Today's Zen Story / Yesterday's Commonplace Book

1. Today's Zen Story

I actually calculates the basics of my federal taxes back in January because I needed to get some numbers for a financial aid form. I found that I owed around $850-900. While I've owed that much before, this was particularly disheartening / panic-causing / traumatic / thwarting / depressing because I thought I'd finally gotten my withholding figured out at this point in grad school, when I wasn't freelancing, and so on. That was not a particularly stellar evening, to say the least. At the time I decided to take my dad's advice and just not think about it for a few months, keeping the money in the savings side of my checking account until April.

I revisited my taxes today, and, perhaps needless to say, I had to work through a lot of aversion to get there. Even when I finally sat down at my desk, I was procrastinating like mad, and I would stop every few questions to go through all the usual internet places: Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, my Not-NYU email account, Nerve (yes, alas). Since I hadn't figured out the exact tax back in January, I didn't know exactly what I was in for. And it wasn't encouraging to see that I'd made an adding error in my income that had it *under* by $100.

And then I realized that I'd missed one of the personal deductions, so that I'd calculated my income as several thousand dollars *over* what it actually was and was thus looking at the wrong tax table altogether.

I still owe a few hundred dollars (and I can't get the NYS forms to work on my computer, so I have to wait until Monday for that), but it's about $500 *less* than I thought it was going to be, than what I've been assuming and stressing out about for the last two months and change.

I can't even really describe the sense of relief, not unalloyed by sheepishness, that I'm experiencing.

2. Yesterday's Commonplace Book

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

--Robert Browning, "Two in the Campagna"

In resisting idolatry, is the reluctant lover protecting himself against illusion? Or in looking for intimacy without risk, is he losing part of his soul? Because the heavy caesuras match the lover's halting heart, they contradict his boast of confronting no obstacles or barriers. Since the words that appear to lurch forward over the line endings are brought short by early-breaking caesuras they also inadvertently disclose to the attentive reader far more than the lover intends to say.

--W. David Shaw, "Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue"

Also from Shaw:

But the despair of the jilted lovers in Maud and "Locksley Hall," like the anguish of St. Simeon decaying by slow degrees on his pillar, is a mere pretense. Such speakers act out a fantasy of anguish in order to escape genuine despair.

So, Sunday. And, Saturday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mid-January funk

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

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

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

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

Epigraphical poem of the day

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

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

--

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solstice

The comforting thing about the Winter Solstice is, of course, the reminder that the nights can only get so dark, that no matter what, at some measurable, identifiable point, it will start to get lighter again. And I am trying to take comfort in facts like these today, when it's gray outside and the rain is washing away all of the snow and everything is sort of damp and dampened. And I still feel like I am losing control of my life. Not in the huge, dramatic, at-least-it-makes-for-a-good story ways of 2007 and certain moments of 2008, but more like a kind of erosion whereby those piles of crap on the floor that were meant to be a temporary solution turn out to have a kind of permanence, where one day of not exactly forgetting to sit zazen turn into two days of not sitting, where opportunities slip through my fingers, where I spend too much money and don't have enough fun, where the meals seem constantly to come from restaurants and include fries (in spite of much money spent on healthy options at the farmers market), and so on and so forth. Work is not getting done. I should really grade the papers that came in on Thursday before I get the papers that will come in on Tuesday. I should read more Browning. I should try again to face my fellowship application. I should clean my apartment.

This is how it's been for weeks now. I'm getting by, of course, because I always do, and in many ways I'm better off (or look to be so) than I was last year at this time. 2008 did not destroy me the way 2007 did, and I did heal...and yet: I feel as if in some cases the healing took a weird turn. Like I'm back together but maybe not all the bones set right. Or that I reentered the world too quickly, without a long enough convalescence. (As if any of us ever have long enough for that.) Which is all to say that this time around, it's all almost frustratingly subtle and elusive, and nothing adds up to why I suddenly found myself crying on the train last night.

