Things that are being, have been, or will be revised

The Victorian Project
Sent the draft of the Victorian project to VIE yesterday afternoon--yes, a week after our original deadline. I haven't heard back from him, but I'm crossing my fingers that it will be okay since a) it wasn't a "real" deadline, just a suggestion to allow for another substantial revision before the real deadline and there's still time for that if necessary, b) he was on vacation until Friday, and c) I'm not sure that there was anything else I could have done to have made it go much faster. It's a 10,000-word piece right now, and between 7,500 and 8,000 of those words did not exist prior to this draft. And I think that it's probably one of the better things I've written, ever.

The Romantic Project
...is due at the end of the week. I'm still not as confident in this as in the Victorian project, but I'm feeling okay about it. Doing a read-through today, comparing notes, figuring out what to focus on. I want to tweak a few things, amplify some points, maybe ditch a couple of others as being more trouble than they're worth, but I'm actually starting to believe that Committee Member was right when she said that it was close, or at least fine to go out to the reviewers. Hopefully, this means that I'll be able to have a relatively normal sleep schedule this week, since last week really got out of control. As I am no longer 20 years old, I also no longer get the same kick out of seeing the sun come up at 4:45 on a Wednesday morning.

My feelings about the way The Professor read the Romantic Project
I made myself sit down after lunch today and actually read through The Professor's comments on the Romantic Project. It's possible that with the distance of a few weeks, and 10,000 decent words on my Victorian poet behind me, I was better able to handle it. Okay, so it wasn't a total hatchet job. Some of the comments were actually helpful, and a lot of what I'd been unhappy about was just him being him. And I get that. And I can take it. But it wasn't completely what I'd needed from him, and I'm still no longer sure that I should be writing everything to meet his approval. I'm not quite as angry as I was. We haven't communicated since he sent me the comments and I wrote a (somewhat passive-aggressively grateful) acknowledgment that I'd gotten them. He called me last week, but I didn't pick up the phone and since he didn't leave a message and I didn't call back. It's possible, of course, that he read my post here about that. But none of this is really at the top of my list of things I'm coping with this week.

Mornings
I've sat every morning (or whenever I get up, which has mostly been before noon, but sometimes just barely), except for Friday when I was with The Poet in DC. The second week has been harder than the first; I'm struggling a bit with the posture, trying to figure out how to make it work for me without slouching, and I'm finding that it takes me almost the whole time just to really get in the right position, and then my timer goes off. I do attribute a couple of insights about the Victorian Project to the sitting, though, and I think overall it's a good thing--helping me to, slowly, shift my understanding of what it means to do nothing. And maybe The Poet can help me work on some of this later in the week. In a more general sense, though, this is giving me the impetus to change the way I deal with mornings in general--instead of getting up and going right to the computer, which slows me down and stresses me out, I get up, have some coffee, sit, and get in the shower. Ideally, anyway. It's not getting me out of the house much faster yet, but I do feel a bit better.

Exercise plans
...have pretty much fallen off the table due to this latest round of intensive writing. I need to get them back in gear, since I only have the membership at Erstwhile Teaching College until the end of August and won't be able to renew it until later in September. I suddenly noticed yesterday that I've gained a bit of weight as of late. Probably time to drink a little bit less beer, make sure to eat all the beets I keep buying from the Greenmarket.

How I feel about Amtrak
The first thought I had upon arriving at Penn Station on Thursday morning, sweating and on about four hours' sleep was...clusterfuck. However, this was before I got on the train (not even an Acela) and discovered the joy that was the Quiet Car. This made for a lovely, lovely trip, except for the part between Philly and Baltimore, when it filled up with teenagers who I'm sure thought they were being quiet. The Poet and I took the Acela back up together and that was also fun, mostly because we had a lot of wine.

24 hours in DC
Had I not gone to the the college I actually attended, I would have gone to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service instead. That's what everyone who knew me at the time thought I was going to do. Coming back to DC for the first time in seven or eight years got me thinking about roads not taken, and about what I would be doing if I had moved to Washington instead of New York. And then, about a half hour after I got to the hotel, I started laughing, realizing that I'd probably be doing pretty much the same thing--having sex with a married politician in a hotel room on a Thursday afternoon. The Poet also thought this was hilarious, though I realize this is going to be one of those stories, like the "How I met K after German class" one, that not everyone finds funny.

In general, 24 hours in DC did for me what five days in Wisconsin didn't: namely, make me appreciate living in New York and want to go home. The restaurant where we had dinner was kind of a joke, and I got carded three times at two of the bars we went to--The Poet found that pretty funny. Our hotel bar was awesome, but closed at like 10. But, as 24 hour periods go, it was really nice, surprisingly relaxing--and it gave me a chance to spend time with The Poet in a way that I don't usually get to because of all the...well, all the extenuating circumstances. We had a really good talk on the train ride home, about all kinds of things. I also took a picture of us with my laptop camera. Now I just need to get another one where it doesn't look like I have roughly eight chins. Because I'm pretty sure I don't, at least not yet.

My idea for this blog post
This was a much more boring post than I was planning it to be, though I'm not sure what I expected, considering that I've spent most of the last week either writing or watching Grey's Anatomy. (I don't care what people say about it being realistic or not, but I find the Derek-Meredith dynamic completely realistic and very similar to K and me--though I've never met his wife and he was the one cheating.) Which means it's probably time to get back to work.

Making adjustments, walking on water

Remember the thing I wrote about Hegel and the thousand ways of being unhappy and how a lot of the Phenomenology of Spirit seems to be about adjusting yourself to the way the world changes? Yeah, it was in the old blog which I'm still loath to link to--especially since I got an out-of-the-blue email from The Ex today which was conciliatory, but just so totally out of the realm of things I'm thinking about at the moment--but ANYway, the point is that I'm still trying to remind myself about that every day, and that it's Hegel as much as anything else that's pushing me towards the whole Zen thing, which if you know me at all in real life is very much not my preferred style, but maybe, just maybe....

Because I have to just keep telling myself over and over again that I will get done what needs to be done and that I will not go crazy and that it's okay to go out when I can (though probably not to bull-riding because I know I won't be able to keep control of myself) and take occasional breaks and that even when everything takes longer than it should it will still be okay. And there's a reason why, three weeks ago, right after my meeting with the committee member who should be my adviser but isn't totally in the right field, I came home and was moved almost to tears by this passage in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind:

To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being, moment after moment. When we lose our balance, we die, but at the same time we also develop ourselves, we grow. Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony. This is how everything exists in the realm of Buddha nature, losing its balance against a background of perfect balance. So if you see things without realizing the background of Buddha nature, everything appears to be in the form of suffering. But if you understand the background of existence, you realize that suffering itself is how we live, and how we extend our life. So in Zen we sometimes emphasize the imbalance or disorder of life.

