been getting done. Also, of course, putting things right with The Poet in terms of not getting back together with him.
During the calling out, J. said to me, "You don't know how beautiful you are." But in a way that's almost impossible to parse. It wasn't meant to be flirtatious, it was almost sad and completely heartfelt, and that's one of the things that makes me nervous. It was nicer than when The Ex used to kind of browbeat me into confidence (which only succeeded in hollowing me out), but still...this moment sticks in my throat a little bit.
He's wonderful to fall asleep with, though. I was restless the first couple of times just because I'm used to mostly sleeping alone (and I almost never slept well with E. or The Poet), but it turns out that I can actually fall asleep while he's holding me. At least for a couple of hours. This in itself is immensely comforting, and I want it to bode well for something. Like I want to be my best self for him, to stop overcompensating for the hurts and traumas of 2007 and beyond. Even thought it's not going to be easy.
I don't know if I'll see him before he leaves for Canada. But I'm going to try to deal either way. And I'm still determined to go to the Village Zendo on Monday.
I may begin tomorrow with an eminently skippable prospectus-related post. Really must get back on track with that. And grading.
5.09.2008
On breaking even as a pyhrric victory
You could say, I suppose, that I played my cards the best I could this week, that I succeeded in what I had set out to do, minimize risk, not doing anything that would jeopardize the shred of a relationship I do have--breaking even, at least--no worse off at the end of the semester than I was at the beginning. And maybe running into K. in the library will be less awkward now and even though The Professor and I haven't talked since last Friday and he's clearly not going to Indiana with me in the fall I will still be able to send him my articles as I write them. And the poet will be around most weeks to spend a night in Brooklyn and leave again in the morning back to Jersey and the rest of his life. And I'll fix the stupid health issue that I've let go on too long already, and eventually the school I want to adjunct at in the fall will let me know about that, and my friend's husband and I will work out my working at his firm, and I'll go to the library on the days I'm not there and I'll write my articles like I said I would. And the summer will pass this way--maybe I really will go shopping at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket on Saturdays and start going back to the Cafe on Sundays and keep up the gym going even when / if my ID card doesn't let me keep my gym bag in my desk. And perhaps I will learn to play by the rules again and maybe--well--I don't know. I'm done hoping for right now, I'm done asking, and I say these things knowing I'm not. But I'm so tired of living like a Liz Phair song and all the books and poems I'm reading tonight remind me that it's one thing to become disillusioned with the straight path that life has to offer, but it's another thing to let go of those illusions, and I've never claimed to like this only to accept it, but in the end it may not matter how much I set out trying to do the right thing, how much I tried to suspend judgment and take what was there, not trying to ask for more.
Right now I am playing for the present, playing to avoid the return of the abyss of a couple of weeks ago, playing to avoid being as wretched as I was in January and February because I will not be able to write a dissertation under those conditions. When my life works, as it did, in various fleeting moments over the past three weeks or so, it was wonderful, inspiring, exciting. But these things collapse so fast. And it's all quicksand. There is a part of me that wants to play for keeps, that maybe wants a reason to consider staying in New York once I graduate, something more than all of this, than being the other woman. But it's hard to go back. I don't have much more to risk--I don't want to let go of what I have, even if it's basically a 56-year-old guy with a wife in New Jersey. At least he cares enough not to make promises he can't follow through on, not to be so rigorous in pushing me away.
But on the other hand, I don't see him as a friend in the way that K and the Professor were. Our relationship is sex, literature, and drinking--with some humanity mixed in. (After all, he did bring me a drink token from the night he spent at the L&L talking to me on the phone.) But it doesn't have that same stomachdrop excitement to it. And of course I'd have to trace longer genealogies here that I don't have the time for--K is a distinct improvement on The Professor in that he actually finds me attractive and pursued me for it--there's just that huge other glaring problem. And he's right, in a way, that him 10 years younger and single probably would be a good match for me.
Somebody please find me that man and make me fall in love with him.
Yet in terms of the spring semester at least I am no worse off than I was when I started, not really. Some wasted efforts of course, but not all lost in that they carried me through those long middle sections--The Professor and I renewed our friendship just long enough for him to read my conference paper and K probably kept me from going insane while my mom was here. So I try to stay thankful for these tiny things even though right now they hurt, hurt badly. But this was the game I was playing. I wish I wasn't playing it.