But then again. I have more friends, and stronger friendships, than I did last year. Occasionally, this makes me sad, too, even though I'm well aware of how pointless that kind of thinking is. (The kind of thinking where I remember how I had to go through all the really bad stuff more or less alone, except for people like K and the Professor coming into my life precisely when they damn well pleased or needed me for something.) I wish I could say that friendship could be enough, that it would keep the cosmic, gaping loneliness at bay, but of course it doesn't. Nevertheless, it's helped me salvage a few nights recently, and that's not all bad. And outwardly, I am so, so, so much better, I am impeccably successful and my not-NYU students now want to be Facebook friends with me, and I'm letting them as long as they aren't registered for my class next semester. (Incidentally, about 1/4 of my students and 3/4 of my best students are transferring out of not-NYU after one semester, for many of the same reasons why other not-NYU students put the institution in the news last week.)

The accidental trajectory of this post is a good example of the ways that reflection remains a treacherous proposition for me, an activity that I know I have to undertake, that eventually I will have to undertake without as many guardrails at some point soon. This fact is somewhat tangentially behind my desire to go to San Francisco this summer, but I don't know if it will be able to wait. Which is why I need to sit zazen like mad until the end of the year. If that can even work.

I have been at odds with other people--mostly strangers--to an unusually damaging degree lately. I've always hated tourists, but now I yell at them, or at least mutter things loudly as I walk past them as they block entrances and staircases. Being on the subway makes me want to gouge my own eyes out. West Village Coffeeshop is almost impossible, and I've been driven out of the library through sheer claustrophobia. You'd think this would be less of an issue since I live alone, but of course when I'm home I just futz around and wish I had someone to hang out with. But this sort of constant anger at strangers in the world is exhausting, and I don't like the kind of person it makes me. I'm sure I did this for years without thinking about it--I suppose Zen practice kind of takes the fun out of directing one's self-hatred outwards.

I can already see that things with The Poet--his situation and mine--are moving back to something like the situation we were in around June and July. I can't go back to that, so I know that there will have to be some letting go on my part soon. This time it bothers me less that I care about him and about seeing him--I'm more comfortable knowing that I do love him--and perhaps it helps too that for various reasons he's less marginal to the rest of my life than he was when we first got together, that I no longer have to defend him as a person, a fellow student, that I don't have to worry that my eyes are somehow clouded when it comes to him. Nevertheless. I expect that we're going to be breaking up again soon, who knows for how long or what the outcome will be, and that this time I don't exactly have someone like J. (oh, he of the laceratingly hot Facebook profile pictures) lined up to write me notes and make me swoon about more or less age appropriate dating again. I mean, the plan was always to do some online dating in January. But I worry about the emotional stress of "putting myself out there," as it were. Though, if 2007's foray into the whole thing was any indication, it's not like I had to do much work beyond the profile. And I'm not going to chase people.

I did, of course, find myself doing my Christmas shopping on Wednesday afternoon with a dude who probably is going to need his own pseudonym (and probably a whole host of changed personal details) at some point. I may have mentioned him in the last post, but for various reasons I can't give too many details because it could be even more quickly revealing than most things I post here. (Let's just say that he's really easy to Google and I don't really want to make that easier. Also I feel like I've been incredibly burned and somewhat manipulated by this kind of thing recently and by the idea that the development of a kind of information ethics is long overdue.) So, um, yeah. There's this dude. I met him a couple of months ago when I made a scheduling change on Wednesdays. We have good conversations and occasionally lunch, and this week lunch stretched into some leisurely holiday shopping that I had been planning to accomplish anyway. He's really nice. He plays a musical instrument and is quite good at it. I am actively trying to leave things at that, if only because I have a feeling that he is far too good / healthy / spiritual for me--and his only interactions with me have come at the point in my week when I am most at peace, kind of blissed out and relaxed and cleansed and all that. And because I did not make this particular schedule change in order to meet dudes. Nevertheless.

I've probably been writing this for too long; it certainly isn't solving any of my performative-constative writing conflicts. But perhaps the Solstice demands it. Let the darkness of the night reach its fullness, stretch out to what seems to be an interminable length, let it be what it has to be. After all, it's perhaps useful for me to remember how close I live to the abyss. The morning has slipped away, though perhaps not entirely unproductively, since I don't feel tired and I've written this post, and there is still a lot of day ahead of me. I want to go to the Brooklyn Museum at some point for a final round of shopping (I kind of want to get these candelabras both for myself and my mother). I need to get this place cleaned up before my party on Wednesday. I can sort through my papers from the semester and before. I will perhaps grade some papers, read some poetry, allow myself to think, reflect, perhaps write some more. But first--it's time to go sit on the cushion, as I haven't done since Thursday.

