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.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
3.20.2009
3.08.2009
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.
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.
3.01.2009
Thoughts on a day that was less productive than I would have liked
Enlightenment and clarity of the mind occur only in response to the sustained effort of study and practice. Endeavoring in the way ripens the conditions of your practice. It is not that the sound of the bamboo is sharp or the color of the blossoms is vivid. Although the sound of the bamboo is wondrous, it is heard at the moment when it's hit by a pebble. Although the color of blossoms is beautiful, they do not open by themselves but unfold in the light of springtime. Studying the way is like this. You attain the way when conditions come together. Although you have your own capacity, you practice the way with the combined strength of the community. So you should practice and search with one mind with others.
A stone is turned to a jewel by polishing. A person becomes a sage by cultivation. What stone is originally shiny? Who is mature from the beginning? You ought to polish and cultivate yourself. Don't diminish yourself. Don't be lazy in your study of the way.
--from Enlightenment Unfolds: The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Dogen, trans. Kazuaki Tanahashi
I think I am slowly learning things about myself, belatedly, perhaps, about the way I work, about the knots that I will have to untie. I ran myself ragged in my teaching week--Tuesday I was "going" for about 18 hours--woke up at six as usual, then teaching, looking at drafts, going back to Brooklyn to run errands then go to the gym then do laundry, then look at more drafts, answering personal emails then finally sleeping a bit after midnight. Wednesday it was hard to do anything except sit zazen and have lunch. Thursday was much like Tuesday, without the gym and with seeing Caroline later. I have three major, unbreakable deadlines next week in addition to all the teaching stuff. While I haven't exactly pissed away the last two days I don't think I've exactly rocked them either. I understand that I need to rest. I'm not sorry I had some time to myself finally. And yet--
I miss D. Already. It's stupid how fast I got used to seeing him regularly--even when he went upstate, I'd seen him Thursday, but nothing this weekend, not even an email since Thursday. I know he's going through a lot--more than I can imagine--and yet...I miss him. I missed having someone here, just to break up the work. I think I have sort of a base level of productivity for a weekend, and it would be nice to see him. It's much easier to be self-sufficient during the week; I feel like the writing I'm doing would be more interesting if I had somehow been able to be in his presence. We talked on the phone a bit Thursday night. It was the first time I ever called first. I know he's just going through a lot. I wish we'd made firmer plans. I'm not obsess-y, yet, really, not like I was with J., but still...I get unsettled. I start to doubt. I start to overcompensate for the doubt. This time, I can see it happening. I've tried to sit with it. I've tried to walk with it. I've tried to write with it, to read Dogen with it, to cook with it, and to drink mediocre white wine that I will not be purchasing again with it. And still. Jittery. Spending so much energy calming down my own restlessness and gnawing loneliness that I can't do anything. Feeling the edge of missing The Poet. And it's not like we even had plans--it's just...I get used to good things fast. I know that in some sense I always wish I could start in the middle, skip this part. I said this with J., too: I'm fun on a first date and I'm a very good girlfriend. I am horrible at the part that comes in between. I'm trying to be careful with him. I am trying to sit with this, to do the nonattachment thing, to not invite all the usual worries to sit down to tea with me. My apartment's pretty damn clean. I made a good dinner tonight. I had some inspiration yesterday, but my classes for the week are not prepped, the MLA abstract due on Monday is not finished, the statement of interest for fellowships that I am not interested in but must apply for anyway by Wednesday has very few complete sentences in it, and the paper I am giving on Friday will be fine by then but is not fine now.
Perhaps needless to say, I will be going to school tomorrow to try to deal with all this somewhere other than my apartment.
And I guess I'm learning something about myself. At least I can see it all happening now, and not completely confuse some of my work/life balance issues with either being madly in love with someone or rejected by that same someone.
I hope this all works. And I kind of hope he calls me first tomorrow. I think we really complement each other and that I could be much shinier with him around. But I worry that I'm going to trip over his neuroses, or he mine. And that's a hard place to start from.
I do think I must like him, though. For what that's worth.
1.28.2009
How it is in the new semester / lunar year
* I was halfway to the subway this morning, walking with the groggy half-formed intention to go to the gym, when I realized I'd forgotten my shoes. Decided that was a sign that I should go to the gym later in the afternoon instead.
* I always forget about the difficulties of building a rapport with a class in the first week. Duh. But I think they will be good. It's the first time I've ever taught two classes in a semester, though when the dust of registration settles, I'll probably have about as many students as I had in my first year at Erstwhile Teaching College. Nevertheless, it's a weird sensation to go through everything twice and I'm sure I'm going to end up both repeating myself and forgetting what I've told which class.
* J. came over on Monday night. It was okay. We were able to explain some things to each other that made the past less uncomfortable. There's still a bruise that hurts if I brush across it the wrong way--denoting something like the state of noncoincidence that I feel like I write about a lot--that neither one of us was in a position, a place, a time, that allowed us to be anything like our best. I'm trying to trust that reading.
* J. was supposed to have come over on Sunday, but he never got in touch with me and I decided I'd rather talk on the phone with the guy I haven't met yet but who keeps sending me the fantastic emails. The phone conversation was similarly pleasant. I wish I didn't know all the things that could go wrong here. And yet: I give myself over to these missives--in part, perhaps, because I feel like he's also doing the same and I rarely ever feel that kind of parity. And the emails are just so damn charming, and it's been awhile since I've had a correspondent who can kind of pull me up like that. Even if it only ends up lasting for ten days, that's something.
* I am trying to trust the present moment. This is something I said to myself at the beginning of last semester, too, but it was knowledge that never reached the level of realization. Trying to get closer to realization this time around--which means, among other things, going to the zendo in today's disgusting weather.
* I keep having dreams about moving and about amateur spectacles. Usually I'm not the one doing the moving, but last night I had a dream where I broke up with The Ex all over again, but it was actually much easier and we lived in a sort of 50s-style midtown apartment complete with twin beds. I wonder if there's some displacement that I'm not dealing with.
* I've started listening to KCRW a lot.
* I fear that I've lost the thread of my dissertation over the last three weeks. This disturbs me. Need to address that. Also need to write a conference paper for March. Augh.
* On the plus side, I'm getting a surprisingly large paycheck from Not-NYU this week. I may try to buy new pants.
* I always forget about the difficulties of building a rapport with a class in the first week. Duh. But I think they will be good. It's the first time I've ever taught two classes in a semester, though when the dust of registration settles, I'll probably have about as many students as I had in my first year at Erstwhile Teaching College. Nevertheless, it's a weird sensation to go through everything twice and I'm sure I'm going to end up both repeating myself and forgetting what I've told which class.
* J. came over on Monday night. It was okay. We were able to explain some things to each other that made the past less uncomfortable. There's still a bruise that hurts if I brush across it the wrong way--denoting something like the state of noncoincidence that I feel like I write about a lot--that neither one of us was in a position, a place, a time, that allowed us to be anything like our best. I'm trying to trust that reading.
* J. was supposed to have come over on Sunday, but he never got in touch with me and I decided I'd rather talk on the phone with the guy I haven't met yet but who keeps sending me the fantastic emails. The phone conversation was similarly pleasant. I wish I didn't know all the things that could go wrong here. And yet: I give myself over to these missives--in part, perhaps, because I feel like he's also doing the same and I rarely ever feel that kind of parity. And the emails are just so damn charming, and it's been awhile since I've had a correspondent who can kind of pull me up like that. Even if it only ends up lasting for ten days, that's something.
* I am trying to trust the present moment. This is something I said to myself at the beginning of last semester, too, but it was knowledge that never reached the level of realization. Trying to get closer to realization this time around--which means, among other things, going to the zendo in today's disgusting weather.