I think I would be happier overall if I could learn how to experience being thwarted, straying from my own plans, falling short of my own to do list, struggling with my own writing, as an act of losing my balance instead. And I am hoping that this will allow me to continue to believe that this will all work somehow, that I am only behind because of the structures that I set up, that there is still time--even though I need to stay in this professional mode, which I think I am doing--and somehow I will be able to catch myself, with the nets I've been weaving for several years, trusting my own reading. And the rhythms of my own thinking--it's after 3:30; it will be stupid to keep my alarm at 7, but I can let it go off at 10 and still have time to sit zazen and eat a decent meal and get to school by around noon and work until 9 and so on and this will be okay and I will go to bed early tomorrow and then figure things out from there.

It all just might work.

Lunchtime conversation

My co-Victorianist friend M., to me: "You seem to be really good at getting guys to say mean things to you."

Me: "Actually, it's only single guys who say mean things to me. Married dudes say nice things to me all the time."

(Ironically, I ran into K. in the cafeteria on my way out.)

A case in point of the above: someone who is not The Poet got drunk on Saturday night and told me he loved me before I got on the D train. It was actually kind of sweet, in a certain way that has a lot to do with it not having to mean anything.

Otherwise: the best-laid plans of the last post have not come to fruition yet, but VIE is still on vacation until Friday, so there's no immediate pressure on that front, except that which comes from my own schedule. I'd still like to have something presentable on Wednesday.

It turns out that The Poet is a totally excellent working companion. For most of the afternoon, we didn't even talk to or look at each other, and I was more focused just from knowing he was there. At least until he started having a really fraught conversation with a reporter.

The Poet also taught me how to sit zazen, which I did for the first time on my own this morning. Had one false start, but the 15 minutes actually went kind of quickly. I think this could be a good thing--I am trying to figure out healthier and more productive models of doing nothing. If that makes any sense. I'm interested to see what happens, even though I feel like an enormous dork talking about this in real life. But all the "z" words are cool.

My department mailbox was full of joy today: both Grey's Anatomy season 2 and the latest Complete Peanuts were there. Of course, it's now going to be a bit before I can indulge.

Speaking of which: back to work.

In which I attempt to be my own adviser

This has been a frustrating day for work--I was at home all day (with the air on, alas) waiting for a UPS shipment and by the time it came it was too late to go into the city even if I wanted to. In reality, it's been a slow week all around--I had sort of an epic drunken trek through Brooklyn last Sunday after banging out a first draft of the Romanticism project; Sunday's insanity was followed by A's wedding drinks, which was destabilizing on its own and also in Williamsburg and thus requiring a 90-minute trek home; and the overall result is that my sleep schedule is still off, but with very little to show for it. Things looked up briefly on Tuesday afternoon as I spent a lot of time making notes on the latest hard copy of the Victorian project, but it was mainly downhill from there. Yesterday (Thursday) I was so tired at school that I just called it quits and ran errands until it was time to run my area meeting, and despite saying that I wasn't going to drink afterwards, I had four margaritas by about 8, came home and did who knows what but it certainly wasn't make dinner, crashed out early after talking to The Poet on the phone, and was up from about 1 to 4 a.m. anyway. I probably should have just made coffee and got to work. But of course I didn't do that. I have been trying to work on the Victorian project all afternoon, evening, and night, but it's not going anywhere--I'm feeling totally blocked, and nothing seems to be helping. I'm starting to panic a bit--it was one thing to throw myself on the mercy of my one committee member for the Romanticism project, but I can't do the same thing with the Very Important Editor of the Very Important Journal, who suggested last month that I send him something around the 20th. (To cover my own ass even then I qualified that with a "thereabouts"--I think that sending something by Wednesday, as long as it is decent, should be acceptable.) It has also been very hot in here--I tried to get through the day with just the fan on and not the A/C, but that was probably stupid. So I think I'll go to school and try to work tomorrow, even though I absolutely despise school on Saturdays.

I don't know what my problem is. It's not the same thing that was wrong with the Romanticism project. I know what I want to do, I know where I need to go. I am trying to stick to outlines and I have several sheets of paper with reminders to myself about what the main parts of the paper need to be and I have tried to be ruthless, in looking through the last working outline that spun wildly out of control, about cutting off lines of inquiry that really don't apply, sticking to the things that the Very Important Editor (hereafter VIE) responded to positively, but also being selective about that. I am not, for the moment, trying to connect the text I'm working on with a bunch of the author's other works. I don't feel the same need to do insane amounts of new research that I did on the Romantic project--though I probably should force myself to read that Gothic Convention book. But for some reason I can just not get started. I have ten disjointed and repetitive pages pasted in from other files, but I can't make them work into a coherent introduction--I think in part because the argument I'm making is somewhat complicated. Or, it's not so complicated, but it's one of those things where I really need to make all three parts come together because I'm not sure any one section really stands alone as interesting. If that makes sense. And I think it will work. But, it will work only if I get the introduction right and I can't seem to do that. I had this problem the last time around, too, so (since that was an outline) I just kind of shrugged and started with "This article makes the case..." Which was unsatisfying to both me and VIE, and we discussed the greater advisability of trying to steer clear of that kind of academese. Unfortunately, beyond that I've got nothing. I've tried out a couple of things but nothing's taking and I feel like I'm wasting a lot of energy spinning my wheels. And I'm mostly just damn frustrated with myself because, after all, a lot of this paper is about fucking premature burial--and if that doesn't lend itself to compelling beginnings, I don't know what does. But I worry about it getting out of control, and I worry that my outline and main points keep sliding out of my head. I've never been good at the whole "framing" thing, and no one seems able to help me.

Speaking of which. I know the other thing driving me right now is the hatchet job that The Professor did on the draft of my Romanticism project. I might be overreacting, and I probably shouldn't have read the email at all, let alone even skimmed his internal comments. But I did. And it's been eating at me since Tuesday, distracting me from the project I'm supposed to be working on, and undermining my confidence at the moment when I really need all the affirmation I can get. I don't mean that I think the draft is by any means perfect, and if I wanted a totally positive reading, I would have sent it elsewhere. I'm used to this with him. But. I'm not used to getting this critique when it's coming from a place outside of our friendship, when the next step isn't to talk more about it in person, when I don't sense any real...I don't know...interest? caring? Like some kind of investment in my success? I know that some of it is meant to be sparring, but...I haven't had the heart to do that with him for awhile--something kind of snapped for me around the night I went out with E. And even though I feel a lot better emotionally in general (and in the specific terms of my interactions with K. and The Poet), I can't muster up whatever it was that allowed me to be friends with The Professor, at least not on the terms that he was offering. And I guess maybe I was hoping that he'd notice, or care. But he didn't. And I knew he'd still be good for the reading and commenting, but what I didn't know was how different that was going to feel when it wasn't backed up by friendship.

