Most of the time...

I'm not wretched in the way that I was on Sunday or most of Monday. I thought I should say that here because there are a few of you out there reading and caring and commiserating, and that's actually meaningful for me. So, thank you.

In fact, it's been something of a quiet week. Not a huge amount of productivity, but I'm between projects anyway. So I've poured myself into interacting humanely with my students and taken some time to focus on myself, though in what's hopefully a less obsessive way. Went back to the midday zazen on Wednesday, which was rejuvenating. And I feel almost calm, which is strange partly because I know that a lot of the crappiness of my situation is directly traceable to my having acted like an idiot on a couple of levels. And I wonder--is this really me, being able to recognize my own issues but not doing the whole self-recrimination thing? It feels weird.

But I'm going to try to practice with that for now and try to get a few hours sleep before it's time to go. Have decided that if I'm not checking a bag, I probably don't need to get to the airport two full hours before the flight, so I can leave more or less at the same time I would to teach. And being able to trust that is even something.

I'm hoping the weather will be nice and that the fall colors will be out. I do actually want to see the extended family. I have my travel zafu. And The Poet will be there to pick me up when I get home. So I guess I start here.

Postscript

...and of course, it's not him that I'm mad at. It's not him that I hate. It's me. Because I wasn't up to the task of this particular interaction. Because he said he wouldn't destroy me and I let him. Because there's nowhere else for the disappointment and the anger to go. Because I clearly want too much even when I don't think I want anything at all. Because I honestly do not think that anyone even remotely age appropriate or unmarried will ever actually love me or work to make me love them. At least not anyone that I can love back.

I know that I'm not supposed to be internalizing this, but if I'm going to be the crazy bitch, this is the way to do it that doesn't get people sending messages to your department chair about you and it also doesn't end up hurting anyone else.

That last part, of course, is a legacy of growing up evangelical and female: you do whatever you can to avoid hurting or inconveniencing other people, even if it means driving a knife into your gut.

It's not so much the way you hurt me, it's more like the way you make me want to hurt myself

Whatever J and I had is over.

He talks about wanting to be friends. I don't really care. And I told him I wouldn't make plans with him more than an hour in advance of anything.

I feel sick. I want to claw my own eyes out.

And most of all, I hate myself, I hate my own reactions to this, I hate the crazy, and I hate the fact that no matter how low I think my expectations are, I still manage to get so cripplingly disappointed.

I hope someone responds to my Facebook message.

I guess I can give my dad the CDs I burned of the new Dylan album.

At least The Poet still loves me. And that's not entirely horrible.

I hate this so much. I need to get out of the house, but I don't know where to go. I was hoping that if I called J before zazen it would be better, but now I don't know how I'm going to get on that cushion or what will happen when I get up.

And I think what makes me angriest of all is the fact that the week I met J was really a turning point of my being in the world, that it was the week I felt that things were changing for me, that I'd made some progress, that I could finally stop getting so hung up on specific people and really be grounded enough to face the world.

What a fucking joke that was.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. How am I supposed to work today? What am I supposed to do? How am I going to get through this wedding?

I kind of want to throw up. Or...I don't know. Buy cigarettes. Something. Erase everything good I've said about him during the past few months so my friends don't think I'm a complete fucking idiot.

Oh, and it's not just that this weekend was the weekend before the wedding. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my abortion. It's not that big of a deal in itself, but it did cause me to mourn what I could have had with E, if we'd managed to stay together longer. So the double abandonment. Yeah, not a whole lot of fucking fun.

I wonder if I should go back on Nerve when I get back from the wedding. That'll at least make for fun fucked up stories to shock people at my h.s. reunion.

I kind of wish I were on the market this year so I'd have something else to care about other than the stupid, quixotic, should-know-better-by-now attempt to try to make a decent life for myself here. After 10 years I should probably get the fucking hint.

Fuck. Just fuck. I wish I had a place I could scream.

Oh, and he was totally making it about the sex. Douchebag. Fucking douchebag.

And I think now I just let The Poet love me.

Citational: from J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading. Also other things.