* I keep having dreams about moving and about amateur spectacles. Usually I'm not the one doing the moving, but last night I had a dream where I broke up with The Ex all over again, but it was actually much easier and we lived in a sort of 50s-style midtown apartment complete with twin beds. I wonder if there's some displacement that I'm not dealing with.
* I've started listening to KCRW a lot.
* I fear that I've lost the thread of my dissertation over the last three weeks. This disturbs me. Need to address that. Also need to write a conference paper for March. Augh.
* On the plus side, I'm getting a surprisingly large paycheck from Not-NYU this week. I may try to buy new pants.
1.19.2009
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.
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.
1.01.2009
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.
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.
11.12.2008
Writing about not writing -- hopefully there will be fewer posts like this in the future
(Excerpted from something I wrote for myself this morning. I feel a little bit like Charlie Brown complaining to Linus about feeling disconnected from Christmas...)
I want to be guided by something that Charles Schulz said in a clip from that old Lee Mendelson documentary: namely, that when he has a good idea for a strip, there’s no place he’d rather be than at his drawing table. Lately, it seems that I’m just the opposite, that even when I find I have something that’s good, I’d rather be doing something else—sleeping, eating, watching tv, drinking, etc. Not that these are bad, but I fear that I’m running the risk of confusing indulging my laziness and procrastination in the name of being kind to myself—but this isn’t really kindness at all, drinking a huge beer and falling asleep on the futon at 8:00 at night to It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a show I don’t even like. And that’s to say nothing of the emotional entanglements I’ve let myself get into this semester. There’s always something or someone I can blame for holding me back. Some of these things are legitimate cases of my needing to take time for me. But as I’m about to celebrate a year in this apartment, a year that included a prestigious conference and two forthcoming publications, not to mention the passing of my orals—I need to keep going at that pace. Just now I put the timer on pause and went to look at my course enrollment for my spring classes, which of course turned into a huge time suck, checking my email addresses, looking at an email that Brian sent me this morning—it’s these kinds of places where my time goes, these kinds of abysses from which I need to rescue my productivity. There’s no reason, when I’m only teaching one class and don’t have any coursework obligations, that I should be so constantly tired and putting things off until the next day, the afternoon, the evening, the weekend. This weekend coming up, of course, I have a huge mountain of teaching work to do. Seven papers to grade (though that is almost laughably nothing, isn’t it? It was just last year that I would be home grading 20 essays that were much less interesting than this. But I also have to figure out how to teach them Derrida, most likely during a teaching observation. I’m not worried about this, but I wish that I could be more excited. Or not even that. I’m excited in the abstract because it’s such a crazy thing to do and I think I can do it. It’s these kinds of things that I end up thinking about on my cushion a lot—and teaching in general—I still haven’t figured out why. But that doesn’t translate into greater productivity when I’m sitting in front of the computer, whether it’s at home, school, or work. I don’t do well practicing my tasks in the present. It’s so easy to deflect and take detours, searching for inspiration I tell myself but really just practicing avoidance. And it’s funny because I don’t come off like that to other people—everyone else seems to think I’m fine—but I don’t feel fine—I don’t feel excited.
I guess in my ideal world, I’m so excited about the ideas I’m working with in my dissertation and the writing of the dissertation itself that I remain focused on my teaching work simply so I can get through it and get back to the writing. Or I’m sufficiently invested in my teaching to give it the time it needs-—joyously. The problem right now is basically that I’m giving things a lot of time, but mostly in the form of procrastination. It takes me an hour to grade a paper because I suddenly look at a paragraph and realize I need to read the last 20 posts on Gawker. And it’s almost worse having fewer papers to work on—it’s so easy to get lazy—-it shouldn’t take me as long to grade seven or eight papers as it took me to grade 20 and yet somehow it does or at least gets close and I – okay I just did it again, this time with a long detour through someone else’s Facebook album. What the hell is wrong with me?
The funny thing is that I don’t want this to be a journal of just whatever—I intend this as a project journal, one where I set aside an hour a week to chart my progress on the dissertation. Not much else. Except that perhaps I need to get some of the emotional and mental background out here—possibly so I can let go of it, or get to the root of it. (That’s a good metaphor—I’m clearly not pulling these weeds out by the roots since they keep coming back.) I mean, it’s not like I can’t write for this hour and then go check the enrollment for my spring classes—why am I actually willing to stop the clock and procrastinate?
I know that some of this is the state of being a little bit between projects, with no imminent deadlines looming. One of the next big things to address will be fellowship application season. For a number of reasons, I’m going to have to pretty substantially revise my prospectus so it first the institution's guidelines, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do that before I get the prospectus approved by the department. And it would be nice to work out the theoretical background in more detail as well, if only so I can articulate it as clearly as possible in the proposal. (Went off the clock again just now to put moisturizer on my face. This is turning into a long hour and I’m only about halfway through, based on the timer.) The proposal for the fellowship is going to have to be a lot shorter and more concise—it will also need to speak to nonliterary people. This may be something I decide to work on when I’m in St Louis for Thanksgiving and can show it to my mom. The other big thing about the proposal is that applying for these fellowships means that I’m basically proving I can / promising to finish by Spring – Summer 2010. I think that’s doable, but it means I can’t have any more wasted semesters. Not that this one has been, but it’s not been as productive as I’d like. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I’ll be teaching two classes in the spring, but that part at least means money and I do think my life will become a bit more open to my work if I don’t have to worry about money as much. Very Virginia Woolf of me.
I want to be guided by something that Charles Schulz said in a clip from that old Lee Mendelson documentary: namely, that when he has a good idea for a strip, there’s no place he’d rather be than at his drawing table. Lately, it seems that I’m just the opposite, that even when I find I have something that’s good, I’d rather be doing something else—sleeping, eating, watching tv, drinking, etc. Not that these are bad, but I fear that I’m running the risk of confusing indulging my laziness and procrastination in the name of being kind to myself—but this isn’t really kindness at all, drinking a huge beer and falling asleep on the futon at 8:00 at night to It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a show I don’t even like. And that’s to say nothing of the emotional entanglements I’ve let myself get into this semester. There’s always something or someone I can blame for holding me back. Some of these things are legitimate cases of my needing to take time for me. But as I’m about to celebrate a year in this apartment, a year that included a prestigious conference and two forthcoming publications, not to mention the passing of my orals—I need to keep going at that pace. Just now I put the timer on pause and went to look at my course enrollment for my spring classes, which of course turned into a huge time suck, checking my email addresses, looking at an email that Brian sent me this morning—it’s these kinds of places where my time goes, these kinds of abysses from which I need to rescue my productivity. There’s no reason, when I’m only teaching one class and don’t have any coursework obligations, that I should be so constantly tired and putting things off until the next day, the afternoon, the evening, the weekend. This weekend coming up, of course, I have a huge mountain of teaching work to do. Seven papers to grade (though that is almost laughably nothing, isn’t it? It was just last year that I would be home grading 20 essays that were much less interesting than this. But I also have to figure out how to teach them Derrida, most likely during a teaching observation. I’m not worried about this, but I wish that I could be more excited. Or not even that. I’m excited in the abstract because it’s such a crazy thing to do and I think I can do it. It’s these kinds of things that I end up thinking about on my cushion a lot—and teaching in general—I still haven’t figured out why. But that doesn’t translate into greater productivity when I’m sitting in front of the computer, whether it’s at home, school, or work. I don’t do well practicing my tasks in the present. It’s so easy to deflect and take detours, searching for inspiration I tell myself but really just practicing avoidance. And it’s funny because I don’t come off like that to other people—everyone else seems to think I’m fine—but I don’t feel fine—I don’t feel excited.
