Not sure I'm doing it right

Well, okay, no. There's one thing that I know went right this week--I gave the best fucking conference paper of my life on Friday morning. It's not something that would have come about any other way than how it did, and every time I've thought back to it since I'm kind of amazed by it. Just in terms of the convergence of events, how I would never have had enough confidence to give this paper in this way at anywhere other than a grad conference at my own institution--but also, I think, in the sense that I both wrote the paper the day before the conference (in a particularly dismal/socked in exhausted six hours in the department lounge after a dismal and frustrating day of teaching) and that I had been writing it for the last two and a half years, more or less. The frame--autobiographical but not marked as such--was something I decided on the week before, a risk undertaken precisely because of the situation of the conference and feeling like I had nothing to lose. It was related to something I told D. before we met but also to a set of experiences I had last summer and an idea I blog about quite frequently. It turned out to be a disturbingly successful metaphor and frame. (I only wish K could have been there. We'd run into each other in the cafeteria a few days before and managed to have a nice conversation about a number of things, including this idea...but no such luck.)

The last conference I'd been to before this one was the one in Toronto last April, and I was struck by how much I *miss* conferencing without even knowing it. Even when no one says anything wildly earthshattering, it's still inspiring to think alongside new people, to spend an entire day or so thinking mostly about books and ideas. It's mentally regenerative even though it's physically exhausting--and, in this case, physically exhausting on top of the worst cold I've had in three years and one of the most horrible and draggeddown weeks I've had in ages--two of them actually, and I'm not sure next week is going to be any better. (More on that anon.) It was enough to make me think, in this horrible, paradoxical, "oh my god I really am an academic and in this economy that's seriously going to fuck up my life" kind of way, that many of my frustrations of the past few months can be traced to having gone to Wisconsin (where I experienced a lot of lethargy and frustration when I actually did want to think) instead of to MLA.

The conference, though, was wonderful, in spite of the fact that I had pretty much lost my voice by the end of the night. Sometime in the afternoon, D. sent me a piece he'd been working on....something crazy and brilliant that I read through instead of listening fully to the faculty panel. This made me grin, especially since he wants me to give him some feedback. (Also, he wrote me a song, he said, and sent the lyrics.) On the downside, I haven't seen him since we went to Edgar's show two weeks ago, and I'm going out of town on Thursday. This is precisely the sort of thing that makes me all stressy. But I'm realizing, though, that my saying last week that I didn't want to go back to The Poet was important, so I don't have to look to D. to provide a reason not to be with The Poet. I did actually talk to The Poet for awhile on the phone yesterday and got a better sense of what's going on in his head and his life--and all of this rather affirmed the fact that it's best I'm just a friend right now, and that he's using my breaking up with him as a way of thinking around something else that's actually much worse.

The rest of this week pretty much sucked, hardcore. I got everything done that I needed to, but it was miserable, sloggy, frustrating. I was almost in tears all day on Wednesday, feeling jerked around by stupid requests from professors treating me like a secretary rather than a colleague (too many flashbacks to my first job in Chicago), frustrated with my students, exhausted from the performance of engagement, too sick to go to the gym, everyone around me seemed to be dragging me down. I almost didn't go to zazen, though that at least temporarily made me feel better, even though I had to start running again right afterwards. I do not want people telling me that I am supernecessary for one group or another to succeed. If I ask you to do final proofreading on something, I do not want to get the okay to do the final copy and then hear three days later that there are changes that need to be made. And so on. I skipped my monthly field seminar on Wednesday night for the first time since I started grad school, was still in the library until after 7:00 grading papers, and so on, so on. The week before was like this too--just as busy but slightly less miserable--this past week--which was all supposed to be about doing my best to get everything done, suddenly had me on the rack.