(It sure as hell isn't backed up by mentorship. One of the things I always try to do, when reading his work or anyone else's, is offer suggestions where I can for improving things and not just ripping it apart. This is not something that is being reciprocated.)

So, basically, once again, The Professor succeeds in undermining my confidence. (This, as some of you may remember, was something of a theme of last summer as well.) I guess this particular undermining just comes as more of a surprise is all. But perhaps it shouldn't. I think one of the reasons why this is feeling slightly more oppressive this evening is that I needed to consult the hard copy of a seminar paper I wrote on this text about two years ago, and of course the copy I have is not the one where the professor of the class praised it but the one where The Professor wrote his comments. I refer to this as the paper that sucks ass; I totally understand all the ways it went wrong and all that. And I have a certain memory of having been a bit disappointed (but not destroyed) when it failed to impress The Professor as much as I wanted it to. But reading those comments now? Just...wow. It's clear that I was totally in love with him at the time; otherwise I don't think I would have forgiven some of it.

It's a hard line to walk. Because I want rigorous readers. Because a lot of time his readings tend to be spot on, because I don't entirely trust myself to reliably distinguish between his actual arrogance and my inertia or stupidity all of the time. Because I don't think I'm as good as my committee (or just random other people) seem to think I am, and so I'm more inclined to trust him because he's always ready to rip me apart. But I think maybe that's changing, that it's already changed w/r/t the nonacademic part of our relationship and all of the sudden this gets thrown into relief as well.

So I think that I'm better off taking my chances with my own committee members and with editors who have at least been impressed enough with me to think I'm not such a total idiot that I can't improve with a little mentoring and interaction. And this is what I know I need to hold on to. But it's hard, and the length of time I've spent writing this post and not writing my paper is a reflection of that. But, like so many other things this summer, I just have to work with what I've got. And I do feel somewhat better after writing this all out, even though it wasn't totally why I came over here.

To return to the article for a second. I'm probably going to have to do what I did the last time around (since this was the same place I got tripped up on back at the beginning of June with this project). Let the academese stand so I at least know what I'm talking about, then try to go back and put in something interesting. My main work for tomorrow and Sunday should be to articulate the body of the paper, not to cram an anecdote into the beginning. I should at least be able to get through the premature burial parts by some point on Sunday, since I practically know those by heart anyway. And I know my way around this poem, which is something. Beyond that, I let VIE tell me what to do, right?

And so. On top of all this, I've agreed to go to D.C. for about 24 hours later in the week. I'll be joining The Poet on a business trip, which seems rather ridiculously sketchy to me, but as it also involves the opportunity to spend the night in a hotel and thus to take the night off from trying to fight the bugs out of my kitchen and worrying about the effect of my air conditioner on my electric bill. So I'll cope. (I also think this week--he's also planning to come over on Sunday to do some studying--might be the last time he and I get to spend a lot of time together for a bit.) But it does kind of throw a wrench in a lot of other scheduling things and means that I have to be a lot more conscious of how I'm managing my time...like if I don't think I can meet up with people from school for Tuesday night bullriding and not have eight bourbons and get home at three in the morning, I may have to pass that up. Tomorrow (well, today, Saturday) night is the last performance of the last episode of "Hospital" and I will have to be similarly in control because I need Sunday.

And yet, I wrote all of this out and it seems doable. Since I'm already here, why not end on a list? Short of either magically writing the entire Victorian article in the next fifteen minutes or drinking a huge shot of scotch, retyping my list is probably the best way to get myself to sleep.

Saturday: Greenmarket in AM; school (dept lounge) in the afternoon / try to get something printed; Axis in the evening

Sunday: (The Poet, here)--edit what I wrote on Saturday, try to double the page count.

Monday: Completed / printable draft of Victorian project. Email VIE to tell him I have not forgotten our deadline. Get to the gym at some point.

Tuesday: Edits on Victorian draft. Input as many of the changes as possible, including the conversion to Chicago style (though at this point it may not be a top priority). Print stuff for Romanticist project. Print train ticket confirmation. Gym.

Wednesday: Work bee! Hooray! Get the Victorian project sent to VIE come hell or high water. Start working through the Romanticism project again.

Thursday: Gym in AM. Train at noon: work on Romanticism revisions.

...and so on. I do have until August 1 for the Romanticism thing--not a huge amount of time, but a week longer than I thought I had.

Last thing. The UPS shipment I got today was two sets of cushions so The Poet can give me some basic lessons in sitting zazen. This is the closest thing to a religious interest I've had in ten years.

I don't think this counts as making a joyful noise unto the Lord

It's quarter to one in the morning. Currently, there are two tour buses double parked and idling outside of my apartment building, much as they were doing for over an hour earlier in the day. As a new refinement, however, there is a small car--triple parked, I suppose--with one of those bone-rattling stereo systems playing at (what I certainly hope is) full-blast. The riders of said tour buses are milling around on the sidewalk--at least *they* seem to be reasonably quiet, though it's hard to know.

From the best I can tell, these buses, etc. are related to a fair that one of the churches up my street was having, which makes it rather doubly ironic that they're not showing a lot of concern for either air or noise pollution in the neighborhood. And while I've more or less grown hardened to the depredations of car stereos on this street, this is actually physically stressful.

At least I'm not actually trying to sleep--the lack of blogging in the past ten days has been due largely to my desire to complete a draft of the Romanticism project that I can send to my committee member, The Professor, and possibly a few other people and then not think about for a week while I work on the Victorian project. The work has been progressing slowly, but more or less steadily, but I really want a break tomorrow and in order to do that I have to finish it tonight. And I didn't really want to swoop in like this, but the vibration is making it difficult for me to concentrate on the willing suspension of disbelief.

Fortunately, I think actually switching accounts to make this post has done the trick--the buses, loud people, and obnoxious car have all departed. I wonder what other annoyances I can write away. Hey, how about those nasty little bugs that keep crawling up my kitchen sink? I will expect them gone in the morning through the magic of blogging!

Since I'm here...well, not a whole lot to report. Schedule drama with teaching, but maybe it's not the worst thing in the world to only end up with one class. A good conversation with a high school friend. Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, which is also a kind of sublime, but with more boobs. Study / writing dates that keep me sane even if they don't get a total lot of work done. Discovered the joys of the $4 pints in the afternoon at the bar near my apartment; was less thrilled by the place being filled on a Saturday afternoon with people with babies and funny looking college students. More tastiness from the greenmarket, especially in the form of beets, interesting-looking summer squash, and goat cheese rolled in cinnamon and dried cranberries. Tonight's dinner was a sauteed pork cutlet, ratatouille, and crusty bread.

I haven't been talking to The Professor lately because I still don't feel like sparring. And I've had a couple of emails with K, but I didn't see him in the library this week, and I feel like maybe that's okay.