I guess in my ideal world, I’m so excited about the ideas I’m working with in my dissertation and the writing of the dissertation itself that I remain focused on my teaching work simply so I can get through it and get back to the writing. Or I’m sufficiently invested in my teaching to give it the time it needs-—joyously. The problem right now is basically that I’m giving things a lot of time, but mostly in the form of procrastination. It takes me an hour to grade a paper because I suddenly look at a paragraph and realize I need to read the last 20 posts on Gawker. And it’s almost worse having fewer papers to work on—it’s so easy to get lazy—-it shouldn’t take me as long to grade seven or eight papers as it took me to grade 20 and yet somehow it does or at least gets close and I – okay I just did it again, this time with a long detour through someone else’s Facebook album. What the hell is wrong with me?
The funny thing is that I don’t want this to be a journal of just whatever—I intend this as a project journal, one where I set aside an hour a week to chart my progress on the dissertation. Not much else. Except that perhaps I need to get some of the emotional and mental background out here—possibly so I can let go of it, or get to the root of it. (That’s a good metaphor—I’m clearly not pulling these weeds out by the roots since they keep coming back.) I mean, it’s not like I can’t write for this hour and then go check the enrollment for my spring classes—why am I actually willing to stop the clock and procrastinate?
I know that some of this is the state of being a little bit between projects, with no imminent deadlines looming. One of the next big things to address will be fellowship application season. For a number of reasons, I’m going to have to pretty substantially revise my prospectus so it first the institution's guidelines, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do that before I get the prospectus approved by the department. And it would be nice to work out the theoretical background in more detail as well, if only so I can articulate it as clearly as possible in the proposal. (Went off the clock again just now to put moisturizer on my face. This is turning into a long hour and I’m only about halfway through, based on the timer.) The proposal for the fellowship is going to have to be a lot shorter and more concise—it will also need to speak to nonliterary people. This may be something I decide to work on when I’m in St Louis for Thanksgiving and can show it to my mom. The other big thing about the proposal is that applying for these fellowships means that I’m basically proving I can / promising to finish by Spring – Summer 2010. I think that’s doable, but it means I can’t have any more wasted semesters. Not that this one has been, but it’s not been as productive as I’d like. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I’ll be teaching two classes in the spring, but that part at least means money and I do think my life will become a bit more open to my work if I don’t have to worry about money as much. Very Virginia Woolf of me.
11.11.2008
Energy seeking, in bullet form
* I've felt increasingly stable emotionally, but I feel like I'm missing a connection with my work. I'm still doing a lot of futzing. There's not a lot of time for futzing. I need to figure out how to regain focus on both teaching and on my own research.
* I wonder if some of the lack of intellectual energy has to do with the change in the ways and contexts in which I talk about my work. I don't have the same kind of aspirational emotional investment in the people I talk about work with these days that I had with, say, The Professor--and part of that is because I'm no longer a still-in-coursework grad student trying to impress some guy I really liked with my knowledge of iterability. I talk about some of these things with friends and with The Poet, but the relationships have shifted. At the same time, I don't really want to get into the same kind of thing I had with The Professor with someone else. So a more substantial identity shift needs to take place.
* I did have a nice conversation this afternoon (completely unexpectedly) with a girl who I've known since I started in the program, but had never talked to her. I had been sort of casually suspicious of her for years, mostly based on stories that I heard about her, but as I've lived through a lot more--well, let's just say I understand how those kinds of rumors and things get started. She's much more settled than her previous repuration suggested, and I really enjoyed talking with her. I need more conversations like this.
* As I was leaving school, I saw K. from across the lobby. We waved, but that was it. It wasn't until I was on a Q train much closer to 14th Street that I realized what I should have done.
* It was one of those days: had I not gone home when I did, I could have seen The Poet. As things stand, we don't get to see each other until next Thursday.
* J both texted and emailed me first. I answered the text, and then he wrote back with something that didn't really move the conversation forward. Then I went home and saw his email. After some agonizing (okay, more like futzing) I sent a couple lines back to that, seeing if it's easier. I didn't really feel anything either way. And I have no idea what I want.
* I thought about going to the MeditateNYC open house at the Boundless Mind Zendo in Park Slope, but inertia and fajitas set in. There's another sangha I may try on Sunday. But the thing is that evening mediation is always going to be hard for me, especially on days when I teach--that 6 to 8 slot is a prime time for my wanting to nap. I really like the midday zazen thing. But we'll see.
* I think my teaching observation is going to coincide with my attempting to lecture on Derrida. You will recall that I am teaching freshman comp.
* I love Boston Legal, but I'm pissed off by their treatment of abortion in the most recent episode. This whole mushy liberal discourse of "it changes you forever" is incredibly condescening bullshit, and I was disappointed to see it voiced by Candace Bergen's character. All kinds of things have the power to change a given person forever, and to privilege this as the one thing that is so powerful that a woman can't be trusted to make the decision--I call bullshit, and I do so as a woman who had an abortion and does not think that it was the worst thing that has ever happened to her. The show itself eventually (more or less) affirmed abortion, but the qualifications they put on it (pro-choice arguments in the mouth of a headstrong 15 year old girl who may or may not have been engaged in a gender-selection abortion) were incredibly insulting. It triggered for me the memory of the "I'm pro-choice but I get squicked out by certain kinds of women having abortions for certain kinds of reasons (generally 'birth control')" meme that was going around the internets (especially those areas populated by female academic bloggers) a couple of months ago. That made me want to scream because, from a number of perspectives, my abortion was basically birth control, even though it only happened once. My life wasn't in danger. I wasn't a teenager. I suppose that if I really wanted to have a baby, I could have convinced E. to be on board with it, and we'd either have some sort of resentful partnership or I'd have moved back in with my parents or something. But I didn't do that. And I'm not sorry. Sure, there were things about the experience that were traumatizing, but they have more to do with the atmosphere at the clinic and the ways in which The Ex and The Professor both (at different times afterwards) responded to it. (The Ex: "Let me tell you how your abortion affected me." The Professor: "If it were mine, I would have wanted you to keep it. But I wouldn't have been with you or anything.") But it wasn't the most traumatizing or destructive thing that's ever happened to me in my life. And even if it was, to legislate with that in mind would be disgusting.
* I did not mean to make this into a post about my abortion, but it's possible that some of my immediate listlessness tonight was related to watching Boston Legal while consuming my dinner. And maybe now it's time to curl up in bed with Anne of Windy Poplars. For the record, I'm mostly excited about going to St Louis for Thanksgiving so I can retrieve the rest of the Anne of Green Gables books and Little House on the Prairie.
* I wonder if some of the lack of intellectual energy has to do with the change in the ways and contexts in which I talk about my work. I don't have the same kind of aspirational emotional investment in the people I talk about work with these days that I had with, say, The Professor--and part of that is because I'm no longer a still-in-coursework grad student trying to impress some guy I really liked with my knowledge of iterability. I talk about some of these things with friends and with The Poet, but the relationships have shifted. At the same time, I don't really want to get into the same kind of thing I had with The Professor with someone else. So a more substantial identity shift needs to take place.
* I did have a nice conversation this afternoon (completely unexpectedly) with a girl who I've known since I started in the program, but had never talked to her. I had been sort of casually suspicious of her for years, mostly based on stories that I heard about her, but as I've lived through a lot more--well, let's just say I understand how those kinds of rumors and things get started. She's much more settled than her previous repuration suggested, and I really enjoyed talking with her. I need more conversations like this.
* As I was leaving school, I saw K. from across the lobby. We waved, but that was it. It wasn't until I was on a Q train much closer to 14th Street that I realized what I should have done.
* It was one of those days: had I not gone home when I did, I could have seen The Poet. As things stand, we don't get to see each other until next Thursday.