The teaching thing is especially frustrating and overwhelming: this is the part where I have to keep telling myself: UR NOT DOING IT RIGHT. Basically, I feel like I'm back in my first semester at Erstwhile Teaching College, where I'm spending insane amounts of time on this thing with absolutely no payoff and then when the lesson plan fails because no one can be bothered to do the reading or, if they've done the reading, to talk about it, things only get more frustrating. I realized that part of the reason why I have an aversion to grading papers is that they seem, unlike drafts or even homework assignments, to be a kind of referendum on my ability as a teacher. Which is completely bullshitty, just not so much that I can believe it's not partially the case. And that, in turn, is clearly not helping my mood. I keep feeling like I'm failing this particular group of students and I don't know what's going wrong. Partially, it's teaching too many things I'm not familiar with, but--still. I think I'm better at first-semester comp than I am at second semester comp. But this, too, seems like it's emanating from self-centered reasons: I feel more secure when I know my students don't have anyone else to compare me to. So I think I get all weird in the spring. (Then again: the first spring semester I ever taught was the semester when I broke up with The Ex and got raked over the emotional coals with The Professor. And last spring I taught the fall version of the class, which made it the easiest semester ever. So perhaps it's time to give myself, and my students, a break.)

Right now the idea is basically to get better and get to spring break. The week is going to be pretty much running uphill. Today is grading, midterm evaluations, and the letter of recommendation for one of my fall students. Tomorrow is prep, hopefully being well enough to go to the gym (I haven't been in over a week and feel tubby--I'm sure this is also one of the reasons why this past week was so unremittingly miserable), getting a few stupid things done at school. Conferences all week, and somehow finding the time to do laundry, pack, maybe buy some cute shoes for spring. And then--down to Charlotte to hang out with one contingent of my extended family. And spring break, which is already being filled in for me, but I have to believe that things will get better after that, that I will eventually stop being sick, that D and I will get many walks through Prospect Park and that things will be okay for a little while.

I hope. Now zazen. Then grading.

Saturday thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My funny Valentine needs a pseudonym

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, happy Valentines day indeed.

"When the shoe fits / The foot is forgotten"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose I will have to find him a pseudonym.

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.

Learning to Weekend

The great thing about teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays is that it takes the pressure off of Sunday. There was work I probably could and should have done today, but nothing that had to be done that couldn't be figured out tomorrow or really at any time between now and Thursday. I can't always do this, but I'm glad I could today.

Prospect Park was lovely. Came in at Grand Army Plaza as per usual, walked all the way down past Wollman Rink to the southernmost end of the lake. The sky was beautiful. What I like about Prospect Park--and what puts it over Central Park for me--is that there are places where you really can feel like you're somewhere else other than New York. And there's something incredibly soothing for me in watching the last light of the sunset play on watersurfaces. Wandered back up along the eastern edge of the park, past the Lefferts House and the Zoo. It was almost dark when I got back to Grand Army Plaza and I could look in all the apartments without feeling as alienated as I sometimes do. I'm more or less always in one of two frames of mind when I leave Prospect Park: either I'm asking myself why I don't go there more often, or I'm feeling crushed and alone because of all the people there with other people. Today it was the former, and I'm glad of it.

On my way home I stopped at one of the wine shops on Vanderbilt because I just didn't think it was right to drink white wine with the lamb I was planning to make. I think this was a good move.

And, finally, because I haven't dinner blogged in so long: tonight I roasted a tiny leg of lamb I got from one of the Greenmarket stands--it's pretty awesome that they sell them in less than 1/2 pound cuts, and even with that I still have enough for a second meal. I roasted it with a red wine / olive oil / worcheshire sauce with onions, garlic, cumin, and dried cranberries and left it pretty rare. Yummy. Complimented it with a variation on my usual sauteed Brussels sprouts that included apples, some smashed blue potatoes (not my favorite way to prepare them, I decided, but tasty), and half an acorn squash. I'm going to have to get a bigger and sharper knife if I'm going to continue to make squash a part of my life.

And now I think maybe this can be an early night, that maybe I'll be ready to get back to work for real in the morning.

Did I mention that I handed in my prospectus last Wednesday? I handed in my prospectus last Wednesday.

On Rewriting Stories and Being-Nobody

Last Tuesday was the second time I've had the privilege of voting for Barack Obama, the first being his Senate primary in Illinois back in the very beginning of 2004. And I have a vivid memory of sitting on the floor of my bedroom in Chicago, taking apart my futon in preparation for my move back to New York with The Ex, and listening to Obama's keynote at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

A few days later, while The Ex and I were driving our moving truck full of books to Astoria, the trumped-up terrorist threats began in preparation for the Republican Convention. We saw people nearly get arrested for participating in (and watching) capoeria in Union Square. When we were in Pennsylvania, NPR was talking about vehicle searches in the tunnels and I wondered if I was putting The Ex in danger by allowing him to come to New York with me. I started my graduate coursework the week of the Republican convention.

