What I'd forgotten...

was more or less the affective stress of being on Nerve. There's a certain addiction to it, a not-so-secret narcissistic indulgence. Getting in a loop of clicking to see who's been looking at me, not that I have any intention of meeting most of them, not that I write most people back. Sometimes there's a sense of regret in this, since it's not like I do a particularly good job of picking the people I do end up with--it all feels like a kind of willed randomness sometimes, undermining the sense that I think I'm getting better at all this.

I wasn't on the site long enough in January before I met D. to remember what this was like. It's only this week that the frenzied loops have come back, that I feel my schedule closing up, a kind of running running running and most of the time it never gets past that point. It's not entirely ideal to be doing this during the semester, especially when I have two writing projects on, but to some extent I know this is all related, that there is a necessity here, that this right now is part of the path in some sort of crazy and occasionally sordid way. After the whole thing with D. collapsed, the weekend I spent convinced that I was going to move to St Louis in less than two months, the weird convergence of various academic rockstar stuff, and going back on the site--at some point I feel like my entire sense of identity broke open and suddenly I'm asking myself questions about who I am, who I want to be with--basic things that I more or less try to ignore are suddenly pressing on me with a kind of urgency, and the thing that I realized about Nerve this weekend is that this is part of it, that I'm more or less trying out different identities in conflict with different people, trying to figure out who I want to be, trying to articulate some kind of sense of who I am--not so much in the sense that I have to be with someone to be anyone but more in the sense that being with different people helps me work out where I can find myself.

I'm not sure that makes any sense. But, then again, I'm not sure what I'm doing makes any sense. Not internet dating per se as much as the weird extremes my dating life in general seems to swing to, where I can go from The Poet to D. and learn what I gain and what I give up--and the truth is, I haven't decided yet, would like not have to decide, who I'm going to be. Suffice it to say there's a very big difference from being the 28-year-old woman with the 57-year-old man and being the 28-year-old chick with the 34-year-old guy and that some of these differences are irreconcilable. (Though this may help explain why I'm most comfortable with guys who are in their early 40s, even though this may also end up being a less happy medium.)

There are things about all this that I can only say elliptically. This is largely an attempt to empty out my own head, but keep the specifics to myself, the idea being to focus on a proposal related to my MLA panel tomorrow and so on. So I went out on dates Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The dude from Friday night was like many of the dates I remember from before. Very cute (in a kind of hipsterish, of course you live in Bushwick kind of way) with a lot in common with me on paper. We had a perfectly cordial and chemistry-less conversation over drinks and dinner, went our separate ways on the subway.

The guy I went out with on Thursday was in his mid-40s, runs a for-profit cultural organization out of his apartment. He's tall, big, kind of goofy-looking (think a more fit version of Jack Black, perhaps), and exactly as brash and unapologetic as you'd think a guy like this would be if he were also Australian. (As a result of this last thing, though, it's possible that I'd be willing to talk on the phone with him forever.) He was a little intense when I first met him, but we had a good time together. He turned out to be really nice. But not in that pushover nice-guy way. More in the way that The Poet is nice. Like, kind. I wasn't sure what to do with it all immediately afterwards. There were some complications, as there always are. But I found myself thinking about him (well, when I wasn't thinking about D. or The Poet) for a lot of the rest of the weekend. I sort of wish I'd been able to swing my own work to see him tonight; in a way it might have been comforting, though I know it's better to go to bed here relatively early, go to the gym so I can continue to fit into my skinny black jeans, head to the zendo to focus, and then work on everything else ever instead tomorrow.

Yesterday...yesterday is one of those days I probably won't ever talk about with anyone. If nothing else, it proved that I'm still capable of doing things that are kind of twisted and not all that enjoyable in the end. And it reminded me of something I really had blocked out about Nerve--the possibility of ending up meeting someone who, over the course of a day and several beers, brings out some of the worst things about you, who pushes you to something without even having to try, who under other circumstances you'd be indifferent to, but the right day, the right mood....And you will always be the crazy chick with the Snoopy tattoo for him to talk about and the next morning you're still a bit shaky, but it's mostly because--well, as I said before, it reminds me of what kind of things I'm capable of doing--and not in a good way. I am trying to let it be instructive. Fortunately, this doesn't happen to me often, but...wow.

Starting to line up a couple of other things for next week. One guy's really on the young side...I think he's okay, but I'm going to have to be more on guard than I'd like. I think I'm pretty much going to stay away from guys under, say, 38, for a bit...the younger ones tend to bring out the crazy.

Right now I'd very much like someone with decently broad shoulders to lean on. That I know for sure.