And the rules don't work in the subjunctive, so I do what I have to do again, pull myself together for another hour of reading and the meeting I have to plan for tomorrow. Take a deep breath and tell myself that my orals reading will all get done. Wonder if I should tear those last couple of pages out of my journal. Send one last email to say, yeah, we'll see each other in the library, and it'll be fine and that's how we'll be friends and it won't make me miserable this time, I promise.
Do I sound self-pitying? I'm not trying to, actually. But I have been reading a lot of Victorian women poets lately, and am probably overidentifying. Suffice it to say that Aurora Leigh, even as it reasserted itself as perhaps my favorite 19th century long poem, was also very much behind that collapse at the end of Spring Break.
And I still think back to my "September 10th" moment--literally, though perhaps disingenuously--but, really--the last time I was entirely happy was on September 10, 2007. It was the first day of German class, and the most perfect date I had with E. It was the night I got pregnant, and in the overnight my grandmother died. And everything's been out of joint since then. I wouldn't even know how to put this all back together again.
Right now I am playing for the present, playing to avoid the return of the abyss of a couple of weeks ago, playing to avoid being as wretched as I was in January and February because I will not be able to write a dissertation under those conditions. When my life works, as it did, in various fleeting moments over the past three weeks or so, it was wonderful, inspiring, exciting. But these things collapse so fast. And it's all quicksand. There is a part of me that wants to play for keeps, that maybe wants a reason to consider staying in New York once I graduate, something more than all of this, than being the other woman. But it's hard to go back. I don't have much more to risk--I don't want to let go of what I have, even if it's basically a 56-year-old guy with a wife in New Jersey. At least he cares enough not to make promises he can't follow through on, not to be so rigorous in pushing me away.
But on the other hand, I don't see him as a friend in the way that K and the Professor were. Our relationship is sex, literature, and drinking--with some humanity mixed in. (After all, he did bring me a drink token from the night he spent at the L&L talking to me on the phone.) But it doesn't have that same stomachdrop excitement to it. And of course I'd have to trace longer genealogies here that I don't have the time for--K is a distinct improvement on The Professor in that he actually finds me attractive and pursued me for it--there's just that huge other glaring problem. And he's right, in a way, that him 10 years younger and single probably would be a good match for me.
Somebody please find me that man and make me fall in love with him.
Yet in terms of the spring semester at least I am no worse off than I was when I started, not really. Some wasted efforts of course, but not all lost in that they carried me through those long middle sections--The Professor and I renewed our friendship just long enough for him to read my conference paper and K probably kept me from going insane while my mom was here. So I try to stay thankful for these tiny things even though right now they hurt, hurt badly. But this was the game I was playing. I wish I wasn't playing it.
And the rules don't work in the subjunctive, so I do what I have to do again, pull myself together for another hour of reading and the meeting I have to plan for tomorrow. Take a deep breath and tell myself that my orals reading will all get done. Wonder if I should tear those last couple of pages out of my journal. Send one last email to say, yeah, we'll see each other in the library, and it'll be fine and that's how we'll be friends and it won't make me miserable this time, I promise.
Do I sound self-pitying? I'm not trying to, actually. But I have been reading a lot of Victorian women poets lately, and am probably overidentifying. Suffice it to say that Aurora Leigh, even as it reasserted itself as perhaps my favorite 19th century long poem, was also very much behind that collapse at the end of Spring Break.
And I still think back to my "September 10th" moment--literally, though perhaps disingenuously--but, really--the last time I was entirely happy was on September 10, 2007. It was the first day of German class, and the most perfect date I had with E. It was the night I got pregnant, and in the overnight my grandmother died. And everything's been out of joint since then. I wouldn't even know how to put this all back together again.
4.02.2008
Finally, an accomplishment. And other miscellaneous notes
So I finally managed to push all the way through a draft of my conference paper, and not a moment too soon. It may not be that bad. It's certainly much more of a self-consciously oral text than any of my previous papers. This may mean that I am growing as a scholar in terms of confident self-presentation; on the other hand, I have to consider the possibility that I feel like I have something to hide in this paper. But I'm actually pretty confident in my thinking about this passage, even if I still do occasionally have these moments when I feel like [famous scholar who will be in the audience for this paper in less than ten days] has had every thought I could possibly ever have on Tennyson. But, given my experience as an audience member at this conference a couple of years ago, I am pretty sure that performance and being able to answer questions without looking like a jerk will count for a lot. Also, it's the first paper on the first panel on the last day.