It is impossible to get outside the limits of language by means of language. Everything we reach that seems to be outside language, for example sensation and perception, turns out to be more language. To live is to read, or rather to commit again and again the failure to read which is the human lot. We are hard at work trying to fulfill the impossible task of reading from the moment we are born until the moment we die. We struggle to read from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night, and what are our dreams but more lessons in the pain of the impossibility of reading, or rather in the pain of having no way whatsoever of knowing whether or not we may have in our discursive wanderings and aberrancies stumbled by accident on the right reading?

...there's something almost comforting about old-school deconstruction on a grey Saturday afternoon.

Yeah, so. It's been awhile. I guess the short version goes something like this: there was the week where all I did was sleep and do the minimum I needed to do to get through teaching. And then got the stomach flu. And then there were some more disappointments, and a large-scale freakout about my brother's wedding, but more about the fact of my attending by myself and feeling like an enormous loser for it. But then snapping out and finishing the damn prospectus, save for another nip and tuck revision and possibly the addition of a paragraph.

There was the night The Poet and I went to Hoboken and made up stories about alternate lives for ourselves. There was the brunch I went to where I ended up having one of those conversations where some dude who is not a literary scholar tries to tell me how to do my job as a literary scholar and you can tell that he mostly feels authorized to do it because he's a dude and you're not. Extra bonus points for his being the older brother of someone who I had a very awkward night with at one of the absolute low points of last December. Though I don't think he knew that.


I did midday zazen at the Village Zendo last Wednesday. Just an hour of sitting. Amazing. I'm going to try to make that a weekly thing.

And today I've been reading, mostly. Which has kind of been nice, though not as nice as seeing J. Who I haven't seen for like two weeks. Again. But how do I tell him that he needs to work harder to get me away from The Poet?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of being kind to oneself. And about how much of what I allow to pass as a kindness to myself (often in the form of drinking, several hours at a time of stupid television, poor food choices) are really not kindnesses at all but indulgences that redouble my own reasons for being unkind to myself.

I've been having fun with my students. It has been amazingly fun teaching them a text that I love. At least the ones who are actually doing the work.

I bought the latest Bob Dylan album, Tell Tale Signs, off of iTunes a couple weeks ago. (An unusual event in my world.) It's amazing and you should download it immediately. I have been doing this thing where I listen to the version of "Most of the Time" that's on this album and then listening to the Sophie Zelmani cover from the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack right afterwards.

I got my travel zafu in the mail this week. It's basically a beach ball with a cloth cover. But it's kind of awesome. I'll also be bringing Xanax to Indiana with me because even though I'm not as actively stressed out by the wedding as I was last week at this time (and boy was I rocking the word vomit at this one party--I'm sure anyone who's seen me in the last ten days, my students included, is tired of me talking about hits), I still think it's better to be safe than drinking too much and saying something unintentionally nasty or angry.

I've been practicing with what it means to trust the present, to trust others, to trust myself. What I think made that midday zazen so great for me was that I realized, most of all, that I could trust my posture, that I could trust myself to know how to sit, that what I did at home was also what I was doing there.

And I'm trying to believe that I don't have to be my own worst enemy.

The aforementioned prospectus post

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

Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guarded optimism and second chances

Around the beginning of the semester--which of course was also around the time I met J.--I spent a lot of time writing around a problem that I was beginning to notice in my personal life: namely, a huge disjunction between the way I experienced my life and the way I represented my life. One of the immediate triggers for this awareness was a conversation with K. where he kept trying to tell me I was an alcoholic and I realized that while I wasn't one, I was talking to him like I was. And I couldn't come up with a reason why that would be a good idea under any circumstances. In a broader sense, this was on my mind because the new school year seemed really to mark a new leaf for me professionally and academically--leaving the institutional fold of Erstwhile Teaching College for Not-NYU, being finished with coursework and orals, and having two forthcoming articles in hand. Moreover, I was coming up to the year anniversary of the semester that just about did me in, the shitstorm that came down before I had the chance to heal from my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. Mostly, I've told those stories and don't really need to go back.

And there, my friends, was the problem. Is the problem, more likely. I looked around at the beginning of the Fall of 2008 and realized that I was still the girl with all the fucked up stories, the girl sleeping with the married guy and probably more famous than she wanted to be for sharing the more sordid of her stories. In a sense, I started listening to myself a bit more and realized that I sounded kind of nuts.

