Psychology of the Snow Day

I got like 600 text messages from Not-NYU telling me that school is cancelled today because of the snow. That's lovely, but of course I don't teach on Mondays, so it has little actual effect on my life. (The snow is, however, likely to make me less excited about slogging to the gym, which also might be having a snow day.) Nevertheless, knowing it's a snow day is making it much harder to get work done; I feel like I should be able to curl up on the couch and watch movies--even though it's not a snow day for, say, turning in one's MLA abstract or grading papers. Augh.

I'm thinking of two other March blizzards. One was my first Spring Break in New York, when the cheap platform boots I bought at the Joyce Leslie on University Place basically split in half. It was also the Spring Break when my then-boyfriend showed up for the St Patrick's Day parade having Bic-ed his head. I had recently received The Worst Haircut of My Life at Astor Place (as one does while a freshman at NYU)--we made a fantastic couple. The St Patrick's Day parade I remember as involving beers hidden in winter hats, long lines for the bathroom at Sbarro, and high school kids from Long Island puking on the side streets. I have not attended since.

The other March blizzard was two years ago, the day of the new student recruitment event, which is sort of a perpetually weird day. (I just found out I'll be in Charlotte for this year's and I'm not sorry.) Before that I was at West Village Coffeeshop with The Professor and ran into someone from my very deep New York past--the archetype for a lot of things that happened to me since college and the sometime hero, sometime villain, sometime addressee of much of my LiveJournal posts circa 2001. It was awkward and came out of nowhere and we smoked a cigarette on the steps of West Village Coffeeshop and then The Professor decided that he needed to leave, so I ended up talking to this guy for awhile and then going to school and a lot of this is a blur. This may be why the snow day has left me somewhat unsettled, needing to focus and finish this abstract, make a decent effort to finish the fellowship application, and grade the rest of the somewhat dismal first set of papers from my class.

Well, that and the fact that I ended up on a bat call with L last night, found out about something The Poet did that I found somewhat less than amusing, came home at 1:30, made popcorn and sent D. a kind of gooshy drunk email, and then went to sleep and had a dream about my latest Facebook friend. Good lord.

So, Sunday. And, Saturday.

I think I'm kind of glad that February's over. It's kind of an overdetermined month for me to begin with, and it's one where, increasingly, its meanings aren't readable until much later anyway. It also inevitably seems long and sloggy--perhaps even because it's so short, you're always surprised it's still going on. Mostly I'll keep telling myself that at least I'm far less wretched than I've been at this time in either of the last two years.

And I feel slightly better today, calmer. Could be it's all just Saturday, something about the way I experience a week making it inevitably--something. I've never really had a comfortable relationship with the weekend, not when I was growing up or working a 9-5 job either. Saturdays rarely sit well with me, and I can't really remember the last time I felt like I actually accomplished something on them, other than going to the farmers' market and making a nice dinner (or going to the museum to meet a cute boy whose recent silence has me going a bit churny). Perhaps there's a lesson in this, about changing my expectations. (I feel much more ready to work today, much more ready to go to school and sit down with all this. The idea of going to school on Saturdays, especially if the next plan is to just go home when I'm done, is incredibly, crushingly depressing even now.) Like perhaps I could have gone to the afternoon sitting at the zendo yesterday--that might have been a good thing to do, something to take me out of the loop I got myself into. These happen once a month; perhaps I should look up the next one and plan for it now. (Of course, now that I look at their calendar, I see they don't have another one on there for awhile. Anyway.)

I suppose the point is that I should maybe ease up on myself where Saturdays are concerned. I'm starting to do that informally already, but even when I'm cleaning the apartment I feel a kind of guilt of how I should be reading or working; I sit down to read and immediately fall asleep no matter how much sleep I got the night before. Perhaps as the weather gets warmer (which is not happening this week--wtf, winter storm warning?) I'll just make a point of being outside, trying to do something to ease some of the anxiety I felt yesterday. Of course this will / would always be easier with another person around. I know what gets me on Saturdays a lot of the time is the solitude, which is why it was so great to have D around those couple of times. But right now I'm not sure that's something fully in my control.

But I'm feeling calmer this morning. I hope it lasts. About to sit zazen, then make an egg sandwich or something to fortify me on the way to Manhattan, which will probably suck. Going to hide out in the department as long as they'll let me, only going to the library under duress. (Though something tells me that if I do go to the library I'll run into K. Which might be amusing. I do occasionally wonder what he's up to, how he's doing.) Mostly, though, I want to spend today really focusing on the strength / productivity / creativity / non-wretchedness that's bigger than the last couple weeks of having D. in my life, something a bit more--grounded, perhaps? I don't know if that's exactly the right word--less contingent, maybe, or at least something that's expressing its contingency in a different way. Like one that isn't so tied to another person, because at least at some level, I know it's not, not entirely anyway. (On the other hand, I don't think that my conference paper for this Friday would be starting out the same way, but that was something I've been thinking about ever since I read Hegel last year.)