I have been especially aware of my writing process with this project, in part because I had the bright idea at the beginning of the semester that I should use myself as an example for my composition students. I think to a certain extent this worked really well with this group of students. (Last semester, it would have contributed to the disaster area mentality.) In certain cases, I think it allowed some of them to trust me as an instructor more--not so much that I know what I'm doing (though I obviously hope they think I know what I'm doing), but more that what I am having them do is not completely arbitrary, nor is it something that I am unwilling to go through myself. While I've been pretty specific about how what I'm working on is different from what they're working on (in terms of the oral presentation and, of course, the stakes), it's helpful I think to be seen writing essentially an eight-page research paper when they are also writing five-to-eight-page research papers. It's also, incidentally, given me the opportunity to talk to them a little bit about what academics do. I kind of wish I'd had a better sense of that when I was an undergraduate, and these students by and large are even less versed in the institutional stuff than I am. My students are genuinely surprised that this kind of writing (let alone getting up and talking about it in front of a bunch of strangers with power over my future employment) is part of what I--and many of their other professors--do.
The extent to which this worked less well is only that, because of the way my work on this paper developed--which is to say, a lot of notes and a month to a "first draft" that has nonetheless been rewritten roughly eight hundred times--has rather limited me in what I have been able to share on a material level. I had this dream that I was going to scan copies of my own edits and post them to Blackboard, but that doesn't totally work with the way I wrote the paper. I also have completely dispensed with internal citations (which I don't tend to do even when I'm writing conference papers) and feel like this sets a bad example without wanting to go back and track down the line numbers of sections I know by heart just at this very minute.
From a non-pedagogical perspective, I do think I'm getting slightly better at churning these things out, even if it doesn't look like it. I'm improving in my abilities to work on many things at once. This is, for example, the first conference paper that I've written basically from scratch while teaching. And without smoking. I know that's not the biggest achievement ever, but it's something. (The second one may be bigger than the first.)
Of course, in order to achieve this final push, I drank a bunch of tea. Though I made a pot that was half PG Tips, half caffeine free blueberry, I'm still feeling a bit awake. Possibly not awake enough to read Coleridge, though. This would be less of a problem if I didn't absolutely have to do laundry tomorrow morning. Would also like to take care of the prep before I start rocking out 19th century style tomorrow, since my observation is Thursday.
I also somehow managed to run out of toilet paper without noticing. Thank god for takeout napkins. I should address that before The Poet comes over on Thursday night.
Finally, A White Bear, who always blogs more excellently than I, has a particularly excellent post about blending one's online and real life identities. This is a perpetual concern of mine (and, yes, this is part of the "other woman" identity that isn't sexual), and while I think I experience my identities differently, I like the way she's thinking. This reminds me, of course, that there's an email I need to answer, but I kind of don't feel like it at the moment. I am becoming quite thankful that The Poet has fewer issues than almost any other man in my life, period.
I have been especially aware of my writing process with this project, in part because I had the bright idea at the beginning of the semester that I should use myself as an example for my composition students. I think to a certain extent this worked really well with this group of students. (Last semester, it would have contributed to the disaster area mentality.) In certain cases, I think it allowed some of them to trust me as an instructor more--not so much that I know what I'm doing (though I obviously hope they think I know what I'm doing), but more that what I am having them do is not completely arbitrary, nor is it something that I am unwilling to go through myself. While I've been pretty specific about how what I'm working on is different from what they're working on (in terms of the oral presentation and, of course, the stakes), it's helpful I think to be seen writing essentially an eight-page research paper when they are also writing five-to-eight-page research papers. It's also, incidentally, given me the opportunity to talk to them a little bit about what academics do. I kind of wish I'd had a better sense of that when I was an undergraduate, and these students by and large are even less versed in the institutional stuff than I am. My students are genuinely surprised that this kind of writing (let alone getting up and talking about it in front of a bunch of strangers with power over my future employment) is part of what I--and many of their other professors--do.
