Things that are not the poem of the day

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

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

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

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

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

Zen and the art of--what?

This was a hard day. I knew it would be. So I cleaned and watched TV and listened to podcasted dharma talks and took a nap and at the last of the apple sage sausages from last week's trip to the Flying Pigs Farm stand (they weren't there today, which was one of many reasons why the market wasn't as much fun as it usually was).

But I think what's really made me feel better is sitting zazen a couple of times and watching a bunch of last season's Gossip Girl episodes.

Awesomeness of the day

The Guardian has a slideshow of Bush at the Olympics with LOL cat captions.

It is awesome.



As seen on my lunchtime browsing of Jezebel.

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.

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 my apartment has in common with the International Space Station

Yes, they are both suffering from a broken toilet. Mine isn't quite as catastrophic (by the way, who builds a space station with just one bathroom?), but it does involve having to turn off the water supply so the tank doesn't just keep running and running.

And with that, I announce my return from Wisconsin and mark the beginning of the summer. Which will no doubt be a classy one, if this first post is any indication.



(The image is from Sue Rowe's website. My parents have both her books in the bathroom at the lake, and reading them through is a ritual for me every time I go up there. Sorry that this post is all about toilets, basically.)

Wisconsin itself was actually quite wonderful, for the simple reason that I didn't think about anything, not about my life, not about my work--hence, no enormous heartpourings to my parents, no inappropriate allusions to my sex life, no political baiting. It was lovely. I should try this more often. Seriously, though--it could have been hard. The cabin was where, over Columbus weekend last year, I started to first realize that I was pregnant, and in my whole story with K, it has the virtue of being that eerie calm before the storm, when I at least I was still doing my German homework having not begun to sleep with a married guy...and so on. But I managed to keep the vast majority of those feelings at bay. I played roughly 7,000 games of Scrabble with my mother, and won about 3,450 of them. My dad started to give my boat driving lessons, and he took the blame for my hitting a sandbar and taking a chunk out of the propeller. I read most of Trollope's The Prime Minister--a somewhat perverse choice, but really--the Palliser novels are like Victorian candy to me right now. I didn't even bring any de Man.

One of the highlights of the trip was hiking with my mother on the Three Eagle Trail that runs between Three Lakes and Eagle River. We had just intended to kill time while my dad worked in the library (the library in Three Lakes has free wi-fi--a big draw), so we set out to see where it would take us and assumed my dad would pick us up easily when he was done. Except around mile 4, the trail veers off from the highway, and there's no easy way out except to walk for another 4.4 miles. Which we did, and it was totally worth the sore legs and not eating lunch until 3:00. And we agreed that we wouldn't have done it if we knew how long it would have been.

I also saw a loon (several, actually) in the water for the first time. Nearly 20 years of hanging out in the Northwoods and--finally. Also, there were multiple eagles and an impressive blue heron on the dock. So a good time, even if it did get down to below freezing one night. I should do a post on the airports when I get the chance--both the Foucauldian efficiency of the TSA at the Rhinelander airport and the white-people fest that is Terminal A at the Minneapolis-St Paul airport. The latter makes me think that I should maybe pass on applying to jobs in, say, South Dakota.

And now I'm back, easing into the summer where I should be hitting the ground running. Coming back was hard, for reasons I don't totally feel like going into at midnight when I still have dishes to do. Suffice it to say that I went a little soft towards the end of my orals reading (okay, a lot soft and it was almost a month). It's time to pull myself back together and be more protective of my time. I was mad at the Poet for a little while, but I'm not any more, as long as he keeps his whole political thing under control and in New Jersey, where it won't be trying to figure out who I am and if I have a MySpace page. I'm having some issues with my shoulder...got a massage from a grad school colleague who's also trained in that kind of thing, and it helped quite a bit in general, but I'm still sore. Made it hard to do much yesterday, but since it woke me up at the crack of dawn, I was able to go to the Greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza (awesome!! Except that people should really leave their bikes at the edges. And I have a feeling that maybe it isn't so much the place to meet straight guys who are single.) and be back home (with strawberries and spinach and grass fed beef, etc.) before 10. So I went and wandered around the Brooklyn Museum--of which I am a new member--for a few hours. I thought "The Dinner Party" was oddly moving. I'll also be going back to hang with the Ghada Amer exhibit some more. It was pouring rain when I planned to leave, so I joined a tour on "The History of the Modern Chair" instead.