* J both texted and emailed me first. I answered the text, and then he wrote back with something that didn't really move the conversation forward. Then I went home and saw his email. After some agonizing (okay, more like futzing) I sent a couple lines back to that, seeing if it's easier. I didn't really feel anything either way. And I have no idea what I want.
* I thought about going to the MeditateNYC open house at the Boundless Mind Zendo in Park Slope, but inertia and fajitas set in. There's another sangha I may try on Sunday. But the thing is that evening mediation is always going to be hard for me, especially on days when I teach--that 6 to 8 slot is a prime time for my wanting to nap. I really like the midday zazen thing. But we'll see.
* I think my teaching observation is going to coincide with my attempting to lecture on Derrida. You will recall that I am teaching freshman comp.
* I love Boston Legal, but I'm pissed off by their treatment of abortion in the most recent episode. This whole mushy liberal discourse of "it changes you forever" is incredibly condescening bullshit, and I was disappointed to see it voiced by Candace Bergen's character. All kinds of things have the power to change a given person forever, and to privilege this as the one thing that is so powerful that a woman can't be trusted to make the decision--I call bullshit, and I do so as a woman who had an abortion and does not think that it was the worst thing that has ever happened to her. The show itself eventually (more or less) affirmed abortion, but the qualifications they put on it (pro-choice arguments in the mouth of a headstrong 15 year old girl who may or may not have been engaged in a gender-selection abortion) were incredibly insulting. It triggered for me the memory of the "I'm pro-choice but I get squicked out by certain kinds of women having abortions for certain kinds of reasons (generally 'birth control')" meme that was going around the internets (especially those areas populated by female academic bloggers) a couple of months ago. That made me want to scream because, from a number of perspectives, my abortion was basically birth control, even though it only happened once. My life wasn't in danger. I wasn't a teenager. I suppose that if I really wanted to have a baby, I could have convinced E. to be on board with it, and we'd either have some sort of resentful partnership or I'd have moved back in with my parents or something. But I didn't do that. And I'm not sorry. Sure, there were things about the experience that were traumatizing, but they have more to do with the atmosphere at the clinic and the ways in which The Ex and The Professor both (at different times afterwards) responded to it. (The Ex: "Let me tell you how your abortion affected me." The Professor: "If it were mine, I would have wanted you to keep it. But I wouldn't have been with you or anything.") But it wasn't the most traumatizing or destructive thing that's ever happened to me in my life. And even if it was, to legislate with that in mind would be disgusting.
* I did not mean to make this into a post about my abortion, but it's possible that some of my immediate listlessness tonight was related to watching Boston Legal while consuming my dinner. And maybe now it's time to curl up in bed with Anne of Windy Poplars. For the record, I'm mostly excited about going to St Louis for Thanksgiving so I can retrieve the rest of the Anne of Green Gables books and Little House on the Prairie.
10.25.2008
Citational: from J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading. Also other things.
It is impossible to get outside the limits of language by means of language. Everything we reach that seems to be outside language, for example sensation and perception, turns out to be more language. To live is to read, or rather to commit again and again the failure to read which is the human lot. We are hard at work trying to fulfill the impossible task of reading from the moment we are born until the moment we die. We struggle to read from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night, and what are our dreams but more lessons in the pain of the impossibility of reading, or rather in the pain of having no way whatsoever of knowing whether or not we may have in our discursive wanderings and aberrancies stumbled by accident on the right reading?
...there's something almost comforting about old-school deconstruction on a grey Saturday afternoon.
Yeah, so. It's been awhile. I guess the short version goes something like this: there was the week where all I did was sleep and do the minimum I needed to do to get through teaching. And then got the stomach flu. And then there were some more disappointments, and a large-scale freakout about my brother's wedding, but more about the fact of my attending by myself and feeling like an enormous loser for it. But then snapping out and finishing the damn prospectus, save for another nip and tuck revision and possibly the addition of a paragraph.
There was the night The Poet and I went to Hoboken and made up stories about alternate lives for ourselves. There was the brunch I went to where I ended up having one of those conversations where some dude who is not a literary scholar tries to tell me how to do my job as a literary scholar and you can tell that he mostly feels authorized to do it because he's a dude and you're not. Extra bonus points for his being the older brother of someone who I had a very awkward night with at one of the absolute low points of last December. Though I don't think he knew that.
I did midday zazen at the Village Zendo last Wednesday. Just an hour of sitting. Amazing. I'm going to try to make that a weekly thing.
And today I've been reading, mostly. Which has kind of been nice, though not as nice as seeing J. Who I haven't seen for like two weeks. Again. But how do I tell him that he needs to work harder to get me away from The Poet?
I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of being kind to oneself. And about how much of what I allow to pass as a kindness to myself (often in the form of drinking, several hours at a time of stupid television, poor food choices) are really not kindnesses at all but indulgences that redouble my own reasons for being unkind to myself.
I've been having fun with my students. It has been amazingly fun teaching them a text that I love. At least the ones who are actually doing the work.
I bought the latest Bob Dylan album, Tell Tale Signs, off of iTunes a couple weeks ago. (An unusual event in my world.) It's amazing and you should download it immediately. I have been doing this thing where I listen to the version of "Most of the Time" that's on this album and then listening to the Sophie Zelmani cover from the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack right afterwards.
I got my travel zafu in the mail this week. It's basically a beach ball with a cloth cover. But it's kind of awesome. I'll also be bringing Xanax to Indiana with me because even though I'm not as actively stressed out by the wedding as I was last week at this time (and boy was I rocking the word vomit at this one party--I'm sure anyone who's seen me in the last ten days, my students included, is tired of me talking about hits), I still think it's better to be safe than drinking too much and saying something unintentionally nasty or angry.
I've been practicing with what it means to trust the present, to trust others, to trust myself. What I think made that midday zazen so great for me was that I realized, most of all, that I could trust my posture, that I could trust myself to know how to sit, that what I did at home was also what I was doing there.
And I'm trying to believe that I don't have to be my own worst enemy.
10.03.2008
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.
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.
9.14.2008
I do rather wish that prep didn't take so damn long. It's my own fault for lingering over their homework assignments, but still. Hopefully this will be the last time for a fall or two that I have to reinvent all my handouts. And all of this is another testament to why it was good to do some prospectus work in the morning.
Tomorrow: Laundry (has to be done) and finishing prep for the week. Maybe I'll take my computer to West Village Coffeeshop. I'm trying to be better about using the resources at my two institutions for things related to that institution, but it's tempting to print a lot of stuff at school because it's more familiar than Not-NYU (which is going to be the pseudonym for the location of my new teaching gig). But, really, I should be rocking out with the photocopying at Not-NYU.
Speaking of which, one of the perks of Not-NYU is access to the NYU library system. Which is going to make prospectusing so much easier because I will actually be able to look at the books I need. And check them out for more than the three (!!!) weeks at a time that I get at School. These are things I did not appreciate when I was an undergraduate at NYU. So I suppose that I can't really grumble too much about the time I need to invest in Not-NYU.
Tomorrow: Laundry (has to be done) and finishing prep for the week. Maybe I'll take my computer to West Village Coffeeshop. I'm trying to be better about using the resources at my two institutions for things related to that institution, but it's tempting to print a lot of stuff at school because it's more familiar than Not-NYU (which is going to be the pseudonym for the location of my new teaching gig). But, really, I should be rocking out with the photocopying at Not-NYU.
Speaking of which, one of the perks of Not-NYU is access to the NYU library system. Which is going to make prospectusing so much easier because I will actually be able to look at the books I need. And check them out for more than the three (!!!) weeks at a time that I get at School. These are things I did not appreciate when I was an undergraduate at NYU. So I suppose that I can't really grumble too much about the time I need to invest in Not-NYU.