We watched the 2004 election returns at the Bowery Poetry Club and the bar next door that had just opened, and because I'd moved out of New York right at the beginning of 2002, I still wasn't really used to the smoking ban and Derrida had died a few weeks earlier and I wasn't really used to that either. I think we went home before the full results were in--it didn't look good, but they hadn't called it yet. So it didn't hit us until the morning, and it was kind of like the day after 9/11 in a lot of ways, except that it wasn't a surprise or spectacle in the way that the attacks were--just a lot of bitter, bitter disappointment. There was a Victorian group meeting at school that night and only like four people came, but I remember it vividly, in part because it was the first time I went to the dinner afterwards. And it really did seem like the end of the world in some ways, especially when you're having a mediocre hamburger and watery pint with people in their late 60s who are telling you that it is.

The Ex, of course, spent the next year hating New York and saying he was allowed to do so because I had a psychological breakdown in Chicago. He came around by the midterm elections in 2006, but that was my first semester of teaching and I was broken in all kinds of other ways.

The events of this past week truly feel like the beginning of a new story. I'm not trying to overpersonalize or otherwise appropriate the events I talk about here, especially since I come across as rather less political than I really am on this blog. But it makes an interesting heuristic if nothing else, another way of understanding my life in New York and my life in grad school particularly, and it allows for certain forms of awareness that I'm not sure I would have had otherwise. I don't know if I'd call it a metaphor, exactly, especially not after reading a bunch of de Man yesterday, but there's certainly a shared affective field here, if nothing else. (Good lord, here I go...) The political weight that has been lifted is substantial, but it's also more than political, at least for me, and no doubt in part to its convergence with making it through the wedding (which was fine, even fun, and clearly not worth the amount of angst I put into it but we all knew that already, right?) and letting go (mostly) of the J situation.

Right up until the end, I refused to believe it. Refused to get my hopes up again (but, as in all of these situations, the hopes were up and in some ways stronger and less flexible because they were denied on some level) because I knew I couldn't take another 2004. With the distance of a few days, it's easy (easier) to see the extent to which all that was driven by a very specific personal story, having to do with the things I believe about myself and the events that I choose to make the defining moments in my life. Hence the personal / political palimpsest of the first several paragraphs and also a hint of vertigo that comes less from displacement but from a more complete un-placing--a reminder (if I can be Hegelian for a second) that we don't actually know where we are in our own stories or even whether we're in the story that we think we're in.

There's also the issue of expectations. This is probably the way in which I cause the most suffering for myself. I've always tried to keep my expectations low, dark, and cynical as a way of bracing myself for disappointment. Much of my inner life operates on this logic. In certain ways, it makes sense, especially in the business I'm in, where I know I can't count on getting a job or whatever. But, in general, this kind of thinking almost always leads to disaster--it was, I think, at the heart of my disaster with J. It's a disaster because the more I lower my expectations on one level, the more desperately I want to be proved wrong in those negative expectations, so that anything less than a complete, almost fairytale like reversal becomes another kind of disappointment. For a long time I've thought that the answer was simply to try harder to manage my expectations, to trust people less or to try in other ways to limit their influence over me. And this, too, was part of the disaster with J (and is related as well to the periods in which my relationship with The Poet has caused me pain as well)--I tend to turn my disappointment back on myself in the form of self-loathing--I don't allow myself, most of the time, to experience even justified / normal feelings when someone does, legitimately and indisputably, disappoint me. My usual m.o. is to get mad at myself for having expected anything of that person in the first place, to get mad at myself for feeling disappointed and for not being able to switch gears back into working and forget about it.