And now...summer. Tomorrow I hit the ground running for real. I've thought about how I'd like my days to be, and I will be doing a test run this week. First order of business is to be smart about Tennyson, in abbreviated form, just enough to convince the Important Journal Editor that I can do the project as soon as the other one is done. I'm also trying to address a few admin-y things this week--the address change that refuses to take, rectifying my inadvertent disenfranchisement. I'm sure you're on the edge of your seat.

Brilliant

I've started to read XKCD more and more often and have, of course, been slowly falling in love with it. One of the quirks that I didn't realize at first was that there's always a message/punchline/commentary when you hover the mouse over the image. But that seems to only work if you look at it on the actual site, at least unless you possess greater html skills than I do. So I'll just give you the hidden text in this one: "The question with Lucy and the football was always whether, on some level, she believed the things she said."

Awesome.

See also: Jealousy and Journal #2 for more of why I love this.

Today would have been reasonably okay if I hadn't come home after my committee member meeting to find a bunch of mouse shit in my kitchen. I'm horrified by the whole thing, but I can't really lay out a trap or anything unless I have someone on speed dial who will come over and take care of it for me. There are a lot of things I can deal with reasonably calmly. Vermin is not one of them. Like so many things in my life, this is something that both isn't my fault and feels like my fault.

What Claudia Wore

My lovely friend M has turned me on to what might be the best blog ever.

I did actually get a decent amount of work done today on prep, Coleridge, the conference paper, and Gaskell. Also went to Target and finally bought some decent curtains. They improve the look of the place immensely. And I made a special trip to Teaching College to use the gym. This would be more virtuous if I wasn't trying to make up for eating a bunch of processed crap, as it is easy to do when working from home.

Hopefully, I will be able to keep up this pace through Thursday. I would definitely like to be able to send out versions of that damn paper to a few people by tomorrow night.

I redacted a few things around here in a fit of what is hopefully unfounded paranoia. I think I'm more than a little bit nervous because of the home invasion / sharing dreams I've been having lately.

Also, I think it would be fun to revive the word "coxcomb" as a synonym for "douchebag," which is a word I've never liked (even if there are occasionally times when it seems apropos). Perhaps I will simply start to make the switch on this blog, and my five readers can spread the meme.

Text and the single-ish girl grad student

See, now, I know this New York Times essay about making decisions about romantic partners based on the contents of their libraries is supposed to be aimed at people like me. And, given that it's the most emailed article at the moment, it's clearly working on some level. And I won't say that I didn't put a bit of thought into how my bookshelves are arranged in my apartment, and I won't say that when I was in college I never slept with a dude because of his books, and I won't pretend that books didn't figure rather heavily into my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. And, okay, there was that one moment with K where he was over here and said in this kind of plaintive what-if voice, "we even have the same books"--and I'd be lying if that wasn't one of those things that made me think (wrongly, as it appears) that we could be friends after the whole kind of sketchy affair thing was over.

However. I still affirm that some of the best sex I've ever had in my life was with The Lawyer, a man who owns almost no books. Like, I think I saw maybe three in his apartment in all the times I was over there, and I'm pretty sure at least one of them was one that I brought and took with when I left. A younger version of myself would have found this to be anathema to everything I stood for, and I have to say that I had at least a moment of pause when I realized that. (It's not like he didn't read things ever--he is a pretty big-deal lawyer and reads a lot for a living. He also told me once that he has some books in storage.) But I got over it and at some point realized it was kind of hot, especially coming off things with my Ex. (Those of you who know him know what I'm talking about.) And I don't think it's just me, either. As far as I know, most of the women that The Lawyer (you know what, let's just call him E) dated from Nerve were academics in one way or another; if I'm remembering correctly, he ended up dumping me for an art history professor. And we had a conversation once where I told him my theory about how all these academic women were attracted to him because having sex in a room without books in it was probably dirty-hot for a lot of us.

It is more than that, though. The one comment in the Times article that totally makes sense is the one about how shared books can generate a false sense of shared ideas:

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.