The extent to which this worked less well is only that, because of the way my work on this paper developed--which is to say, a lot of notes and a month to a "first draft" that has nonetheless been rewritten roughly eight hundred times--has rather limited me in what I have been able to share on a material level. I had this dream that I was going to scan copies of my own edits and post them to Blackboard, but that doesn't totally work with the way I wrote the paper. I also have completely dispensed with internal citations (which I don't tend to do even when I'm writing conference papers) and feel like this sets a bad example without wanting to go back and track down the line numbers of sections I know by heart just at this very minute.
From a non-pedagogical perspective, I do think I'm getting slightly better at churning these things out, even if it doesn't look like it. I'm improving in my abilities to work on many things at once. This is, for example, the first conference paper that I've written basically from scratch while teaching. And without smoking. I know that's not the biggest achievement ever, but it's something. (The second one may be bigger than the first.)
Of course, in order to achieve this final push, I drank a bunch of tea. Though I made a pot that was half PG Tips, half caffeine free blueberry, I'm still feeling a bit awake. Possibly not awake enough to read Coleridge, though. This would be less of a problem if I didn't absolutely have to do laundry tomorrow morning. Would also like to take care of the prep before I start rocking out 19th century style tomorrow, since my observation is Thursday.
I also somehow managed to run out of toilet paper without noticing. Thank god for takeout napkins. I should address that before The Poet comes over on Thursday night.
Finally, A White Bear, who always blogs more excellently than I, has a particularly excellent post about blending one's online and real life identities. This is a perpetual concern of mine (and, yes, this is part of the "other woman" identity that isn't sexual), and while I think I experience my identities differently, I like the way she's thinking. This reminds me, of course, that there's an email I need to answer, but I kind of don't feel like it at the moment. I am becoming quite thankful that The Poet has fewer issues than almost any other man in my life, period.
3.11.2008
Scenes from a Tuesday
The first thing you should know about my day today is that the people I'm apartment sitting for told me that the cleaning lady would come on Saturday, supposedly around 10 or 11, but she actually showed up today at 9:45. Thankfully, I was post-shower and had pants on, but still--unnerving and slightly uncomfortable--I kind of just grabbed as much stuff as I could think of to take to Manhattan with me. One reason why I will never be part of the power elite is that I don't know how to handle these sorts of things.
I began the working portion of my day by reading Rousseau's account of his tweaking out when the Venetian prostitute he was in love with turned out to only have one nipple.
Speaking of which. At West Village Coffeeshop this morning, we sat around trying to figure out what crazy, dangerous thing it was that Spitzer wanted to do with the call girls. I'm going to be a bit let down if it was just "not wear a condom." Lame. Definitely not blowing up your career lame.
I'm still a bit bothered by last night's dinner. Like the way she always criticizes me for things like not being "good" at the kissing hello thing. Um, I'm from the midwest. And, really, 99% of my friends do not greet me the French way. It's not that it makes me uncomfortable, but it's just not so much what I "do." It's not the first time this has come up, and for some reason it seems emblematic. Also: knowing me for a certain number of years does not, in an absolute sense, privilege your read on my situation. It can help, but it isn't the last word. My Ex made this mistake a lot, and I was reminded last night of how much A. reminds me of him in some ways, and it makes me wonder how long our friendship can really last.
On the other hand, what do I know? I'm just the last one of that group not even remotely partnered, I let myself be in a horrible relationship for five years, I have a lot of sex, and some of it is with married dudes. Even if I were okay, she probably wouldn't believe me. And it could be all a defense on my part, right?
I'm bracketing this for now, though. I may run some of it past my friend M. (formerly of Chicago), who I'm meeting for drinks in a little bit. And I should get some pizza or something before that happens. I do want to do a couple of posts on this (sort of by way of definding my username)--first, on the idea of self-presentation and being okay; second, on what I meant when I said to A that I don't feel like I have much in common with her and our other mutual friends anymore--I *don't* think it's a matter of my being in school, which is what she thought--in part because I have this feeling about some grad school people too, sometimes.
For what it's worth, and I may have said this before, I'm not, like, wildly thrilled about the turns my life has taken recently, but I'm also not as completely mired in misery as I was. I think I get to let that be something.