I'm going to a bar in Williamsburg on Monday night to celebrate the City Hall wedding of my old friend A. I wrote about the last time I saw her here. We've exchanged a couple of more or less cordial emails since then, around the time of my exam, but there wasn't really an effort to get together. I plan to be perfectly nice and to not really talk about my personal life.

Except that...I finally changed my Facebook status from "single" to "it's complicated," admitting something that has been true for awhile now, which is that I'm in a relationship with The Poet. It's been about four months, actually, since I started seeing him regularly, and that makes it the longest actual relationship I've had since breaking up with the Ex in February of last year. Well, the longest romantic relationship I've had, anyway. My relationship to to the Romanticism project is almost at the two-year mark, which may explain some of my fatigue in trying to refine my interpretation of the sublime over and over again. But--to go back to the main point--this clearly means something, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps that I'm just more willing to own it lately, to see it, as my often eminently reasonable fellow Victorianist M puts it, as simply "having sex with someone who makes me happy." And he does make me happy, regardless of how the relationship looks on paper or to other people. So I'm just going to go with that for now.

Okay, I should get back to work. What's frustrating is that none of what I'm trying to write is new, exactly--I have pieces of it scattered everywhere, and one of the weird things about this long term relationship with a text of my own making is that I keep finding places where I anticipated myself. (Oh, and I also found my notes to the Biographia Literaria, which I blogged about not being to find during my orals reading.) But the transitions! And the framing! But at least I have more or less followed my committee member's advice and just stopped reading for the time being....

I feel so much better today than I did yesterday.

We'll see if this feeling of well-being survives its encounter with the Romanticism project.

Also...

I think it's really, really, really weird that my brother's fiancee is already using his / my last name on her email. I mean, maybe it's just for wedding related emails, but even so.

Cultural notes (and then some)

* So far I have to admit to being underwhelmed by the whole "Waterfalls" thing. I can see two of them from the trains going over the Manhattan Bridge, and at least from this angle it leaves me cold, even if it does give me something else to look at than E.'s apartment building. I was expecting something more...I don't know. More like The Gates, which a lot of people have said already. I read somewhere that the artist claims that you have to see them full on via some boat tour to really "get" the display--that's all well and good, but since this is a piece of public art (ostensibly), I think more attention should have been paid to, say, how it looks from the Q train (i.e., to people who actually live in New York and ride the subway) and not just how we can get a bunch of out of towners to spend money to see it from the Circle Line or whatever. So, until I see something that changes my mind, this is mostly just another case of Mike Bloomberg confusing this city with Disney World, without even decent special effects.

* I caught the first twenty minutes of Can't Hardly Wait while on the elliptical machine at Erstwhile Teaching College last night. With ten years in between me and my own high school graduation, I'm able to find the movie a lot funnier. I'm also, at this point, willing to admit that I, too, peeled out of the parking lot on the last day of school blasting Third Eye Blind's "Graduate" from my little red Ford Escort. (Actually, it's kind of fun to know every song in a movie.) On the other hand, the movie was a good reminder of why I don't plan on dating anyone under 35 anytime soon.

* Since the recent slowness of my home internet connection (thanks for nothing, Verizon!) means I still can't watch TV online, I have been indulging in the first season of Grey's Anatomy yet again. Given everything that's happened in the last seven or eight months, it's even harder to watch that last scene in the final episode. This might be contributing to the insomnia / slight heaviness I've been feeling over the last couple of days; nevertheless, my one indulgence in this indigent summer is probably going to be to purchase Season 2. Well, and get my hair cut for the first time since April.

* I have never had the slightest interest in seeing Mamma Mia on Broadway. Nevertheless, the ads for the movie version are oddly compelling. I can't imagine who I'd have to go see it with, though.

* Regina Spektor is doing a show in August at McCarren Pool. Despite the fact that I've already been to one concert by someone I'd never even heard of with The Professor because he didn't want to go alone, he's already rejected this idea. I'm getting close to giving up on this friendship (except for the reading each other's work part, and even that's not seeming particularly worth it lately). Again.

* Right now I'm listening to the set at the top of the Samurai.fm homepage. (Spectral presents Osborne.) Sometimes I miss electronic music, but that was such an Ex thing.

* I'm seeing The Poet tonight for the first time since early June. I'm hoping this will help me feel less like I'm falling apart and imploding with misdirected anger. That part wasn't cultural, of course.

Me vs. the Gothic

I'm beginning to think there's a common reason for some of the difficulties that I'm encountering with my two projects. (I think maybe I'll just start calling them the Victorian and the Romantic, though I've mentioned the specific authors / texts here frequently enough that it probably doesn't matter.) On the surface, they don't have a lot in common: the Victorian project has me reading books on live burial and playing around with what I can see of popular periodicals of the nineteenth century, while for the Romantic project I am mostly still treading water with philosophy--lots of Kant, some Hegel, and a smattering of more recent people like Nancy and Lyotard. (Derrida, as I was discussing with some faculty from my department last week, is oddly absent from both of my bibliographies right now, though I think that "No Apocalypse, Not Now" may end up having some relevance to the Victorian project.)

In both of these projects, however, I keep running up against The Gothic. And it's making things hard. The Gothic has always sort of skirted the edges of the work I do--last summer at this time I was working on an earlier version of the Romantic paper and it was centered around the theme of humiliation. I did a fair bit of coursework around early Romantic / late eighteenth century texts (particularly those by Godwin and Wollstonecraft) from the perspective of the discourse of sensibility, and the best thing I ever read in the last American lit class I took (more than three years ago now--it was my first year in grad school) was Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, which I still plan to teach and publish on someday. Dealing with these kinds of texts and just generally being someone who works on long nineteenth century literature means that I have to have a decent working knowledge / awareness of the Gothic and how it works.

But that doesn't mean, on the other hand, that I'm particularly interested in it. Okay, that sounds more horrible than I meant it to. I mean, I do like a good Gothic potboiler every now and then, and I feel like I can certainly appreciate what it is and how it does what it does, why it was important at the time, and so on. I guess it's more that my own critical investments are elsewhere right now and have been for a long time. What seems to be happening right now, though, is that the texts, concepts, and passages that I'm working on, have all largely been labeled as Gothic, and I'm finding that this makes reading them against that particular grain to be something of an uphill battle. And it's not even that I find myself wanting to argue that these texts are not Gothic (I mean, premature burial, yo), but rather that calling a poem "Gothic" or identifying its sites of sexual guilt or whatever doesn't actually constitute an interpretation these days. While the work of people like Eve Segdwick and Judith Halberstam (both of whom I've been skimming madly since last week) is aimed at showing the Gothic to be worthy of study and complex in itself, I wonder if the term as used by others is falling back into a critical shorthand. Not one used to dismiss entire passages--about 22 years ago, my adviser dismissed the passage at the center of my Victorian project as being "luridly gothic"--but certainly as a way to imply that there is a certain group of texts whose readability (and even whose unreadability) is assured according to this set of codes. And so the question for what I'm doing largely becomes one of the supplement, the so what, and the why bother. And I find myself wanting to say, "because it's just more interesting," but I do feel like I'm fighting against the weight of a historicist juggernaut here. But I soldier on.