The question always turns on the management of expectation, on how not to get my hopes up. In practice, I think, this means that I hold back from caring about things--at least consciously. There's so much I'm working for in my own life that could go to shit, the last thing I want to do is go all in on trusting someone else who could disappoint me. Which means that the extent of my emotional investments often goes unacknowledged, which in turn means that I'm not always particularly good about choosing the sites of those investments because I'm not making them anyway, right? Or I try to throw out all these structures and place everything on one person, etc. etc.

You're getting the picture. And even when it works it doesn't because there's all that worrying over nothing.

In the past few days I've been trying to think about things at least a little differently. See, my initial reaction to Obama's victory (well, besides getting a thrill every time I think about the words "President Obama") was something like, hey, maybe I should have been more optimistic, maybe I shouldn't have kept my expectations so low, etc. etc. Not a bad reaction, but I don't think it gets to the heart of the issue. I sat midday zazen on the day after the election, and it suddenly hit me while I was walking up Broadway: the problem is the structure of expectation itself. Which isn't to say that hope and optimism are bad things, but rather to point out (at least to myself) that those things need to be part of the way I constitute the present moment and need to feed into the continuation of my learning how to trust each moment and each situation--without having expectations for how things should be or for how they could go wrong.

Some of this was crystallized for me on Thursday night, when I went to see Norman Fischer give a talk--mostly on his recent book (a Buddhist-oriented interpretation of the Odyssey). A lot of it focused on the relationship between being somebody and being nobody and the importance of practicing the latter. That struck me in a very particular way at the time, especially this idea of "allowing" yourself to be nobody...this seems to me to be a huge struggle for academics as a group, especially grad students, as we build up our names and CVs. (Ironically, the working group meeting we had on Friday was precisely on the question of CV design and now I need to redo mine.) We're always supposed to be "on," to be thinking only about our projects and our careers--or at least this is what we think people expect of us. The person other than The Poet who has been extremely supportive about my desire to go to San Francisco next summer has been Fabulous Committee Member. And I think the pressure to be somebody (and to be a stable, legible somebody) is compounded by growing up in an evangelical tradition, which constructs the self in a very specific and often negative way--the being-nobody that Norman Fischer was talking about is something, obviously, very different from the self-denial or self-annihilation (in Christ, in one's husband if one is a woman) preached in the places where I first grew up spiritually. Though I haven't fully worked out those different kinds of being-nobody for myself yet.

Being-nobody, he said, is part of what allows us to see our own stories as flexible and based on infinite choices rather than as fixed or typed. I've always, I think, been aware of the flexibility of stories to some extent, but I've really only experienced that on the level of being myself / being someone else--which is a false choice since it still includes an irreducible selfhood. Or, it's the difference between rewriting a story and starting a new one. (There was always something of the subjective suicide in my moving to the Midwest, and I've now been in New York continuously for longer than I've ever been before and there's a part of me that thinks things would be easier if I just left town again. But I can't, not until 2010 or so at the earliest.) But there is something powerful in the process of becoming aware of the memories and perceptions that we've arbitrarily chosen to privilege as formative in the process of becoming-ourselves. (In a way, of course, I'm sure blogging compounds this problem, though this isn't an archive in the traditional way.) And to think that we could change them, start from a different point that says something different from what the so-called formative moment says.

I'm sure that a lot of this hit me in this way because one of the things that brought me to practice was this divide between how I talked about my life and how I experienced my life--or, of just feeling the pressures of being somebody, particularly when that "somebody" was expected to drink a lot, date married dudes, have huge personal crises, and be a little bit intimidating and scary. And I think it does ask a lot of people (thinking here again of J) to expect them to see through my own self-presentation. (Though if anyone was able to do this, it's been The Poet.)

Of course, once you start thinking about all your determining narratives, it gets pretty overwhelming. I think there are a few I can start practicing with, though. One is the "thwarted" narrative, one that governs nearly every aspect of my life and is largely responsible for the enormous amount of hostility I bring to the world. In its archetypal form, it's simple: trying to be good, doing the right thing, expecting a thousand times more of yourself than you ask of anyone else or anyone asks of you, following authority, doing your homework and still getting screwed over, blocked, bag searched on the subway, annoyed by the first thing that crosses your path or upsets your composure, your heart broken by the first guy you meet when you're trying to take a break from your old married boyfriend who got you into Buddhism in the first place. And so on.