I began the working portion of my day by reading Rousseau's account of his tweaking out when the Venetian prostitute he was in love with turned out to only have one nipple.
Speaking of which. At West Village Coffeeshop this morning, we sat around trying to figure out what crazy, dangerous thing it was that Spitzer wanted to do with the call girls. I'm going to be a bit let down if it was just "not wear a condom." Lame. Definitely not blowing up your career lame.
I'm still a bit bothered by last night's dinner. Like the way she always criticizes me for things like not being "good" at the kissing hello thing. Um, I'm from the midwest. And, really, 99% of my friends do not greet me the French way. It's not that it makes me uncomfortable, but it's just not so much what I "do." It's not the first time this has come up, and for some reason it seems emblematic. Also: knowing me for a certain number of years does not, in an absolute sense, privilege your read on my situation. It can help, but it isn't the last word. My Ex made this mistake a lot, and I was reminded last night of how much A. reminds me of him in some ways, and it makes me wonder how long our friendship can really last.
On the other hand, what do I know? I'm just the last one of that group not even remotely partnered, I let myself be in a horrible relationship for five years, I have a lot of sex, and some of it is with married dudes. Even if I were okay, she probably wouldn't believe me. And it could be all a defense on my part, right?
I'm bracketing this for now, though. I may run some of it past my friend M. (formerly of Chicago), who I'm meeting for drinks in a little bit. And I should get some pizza or something before that happens. I do want to do a couple of posts on this (sort of by way of definding my username)--first, on the idea of self-presentation and being okay; second, on what I meant when I said to A that I don't feel like I have much in common with her and our other mutual friends anymore--I *don't* think it's a matter of my being in school, which is what she thought--in part because I have this feeling about some grad school people too, sometimes.
For what it's worth, and I may have said this before, I'm not, like, wildly thrilled about the turns my life has taken recently, but I'm also not as completely mired in misery as I was. I think I get to let that be something.
2.29.2008
More telegraphy
I realize it's something of an imposition to dramatically start a new blog and then fall silent once everyone is here. However, the last week or so has been absolutely wretched, in ways that didn't lend themselves to even decent ranting.
I am, however, feeling slightly less wretched today, so perhaps I'll get around to throwing myself a blogwarming party this weekend that I will be spending with Tennyson.
I am, however, feeling slightly less wretched today, so perhaps I'll get around to throwing myself a blogwarming party this weekend that I will be spending with Tennyson.
2.18.2008
New mantra
I know that I'm living out a certain script right now and that my ability to change the plot entirely simply may not be in my control right now. But I'm going to try, to the best of my admittedly depleted strength, to fight it where I can. To follow the advice of the Lawyer and get rid of the timesucking people in my life--and, more so, to be honest with myself about who those people are. Starting with people like K.
In that spirit, I quote Bob Dylan: "The things you have the hardest time parting with are the things you need the least." I have taped this over my desk.
More on this later; I didn't sleep well after last night's incidents and could use a nap before dinner and the evening's work.
I was getting back into the Tennyson groove today and came across twenty-two pages of notes that I prepared when I was working on the abstract for this paper. To give you an index of how traumatic October and November were: I have absolutely no recollection of writing them out. None.
In that spirit, I quote Bob Dylan: "The things you have the hardest time parting with are the things you need the least." I have taped this over my desk.
More on this later; I didn't sleep well after last night's incidents and could use a nap before dinner and the evening's work.
I was getting back into the Tennyson groove today and came across twenty-two pages of notes that I prepared when I was working on the abstract for this paper. To give you an index of how traumatic October and November were: I have absolutely no recollection of writing them out. None.
2.13.2008
Running to stand still
This week has been mostly an experience of mounting frustration and exhaustion, punctuated by the occasional moment of being-social but also by too many late-night meals and possibly too much wine. I can't quite identify the source of this being-out-of-sorts. I mean, yes, my mind has been running over the same track regardless of what I try to think about--I set out to read Wordsworth or bring The Life of Charlotte Bronte on the train, and what I do instead is try to turn my experiences with The Lawyer and K into Moth-style stories that I will never actually tell.