Where was I...?

Yeah, so it's been awhile. I don't know why I fell silent here...I've been doing slightly more consistent writing in my paper journal and elsewhere, but everything that I could have put here seems to have become deflected in some weird way. And I wouldn't know where to begin to describe the last month. There was St Louis, the news that my sister in law is pregnant already, the party my parents threw for her and my brother, the displacement of seeing a bunch of people for the first time in ten years, and the ultimate of feeling like an asshole because I was too drunk to enjoy most of my reunion. Also, the realization while sitting zazen in my childhood bedroom that I'd positioned myself in the same place, facing the same direction even, as I do when I'm sitting zazen at home. (To the right of the door, facing south.)

For some reason after I came back from St Louis I felt absolutely lethargic. I still sometimes feel that way--chalking it up to it being the end of the semester and just being run down from all these 8:00 classes and the fact that I'm now getting up in total darkness. (Might be time to invest in a sun lamp.) Somewhere along the way my prospectus got approved, but really I feel like I've been phoning things in, that I have these brief moments of clarity and energy that disappear before I can realize they're happening. I want to get back to a moment I had a couple weeks ago when I was sitting at the zendo and halfway through the second half hour everything just clicked into clarity and it was amazing. But then I had to go meet with a student and all of the sudden it was Saturday and I was exhausted and dissipated and having Thursday night existential crises where I was beginning to feel constrained by my friendships and all this encouragement to drink and stay out when I just wanted to go home on my own. And it's all more complicated than this, but that's the basic part.

Oh, and right before I went to St Louis I saw Synecdoche, New York and it just about broke my heart.

I don't really know what to say, what to tell you, what to tell myself. I feel like I've wasted another day, even though I did get a few things done. I want to do the whole Paterian gemlike flame and burn continually and just feel engaged with all this and be able to trust myself in the world. All these things are connected. The weather is doing this weird thing where it's 20 degrees one day and 55 the next. I wore these red Prada shoes with 4-inch heels to my department party--I bought them back when I was living with my ex years ago and only just pulled them out this weekend. I didn't go out with everyone after the party. I feel so old. I feel like I'm missing something. I wish I could shake this sense of dissatisfaction--but I'm beginning to realize that this may be zazen doing its work, showing me what needs to change in my life. I no longer feel like going out and partying with everyone every night. Or drinking a bottle of wine on my own. But there's so much to change. I don't even know where to start.

K. made a brief appearance back in my life a couple weeks ago, just in time for his birthday. We never did manage to get together. Maybe that's for the best. The Poet tells me he loves me, and I believe it, and it's okay, but I'm not sure we're destined to live in the same state ever. But I am grateful for his presence this year. The last person I ever dated on Nerve called me up last week on a slim pretext wanting to hang out. We had a nice phonecall, but that part was never the problem. I accepted a Facebook friending from some dude I've never met but who knows a friend of mine. I spent $9.99 at iTunes downloading the latest album by this other guy I've met recently and...augh.

When I first started blogging it was performative rather than constative. It's been constative for a long time. I miss performative. It's probably time to go to bed.

My favorite piece of gym equipment has always been the elliptical machine

Something unexpected (at least, to me) happened on Friday night. It's proved to be disruptive on a number of different levels, some of which are very vintage 2007, others of which threaten whatever semblance of balance I am occasionally able to attain in my life. It happened, as these things often do, with someone else, and in this case there are some complications related to that, too. (Though not the usual ones that I have--I know what you're thinking.) And for all these reasons--the sheer unexpectedness, the complications provided by the circumstances of how we met in the first place--I need this person to say, simply, "yes, that thing happened." That's all. But this confirmation has not yet occurred, and it's left me feeling epistemologically and phenomenologically abandoned at a time when things would be hard enough without it.

I wonder what it will take for me to feel safe in the world. I wonder what it can possibly mean to be gracious with these stories, to be gracious with myself.

In brief

I want to coincide with someone.