The other common thread between these two projects, by the way, if the feeling that I'm completely behindhand on my de Man.

---
Mostly unrelated, before I go scavenge myself some lunch: a "Dickensian" toilet policy? Really?

Bookmarked for later lesson planning

Janet Zweig, "Her Recursive Apology" (sculpture)

From the website description:

The residue of a procedure. 4,386,375 apologies were randomly generated on over 8,000 sheets of continuous paper in tiny type. No two sheets are alike. The spiralling stacks grow progressively larger. A suspended work in progress.

The black box

I wrote this into my notebook shortly before I left to go meet him:

If Psyche remains alone, it is first because she is alone in knowing nothing of this. There again the meaning of the sentence bursts. Into bits, I mean. Psyche is the only one who knows nothing (nothing of herself, of her extension, of her recumbent being-extended); but further, by being alone in knowing nothing of this, she is also alone for not knowing anything of this. She finds herself alone without knowing it; her solitude is radical because she knows nothing, nothing of herself, of her extension, of that which others know; she doesn't know what they know and that they know, that is, the content and fact of their knowledge. On the subject of herself. Indeed, she is the submissive subject (extended object), the support or subjectile of their knowledge but not of hers because on her own she knows nothing of herself--on the subject of herself.

--Jacques Derrida, On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, p. 15

I always have a good time with him, even now. For one thing, he remains one of the nicest people I've ever been with, completely supportive in so many ways, supportive and successful in a way that makes me almost automatically my best self when I'm around him, my best self in a way that I am for almost no one else, certainly not K., not The Professor, not The Poet. And it was kind of fun, in a way, to find out that he thought of me as an ex, to have retroactive confirmation that what we had last summer wasn't just important to me. What happened to me on the train home, I don't know. But it wasn't like some of the other crying I've done lately--it didn't actually feel like a breakdown until I was on the phone later--and so I wonder if it had simply been mourning. Like I've never really just sat down and let myself cry specifically about what happened last summer and early fall, to mourn the loss of those two months or so when I really was enjoying my life, when I was more confident than I had ever been (or have been since). And maybe in a certain sense this was okay. I never really cried about the abortion at the time; I kept working on my German homework and teaching my class and I went out and found a new apartment and spent the night with K.--yesterday The Professor and I were talking about getting over things and I realize now that it's not a matter of my getting over things faster, it's a matter of my not standing still. And while I have cried over certain losses with E., maybe...I don't know. It could all just be a rationalization for too many vodka tonics and some drunk phone calls. But I'm trying to figure this out because it wasn't like he got to the bar and I wanted to jump him immediately. I don't really want him back, I'm happy for him to be in love with the woman he is in love with (even though I do sometimes panic about always being the person that you're with right before you meet the person you love--or whatever the married-guy equivalent is); I told him last night that I would have liked it to have been possible for us to have been together for a few more months than we were, but probably not forever. And that he had to find me someone just like him, but not him. It's not--or no longer--that drop-everything attraction that I periodically feel for K. So I'm trying to figure out what it is, and also how I can be friends with him and not have the crushing train ride home every time.

The writing is almost nonexistent, though I do have a two-week reprieve on the sublime thing. I think maybe today I'll work a bit at West Village Coffeeshop--maybe even splurge on lunch there--before going to school, where I'll be until at least 8:00 anyway. I'm beginning to think that sitting in front of a computer so much may be doing more harm than good.

I had a dream where my mother was helping me decorate my apartment for Christmas and I thought it was this apartment except that my bedroom was in a different place and there was a window and we watched the lightning with our neighbors and the outside was different. And the dream was set in mid-November, so it was early to be decorating for Christmas but there was some reason why we were doing it that way. We had a lot of red and white lights and my mother was really big on my placing festive objects around the room.

The other dream I remember was a sort of old-time outdoor market--the kind of thing where people are selling handicrafts and jams and things--there's something like this at the big festival that my town holds every September--they call it the Folklife Festival, I think, and they have a bunch of 19th century reenactors. But anyway. I was looking at some rugs but not with the desire to buy them--I don't have any money for that kind of thing right now--but the guy selling them kept following me around and trying to sell them to me--I don't remember it being creepy, more that I was feeling bad about not buying anything. There was also a team dance contest. With the non-Lindsay Lohans.

What I really want for myself this summer is to fall madly, stomachdroppingly, headoverheels in love with someone--someone who has the same effect on me that E. does of making me want to be my best self and actually end up believing it. Because if I don't get swept off my feet, I think there's going to be quite a fair bit of inertia left behind.

I'm never a clean break

...If I could, I would simply wish to not have to live out the rest of 2008, to wake up in 2009 and just deal with whatever's there.

I sort of wish there was some reason I could hate E. as much as I can / should hate K., or even The Professor.

Resolution and possibly some stab at independence

Summer Mondays dawning with possibility, though it's a possibility with a couple of asterisks--okay, so I futzed around last night doing the crossword online and whatever, but I still slept for almost eight hours and I didn't drink last night, so why am I so tired? The only thing I can think of is the humidity, so I may have to run the air conditioner tonight. Greyskies again, which I don't mind so much now that I'm inside, but, again, humidity and the like. My one heavy framed picture (an animation cell from an old Sunbeam commercial with Linus and Snoopy, signed by Bill Melendez) fell down again this morning. This is completely my mother's fault--she claimed I was hanging my pictures too high on the wall and moved this one down--it fell once while she was still on that visit, and now this. Argh. At least I've been there both times this has happened. (In other domestic news, the soapdish is back on the wall, but now my tub isn't draining all that well--a problem that I have never had in this apartment. I think that the guy who repaired the soapdish must have just washed all the excess plaster down the drain. Brilliant.)

But I'm back here for another week, a new set of goals I haven't failed at yet. I've passed through another period of wretchedness, sloughed off another set of distracting desires. That's what a lot of this is about, after all, and I don't need to be a Buddhist to know that, just a midwesterner. Because it's Monday and still the morning, I can say things like I will not be distracted, I will not spend 2:30-4:00 obsessing about whether K. will show up, I will not spend 4:00-6:30 obsessing that he is here. I will make it to the gym, as this is the one day I know I can go in the evening. I will make do with what I have. I will write five pages today and hope that two and a half of them will be good. I will simply write to write and edit later. I will not obsess about whether I'm actually going to see E. tomorrow. I will bracket all the other conflictedness that might have been raised over the weekend. I will use the online timer I found last week. I will not get bogged down by reading things of minimal relevance and maximum frustration. I will stick to the plan I had for this piece of writing, the one that impressed the guest editor--if there was something horribly off base, I will assume she would have told me in February. I will concentrate, I will be in the moment, I will take on one thing at a time.