And maybe he'll call me. Maybe he won't. I don't know what I'll do in the latter case. I may call him and I may not. I'll see how I feel several hours from now; I'd very much like to get in a solid 7-8 hour workday if I can. (Which means I should have been sitting zazen like 20 minutes ago, but, alas.) I'm getting to a point where I'm simply ready to say: I want a boyfriend. If he can do that right now, if he wants to do that right now, then--great. I'll be in 100% as they say on teevee. If not...then I have to think of something else, someone else.

I often have a hard time figuring out my posture when I sit--I don't really have a good sense of my own body position, whether I'm actually sitting up straight or not. The foregoing paragraph is more or less an emotional correlative of this physical confusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

My funny Valentine needs a pseudonym

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, happy Valentines day indeed.

"When the shoe fits / The foot is forgotten"

I was wrong in the post that I made last Sunday, about how by now I'd either be foolishly and stupidly happy or I'd be disappointed and angry with myself.

I am happy, yes, but it's not the feeling I've expected. All I can say is this:

Yesterday was one of the best days I've had in New York in a very, very long time.

Perhaps that's it; nothing else to say right now except to mark this calmness. Certainly a bit of grogginess--I've come down with a head cold, so I'm pretty run down, going to bed soon, and facing the lesson planning monster for most of tomorrow, hoping for a good night's sleep. But even this cold may be, in a certain reading, auspicious--I was telling him just the other day about my experience of the psychosomatic head cold related to Maud and certain other texts--and in a way it's possible to see this as a gift, the sheer physical impossibility of working myself up to the heartracing nervous excitement that accompanied most of my interactions with J. What I feel instead is a kind of groundedness and peace, a sense of gratitude, almost, for a day of being in affectionate physical contact with another person. I've never had so much fun at the Brooklyn Museum. Holding hands over dinner and in the car as he drove....But I don't want to get all mushy about it because it isn't that, not at all.

I'm trying, for the moment, to realize trust in the present, to allow myself to be present to where I am and who I am with. Another small gift: I was awake at a certain hour this morning, in spite of head cold / grogginess / it being Sunday because I thought my bathroom ceiling was going to be fixed. That didn't happen, but it made me available for something vastly more important.

And, again. Reflecting on the week, it seems now that I can perceive a kind of opening to this, how everyone else who could have made these kind of claim on me had faded a bit. The Poet in Puerto Rico and not emailing or calling (until tonight, a bad signal before we could even say hello and I didn't call back), other email exchanges dropping off, a substitute meditation leader on Wednesday, not running into K despite many hours spent in the library, making peace with J on Monday in a way that cleared some space there as well...I didn't even have time to sign into Nerve this week, and it stopped seeming important. It wasn't just him, it was the beginning of school, the need to be present for several friends, to finish the fellowship application, to go to the gym, and on and on. And I won't put too much on this. It needs to remain what it is for now and we'll go from there. I'll appreciate things like the fact that, for now, most of my apartment is spectacularly clean and that I woke up this morning feeling more ready to work (in spite of the cold) than I have in a long time. I did my Key Food grocery shopping to make this fantastic bean / sweet potato / peanut soup. I finished The Renaissance and started thinking again, despite the slowdown feeling from the cold. I don't feel my usual Sunday night impulse to make a thousand impossible lists. There is a lot to be done tomorrow, but I know what I have to do, I always know what I have to do, but this is different. He's coming to Brooklyn again on Friday.

(Parenthetically, I will admit to the fact that he is also incredibly pretty. In the best way possible. In certain lights he reminded me of a taller, somewhat less tough version of J; from other angles he could seem almost impossibly young. All of this should make me nervous, but how could I be nervous when less than five minutes after we enter the museum he threw his arms around me from behind and we proceeded to spend two hours walking around holding hands? This never happens to me....)

I'm going to sleep now, hoping that the cold will work its way through my system tonight, having done the work I needed it to do. In the meantime, the text of the poem by Chuang Tzu--the source of the title of this post and something that's been quoted in several of the podcasts I've been listening to lately:

Ch'ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.

His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.

No application was needed
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.

So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
"For" and "against" are forgotten.

No drives no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

I suppose I will have to find him a pseudonym.

How it is in the new semester / lunar year

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

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

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

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

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

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

* I've started listening to KCRW a lot.

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

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

I clearly don't do guarded optimism

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

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

Mid-January funk

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epigraphical poem of the day

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

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

--

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

"The small becomes the dreadful and immense"

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

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

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

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

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

A quick poem of the day

Robert Browning, "Apparent Failure" (1864)

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

The poem ends thus:

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

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

----

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

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

Robert Browning, "A Likeness" (1864)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things that are not the poem of the day

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Browning, "Youth and Art" (1864)

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

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

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

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

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

The text of the poem is here.

Bonus epigraph, for something

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

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

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

A poem a day and other more specific resolutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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