There are too many people in my life who could be my great love, if not for some constellation of extenuating circumstances, mine and theirs. K., J., The Poet, even to some extent E, though I never see him--all of these, under slightly different circumstances, could be the great partnership. As evidenced by the fact that I've kissed every single one of them goodbye the last time I saw them. (J. being like 10 minutes ago and oh by the way now we're Facebook friends.) But none of us can coincide.

What would it be like, to coincide? I said to J, and he agreed, that this wasn't the way our story was supposed to go. K. always said if he were 15 years younger and single--The Poet, too. And I vowed not to live in those what ifs, not to go to Hoboken, as it were.

And yet. I'll be okay tonight. I've been up since 6 and it's almost 2--I won't have trouble sleeping. I'll work in the morning, I'll see people in the afternoon. I won't squander Saturday or Sunday. Monday I will tell the girls about this--C and L, but not the same C who reads this. Tuesday I'll introduce my students to Derrida. Wednesday I will sit zazen and maybe more. And so on. I'll sit every day, I'll see The Poet on Thursday. I could have gone to DC tonight and I didn't. I'll be okay. I'll sit with my present, I promise. I'll try to at least coincide with myself. It's better this way. I'll take myself back to the period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. No one's ever there, especially not, as I found today, on a rainy Thursday. I won't obsess. I'll have good news to report to the guy I had the conversation about distraction with yesterday.

I promise I'll be good this time.

Just promise me something in return.

Most of the time...

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

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

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

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

Oh, right, so I have this blog...

Yeah. So. Really haven't been doing much of interest lately. Well, got the Romanticism Project sent off on Friday, so that was good. But it seems like a long time ago and I've already put it out of my head so I can focus on everything else. Also, I did a lot of drinking and goofing off for about 48 hours after that. Mostly fun, but also a long recovery. House/cat-sat for Fabulous Committee Member. Hoping I didn't kill her husband's tomato plant. Threw together the beginnings of the syllabus for the fall class. And went back to the Victorian Project. It needs a big overhaul. I think I can do it, but it's daunting. I'm sort of debating at the moment whether to push myself to start that tonight or just take a (not entirely deserved) night off and go to bed early. (Which I may not be able to do, since I keep having trouble falling asleep at like 2.) I could compromise and read more.

Had a number of dreams about people I knew while housesitting for FCM. Most of these could be described as vaguely to entirely inappropriate. I also had a dream where the premise was that everything of the last year and a half was the dream and I was still with my ex. That one had me shaking a bit when I woke up.

Also while at FCM's apartment, I read Gary Shteyngart's Russian Debutante's Handbook on a whim. It was kind of awesome. I don't read much fiction published after, say, 1900 and almost nothing of the last ten years, beyond some Murakami (and even that might be older) and whatever's in the New Yorker. But maybe I should start. I mean, I do only have one of Trollope's Palliser novels left for my before-bed reading.

I feel like it's been kind of a frustrating week with The Poet. I don't really want to go into much detail right now. I mean, in a way it's just kind of your basic *relationship* stuff...which of course generates its own drama because I get thrown back into worrying about having a relationship. Not the way I was in June, but somewhat similar. Without the need for Xanax. In a way, I'm trying to look at some of this as a blessing in disguise, where circumstances step in to hold things in check a bit right at the point where I get ready to let go a little bit too much. If that makes any sense. I think this is all of a piece with the walking on water thing.

As the fall semester starts, I'm going to be co-blogging (under my real name) at a field-specific blog that one of my colleagues has started. It's listed on my Facebook profile if you're interested.

Sometimes I have these really great moments where I really feel like I'm getting somewhere. Clearly, however, these moments are not currently connected to this blog. Perhaps when I'm not starting down 10,000 words of my own making and wondering how to make them make sense.

Making adjustments, walking on water

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

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

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

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

It all just might work.