Lea, whom I have known since my back-in-the-day Moth internship, got the 30-second version of 2007 last night and commented that I could have done the entire "Love Hurts" story slam on my own, but she also said something more important, which is that I must have a lot to process and this, implicitly, is why I wouldn't have put my name in the hat even if I had shown up more than three minutes before they got started. None of my stories have particularly good endings right now--and this is one of the reasons why I'm committed to blogging as a form of digitally thinking out loud--but in a way that is open-ended, sometimes fluctuating, and sort of generally dispersed--this time around I'm giving up all pretense of creating something stable.
Nevertheless (and this is something that I've always been susceptible to in my experience with the Moth), listening to other people's stories always throws me back on myself. And so, the morning after the Slam, I think my way through the Lawyer story on the train and I think I'm almost there. I have my opening: "2007 was the worst year of my life, until I met E---. On our first date we went to the Astoria Beer Garden and I found out that I couldn't actually drink two pitchers of beer." And the ending will have me going over the Manhattan Bridge at 8:30 on a Friday morning in January and looking up and realizing that not only could I see his building from the train, it was really, really, really prominent. And I will talk about how I'd always worried that this was going to be the case after he dumped me, but I was okay with it that morning--I was just glad that I didn't know it was there before that day. This probably doesn't make sense and I don't really want to take the time to work it out here right now, but the overall idea is that this is someone who made me really happy and confident and then provoked something in my life that was kind of disastrous, but I'm okay with it now and trying to take the good things. Except that the last part isn't entirely true yet and I can't tell this story until it is.
The other story I keep running over in my head is the one with K, based on a conversation we had in the library on Sunday. There is part of me that's really not on board with considering him a friend, a part that still feels angry and wronged. But I wasn't going to talk about it in the library when I only had 45 minutes to finish and print my talk. And he thinks he's 95 percent sure why I'm mad, but I'm not sure he's right and even if he is, there's still 5 percent that needs to be said. So the other story could, provisionally, be called "Why I'm Still Mad at You." I don't have this one fully worked out--the shortish version is on my other blog, but the more I thikn about it, the more I feel like it was unfair of him to pull that whole "I'm not even sure you like me" move--he could have at least had the decency to let me keep my defenses up if he was going to abandon me that completely.
I found myself starting to get choked up about this yesterday and I simply had to tell myself that I have not ever cried because of K and I sure as hell am not going to start now.
Yet, while I realize the limits of taking a handful of interactions with a married guy 20 years older than me as representative of the rest of my emotional and sexual life (not that I'm having either one right now), I can't quite not think that the moment when I tell a guy I like him is not inherently the moment of disaster for me. This is a possible construction of what happened with The Professor, who I don't think about much anymore except when Our Mutual Friend shares his interactions under the well-meaning but misguided belief that I care. It didn't help anything with the Lawyer, either. And I'm not even going to go into what I suffered from my ex-boyfriend because I loved him. And this idea--the disasters that come from opening myself to someone even a little bit, and the related issue of my sort of startling inability to be attracted to people who like me first (the Mutual Friend being an excellent case in point here)...well, it gets your day off to a bad start even before you leave your sauna-like apartment (seriously, I woke up four times last night because it was so fucking hot) into the damp and disgusting weather.
But I'm not sure any of these things are more than symptoms. I am not taking certain forms of solitude well--I can work a couple of grueling days, but without the ability to really relax with anyone who cares, without really being able to share burdens--I'm just so tired. And most of the time I kind of want to cry but not for reasons I could articulate. Like today on my way out of the Planned Parenthood--it was particularly slow today, and Gaskell is really not thrilling enough to make the time pass quickly--I was there for two stupid hours for something that took less than ten minutes and I suppose I should be happy that the HIV test came back negative (this was not the main reason why I was there, nor was I actually worried, but still) and that I will probably only have to come back once more to finish taking care of the thing I was there for (seventh time's the charm, I hope, but I feel like they should give me a frequent flyer card at this point), but it was all I could do not to start crying in one of the offices and save it for Bleecker Street and the D train to midtown instead.
I only needed a couple minutes--I'm not going to walk into school discomposed, which is one reason I'm at the library now--I need to stay here and get work done. Going home would only mean a nap, probably some self-loathing when I saw how long the nap would take, and possibly passing out from heatstroke--my radiators are shooting this wall of heat across the whole place. Instead, I will stay here and try to work on some course prep so all I have to do for the kids this weekend is read their drafts. What I really want to do is stop the clock for a couple of days and just watch TV and sleep. But I can't do that. I am, however, planning a version of that for tomorrow night.