For whatever reason, not much of this made the blog. I started to get into it in a couple of posts that I abandoned as they got increasingly complicated or whatever. Maybe I just didn't want to admit to some of it. And I think that when things seemed really good with J., it was easiest just to pretend that the rest of it never happened, that from now on everything was going to be fine &c.

We see, of course, how that turned out.

A lot of things happened in the last 36 hours or so. When the Xanax and zazen combination didn't work, I went to the bar on the next block for some $4 happy hour pints and read more of "The Angel in the House" and realized in the middle of all of it that sleeping with The Poet on Thursday had been a horrible, horrible mistake in part because I had been thinking about J. the whole time and after two beers I decided that I needed to text J. and tell him that. I saw it as a last ditch effort. What I couldn't get past all yesterday (Friday-yesterday) was the sense that I had done a horrible thing when I called him on Thursday and that I was engaged in an acute form of self-sabotage without even really knowing why. And not long after that I went home to eat junk food for dinner and catch up on my Thursday night TV and just forget about the whole thing. If nothing else, I told myself, I've learned that being with The Poet no longer solves all of my problems, and as much as I'd like to think differently (because he is kind, because he cares, because after the last six or seven months we achieved a very wonderful coexistence), he would never be able to be the person I need him to be.

But he did text me back, and with no small sense of trepidation and outright panic, I went to meet him on the Lower East Side at 1:00 in the morning.

It was a strange conversation and a stranger couple of hours. Probably one of the hardest conversations I've ever had to have with someone I barely know. I did a lot of apologizing and I don't think it was unjustified. I don't really want to go into the specifics (since that would, ironically, reinscribe and reproduce many of the impulses that got me here in the first place), but suffice it to say that I learned a lot of things about how I appear to other people (especially those who don't know me) and I also realized that I have a long way to go in figuring out how to deal with relationships. And a lot of what he called me out for can be related back to the problems I was writing about at the beginning, the experience vs. representation divide in my own life, and habits of speech and thought that have become kind of disturbingly entrenched over the last year and a half. It wasn't just the high awfulness of Thursday night, but things that were there from the very beginning, things that got exposed in part because that cleavage was there, that I had long since ceased to talk about myself in the way that I wanted to be.

But he came out to meet me anyway (and I him). I'm not sure either one of us knows why. And there's still a long way to go in any of this, and there were a lot of things that had to take place last night that were scary (beyond even the scariness of having someone call you out for everything you'd been feedback looping the self-recrimination about for the past three weeks), but I went through with it because I wanted to be with him. And it seems right and good and we've made some deals with each other (I hate to call them promises, exactly, not because they aren't but because that word seems overdetermined in this context) and I'm left just trying to do the best I can, holding on, relaxing, watching my speech, and trying to put myself back together again from these last couple of days. He's going to Montreal again this week, which means that I have no excuse for not writing my prospectus, prepping the next unit of my class, and all those other things that haven't been getting done. Also, of course, putting things right with The Poet in terms of not getting back together with him.

During the calling out, J. said to me, "You don't know how beautiful you are." But in a way that's almost impossible to parse. It wasn't meant to be flirtatious, it was almost sad and completely heartfelt, and that's one of the things that makes me nervous. It was nicer than when The Ex used to kind of browbeat me into confidence (which only succeeded in hollowing me out), but still...this moment sticks in my throat a little bit.

He's wonderful to fall asleep with, though. I was restless the first couple of times just because I'm used to mostly sleeping alone (and I almost never slept well with E. or The Poet), but it turns out that I can actually fall asleep while he's holding me. At least for a couple of hours. This in itself is immensely comforting, and I want it to bode well for something. Like I want to be my best self for him, to stop overcompensating for the hurts and traumas of 2007 and beyond. Even thought it's not going to be easy.

I don't know if I'll see him before he leaves for Canada. But I'm going to try to deal either way. And I'm still determined to go to the Village Zendo on Monday.

I may begin tomorrow with an eminently skippable prospectus-related post. Really must get back on track with that. And grading.

The shorter version

Hebrews 11:1 tells us that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

My problem is not that I lack faith.

It's that I don't know what to hope for.

Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Meet them at the door laughing..."

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

--Rumi