Bloomsday Edgestories

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, an accomplishment. And other miscellaneous notes

So I finally managed to push all the way through a draft of my conference paper, and not a moment too soon. It may not be that bad. It's certainly much more of a self-consciously oral text than any of my previous papers. This may mean that I am growing as a scholar in terms of confident self-presentation; on the other hand, I have to consider the possibility that I feel like I have something to hide in this paper. But I'm actually pretty confident in my thinking about this passage, even if I still do occasionally have these moments when I feel like [famous scholar who will be in the audience for this paper in less than ten days] has had every thought I could possibly ever have on Tennyson. But, given my experience as an audience member at this conference a couple of years ago, I am pretty sure that performance and being able to answer questions without looking like a jerk will count for a lot. Also, it's the first paper on the first panel on the last day.

I have been especially aware of my writing process with this project, in part because I had the bright idea at the beginning of the semester that I should use myself as an example for my composition students. I think to a certain extent this worked really well with this group of students. (Last semester, it would have contributed to the disaster area mentality.) In certain cases, I think it allowed some of them to trust me as an instructor more--not so much that I know what I'm doing (though I obviously hope they think I know what I'm doing), but more that what I am having them do is not completely arbitrary, nor is it something that I am unwilling to go through myself. While I've been pretty specific about how what I'm working on is different from what they're working on (in terms of the oral presentation and, of course, the stakes), it's helpful I think to be seen writing essentially an eight-page research paper when they are also writing five-to-eight-page research papers. It's also, incidentally, given me the opportunity to talk to them a little bit about what academics do. I kind of wish I'd had a better sense of that when I was an undergraduate, and these students by and large are even less versed in the institutional stuff than I am. My students are genuinely surprised that this kind of writing (let alone getting up and talking about it in front of a bunch of strangers with power over my future employment) is part of what I--and many of their other professors--do.

The extent to which this worked less well is only that, because of the way my work on this paper developed--which is to say, a lot of notes and a month to a "first draft" that has nonetheless been rewritten roughly eight hundred times--has rather limited me in what I have been able to share on a material level. I had this dream that I was going to scan copies of my own edits and post them to Blackboard, but that doesn't totally work with the way I wrote the paper. I also have completely dispensed with internal citations (which I don't tend to do even when I'm writing conference papers) and feel like this sets a bad example without wanting to go back and track down the line numbers of sections I know by heart just at this very minute.

From a non-pedagogical perspective, I do think I'm getting slightly better at churning these things out, even if it doesn't look like it. I'm improving in my abilities to work on many things at once. This is, for example, the first conference paper that I've written basically from scratch while teaching. And without smoking. I know that's not the biggest achievement ever, but it's something. (The second one may be bigger than the first.)

Of course, in order to achieve this final push, I drank a bunch of tea. Though I made a pot that was half PG Tips, half caffeine free blueberry, I'm still feeling a bit awake. Possibly not awake enough to read Coleridge, though. This would be less of a problem if I didn't absolutely have to do laundry tomorrow morning. Would also like to take care of the prep before I start rocking out 19th century style tomorrow, since my observation is Thursday.

I also somehow managed to run out of toilet paper without noticing. Thank god for takeout napkins. I should address that before The Poet comes over on Thursday night.

Finally, A White Bear, who always blogs more excellently than I, has a particularly excellent post about blending one's online and real life identities. This is a perpetual concern of mine (and, yes, this is part of the "other woman" identity that isn't sexual), and while I think I experience my identities differently, I like the way she's thinking. This reminds me, of course, that there's an email I need to answer, but I kind of don't feel like it at the moment. I am becoming quite thankful that The Poet has fewer issues than almost any other man in my life, period.

In which I begin to think I should pay more attention to my dreams

My paranoia was not unfounded, but suffice it to say I redacted the wrong information.

The irony is, of course, that the more time one spends interacting with me in real life, the easier it is for them to find this blog and--the less likely it is that they *should* actually be reading it.

It's not as bad as it could be, but it's going to make for renewed field-related awkwardness in the near future, just when I was looking forward to seeing an end to that.

In other news: five more teaching days until Spring Break.

Not exactly archive fever

Why is it that I can find the journals that record all of my personal traumas and triumphs, as well as a good deal of everything I've read or worked on over the past two years except for the journal that would contain all the notes I made while reading the Biographia Literaria last summer?

Also, how could I have not typed up more than a couple lines of notes from the Biographia? Irritatingly, I'm sure that decision had something to do with taking notes in my journal.