I think one thing that bothers me is that even while I'm not dating and am doing so at least partially by choice (having to do with my workload, time committments, emotional fragility, and that stupid medical problem), I can't let myself "go" in a way that would make me undatable forever. So I have to keep going to the gym even when I'm depressed because I know I gained weight over December / January that I haven't lost yet (I mean, let's face it, my main exercise came from sex), that I can't become a full blown alcoholic (in part because that makes you fat--my vanity is often in conflict with my malaise in this way), that I essentially can't become more scary than I apparently already am, that I can't become angry, that I can't lose social skills. And so on. One of the things I don't like about not having sex at the moment is that at some point it's going to be so long that the next time is going to become Important. And I really don't want that--that's too much of a recipe for getting crushed all over again.
I didn't really want to go over all this now. It's not an entirely good use of my library time. But, with no one at home to wait for me, I can stay here until 11 tonight if I want. (It just gets into that "eating dinner at midnight" pattern again--and I know that's bad, bad, bad.) None of this makes me want to prep a grammar lesson any more than I do. What I think is that I'll start with about an hour of Wordsworth, maybe think a bit more about Villette, then get to the prep. Villette, incidentally, may become somewhat important for the paper I'm giving in a couple of months. There's a lot of live burial in there towards the end. Which is essentially what I'm going to do starting....now.
Lea, whom I have known since my back-in-the-day Moth internship, got the 30-second version of 2007 last night and commented that I could have done the entire "Love Hurts" story slam on my own, but she also said something more important, which is that I must have a lot to process and this, implicitly, is why I wouldn't have put my name in the hat even if I had shown up more than three minutes before they got started. None of my stories have particularly good endings right now--and this is one of the reasons why I'm committed to blogging as a form of digitally thinking out loud--but in a way that is open-ended, sometimes fluctuating, and sort of generally dispersed--this time around I'm giving up all pretense of creating something stable.
Nevertheless (and this is something that I've always been susceptible to in my experience with the Moth), listening to other people's stories always throws me back on myself. And so, the morning after the Slam, I think my way through the Lawyer story on the train and I think I'm almost there. I have my opening: "2007 was the worst year of my life, until I met E---. On our first date we went to the Astoria Beer Garden and I found out that I couldn't actually drink two pitchers of beer." And the ending will have me going over the Manhattan Bridge at 8:30 on a Friday morning in January and looking up and realizing that not only could I see his building from the train, it was really, really, really prominent. And I will talk about how I'd always worried that this was going to be the case after he dumped me, but I was okay with it that morning--I was just glad that I didn't know it was there before that day. This probably doesn't make sense and I don't really want to take the time to work it out here right now, but the overall idea is that this is someone who made me really happy and confident and then provoked something in my life that was kind of disastrous, but I'm okay with it now and trying to take the good things. Except that the last part isn't entirely true yet and I can't tell this story until it is.
The other story I keep running over in my head is the one with K, based on a conversation we had in the library on Sunday. There is part of me that's really not on board with considering him a friend, a part that still feels angry and wronged. But I wasn't going to talk about it in the library when I only had 45 minutes to finish and print my talk. And he thinks he's 95 percent sure why I'm mad, but I'm not sure he's right and even if he is, there's still 5 percent that needs to be said. So the other story could, provisionally, be called "Why I'm Still Mad at You." I don't have this one fully worked out--the shortish version is on my other blog, but the more I thikn about it, the more I feel like it was unfair of him to pull that whole "I'm not even sure you like me" move--he could have at least had the decency to let me keep my defenses up if he was going to abandon me that completely.
I found myself starting to get choked up about this yesterday and I simply had to tell myself that I have not ever cried because of K and I sure as hell am not going to start now.