I mean, there's something to be said for someone who gets a lot of your references and all. The Professor and I started hanging out together because we could talk Derrida together and shared an appreciation for a certain Victorian novelist who isn't Dickens. In general, though, and especially with men who are not themselves academics, books can be more trouble than they're worth. Obviously, I would like to end up with a dude who does more than watch Rock of Love all day. (On the other hand, I completely prefer the elliptical machine near the TV playing Rock of Love to the elliptical machine where I'm left to the company of my New Yorker when I'm at the gym.) And obviously, I don't want to have to continually defend my reading at all to someone. But that's not the experience I had, at least not on the internet. What I got from Nerve were all these guys who weren't academics but kind of wanted to be and to some extent were crazier autodidacts than I was, and with me this translated into an alternation of fetishizing what I do for a living (is what I do for a living kind of cool and awesome all the time? Yeah. Is it also just another profession among many, and one with perhaps more of its share of demands and ridiculous hoops? Yeah.) and giving off the impression that I am somehow falling short of their expectations because I don't want to be cool and literary all the time. People who mostly know me in academic and other mostly non-sexual contexts are always surprised when I tell them that there's a group of dudes in the world who find me shallow--these are often the same dudes who buy me a drink and expect me to validate them for reading Moby-Dick. Have I read Moby-Dick? Yes, I have. Do I need to troll the internet for strangers with whom to discuss it? No.

I do know a lot of my personal reaction to this has to do with the specific terms of my relationship with my ex-boyfriend and especially the pressures he put on me because I was doing something that he, through an unfortunate convergence of circumstances and bad planning, couldn't pull off himself. In a broader sense, though, I think I spent so much time in high school and college pushing people off because I wasn't sure that they only liked me for my mind that I ended up making my life then much harder than it needed to be. I'm more comfortable with being liked for other reasons now, and I'm trying at least in a halfhearted way to keep those other reasons in play. (Ironically, I only really shop when I'm depressed, so I haven't bought anything in awhile. I should be able to justify something for the Toronto trip, though.) I joke that the longer I spend in grad school, the more vain that I get. It's not totally a joke, it's more a combination of trying to control the few things I can control and of still finding it wonderful not to have my Ex putting pressure on me all the time.

With that being said, I should finish making my presentation assignment handout and contemplate a trip to the gym tomorrow. I didn't go at all last week, and I'm sure that's partly why I got so damn manic.

Undedicated: Jim White, "Static on the Radio"

In another life, this is the kind of song that would have me stop whatever I was doing and smoke a cigarette for its duration. In my current life, it's still pretty cool and haunting and I still stop everything I'm doing to listen to it and it makes me want to go driving in Wisconsin at dusk.

Tangential

So, I'm typing my notes from reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and I find myself wondering whether The Matrix isn't, at bottom, an inherently Rousseauistic text. I mean, okay, it's a little bit too communitarian in the end, since Rousseau is all about the solitary individual, but what these works seem to share is the sense that man (against anything that Hobbes et al. would say) is essentially good (think Morpheus's defense against the Agent Smiths in the first movie, a scene that has always bothered me precisely because I am something of a misanthrope [yes! Shocking! I know.] and am also still shaped by a certain kind of Calvinist upbringing and would thus never suffer for those kinds of ideals) and a suspicion of "progress" in general as increasing our interdependece in a way that is ultimately detrimental to ourselves. And the Matrix movies also seem to share a belief that transparency in our language and interactions should be a goal--even if it can't be fully achieved--I mean, isn't that what the point of getting unplugged is?

I could be completely off base here, and it's been awhile since I've seen The Matrix while I was sober. And perhaps I'm being too reductive in limiting this just to Rousseau--perhaps there's a more general "Romantic" element of The Matrix to be explored? Surely someone's done that...(n.b. Google seems to say no to this, but Google also doesn't believe that I meant to search just for "romanticism" and so also pulls up hits for "the matrix" and "romantic," which is not particularly what I am interested in.)

Undedicated: Shelby Lynne's "Anyone Who Had A Heart"

Heard this song on the World Cafe this evening. The video annoys me a little bit, but I like the music a lot.



I'm really tired. The Wilde guest lecture was fun, but draining. The rest of the day felt a bit like swimming uphill, but I'm proud of myself for going to the gym when it was clear that the scanner in the library wasn't going to be free for awhile. I don't know if I can make it through the rest of the notes I have to type tonight--I may just try to go to bed and wake up early-ish. Like around 8 or a little before. I think I was just drained today.

I don't really know what I want, but I want something slightly other than this. I wonder how I can once again become someone who has anything at all to give.