In all of this, of course, I feel very close to Coleridge. Because I often forget things that I blog about (something that has always added a kind of frisson of risk to all of this), I can't remember off the top of my head whether I mentioned here or not the fact that I was so tired / hung over / stressed out by K that all I ended up doing on Friday afternoon was writing out stanza VI of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode." The resolutions I am making here, the ones I have been making for the last several days, are all indebted to this example--for better or worse.

Dinner Blogging, Weekend Miscellany

So I ran out of time last night to do anything more than heat up a bit more turkey sausage with kale and onions. Tonight, however, I took a more leisurely approach, and this was the final result:



We have a rib steak (or a third of one--it's rich enough that what I had there was the perfect size), seasoned with worcheshire sauce, salt, and red pepper flakes and pan seared, served over blanched garlic scapes (tasty!). The salad is kale, snap peas, blueberries, and cherries in a basic vinaigrette. The reheated sourdough bread was mighty tasty. So, nothing too fancy, but certainly a nice change of pace for me. If I'm feeling ambitious tomorrow night, I may try the other pork chop with the cherries in some combination. Other than that, though, I won't be having dinner home again until Friday--if, that is, my plans hold up better than they did last week. (I have reason to be hopeful about this.) My other project of the night, relatedly, is going to be to make enough spaghetti (with more of the turkey sausage, kale, etc., in a sauce) to eat for lunch throughout the week, hopefully reducing my need to a.) think about this when I have so much else going on; and, b.) eat in the cafeteria at school, which is quite often a dismal crapshoot. (For some reason, they're really all about inappropriately heavy meals throughout the summer--think, like, pot roast when it's 95 degrees outside.) I really need to get a draft of the sublime thing done by Thursday (my personal deadline, since it's when The Poet's coming back--when I'm actually going to see him again, I don't know).

So much for food. Now for the miscellany.

I feel like I had a couple of small epiphanies yesterday. I received two phone calls in rapid succession late in the afternoon. After the first phone call, which was pleasant and relaxed, I hung up the phone with a smile on my face, feeling a little bit lighter all around. The second phone call was much more frustrating, seemingly at cross purposes, leaving much unresolved, and when it ended abruptly, my stomach hurt a little bit. One of these phone calls was from The Poet. The other was from K. And it did in fact occur to me that, if these are the two men I feel myself torn between at the moment, then I'm with the better one. What I said about The Poet when I first met him was that he didn't seem to have many issues, he was divided but not conflicted. K. is all conflict and contradiction, and it's been pulling me in. I need to figure out what to do about that. I had a later moment last night when I suddenly felt very protective of my life, thinking maybe this certain freedom isn't so bad all the time and maybe I only talk about exit strategies with The Poet for other people's benefit. The other side of this is just not having seen him for two weeks and not seeing him again for at least another week. I try not to make judgements about people when they're away.

The second epiphany had to do with "Hospital" and realizing how this crazy, weirdly repetitive play has an enormous amount to do with sort of grounding me each summer--it's comforting in its mix of strangeness and familiarity, and the end of the doctor sequence in last night's episode really brought that home to me.

After the play, I got drunk and....talked about my blog. Possibly a bad strategic move.

My internet continues to suck. Not only is it not fun to watch tv in 2-minute segments (about all I can get to buffer), everything is slow, and I've lost access completely a couple of times today. Stupid Verizon, but I don't really have the time to deal with that this week, either.

I'm a bit at loose ends for the writing I need to be doing. I'm not sure that reading De Man is making me less nervous, either.

Food and possibility

For the record, there was a bit more drama about the subjects raised in the last post that lasted throughout much of last night and which (coupled with a marked slowdown of my internet speed which makes it difficult to watch tv online) made me even more wretched--and not insignificantly, more angry--than I was in the afternoon. But this post isn't about that. This post is about food.

The one thing that has given me consistent and reliable pleasure in this already-tumultuous summer is going to the Greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza on Saturdays. In fact, the one Saturday this month where I've been the most wretched is the one when I didn't go to the Greenmarket. I don't think those things are entirely unrelated. I mean, granted, it isn't really about the shopping experience per se. I do tend to hurry a little bit, being one of the only people there alone, not really interested in dodging bikes, strollers, and couples. But there are moments of joy even here--seeing what fruits and vegetables are in season, daring myself to take new things home and see what I can do with them, and getting different "treats" to take back. It's of course a little bit on the expensive side, but I've been doing a better job of actually cooking balanced meals for myself, and it means I can skip some of the more cringe-worthy sections of my Key Food. I'm not disciplined enough to eat entirely at the Greenmarket--as a single person, that would be especially hard, and I admit to liking to have certain vegetables (peppers, brussels sprouts, spinach) around even when they are not in season. I also can't really afford to buy everything local / organic, as I'm living on basically "nothing a year" (as they say in Vanity Fair) at the moment. But I do think it's worth it, especially for things like meat and bread, and as one result I've ended up eating slightly less meat but more interesting kinds of meat when I do, cutting out chicken breasts (not intentionally, but there are more interesting things to spend money on and I've never liked the ones at my grocery store), and only really eating processed food when it comes from Target. Of course, this also sometimes means that I run out of food that can be easily prepared by the end of the week. Last night for dinner I basically had a granola bar and a handful of dried fruit. Granted, I had a big lunch, but still...

Anyway. The real Greenmarket happiness comes when I get home and can survey the week's takings. And, of course, the cooking. The high point of this week was the night I made a pork chop from the Flying Pigs Farm, following the simple instructions they provided. It was the.most.amazing.pork.chop I have ever eaten. Incredibly flavorful and juicy, nothing akin to the dried out kind of cardboardy chops I remember from my childhood. I have a second one in my freezer for when I want a treat again. As sides for this meal, I made some oven-roasted asparagus, sauteed spinach with red pepper, and potato pancakes but with shredded zucchini instead of potatoes. The rest of the week was downhill from there. I wish I'd thought to take a picture of it. Actually, maybe I should start doing that--but it would require having actual batteries for my digital camera.

I do think I like the sense of possibility that going to the Greenmarket provides. I've never really liked Fridays, and I've had a vexed relationship to the weekends. Given the state of my life right now, Friday afternoon brings not relief but a sense of all the work that I didn't get done during the week, a kind of lethargy that isn't relaxation, the sense of falling back into invisibility. Sometimes it's not always this bad, but that feeling is always there around the edges.

And I think this is why, even before I broke up with the Ex, even before I discovered the joys of the greenmarket, I would often find myself cooking semi-complicated meals and listening to the radio on Saturday nights.