9.04.2008
6.25.2008
Bookmarked for later lesson planning
Janet Zweig, "Her Recursive Apology" (sculpture)
From the website description:
From the website description:
The residue of a procedure. 4,386,375 apologies were randomly generated on over 8,000 sheets of continuous paper in tiny type. No two sheets are alike. The spiralling stacks grow progressively larger. A suspended work in progress.
6.11.2008
Bullets, mostly domestic and pedagogical
* I did laundry tonight, since it's no longer so hot that I can justify buying new underwear to avoid the laundromat. The washer that had all of my dark / warm water stuff in had fabric softener in it--something I don't usually use myself. Now my dark / warm water clothes and my towels smell like Downy--not a bad smell, but they don't smell like my clothes and towels.
* Speaking of clothes, my bridesmaid's dress has been chosen for me. It's not actually that bad, right? I don't think I've ever worn a strapless gown in my life, though. As I observed to my mother this morning, that's a good incentive to keep going to the gym through the summer and fall, especially because I will be the token old maid in the wedding party.
* I feel like I've been working really hard today without getting anything done. I will be switching to full on work with Coleridge tomorrow. Well, that and getting my paperwork together at New Teaching School which Needs a Pseudonym, having lunch with an aunt and uncle who are in town, and going to hear some friends read / perform in Brooklyn. So tomorrow, alas, may not be a gym day.
* Speaking of NTSwNaP (see what I mean?). I got a whole bunch of info on the fall semester from the Writing Director there. I'm already in a different world--there's just more here in terms of sheer documentation than I got from Erstwhile Teaching College in two years. And it's a whole new ballgame, one that's played without course readers and where you actually write course descriptions based on topics from which the students then choose. In a general sense, I realize that the centers of adjunct autonomy are almost completely reversed in these two situations--ETC has a reader that they want you to teach from, and they require more essays, but beyond that they aren't at the moment pushing their adjuncts to do much more that's intellectually coherent, as long as the kids learn some grammar along the way. My class tended to be organized around some broad units, but they weren't necessarily connected to each other--and, especially in this last semester, they were all in a certain sense tailored to the institution, which basically meant that I could be very self-referential in terms of things like linguistic diversity, what it means to write in English, and so on--and be reasonably certain that 90% of the people in the room had personal experience with that kind of thing. This new teaching gig will be the first time I will be standing in front of a classroom of majority English-speakers (as a first language, that is)--not to mention students who will probably all be living in dorms close to campus rather than with their parents in Ozone Park and Bensonhurst. And all of this makes me a bit nostalgic (read: terrified of change) for ETC and makes me wonder if I shouldn't give up that class--but the places are so different that it doesn't make sense for me--at least not in what will be a prospectusing and fellowship applying semester--to be teaching at both. Also, in a very practical sense--the New Gig is probably closer to the kinds of writing programs that are going on at places where I would like to teach. Not that I want to teach exclusively in a writing program, but I think it'll be good to have both things.
* The Poet has been getting himself into political controversy in his hometown, and it's the kind of thing where if it backfires in a certain way it's going to hit me too. Okay, so that's a little bit unlikely at this point, but if I'm still with him when the next step in his political career comes, then--yeah, he thinks he's going to be able to keep me out of it, but it's clear even from the tone of what I read online today that it won't be up to him. (Of course, if I'm still even with him, then that will...ack. Anyway.) Which is all a long way of setting up the fact that I about had a heart attack tonight when I got a call from an unknown New Jersey number on my cell. Especially since we'd been flirting a bit over email in the afternoon. As it turns out, though, it was just my aunt--calling, I suppose, from a hotel rather than her cell--but I only found that out when I listened to the message. I have a pretty strict policy of not answering numbers I don't recognize.
* I feel sticky and I swear it's from the fabric softener on this t-shirt. Was that gross?
* I'm beginning to miss creative writing a lot. But I've been pretty good about forcing myself to think in paragraphs and not just mindlessly take notes on things. But the emphasis is on "pretty good."
* When my mother was here, the soap dish fell out of the wall in the shower. She managed to at least provisionally caulk it back in. That lasted until Sunday, probably because it got so damn hot in here. So now I'm back to having a plastic bag taped over a gaping hole in my shower. I'm waiting a few days before calling the landlord because I don't want to be stuck here until I'm ready. Also, this feels stupider than the toilet situation--not that this one is my fault any more than that one, but still.
* My life has been vastly improved by my cultivating the habit of making coffee before I go to bed and then putting it in the refrigerator--hence, iced coffee in the morning, and something more securely portable. This will be essential when I start teaching that 8:00 class.
* Finally, I may be starting to heal from K, since I was able to watch an episode of the Daily Show without thinking about him and getting depressed. Technically, I stopped watching during the writers' strike, but K first entered my consciousness as "dude in my German class who looks like Jon Stewart," and that's been sort of making me reluctant to go back. Oddly, though, now I find the whole thing less funny than I did--am I an enormous killjoy because I got kind of queasy about the Gitmo jokes? I don't know. I suppose I have other things I'm supposed to think about. Tomorrow--Coleridge and the syncope!
* Speaking of clothes, my bridesmaid's dress has been chosen for me. It's not actually that bad, right? I don't think I've ever worn a strapless gown in my life, though. As I observed to my mother this morning, that's a good incentive to keep going to the gym through the summer and fall, especially because I will be the token old maid in the wedding party.
* I feel like I've been working really hard today without getting anything done. I will be switching to full on work with Coleridge tomorrow. Well, that and getting my paperwork together at New Teaching School which Needs a Pseudonym, having lunch with an aunt and uncle who are in town, and going to hear some friends read / perform in Brooklyn. So tomorrow, alas, may not be a gym day.
* Speaking of NTSwNaP (see what I mean?). I got a whole bunch of info on the fall semester from the Writing Director there. I'm already in a different world--there's just more here in terms of sheer documentation than I got from Erstwhile Teaching College in two years. And it's a whole new ballgame, one that's played without course readers and where you actually write course descriptions based on topics from which the students then choose. In a general sense, I realize that the centers of adjunct autonomy are almost completely reversed in these two situations--ETC has a reader that they want you to teach from, and they require more essays, but beyond that they aren't at the moment pushing their adjuncts to do much more that's intellectually coherent, as long as the kids learn some grammar along the way. My class tended to be organized around some broad units, but they weren't necessarily connected to each other--and, especially in this last semester, they were all in a certain sense tailored to the institution, which basically meant that I could be very self-referential in terms of things like linguistic diversity, what it means to write in English, and so on--and be reasonably certain that 90% of the people in the room had personal experience with that kind of thing. This new teaching gig will be the first time I will be standing in front of a classroom of majority English-speakers (as a first language, that is)--not to mention students who will probably all be living in dorms close to campus rather than with their parents in Ozone Park and Bensonhurst. And all of this makes me a bit nostalgic (read: terrified of change) for ETC and makes me wonder if I shouldn't give up that class--but the places are so different that it doesn't make sense for me--at least not in what will be a prospectusing and fellowship applying semester--to be teaching at both. Also, in a very practical sense--the New Gig is probably closer to the kinds of writing programs that are going on at places where I would like to teach. Not that I want to teach exclusively in a writing program, but I think it'll be good to have both things.
* The Poet has been getting himself into political controversy in his hometown, and it's the kind of thing where if it backfires in a certain way it's going to hit me too. Okay, so that's a little bit unlikely at this point, but if I'm still with him when the next step in his political career comes, then--yeah, he thinks he's going to be able to keep me out of it, but it's clear even from the tone of what I read online today that it won't be up to him. (Of course, if I'm still even with him, then that will...ack. Anyway.) Which is all a long way of setting up the fact that I about had a heart attack tonight when I got a call from an unknown New Jersey number on my cell. Especially since we'd been flirting a bit over email in the afternoon. As it turns out, though, it was just my aunt--calling, I suppose, from a hotel rather than her cell--but I only found that out when I listened to the message. I have a pretty strict policy of not answering numbers I don't recognize.