Yet, while I realize the limits of taking a handful of interactions with a married guy 20 years older than me as representative of the rest of my emotional and sexual life (not that I'm having either one right now), I can't quite not think that the moment when I tell a guy I like him is not inherently the moment of disaster for me. This is a possible construction of what happened with The Professor, who I don't think about much anymore except when Our Mutual Friend shares his interactions under the well-meaning but misguided belief that I care. It didn't help anything with the Lawyer, either. And I'm not even going to go into what I suffered from my ex-boyfriend because I loved him. And this idea--the disasters that come from opening myself to someone even a little bit, and the related issue of my sort of startling inability to be attracted to people who like me first (the Mutual Friend being an excellent case in point here)...well, it gets your day off to a bad start even before you leave your sauna-like apartment (seriously, I woke up four times last night because it was so fucking hot) into the damp and disgusting weather.
But I'm not sure any of these things are more than symptoms. I am not taking certain forms of solitude well--I can work a couple of grueling days, but without the ability to really relax with anyone who cares, without really being able to share burdens--I'm just so tired. And most of the time I kind of want to cry but not for reasons I could articulate. Like today on my way out of the Planned Parenthood--it was particularly slow today, and Gaskell is really not thrilling enough to make the time pass quickly--I was there for two stupid hours for something that took less than ten minutes and I suppose I should be happy that the HIV test came back negative (this was not the main reason why I was there, nor was I actually worried, but still) and that I will probably only have to come back once more to finish taking care of the thing I was there for (seventh time's the charm, I hope, but I feel like they should give me a frequent flyer card at this point), but it was all I could do not to start crying in one of the offices and save it for Bleecker Street and the D train to midtown instead.
I only needed a couple minutes--I'm not going to walk into school discomposed, which is one reason I'm at the library now--I need to stay here and get work done. Going home would only mean a nap, probably some self-loathing when I saw how long the nap would take, and possibly passing out from heatstroke--my radiators are shooting this wall of heat across the whole place. Instead, I will stay here and try to work on some course prep so all I have to do for the kids this weekend is read their drafts. What I really want to do is stop the clock for a couple of days and just watch TV and sleep. But I can't do that. I am, however, planning a version of that for tomorrow night.
I think one thing that bothers me is that even while I'm not dating and am doing so at least partially by choice (having to do with my workload, time committments, emotional fragility, and that stupid medical problem), I can't let myself "go" in a way that would make me undatable forever. So I have to keep going to the gym even when I'm depressed because I know I gained weight over December / January that I haven't lost yet (I mean, let's face it, my main exercise came from sex), that I can't become a full blown alcoholic (in part because that makes you fat--my vanity is often in conflict with my malaise in this way), that I essentially can't become more scary than I apparently already am, that I can't become angry, that I can't lose social skills. And so on. One of the things I don't like about not having sex at the moment is that at some point it's going to be so long that the next time is going to become Important. And I really don't want that--that's too much of a recipe for getting crushed all over again.
I didn't really want to go over all this now. It's not an entirely good use of my library time. But, with no one at home to wait for me, I can stay here until 11 tonight if I want. (It just gets into that "eating dinner at midnight" pattern again--and I know that's bad, bad, bad.) None of this makes me want to prep a grammar lesson any more than I do. What I think is that I'll start with about an hour of Wordsworth, maybe think a bit more about Villette, then get to the prep. Villette, incidentally, may become somewhat important for the paper I'm giving in a couple of months. There's a lot of live burial in there towards the end. Which is essentially what I'm going to do starting....now.
2.07.2008
Preliminaries
I used to be someone else. I can't be her anymore.
The short version is that I had a reader who would not go away, who claimed precedence on all interpretations, who insisted that, no matter what, I was required to remain transparent to him. And eventually I realized that I couldn't write like that, that I was no longer safe, and that I had to be the one to leave.
It feels a bit like going into hiding.
Who I was, there, needs to remain there. I will say more soon about who I am here, about the connotations and associations that have come together to make this new set of texts.
For now, I ask only that you attempt to take seriously Derrida's much-misunderstood assertion that there is nothing outside the text.
One more pseudonym. One more time.
The short version is that I had a reader who would not go away, who claimed precedence on all interpretations, who insisted that, no matter what, I was required to remain transparent to him. And eventually I realized that I couldn't write like that, that I was no longer safe, and that I had to be the one to leave.
It feels a bit like going into hiding.
Who I was, there, needs to remain there. I will say more soon about who I am here, about the connotations and associations that have come together to make this new set of texts.
For now, I ask only that you attempt to take seriously Derrida's much-misunderstood assertion that there is nothing outside the text.
One more pseudonym. One more time.
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