It has its roots a couple of places, but I think this is the important one: I was convinced from the time that I was eight or so that if God had actually wanted me to be a Christian (in that kind of Calvinist-elect way) he would have given me a sibling I could love or no sibling at all. Every single time I tried to accept Jesus and make resolutions to live a better life, to listen to more Christian radio, to take notes on the sermon, and so on--all of that collapsed as soon as my brother did something to throw me into a rage. Which was pretty much every day until high school. And sometimes after that. This isn't why I ended up leaving the church or finally moving to New York so I could distance myself from it, but it's one of the most vivid and persistent things that I remember about growing up.

I'm not sure right off the bat how one begins to rewrite a narrative like this one. I still haven't fully untangled the threads. I know, for instance, that this is another thing that collapses into anger with myself--why can't I be better, why can't I love my brother, why can't I be normal and not crazy so that someone other than The Poet will love me...So getting out is hard. I may have to start by focusing on the places where I've begun to rewrite certain manifestations of this narrative already, spiritual practice being a significant one. I'm still surprised to find myself on my cushion every day, especially on the days I teach. That's a huge lifestyle shift for me, and I shouldn't let myself minimize it.

The other site of rewriting is the one suggested by the narrative that began this very long post. I'm no longer the scared first-year grad student I was in 2004. All of the things that seemed impossible to me then--teaching, publishing, living without The Ex, having a President-Elect Barack Obama, and so on--are happening now almost imperceptibly and have somehow come to pass without a kind of apocalyptic rupture, have come about gradually, through a series of moments that will themselves pass away.

And for now I am going to try to trust that. I'm also going to go for a walk in Prospect Park this afternoon, regardless of how much prep work I get done in the next hour or so.

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.

Holding things lightly (more to come)

Did what I had to do on Wednesday. We ended on affectionate terms and with few regrets. And that was the point of it all, of course. So that we can still stand by each other as essentially good people, still reflect on the time we had together as something that was, on balance, a good thing for the both of us. I don't think I could have healed the way I did in the past couple of months without him.

And so. Spent the day and night with J. on Thursday. Liking him a lot. For something that started as a shot in the dark on his part, we've turned out to have a lot in common. His ability to read me is occasionally unnerving, but it's not the same kind of connection I had with, say, The Professor, that kind of has its destructive potential built in. So that's good. And his eyes--! (That was my 14-year-old moment, for those of you keeping score.)

We were supposed to hang out today, but he had to cancel. Which turns out to be fine for me, since yesterday got swallowed up by my first (exhausting) foray into the procurement of a bridesmaid's dress. Which is apparently incredibly belated as the wedding is in six weeks. It would be quicker to get a fucking passport. (Part of the exhaustion is no doubt due to my own ambivalence about my brother, which I want to work out in another post.) So all I did yesterday was that, the Greenmarket, and an epic nap, followed by epic Grey's Anatomy watching. With my plans for the day cancelled, I have been able to stay home, wear clothes that never leave this apartment, be on my period in peace, not wear makeup, and keep the pimple on my cheek to myself. I've also been able to make this the first full day of work that I've had since finishing the Victorian project. Spent just over 4 hours on my prospectus (*finally*) and am about to sit zazen again by way of transitioning into thinking about teaching stuff. I'm definitely glad I decided when I woke up to do the prospectus time first--I have a feeling that prep would have become an all-day project as it does all too often. Something to keep in mind for the coming weeks.

So I've given myself a deadline of 10/1 for articulating a topic and coming up with chapter headings. Would like to have a full draft shortly thereafter. I'll probably be blogging that more specifically on the site where I use my real name. (If you Google me and my main institution you should be able to find it.) I'm glad that we're about to come up on the workshop days in my class--far less prep for me and grading that can be done more or less immediately. This means more time for the prospectus and for staring at the cute boy that I like.

Which is pretty much where I need to be right now, holding lightly, and practicing with the present. And with that being said, I think it's time to sit for a few minutes. Perhaps I'll say more on some of these things later.