* I feel sticky and I swear it's from the fabric softener on this t-shirt. Was that gross?
* I'm beginning to miss creative writing a lot. But I've been pretty good about forcing myself to think in paragraphs and not just mindlessly take notes on things. But the emphasis is on "pretty good."
* When my mother was here, the soap dish fell out of the wall in the shower. She managed to at least provisionally caulk it back in. That lasted until Sunday, probably because it got so damn hot in here. So now I'm back to having a plastic bag taped over a gaping hole in my shower. I'm waiting a few days before calling the landlord because I don't want to be stuck here until I'm ready. Also, this feels stupider than the toilet situation--not that this one is my fault any more than that one, but still.
* My life has been vastly improved by my cultivating the habit of making coffee before I go to bed and then putting it in the refrigerator--hence, iced coffee in the morning, and something more securely portable. This will be essential when I start teaching that 8:00 class.
* Finally, I may be starting to heal from K, since I was able to watch an episode of the Daily Show without thinking about him and getting depressed. Technically, I stopped watching during the writers' strike, but K first entered my consciousness as "dude in my German class who looks like Jon Stewart," and that's been sort of making me reluctant to go back. Oddly, though, now I find the whole thing less funny than I did--am I an enormous killjoy because I got kind of queasy about the Gitmo jokes? I don't know. I suppose I have other things I'm supposed to think about. Tomorrow--Coleridge and the syncope!
6.03.2008
In which my best laid plans set a new record for evanescence
Today kicked my ass, plain and simple.
This is a hard way to start the summer.
At least, however, I had only gotten as far as the Manhattan Bridge on the B train before I realized, with a groan, that I didn't have my keys.
And at least when I finally made it back to Teaching College after another 45 minutes on several trains, the building was still open and my keys still where I left them in the bag I take to the gym and keep in my desk. But so much for being rewarded for making healthy choices, huh?
The Poet called me at 9:15 this morning about a library book. Except, as I realized later, it wasn't really about that. It was sort of a crazy conversation, and sometime in the midafternoon, I began to understand that he was trying not to come apart. And now I have a new unlikely phrase to add to my collection of sentences that I never thought would be necessary to use to describe my life, namely: my boyfriend's wife is dying. There, I said it, and it looks awful and, like so many of these things, I find myself wanting to protest, "it isn't as bad as it sounds." But this one does change the stakes in some ways. He had been at a work thing near school this evening--before the latest news, we'd planned to spend the night together. We met for a drink instead--it seemed schizophrenic, like so much of the rest of this day (did I mention that the stated project was to work on Maud?), and I could see his compartmentalizing skills start to fray, one minute talking about surfing or the contract he just landed at work or the department exam but then nearly breaking down at the bar. He says she is the woman who broke him, who made him understand what it meant to be a human being. And I hold his hand because there is nothing else I can do and I try not to be scared by how much I find myself caring about him.
None of this is, of course, conductive to a drama-free summer. I mean, there was going to be drama. But on day one?
On the other hand:
It's not that I didn't try to be healthy and productive, or even that I didn't succeed in some ways. My shoulders are still tight and kind of painfully so, but I went to the gym at Erstwhile Teaching College anyway, ate reasonably healthy food, and drank lots of water.
And it's not like I didn't get some good news along the way--mainly, that my adjuncting offer was formalized for the fall at the school that is near my undergrad alma mater. The idea of teaching two classes and doing so in Manhattan at 8 in the morning is a bit daunting--and I will actually miss my students at Erstwhile Teaching College--but I think this is the right move for a number of reasons.
And yet:
Writing doesn't feel easier like I thought it would post-orals. I still feel like an idiot when it comes to framing and I still don't think I can answer the "so what" question. Also, my shoulders really hurt, my kitchen is a mess, and the guy's coming in the morning to look at my toilet. So maybe it's about time for bed.
Ack.
This is a hard way to start the summer.
At least, however, I had only gotten as far as the Manhattan Bridge on the B train before I realized, with a groan, that I didn't have my keys.
And at least when I finally made it back to Teaching College after another 45 minutes on several trains, the building was still open and my keys still where I left them in the bag I take to the gym and keep in my desk. But so much for being rewarded for making healthy choices, huh?
The Poet called me at 9:15 this morning about a library book. Except, as I realized later, it wasn't really about that. It was sort of a crazy conversation, and sometime in the midafternoon, I began to understand that he was trying not to come apart. And now I have a new unlikely phrase to add to my collection of sentences that I never thought would be necessary to use to describe my life, namely: my boyfriend's wife is dying. There, I said it, and it looks awful and, like so many of these things, I find myself wanting to protest, "it isn't as bad as it sounds." But this one does change the stakes in some ways. He had been at a work thing near school this evening--before the latest news, we'd planned to spend the night together. We met for a drink instead--it seemed schizophrenic, like so much of the rest of this day (did I mention that the stated project was to work on Maud?), and I could see his compartmentalizing skills start to fray, one minute talking about surfing or the contract he just landed at work or the department exam but then nearly breaking down at the bar. He says she is the woman who broke him, who made him understand what it meant to be a human being. And I hold his hand because there is nothing else I can do and I try not to be scared by how much I find myself caring about him.
None of this is, of course, conductive to a drama-free summer. I mean, there was going to be drama. But on day one?
On the other hand:
It's not that I didn't try to be healthy and productive, or even that I didn't succeed in some ways. My shoulders are still tight and kind of painfully so, but I went to the gym at Erstwhile Teaching College anyway, ate reasonably healthy food, and drank lots of water.
And it's not like I didn't get some good news along the way--mainly, that my adjuncting offer was formalized for the fall at the school that is near my undergrad alma mater. The idea of teaching two classes and doing so in Manhattan at 8 in the morning is a bit daunting--and I will actually miss my students at Erstwhile Teaching College--but I think this is the right move for a number of reasons.
And yet:
Writing doesn't feel easier like I thought it would post-orals. I still feel like an idiot when it comes to framing and I still don't think I can answer the "so what" question. Also, my shoulders really hurt, my kitchen is a mess, and the guy's coming in the morning to look at my toilet. So maybe it's about time for bed.
Ack.
4.03.2008
Minor (or not) notes
* There are days when I actually kind of like teaching composition. Maybe it's just teaching in general. But for some reason, there is a satisfaction in doing some of these things.
* My students remain awesome. Sadly, they made the teaching schedule for the fall without anyone actually asking us what our preferences were, so I don't think I get to have any of them in the next part of the course. Also, the thought of teaching a third straight semester of this section is kind of meh. Still haven't heard from Other College if they're going to hire me or not.
* Petty blog-related drama aside, I am significantly happier than I was a year ago.
* My students remain awesome. Sadly, they made the teaching schedule for the fall without anyone actually asking us what our preferences were, so I don't think I get to have any of them in the next part of the course. Also, the thought of teaching a third straight semester of this section is kind of meh. Still haven't heard from Other College if they're going to hire me or not.
* Petty blog-related drama aside, I am significantly happier than I was a year ago.
4.02.2008
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.
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.
3.11.2008
Scenes from a Tuesday
The first thing you should know about my day today is that the people I'm apartment sitting for told me that the cleaning lady would come on Saturday, supposedly around 10 or 11, but she actually showed up today at 9:45. Thankfully, I was post-shower and had pants on, but still--unnerving and slightly uncomfortable--I kind of just grabbed as much stuff as I could think of to take to Manhattan with me. One reason why I will never be part of the power elite is that I don't know how to handle these sorts of things.