Relatedly: I sometimes wish my life writing and work writing could be more separate because there's really no way for me not to be reminded of what I was doing and feeling as I search to figure out what I was reading. This is sometimes inconvenient. But I don't know how to do otherwise in the moment, and I think that if I were to be able to separate them more effectively, I would start to be a very different (and possibly lesser) scholar.

It's really noisy in the building today, for some reason. Probably time to decamp to school soon and try to finish that damn conference paper.

On Mary Wollstonecraft and running to stand still

What a long time it requires for us to know ourselves; and yet almost everyone of has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own, even to himself. I cannot immediately determine whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this solitude a new page in the history of my own heart, though I may venture to assure you that a further acquaintance with mankind only tends to increase my respect for your judgment, and esteem for your character. --Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)

My committee member and I met to talk through Godwin and Wollstonecraft this afternoon. When I got to the coffeeshop (the same one where I once saw Paul Bettany), I told her that I'd figured out what Godwin meant about the Letters... being a book calculated to make a reader fall in love with its author.

Unfortunately, it came out sounding a little bit lame. But it still had the feeling of a profound revelation for me when it first crossed my mind this morning in the frenzy of preparation for the discussion now over (this has been the general motion of the week). This is how I wrote it in my notes this morning:

Does G find the letters to be calculated to make the reader fall in love with the author in part because the author is still in love with the person she’s addressing? Actually, it just occurred to me that there’s another thing here…there’s something hot for a certain kind of man about an obviously intelligent woman who feels—-and feeling here is almost entirely inseparable from suffering and from doing so with a kind of frankness—-allowing oneself to be seen at one’s lowest point: as W herself says at one point: “I felt like a bird fluttering on the ground unable to mount; yet unwilling to crawl tranquilly like a reptile, whilst still conscious it had wings.”

I should have just blogged this thought when I had it because it looks lame here, too. It felt more profound in the context of rereading my notes on the Letters and also, I think, in light of the fact that this week I have begun to articulate to some of my committee members and friends and really anyone who will listen the emotional effects of my orals reading. Namely, that I have been much happier since I got Charlotte Bronte out of my system. Because that was also about suffering and the reification of it by others. Yet, it's also connected to well, shallower things, more personal ones, some just ridiculous. The emotional equivalents of the ligers and tigons that distracted me from Tennyson earlier in the week.

But perhaps I should go back further. I started working on Wollstonecraft about two years ago. And I realized today, in going back and rereading certain texts and my notes on others, that I am much better positioned to understand Wollstonecraft than I was in the spring of 2006. If nothing else, I am profoundly grateful that a woman like her existed and that she left an archive. And I am grateful that Godwin wrote the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even with all its misreadings (and they are legion), imprudences, and, indeed, reifications of her as a suffering subject. (There's a particularly unforgettable image early on where the young Mary throws her body on top of her mother to shield her from her father's blows.)

In part, the fact that I can read around Godwin's impositions on Wollstonecraft is due to my internalization of the latter and also to the experience of the last two years, to my own reflections on why I once told The Poet that I don't believe in narrative (like many other people in my life, he thinks I should write a novel, which is laughable to anyone who reads this blog, I'm sure).


This post is also about feeling like I've spent this whole week doing work that gets consumed almost right after I produce it. Like I've been waking up at 7:00 in the morning to prepare for things that are over by 3. This is a weird way to live sometimes, especially because I don't feel actively stressed out. (Looks like there may be an advantage to dating a Zen master after all.)

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Related but tangential: Is there a bad version out there of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"? This may be one of the most beautiful songs in the world.


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I hope that the effort it just took me to type all of this out is worth it in terms of clearing my mind so that I can work this weekend without obsessing. I really must get ahead on prep and finish the conference paper. And apply to the next conferences, of course. And read Coleridge, Gaskell, and perhaps some early Tennyson.

Now off to Williamsburg for drinks and dinner.

More telegraphy

I realize it's something of an imposition to dramatically start a new blog and then fall silent once everyone is here. However, the last week or so has been absolutely wretched, in ways that didn't lend themselves to even decent ranting.

I am, however, feeling slightly less wretched today, so perhaps I'll get around to throwing myself a blogwarming party this weekend that I will be spending with Tennyson.