Hedgetrimming

And I try to hold on to all of this lightly, but I still feel the visegrip of the second week of September closing in. Yesterday I sat in West Village Coffeeshop and watched it rain and it seemed like the same rain that came down outside Cafe Naico last year at this time, while I was there on the phone with my mother and searching for flights to Chicago at the end of the week for my grandmother's funeral and Rosh Hashanah was like two weeks earlier last year, which was lucky because I don't think I would have been able to teach the day after. I suppose that, regardless of how drunk I am by the time my free minutes kick in tomorrow night, I should call my father.

And I try to hold on to all of this lightly, but it's so easy to get so tired so fast and I haven't been sleeping through the night so well and when I do sleep I don't always feel rested. I ground to a halt yesterday afternoon and stayed up past midnight watching episodes of Studio 60 online and getting drunk for no good reason and wishing K. would call me back, just because at this one moment, this one point, I needed to hear what I already know said back to me by someone else, someone like him, but of course he didn't call and finally I couldn't keep my eyes open. I need a sign, I said to Facebook, and some girl from my program wrote back this incomprehensible and slightly menacing message about someone else in the department. I kept the phone by my bed just like The Poet asked me to but he didn't call so I guess he made it through the night sleeping in the chair in his wife's hospital room. The surgery went well, he told me yesterday. And on the phone acting like everything was going to be fine again, she'd just have to go back on chemo, and he can come to Brooklyn tomorrow night after all and I am thinking I can't have him in Brooklyn anymore I can't wake up with him on the morning of the day I'm supposed to spend walking around New York with someone new and it's hard enough to get up at 6 to teach as it is and I can't be on this roller coaster just last week you came within two inches of breaking up with me out of not-unjustified guilt.

But I can't say this on the phone. I do the verbal equivalent of nodding. Because I really didn't think he was going to be able to spend the night with me under any circumstances and I just am not prepared. I have to break up with him tonight. Only a bit because of J (the guy from the coffeeshop). I mean, that's not completely irrelevant. I do want to give this thing a chance, if only because I don't remember the last time I clicked so much with someone based on a completely random encounter. And maybe I wouldn't be at this point with The Poet otherwise. Okay, it's pretty sure that I wouldn't be. But still. I guess I don't want to make it too much about J in case we end up hating each other tomorrow and then I'll still be broken up with The Poet and all of this was always at some level about hedging my bets because I told The Poet I would never break up with him unless there was someone else. But these transitions are broken up close and there is going to be an abyss. Maybe only a small one, fifteen hours or so, but an abyss nonetheless, big enough at least for the earth to open up and swallow the Twin Towers, long enough to rip my life apart. (As if those things are in any way equivalent.)

I should probably get to work, including reading next Tuesday's homework assignment so there are no more surprises.

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.

I discover what my problem is.

Well, okay, perhaps not in a cosmic sense or anything. But, see, yesterday was another day of basically just huge frustration with the Victorian project--possibly even more frustrating since I had a really incredible zazen session in the morning--at least in the sense that I finally broke through the barrier of constantly wondering what time it was and really beginning to feel like I was starting to constitute a present that was something other than the usual mindracing of past/present. But that didn't translate into better writing, and when I headed off to the party last night, I was more than a little frustrated with the two paragraphs I had in the new version, and also just generally feeling like I was losing touch with the purpose of my work again--kind of coming back to the place I was emotionally with all this back at the beginning of July when I had lunch with FCM, a place where I do actually know that I'm no longer approaching this correctly, but can't get myself back together on my own. I need a pep talk, I thought to myself.

And that's when it hit me. Talk. Talking. Like, to people. In person. When was the last time I had a meaningful face to face conversation, I asked myself? I had been at home, except for my whirlwind trip to the Greenmarket (orange cherry tomatoes, more summer squash, peppers, a wheat baguette, ground turkey), all day. Friday I also worked from home. Thursday I went to the library but the only person I saw there was K, and I didn't talk to him. Wednesday I had been coming home from FCM's apartment and...worked from home. Tuesday I had worked at FCM's apartment, since I'd been planning to see The Poet Tuesday night, and when that feel through, I stayed in, talked to him on the phone, and watched Bring it On on Hulu. The last face to face conversation I've had that didn't involve a food / drink purchase was, I calculated, Monday night when I ran into my friend S. at West Village Coffeeshop.