I began the working portion of my day by reading Rousseau's account of his tweaking out when the Venetian prostitute he was in love with turned out to only have one nipple.
Speaking of which. At West Village Coffeeshop this morning, we sat around trying to figure out what crazy, dangerous thing it was that Spitzer wanted to do with the call girls. I'm going to be a bit let down if it was just "not wear a condom." Lame. Definitely not blowing up your career lame.
I'm still a bit bothered by last night's dinner. Like the way she always criticizes me for things like not being "good" at the kissing hello thing. Um, I'm from the midwest. And, really, 99% of my friends do not greet me the French way. It's not that it makes me uncomfortable, but it's just not so much what I "do." It's not the first time this has come up, and for some reason it seems emblematic. Also: knowing me for a certain number of years does not, in an absolute sense, privilege your read on my situation. It can help, but it isn't the last word. My Ex made this mistake a lot, and I was reminded last night of how much A. reminds me of him in some ways, and it makes me wonder how long our friendship can really last.
On the other hand, what do I know? I'm just the last one of that group not even remotely partnered, I let myself be in a horrible relationship for five years, I have a lot of sex, and some of it is with married dudes. Even if I were okay, she probably wouldn't believe me. And it could be all a defense on my part, right?
I'm bracketing this for now, though. I may run some of it past my friend M. (formerly of Chicago), who I'm meeting for drinks in a little bit. And I should get some pizza or something before that happens. I do want to do a couple of posts on this (sort of by way of definding my username)--first, on the idea of self-presentation and being okay; second, on what I meant when I said to A that I don't feel like I have much in common with her and our other mutual friends anymore--I *don't* think it's a matter of my being in school, which is what she thought--in part because I have this feeling about some grad school people too, sometimes.
For what it's worth, and I may have said this before, I'm not, like, wildly thrilled about the turns my life has taken recently, but I'm also not as completely mired in misery as I was. I think I get to let that be something.
I began the working portion of my day by reading Rousseau's account of his tweaking out when the Venetian prostitute he was in love with turned out to only have one nipple.
Speaking of which. At West Village Coffeeshop this morning, we sat around trying to figure out what crazy, dangerous thing it was that Spitzer wanted to do with the call girls. I'm going to be a bit let down if it was just "not wear a condom." Lame. Definitely not blowing up your career lame.
I'm still a bit bothered by last night's dinner. Like the way she always criticizes me for things like not being "good" at the kissing hello thing. Um, I'm from the midwest. And, really, 99% of my friends do not greet me the French way. It's not that it makes me uncomfortable, but it's just not so much what I "do." It's not the first time this has come up, and for some reason it seems emblematic. Also: knowing me for a certain number of years does not, in an absolute sense, privilege your read on my situation. It can help, but it isn't the last word. My Ex made this mistake a lot, and I was reminded last night of how much A. reminds me of him in some ways, and it makes me wonder how long our friendship can really last.
On the other hand, what do I know? I'm just the last one of that group not even remotely partnered, I let myself be in a horrible relationship for five years, I have a lot of sex, and some of it is with married dudes. Even if I were okay, she probably wouldn't believe me. And it could be all a defense on my part, right?
I'm bracketing this for now, though. I may run some of it past my friend M. (formerly of Chicago), who I'm meeting for drinks in a little bit. And I should get some pizza or something before that happens. I do want to do a couple of posts on this (sort of by way of definding my username)--first, on the idea of self-presentation and being okay; second, on what I meant when I said to A that I don't feel like I have much in common with her and our other mutual friends anymore--I *don't* think it's a matter of my being in school, which is what she thought--in part because I have this feeling about some grad school people too, sometimes.
For what it's worth, and I may have said this before, I'm not, like, wildly thrilled about the turns my life has taken recently, but I'm also not as completely mired in misery as I was. I think I get to let that be something.
For not to think of what I needs must feel
(With apologies, of course, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.)
So for the last couple of days, I've been house-and-cat-sitting for one of my committee members and her partner while they're at an international conference. They don't live all that far from me, but it's a much nicer/cooler part of Brooklyn than where I make my own home, a part that I've always loved without actually being able to afford living there. It's a nice place, without being over the top or pretentious--though they're clearly people with very good taste who take pictures of themselves looking photogenic in culturally important locations. They are also the kind of people who don't keep any processed food around, and when they do, they put it in glass jars in the cupboard. (That's actually a good lesson for me, since I've already been making halfhearted attempts at living less on things that come from freezer sections and snack aisles.) I know they are doing me a favor by giving me this chance--and my committee member was right, it is really nice to be liberated from my own belongings, books, and distractions, but it's also left me feeling more than a little displaced as I muddle through the rest of my life at the moment. It's not a bad thing, and I'm certainly grateful, but I suppose I was hoping for a little, I don't know...inspiration? I mean, I've gotten a lot of reading done (this week, it's Rousseau's Confessions, Genette's Narrative Discourse, and a lot of guilt feelings about Tennyson), and it's not like I haven't been writing at all--it's just that the writing has mostly been notes on George Eliot novels and responses to my students' paper drafts. (At some point I would like to do a post on the amount of writing that goes into teaching comp--it's not something that I've seen covered before, but it's been on my mind, as several of my students have mentioned in conferences that they were pleasantly surprised that I read what they write and respond to it.)
What I really need to do is write my conference paper. There were a couple of minutes yesterday where I felt like the intro was coming together, so at least that's good.
I don't know what to do, though, about my larger feeling that I'm just existing. I mean, I do actually have things to blog about. For one thing, I saw The Professor last week. Those of you who came over from the last blog may remember the rather large role The Professor played in my life from mid-2006 until about six months ago, when he bailed on me as a friend shortly before my abortion. (Yeah, since my Ex doesn't have access to this space, I can just come right out with that one--but most of you know that already, and it still feels better just to have that in play, period--someday I'll do the narrative of what was by far *not* the worst thing to happen to me in 2007.) Anyway, he shows up late to the Victorian Seminar my department runs last Wednesday, and he's sporting this awful beard. Like, "adding ten years and the suspicion that you're kinda sketchy" awful. And in that moment, I realized I was completely over him. It was awesome. We did end up talking at dinner--almost like old times--but as we left, I felt this unfamiliar sensation--the sensation of feeling....nothing. It was good, but also contributes to my general detachment and coldness.
Bonus fallout from last Wednesday: an outburst of jealousy from Our Mutual Friend. This has always been kind of rumbling in the background, but it took several days and a certain finesse of emails to get it out. All I can say is, would that The Professor had ever found me "disconcertingly beautiful." My life would be much less complicated now. As it is, I find myself the object of a crush from someone I am just not attracted to and I feel guilty about it.
Tonight I had dinner with my old friend A. She is clearly worried about me. It's funny, though. Both The Professor and my friend J seem to think that I am doing well, but A doesn't buy it. I don't feel like I have much in common with her anymore. It's not so much the student thing. It's more living in Brooklyn on no money and not getting invited out and they're all busy being engaged to age-appropriate people while I go out with a dude who's not that much younger than my dad and who I can't really talk about with anyone. And everyone seems to have that friend they're going to introduce me to....
Is it wrong of me to just admit that I can't completely make myself happy, and that even waking up to --- is better than nothing, even though I know better?
I think I will appreciate my home when I return to it.
I know I have stopped making sense. I should post this and go to sleep so I can regret this in the morning.
I miss inspiration, though. The last time I felt it, really, was the brief period with the first married guy, whom I'll call the Evanescent K, currently playing the role of the self-proclaimed douchebag who avoids me in the library.
Discussion question: Am I scary? Because there are, apparently, plenty of dudes who think I am? Complication: My students apparently think I am fun and happy and nice all the time. I shocked one of them as we walked to class last week when I said that I sometimes yell at tourists who are moving too slowly on the sidewalk.