This week's possibilities from the Greenmarket are as follows:
cherries
blueberries (some of which I plan to freeze)
peaches
kale
young onions (one of my earliest and most favorite greenmarket discoveries)
garlic scapes
a loaf of sourdough (usually I'm much better about getting something in the multigrain family, but every now and then....)
a grass-fed eye steak
turkey sausage
a garlic, goat cheese, and rosemary foccacia

Plus, I still have snap peas left over from last week. Lunch was a bit of turkey sausage, about half the foccacia, and a peach. Dinner (before I, most likely, go into Manhattan to see the second episode of "Hospital" at the Axis Company), I think, is going to be a bit of the steak, some kale, and some of the garlic scapes. So, yay.

Other good things: someone came to fix my soap dish, it's not so hot that I have to have the air conditioner on, and the slowness of my internet connection makes it more likely that I will do work than watch television. I'm trying to be grateful for small things.

What I don't understand: Friday afternoon

Back in May, it seems that we left things--at, I might add, your instigation--somewhere around the intersection of "we're still friends" and "but I can't really talk to you." And that hurt, a lot.

I knew, of course, that eventually I was going to start seeing you in the library again, that it was going to come as a bodily shock to me whether I wanted it to or not--and it did, even on that Monday before my exam, when I was so tired I could barely see and I didn't even talk to you, but that's the physical sensation (and if that's not a kind of syncope, then all of this is for nothing) that broke through even that.

So the next time I see you is Friday the 13th. It is a strange day overall, the kind of day that I could write an entire novel about and while this isn't the most fucked up thing that could happen at the library it's also not completely the least either. Three sets of computers away and I spend the entire afternoon acting like I'm in highschool trying to make eye contact but also trying not to look like I am, "He must know I'm here," I think to myself but because of the way we left things, I don't feel like I can deliberately go over there and talk to you--I get close once (because you are sitting near a certain group of shelves that I do have occasion to use periodically) but I can't tell if you are concentrating really hard or concentrating really hard on not seeing me, so I go back to peering out from behind my computer while reading The Discourse of the Syncope and generally trying to look busy. I decide that if I leave first I will at least walk by and say hello. And then you look like you're leaving without acknowledging my presence and that hurts--a lot. But then you come back and you do come to talk to me and you're the one who's all like, "We should get a drink next week"--which you have pretty much never suggested ever and which I don't feel like I could suggest on my own, but because it's your idea, I say okay, even look at my calendar to see what would work. You say you'll call me but you don't. On Monday afternoon you are sitting six feet away from me on the other side of the line of computers with a girl from your department and I learn a lot in a very short time about the syncope, and we make only brief eye contact as I leave. I finally email on Tuesday night (largely against my better judgment, but my Wednesday plans with E. had been deferred until next week at this point and I needed more to look forward to this week) and you get back to me the next day saying you totally do want to get a drink, asking me about my schedule, but then listing all the deadlines you have. And I'm kind of thinking already--way to go, dude, why are you even trying to make plans with anyone if you knew you had that coming up--but when we fail to cross paths on Wednesday night and end up emailing instead you say something that at least suggests to me why you asked about my plans in the next 72 hours and it does piss me off ever so slightly. But I say that maybe I'll text after a social obligation on Thursday night. Which I do, following up with a voicemail--one of three to different people, all of which go unanswered until the next day. You send me a text at 1:00 this afternoon apologizing for not answering sooner.

I had a horrible and slow morning, but I did finally drag myself to school, thinking that even if I only write and work for two hours that's two more hours of work than I would do at home. You are here. You are talking with other chicks from your department. I don't interrupt, but you must have known I was here. I try to glance up less than I did last week. I still don't think it's in my power to go up to you--I already feel like I've done enough chasing you this week. I'm not sure why my presence couldn't have been acknowledged in some way, even if it was a text message. And now it looks like you left again and this time you didn't stop over to say hi.

And I don't understand any of this.

In related news, this is officially the Summer of the Fake Boyfriend.

Undedicated (barely): Martha Wainwright, "Bleeding All Over You"

...well, I guess I have a new theme song. It's a bit eerie, actually, to find so much of a reflection like this, but in a way it's why I like to listen to World Cafe when I'm working at home at night. (Yes! Working! As opposed to watching tv!)


The album title, by the way, is "I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too." Yeah, I don't know *anyone* in these parts who that would apply to. Geez.

...and then on other days, you're just kind of stuck.

Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.(Tennyson)

At least once a day--and often more--I find myself becoming Mariana in the moated grange. Which is simply to say that nothing happening is sometimes as bad as the things that happen, and often even more distracting.

Bloomsday Edgestories

I learned today from reading Jean-Luc Nancy's The Discourse of the Syncope that the feminine form of Kant--die Kante--means "the pointed, the thin and sharp edge, the angle, of a ridge or divide" (91). I am thinking of this as a razoredge or a tightrope or--to think less laceratingly for the moment--the silvering of the mirror (and I'm thinking here of Derrida's reading of Ponge's "Fable," mostly in "Psyche: Invention of the Other") and watersurfaces of the kind that lend themselves to a confusion of shadow and substance, as in the scene in Book 4 of the Prelude--a kind of multiple vision--the sky and trees reflected there, but also the reeds and fish underneath the surface, a dual visibility that in some sense makes the surface "itself" in-visible. (This all seems, at times, like a hopelessly old-fashioned exercise in deconstruction deployed to cover over my own personal stupidities. If I could set the scene for you I would, but I'm not sure I could do it unless I could make it into the third person first and even then I'm not sure I would despise myself any less.)

And I am thinking, on this Bloomsday (inevitably a legacy of my ex-boyfriend; there are certain textual transmissions that occasionally make it hard for me to do what I do) of tightrope acts and walking on water and I have been trying for the last couple of hours to recover from a certain multiday stupefaction (something like this always seems to happen when I should be writing--I end up reading, and badly) and to think in paragraphs, to make another try at staking out a position within the Critique of Judgment and I am turning around on what seems to me to be the dual question of the essential spontaneity of aesthetic judgment and the suspension that secures the instance (I hear this with a French accent today) of freedom. (Simply being here is to risk a complete collapse; I come here, I say, so that I will be more productive and more disciplined than I would be at home; coming here, though, is always a risk, and there is so much that can go wrong, so many ways to force myself into a kind of disappointment. Why can't that be me? Suspension is exhausting; I didn't know what I would be getting into; in some ways the forced lightheartedness is almost worse; having him know what he knows about my life is worse than him not knowing anything at all; this is not conductive to writing about the sublime except when it is and I wouldn't have written this if I had stayed home today.) I find myself wondering as I contemplate this spontaneity--and I'm not sure Kant ever uses the word, only implies it--this instability--I find myself recurring again and again to the question of the razor edge and the water surface, specifically: Do you ever get used to walking on water?