I'd be lying to say that your band sucks, but I am an academic rockstar

Deciding that this will be the week of some kind of rebound--not that I'm going to go trolling specifically to get laid or anything, but only that I will be focusing on awesomeness and focus. Admittedly, it hasn't started out quite like that. Didn't go to the gym as planned this morning because I was in a lot of pain, and I've been futzing on the internet for most of the weekend, only barely getting the teaching stuff done. Nevertheless. The zendo is now open on Mondays for midday meditation. I owe far less money in taxes than I'd been assuming I did. The decision about St Louis is no longer contingent on my mental state on May 1: at this point, I'm prepared to make whatever move makes sense based on the funding situation. Writing fellowship, I stay. Dissertation year fellowship or no funding, I go. Simple as that. I mean, not simple. But less fraught than it's been.

And I'm not saying it wasn't incredibly exciting to wake up yesterday morning to an email from the scholar who has perhaps been most influential on my work over the last five years--inviting me to contribute a longer version of my MLA paper (which was accepted, but the panel still has to be) to an essay collection. The collection proposal is uncannily similar to my dissertation proposal, and it dawned on me that--against all odds and without setting out to do this explicitly--I may have just actually read the field correctly.

I had my recurring dream about K. last night, the one where his wife is always finding me or in danger of finding me. It's weird to be having these dreams now: we haven't even been alone in a room together since last September, and it's been almost two years since everything happened. I saw him last about six weeks ago at school and have had this dream twice in the last three. Strange.

D. did finally break up with me on Friday, which I can't remember if I mentioned here or not. There were some things about it all that were shady, especially the part where I saw him online on Nerve last night. But I've archived his email, poured out the half and half, thrown away the hot chocolate, and that's all there was. I still can't quite walk past the Brooklyn Museum (managed to avoid it in everywhere I went this weekend), and sometimes I hear one of his band's songs in my head. But all the knifethrusts went on last week; Friday was just the last stage in it all. It's something that'll make me sad in the back of my mind for a long time, but I got a kickass conference paper out of it, I rediscovered something about myself as an artistic writer (though I always work better with an audience, alas), and it all provided the occasion (albeit painful) for rethinking several of my personal narratives--including the one about how I *have* to write my dissertation in New York.

And so. On with the rainy day.

New set of plans

My options for next year are something like the following:

1. I get Fellowship A. Fellowship A would mean working at a college in New York, secretly keeping my job at not-NYU to maintain library access, etc. It would be an insanely busy year, but it would buy me at least one more summer of diss work. If I get Fellowship A, I stay in New York, but try to move somewhere nicer / cheaper around October.

2. I don't get any fellowships. In this case, I move back to St Louis by mid-June.

3. I get Fellowship B. This one is less money, but more prestige and no strings attached.
3a. I get Fellowship B and take the money to St Louis. Financially, I could live on Fellowship B in St Louis, though I might pick up an adjunct gig for easier access to libraries.
3b. I get Fellowship B, continue to teach at Not-NYU, and stay in New York, at least attempting to negotiate a rent reduction or move

If #3 happens, I will set myself a goal of July 31 for making the decision about whether I stay in New York or move to St Louis. The decision will be made on the basis of whether I'm happy here. If I had to make this decision today, I would be planning to move back to St Louis the day after classes end at Not-NYU this semester.

There's a Zen center in St Louis. My parents say they'd help with a car and getting my stuff back to the midwest.

Yes, it's come to this. I'm too worn down by this city to remain committed to it. I've been absolutely wretched all weekend. Some douchebag called me a cunt at Franklin Park last night, which means I won't be going there again, and I probably will also be avoiding Soda Bar on Vanderbilt because it's the same owners. I haven't gotten any work done for my teaching stuff today, mostly because I've been crying. I'm trying to pull myself together enough to go get cash and food and possibly cigarettes. Because I don't care right now. I probably have to apologize to everyone who was in a meeting with me on Friday. I think I'm falling apart. I don't want to talk about D. right now. I just need someone to hold me through this night, through the remainder of the weekend, but it's not an option I have. I try so hard. I'm not clingy. I'm not unattractive. I'm smart but not pretentious. I'm good at what I do, but not snobby about it. I'm trying hard to be a better, more spiritual, more compassionate, more flexible person. Somehow that's not enough here.

Friday miscellany

I saw David Cromer's production of Our Town with Caroline last night. We sat on the stage since the tickets were $40 cheaper or so and--wow. I only have fuzzy memories from seeing this performed a couple times in my childhood (and from the episode of My So-Called Life where Rayanne tries out for Emily's part), so it was in many ways a mostly new play to me. The house really is set up for a kind of proximity--I was going to say intimacy, but I think that would be the wrong word--not only with the actors but with the rest of the audience, which I think is an incredibly interesting choice. And it did take me back a little bit to some theatre experiences I stumbled into when I was much younger, like the night I saw The Caretaker at the St Mark's Theatre--probably the first time I'd been even remotely close to the action of a play and all of the sudden it's taking place three feet away. Our Town really is an incredibly meditative play. The last twenty minutes seemed to accomplish everything that Synecdoche, New York was struggling with over two hours to achieve, and it did so much more elegantly, without the elaborate machinery that was Caden Cotard's self-centeredness--the point being here that even good people are blind. (And in this sense we care in a way that we don't in the film.) Had I not been right on stage, I probably would have started crying--the only other time this happens to me is at the end of the Axis Company's Hospital series.