Yes, I have been drinking. I went home briefly on my way here to drop off books, check mail, and get my own towels, and decided to bring a bit of bourbon over here. But I can't judge alcohol when it's in a vitamin water bottle, apparently.
I am actually kind of homesick for my own apartment. I think that's a good thing.
So for the last couple of days, I've been house-and-cat-sitting for one of my committee members and her partner while they're at an international conference. They don't live all that far from me, but it's a much nicer/cooler part of Brooklyn than where I make my own home, a part that I've always loved without actually being able to afford living there. It's a nice place, without being over the top or pretentious--though they're clearly people with very good taste who take pictures of themselves looking photogenic in culturally important locations. They are also the kind of people who don't keep any processed food around, and when they do, they put it in glass jars in the cupboard. (That's actually a good lesson for me, since I've already been making halfhearted attempts at living less on things that come from freezer sections and snack aisles.) I know they are doing me a favor by giving me this chance--and my committee member was right, it is really nice to be liberated from my own belongings, books, and distractions, but it's also left me feeling more than a little displaced as I muddle through the rest of my life at the moment. It's not a bad thing, and I'm certainly grateful, but I suppose I was hoping for a little, I don't know...inspiration? I mean, I've gotten a lot of reading done (this week, it's Rousseau's Confessions, Genette's Narrative Discourse, and a lot of guilt feelings about Tennyson), and it's not like I haven't been writing at all--it's just that the writing has mostly been notes on George Eliot novels and responses to my students' paper drafts. (At some point I would like to do a post on the amount of writing that goes into teaching comp--it's not something that I've seen covered before, but it's been on my mind, as several of my students have mentioned in conferences that they were pleasantly surprised that I read what they write and respond to it.)
What I really need to do is write my conference paper. There were a couple of minutes yesterday where I felt like the intro was coming together, so at least that's good.
I don't know what to do, though, about my larger feeling that I'm just existing. I mean, I do actually have things to blog about. For one thing, I saw The Professor last week. Those of you who came over from the last blog may remember the rather large role The Professor played in my life from mid-2006 until about six months ago, when he bailed on me as a friend shortly before my abortion. (Yeah, since my Ex doesn't have access to this space, I can just come right out with that one--but most of you know that already, and it still feels better just to have that in play, period--someday I'll do the narrative of what was by far *not* the worst thing to happen to me in 2007.) Anyway, he shows up late to the Victorian Seminar my department runs last Wednesday, and he's sporting this awful beard. Like, "adding ten years and the suspicion that you're kinda sketchy" awful. And in that moment, I realized I was completely over him. It was awesome. We did end up talking at dinner--almost like old times--but as we left, I felt this unfamiliar sensation--the sensation of feeling....nothing. It was good, but also contributes to my general detachment and coldness.
Bonus fallout from last Wednesday: an outburst of jealousy from Our Mutual Friend. This has always been kind of rumbling in the background, but it took several days and a certain finesse of emails to get it out. All I can say is, would that The Professor had ever found me "disconcertingly beautiful." My life would be much less complicated now. As it is, I find myself the object of a crush from someone I am just not attracted to and I feel guilty about it.
Tonight I had dinner with my old friend A. She is clearly worried about me. It's funny, though. Both The Professor and my friend J seem to think that I am doing well, but A doesn't buy it. I don't feel like I have much in common with her anymore. It's not so much the student thing. It's more living in Brooklyn on no money and not getting invited out and they're all busy being engaged to age-appropriate people while I go out with a dude who's not that much younger than my dad and who I can't really talk about with anyone. And everyone seems to have that friend they're going to introduce me to....
Is it wrong of me to just admit that I can't completely make myself happy, and that even waking up to --- is better than nothing, even though I know better?
I think I will appreciate my home when I return to it.
I know I have stopped making sense. I should post this and go to sleep so I can regret this in the morning.
I miss inspiration, though. The last time I felt it, really, was the brief period with the first married guy, whom I'll call the Evanescent K, currently playing the role of the self-proclaimed douchebag who avoids me in the library.
Discussion question: Am I scary? Because there are, apparently, plenty of dudes who think I am? Complication: My students apparently think I am fun and happy and nice all the time. I shocked one of them as we walked to class last week when I said that I sometimes yell at tourists who are moving too slowly on the sidewalk.
Yes, I have been drinking. I went home briefly on my way here to drop off books, check mail, and get my own towels, and decided to bring a bit of bourbon over here. But I can't judge alcohol when it's in a vitamin water bottle, apparently.
I am actually kind of homesick for my own apartment. I think that's a good thing.
3.03.2008
Sky Blue Sky
Last March was all Ides for me, really--I've been betrayed by so many of these mid-50-degree days walking down from Midtown past Bryant Park. It's worth remembering through all of this that 2007 wouldn't have hurt so much if there hadn't been so many bluesky days and letting yourself hope even though everything else was against it--and I remember how he and I talked each other in to believing in Spring even though we should have been smarter than that and this was the first time that someone asked me to save him from himself and I couldn't do it. And today for the first time I'm not wearing my winter coat--the black jacket and blue hoodie have come out and the sun is shining and somehow I have to write this conference paper and maybe it will all be okay today and I'll work steadily for the next nine hours and everything will be okay, okay, okay. How am I doing? I said something about being okay, less wretched, even if it's for the wrong reasons. I'm still willing to make certain compromises because it's nice to be admired by someone even if you can't introduce him to your friends or your mother. And it will never lead to the stomachdrop excitement and the almost manic bouts of confidence--and maybe that's okay, too, for now.
Wilco: I didn't die, I should be satisfied / I survived, that's good enough for now...
I'm justifying my late start at work by the fact that I was talking with my adviser about my conference paper. I have almost 40 pages of notes--not to mention the seminar paper I wrote a couple years ago on this poem--but I still haven't quite tricked myself into writing the paper. Hopefully with the rest of today, tomorrow evening after teaching, and Wednesday morning, this will come together. Though there are a couple of other things that need to get done.
Tentative plans--
Rousseau until about 3:30
Paper research / Writing from 3:30-8
Break to try to do the scanning stuff again. Ugh. Also delete some things from my school hard drive.
Back to writing until 10:30--try to have something that I can print.
Tuesday morning
Prep / Print / Verify Roster / Send email about the in-class essay / Grade the stray paper / Input grades so far / Make conference schedule
Work on conference paper and Rousseau while students are doing peer review and in the evening.
Wednesday - All conference paper, all the time
Except after all the 19th century stuff, when I should try to finish Rousseau
Thursday - Prep / Rousseau / pack for housesitting gig.
Wilco: I didn't die, I should be satisfied / I survived, that's good enough for now...
I'm justifying my late start at work by the fact that I was talking with my adviser about my conference paper. I have almost 40 pages of notes--not to mention the seminar paper I wrote a couple years ago on this poem--but I still haven't quite tricked myself into writing the paper. Hopefully with the rest of today, tomorrow evening after teaching, and Wednesday morning, this will come together. Though there are a couple of other things that need to get done.
Tentative plans--
Rousseau until about 3:30
Paper research / Writing from 3:30-8
Break to try to do the scanning stuff again. Ugh. Also delete some things from my school hard drive.
Back to writing until 10:30--try to have something that I can print.
Tuesday morning
Prep / Print / Verify Roster / Send email about the in-class essay / Grade the stray paper / Input grades so far / Make conference schedule
Work on conference paper and Rousseau while students are doing peer review and in the evening.
Wednesday - All conference paper, all the time
Except after all the 19th century stuff, when I should try to finish Rousseau
Thursday - Prep / Rousseau / pack for housesitting gig.
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