The story goes that Peter was okay until he looked down. What's the opposite of looking down? What did it mean for him to look down? Is it simply a matter of knowing or not knowing what you're doing? This seems to make faith a matter of ignorance--no, it's more than this, to walk on water you almost have to know what you're doing at every moment. (I see you past the shoulder of the person I'm talking to don't you realize that all I wanted was to be able to do this with you, to work side by side? This is all I've ever really wanted of the people I've loved, and perhaps this is why it would be difficult, as things stand now, to fall in love with The Poet, who seems very far from here as it is.) To know but not to look--some sort of action, some kind of energy--nervous energy, tension, a suspension that is almost a churning, lifting you just far enough above the water not to fall. You can't get used to walking on water--that's when you fall, that's when you go slack, you let your guard down and you become ever so slightly too heavy--there was never much of a margin for error to begin with and now it's over and you might never be able to regain that first lightness, you will have to learn some other trick. (It's only now that I come face to face with how much I have been depending on some illusion of a singularity that went both ways--not in an absolute sense, but at least in terms of the immediate context--and by a bad accident of positioning, a choice that I made before anyone else was here this morning--I get to watch this get chipped away moment by moment--)

And I am trying to write about Kant and get myself back to Christabel and I am still turning over the same set of ideas, more or less. I call it something different now, moving beyond humiliation and its overdeterminations, thinking now more broadly in terms that I am preparing to live with for years--funny, how one's longest relationships are revealed to be with texts, with certain words, as people themselves come and go.

Late on Friday night I told The Professor what I have been thinking for several weeks now--that I would be happier if I could write something like poetry, if I could regain the kind of relation I used to have to theory, philosophy, and literature, that graphomania that had me writing in several locations and in several discourses all at once. No doubt this was dangerous when I was 20 and 21; no doubt there would be risks this time around, too, not the least of which being a kind of absolute self-indulgence or just trying too hard. I might be happier, too, if I could slip into the third person sometimes, like I did one afternoon sitting in the St Mark's Churchyard in the summer of 2000. I used to write to survive; when I stopped writing, I stopped surviving. I am still working alone; I have been looking outside to see if we're getting the storm they promised us (we're not); I need to decide what I have the heart to do the rest of today; maybe I will let myself get beer if I go to the gym first.

Bullets, mostly domestic and pedagogical

* I did laundry tonight, since it's no longer so hot that I can justify buying new underwear to avoid the laundromat. The washer that had all of my dark / warm water stuff in had fabric softener in it--something I don't usually use myself. Now my dark / warm water clothes and my towels smell like Downy--not a bad smell, but they don't smell like my clothes and towels.

* Speaking of clothes, my bridesmaid's dress has been chosen for me. It's not actually that bad, right? I don't think I've ever worn a strapless gown in my life, though. As I observed to my mother this morning, that's a good incentive to keep going to the gym through the summer and fall, especially because I will be the token old maid in the wedding party.

* I feel like I've been working really hard today without getting anything done. I will be switching to full on work with Coleridge tomorrow. Well, that and getting my paperwork together at New Teaching School which Needs a Pseudonym, having lunch with an aunt and uncle who are in town, and going to hear some friends read / perform in Brooklyn. So tomorrow, alas, may not be a gym day.

* Speaking of NTSwNaP (see what I mean?). I got a whole bunch of info on the fall semester from the Writing Director there. I'm already in a different world--there's just more here in terms of sheer documentation than I got from Erstwhile Teaching College in two years. And it's a whole new ballgame, one that's played without course readers and where you actually write course descriptions based on topics from which the students then choose. In a general sense, I realize that the centers of adjunct autonomy are almost completely reversed in these two situations--ETC has a reader that they want you to teach from, and they require more essays, but beyond that they aren't at the moment pushing their adjuncts to do much more that's intellectually coherent, as long as the kids learn some grammar along the way. My class tended to be organized around some broad units, but they weren't necessarily connected to each other--and, especially in this last semester, they were all in a certain sense tailored to the institution, which basically meant that I could be very self-referential in terms of things like linguistic diversity, what it means to write in English, and so on--and be reasonably certain that 90% of the people in the room had personal experience with that kind of thing. This new teaching gig will be the first time I will be standing in front of a classroom of majority English-speakers (as a first language, that is)--not to mention students who will probably all be living in dorms close to campus rather than with their parents in Ozone Park and Bensonhurst. And all of this makes me a bit nostalgic (read: terrified of change) for ETC and makes me wonder if I shouldn't give up that class--but the places are so different that it doesn't make sense for me--at least not in what will be a prospectusing and fellowship applying semester--to be teaching at both. Also, in a very practical sense--the New Gig is probably closer to the kinds of writing programs that are going on at places where I would like to teach. Not that I want to teach exclusively in a writing program, but I think it'll be good to have both things.

* The Poet has been getting himself into political controversy in his hometown, and it's the kind of thing where if it backfires in a certain way it's going to hit me too. Okay, so that's a little bit unlikely at this point, but if I'm still with him when the next step in his political career comes, then--yeah, he thinks he's going to be able to keep me out of it, but it's clear even from the tone of what I read online today that it won't be up to him. (Of course, if I'm still even with him, then that will...ack. Anyway.) Which is all a long way of setting up the fact that I about had a heart attack tonight when I got a call from an unknown New Jersey number on my cell. Especially since we'd been flirting a bit over email in the afternoon. As it turns out, though, it was just my aunt--calling, I suppose, from a hotel rather than her cell--but I only found that out when I listened to the message. I have a pretty strict policy of not answering numbers I don't recognize.

* I feel sticky and I swear it's from the fabric softener on this t-shirt. Was that gross?

* I'm beginning to miss creative writing a lot. But I've been pretty good about forcing myself to think in paragraphs and not just mindlessly take notes on things. But the emphasis is on "pretty good."

* When my mother was here, the soap dish fell out of the wall in the shower. She managed to at least provisionally caulk it back in. That lasted until Sunday, probably because it got so damn hot in here. So now I'm back to having a plastic bag taped over a gaping hole in my shower. I'm waiting a few days before calling the landlord because I don't want to be stuck here until I'm ready. Also, this feels stupider than the toilet situation--not that this one is my fault any more than that one, but still.

* My life has been vastly improved by my cultivating the habit of making coffee before I go to bed and then putting it in the refrigerator--hence, iced coffee in the morning, and something more securely portable. This will be essential when I start teaching that 8:00 class.

* Finally, I may be starting to heal from K, since I was able to watch an episode of the Daily Show without thinking about him and getting depressed. Technically, I stopped watching during the writers' strike, but K first entered my consciousness as "dude in my German class who looks like Jon Stewart," and that's been sort of making me reluctant to go back. Oddly, though, now I find the whole thing less funny than I did--am I an enormous killjoy because I got kind of queasy about the Gitmo jokes? I don't know. I suppose I have other things I'm supposed to think about. Tomorrow--Coleridge and the syncope!