The play was also quite a wonderful illustration of Coleridgean suspension of disbelief at its best--particularly the part about transferring from these shadows of the imagination a human interest and a semblance of truth--but in a way that, I think, complicates any sort of "live for today" message at the end. It's possible that the blindness isn't a tragedy after all.

Other things. It's my last weekday of spring break. I've accomplished very little and it's snowing. I need to go to the gym, sit zazen, put in several hours with Browning and get my life back in order. Was in Charlotte visiting family last week at this time; the weather was awful and my aunt got the stomach flu (which I am still worried about coming down with, since it seems to appear about a week after you think you should have gotten it) so there was a lot of sitting around, but in many ways this was perfectly fine. I didn't really have to think. Just thought that by the time I got back to New York I'd be ready to do that again. Not so much. Not sure where these days have gone...possibly too much fuzting and a bit too much drinking on Wednesday. By tomorrow I'm going to have to switch back into teacher mode and prep virtually the entire rest of the semester. Of course I am not looking forward to this.

On the other hand, I'm finally (mostly) over the cold I had for two weeks and I have my voice back. I'm also not as miserably run down as I was during the first two weeks of March. So this is good. The downside is that while I was sick and not going to the gym for 2 1/2 weeks, I ate a lot of takeout and then just ate a lot of food in general in North Carolina. So I'm feeling pudgy. Disappointing, too, because I lost like three pounds in February and have certainly gained that back. And I've certainly not been doing well with food this week. The whole thing is annoying, but I'll go to the gym after this and I should be able to get in at least four days next week. I need to keep up confidence here, just saying.

Saw The Poet on Tuesday for the first time in two months. Mixed feelings. Don't really want to be back with him, but very much want to be his friend. I'm not sure he has friends like me and it became clear over the course of our conversation that he is, in many ways, extremely isolated right now. And he would switch back and forth between these crazy future plans of how we're going to end up together in a couple of years living in some cute place in Hoboken or something and talking about our relationship in this weirdly extreme past tense. I have a feeling that there's a lot of this that's being displaced from other things going on in his life. I hope I can continue to be there for him in some way, though.

Saw D. the Tuesday before I left. He drove out to Brooklyn on one of those nights where I had more or less lost my voice. Did my best to function in the fog. We had a really great phone conversation on Wednesday, and I haven't heard from him since so now I'm all nervous again. It's the nervousness of a relationship (such as it is) that's pretty much non-fucked up and I do tend to worry that I'm nothing without the sense of the sordid. But I also worry about seeming to put demands and expectations on him--which I'm not, except that I really do like seeing people I'm sleeping with at least once a week. Which has been difficult for us lately for various reasons. Also, I ended up talking a lot with C. about her stuff last night which meant that I kind of unconsciously started obsessing over D., which is never good. But I do know that if I continue to not hear from him today, it's going to be distracting.

Had my recurring dream about K. earlier in the week. Still, everything's less wretched than last March. And with that, I should probably get ready for the gym so that eventually I can make spring break mean something productive. It's never too late to hit the ground running--right?

(By the way, I signed up for a Twitter account, for no apparent reason. It's my firstname/middle initial/lastname.

Words kicking around in my head makes it hard to deal with composition papers

Variations on the Search for Fresh Produce, scribbled in the margins of 3/8/09. Not really a poem or anything much.

Queen of the peppadaws
Strawberry season
Now it's turnips and fingerlings
As far as the eye can see
The market reminds us
That nothing is timeless
Hydroponic red peppers and mesculun mix

(And I'm not so sure about you this time)

Grand Army Plaza / Prospect Heights / Park Slope
But I'm the wrong side of the museum lights
(Where else can you express the bargain in those terms?)

Hazeleye bursting green
I looked up into them
Washington Avenue but you aren't there

Queen of the peppadaws
Strawberry season
I saw your face in a canvas bag back recycling back weekends of fresh eggs and summer squash

(And I'm not so sure about you this time)

The fountain's covered in ice
The socialists are patrolling the library steps
That car is heading right for me suddenly swerving
(It's just the road baby, you know where the lines are)
And this is only Saturday morning
This is only Saturday morning
Saturday's warning
This is only Saturday morning

Queen of the peppadaws
Dreaming of summer
Flatbush Avenue but it never pays to look ahead, no not that way
Setting up a day against the rest of your life
Attention veering off
Cars in the roundabout
Coming at you
Queen of the peppadaws
I'm not so sure about you this time