Whoops. No wonder I was going a little bit crazy. No, crazy isn't even the right word, really. Except for being disappointed when I couldn't see The Poet, my solitude had largely been of my own making. I like taking advantage of FCM's place when I have the chance to, and I was also grateful to be back in my own home. Thursday was not a particularly productive day in the library, and I thought that maybe taking a break for a few days would help. I'm actually kind of proud of myself that I don't take every chance to talk to K.--in a way, this makes me feel better about the situation. And I'm really happy I stayed here on Friday, even if it wasn't super productive. But, even for me, this was kind of an excess in alone time, even in the summer.

Needless to say, I was really glad that I had a place to be last night, to be with a large part of my favorite people from my program in a setting that wasn't quite as debauched as usual. It's not like I felt the need to talk about my project per se, but more the sound of hearing my own voice and the voices of others that was regenerating. I had an especially nice talk with a guy who was in a seminar with me a couple of years ago--it had been a class that affected a lot of people deeply and long afterwards, and I was glad to be able to compare experiences. All in all, there was something oddly affirming about the whole night: everyone looked *spectacular*, people seemed happy and rested or at least not actively stressed out, L. brought cranberry wine from Three Lakes, and (at least in terms of the conversations that I had with people), there seemed to be far less of the general gossip about other people that occasionally makes me feel bad when it's over. And I was also able to reestablish what I hope will become a practice of not drinking so much that I'm completely out of it for two days.

Which is not to say that I've gotten much done yet today. I slept in, shot some emails back and forth with The Poet, sat, had some food, listened to some podcasts from the San Francisco Zen Center, and took a nap. Now, obviously, I am blogging. But I don't feel as twisted up as I have for the last couple of weeks, and I've finally remembered that there was nothing in VIE's email to me that said, "Start from zero with your article and redo the whole thing"--this was my idea. And even my revision, while it does involve some rewriting, was never supposed to be that.

To wit (and this is in some ways the impetus of this post, as far as externalizing something like this helps me get it done), the parts of the article that need actual writing rather than tweaking are:

* The intro, though this involves mostly moving up and combining the three or four paragraphs about the passage that are currently scattered on pages 6-13.

* What comes immediately after the intro, for obvious reasons. This will involve the insertion of criticism and a greater engagement with Adviser's work on Poe and my author.

* The discussion of the "signs of death" debate needs to be streamlined and tied more closely to the poem and to issues of reading and signification.

* The fiction pieces I'm using along with Poe need to be discussed separately in terms of their relation to ideas, not discussed randomly in the middle of the piece.

* I need to extend the discussion of the sleep / death articulation in the section on knowledge in a way that brings it back to linguistic signification and the signs of death debate.

* The final section on the governing metaphor in the broader Victorian literary context needs to be expanded substantially and brought back to issues of reading at the end.

This all looks like a lot, but it's different from actually rewriting the article. And I should be able to at least tell VIE where things are tomorrow even if it does take me a couple more days to whip things into shape. Though I should probably get on that about now.

----

The Poet sent me an email this morning asking me what I thought of the John Edwards thing and telling me that his wife had been forwarding him the NY Times articles, but that she'd attached a note saying, "It's okay, you know that you have the green light from me for your affairs." (Or something like that.) My general feeling, to the extent that I've given it much thought, is that it annoys me when people are aghast at the idea that adult life and adult relationships are complicated, and I think we'd be a lot better off as a society if we approached relationships with less of a one size fits all mentality and recognized that there are many ways of not conforming to the norm that don't necessarily make them less ethical. I'm speaking here mainly from my experience as being increasingly pegged as "that chick who dates old married dudes" and from feeling like I'm just kind of tired of talking about the whole thing. With that being said, it doesn't seem to me like Edwards was being particularly ethical about the whole thing, and he was also being stupid. Given that he was running for president in the United Fucking States, this would have been a good time, methinks, to keep it in his pants or at least have used protection. It does infuriate me, as a Democrat who has always kind of liked the guy, that he could have gotten the nomination and then had this story break, which would basically have fucked us all over in the country for at *least* another four years--in a way that even the Bill / Monica thing didn't have the power to do.

Anyway. Back to work, I think.