* 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.
Showing posts with label tmi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tmi. Show all posts
11.11.2008
10.05.2008
Guarded optimism and second chances
Around the beginning of the semester--which of course was also around the time I met J.--I spent a lot of time writing around a problem that I was beginning to notice in my personal life: namely, a huge disjunction between the way I experienced my life and the way I represented my life. One of the immediate triggers for this awareness was a conversation with K. where he kept trying to tell me I was an alcoholic and I realized that while I wasn't one, I was talking to him like I was. And I couldn't come up with a reason why that would be a good idea under any circumstances. In a broader sense, this was on my mind because the new school year seemed really to mark a new leaf for me professionally and academically--leaving the institutional fold of Erstwhile Teaching College for Not-NYU, being finished with coursework and orals, and having two forthcoming articles in hand. Moreover, I was coming up to the year anniversary of the semester that just about did me in, the shitstorm that came down before I had the chance to heal from my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. Mostly, I've told those stories and don't really need to go back.
And there, my friends, was the problem. Is the problem, more likely. I looked around at the beginning of the Fall of 2008 and realized that I was still the girl with all the fucked up stories, the girl sleeping with the married guy and probably more famous than she wanted to be for sharing the more sordid of her stories. In a sense, I started listening to myself a bit more and realized that I sounded kind of nuts.
For whatever reason, not much of this made the blog. I started to get into it in a couple of posts that I abandoned as they got increasingly complicated or whatever. Maybe I just didn't want to admit to some of it. And I think that when things seemed really good with J., it was easiest just to pretend that the rest of it never happened, that from now on everything was going to be fine &c.
We see, of course, how that turned out.
A lot of things happened in the last 36 hours or so. When the Xanax and zazen combination didn't work, I went to the bar on the next block for some $4 happy hour pints and read more of "The Angel in the House" and realized in the middle of all of it that sleeping with The Poet on Thursday had been a horrible, horrible mistake in part because I had been thinking about J. the whole time and after two beers I decided that I needed to text J. and tell him that. I saw it as a last ditch effort. What I couldn't get past all yesterday (Friday-yesterday) was the sense that I had done a horrible thing when I called him on Thursday and that I was engaged in an acute form of self-sabotage without even really knowing why. And not long after that I went home to eat junk food for dinner and catch up on my Thursday night TV and just forget about the whole thing. If nothing else, I told myself, I've learned that being with The Poet no longer solves all of my problems, and as much as I'd like to think differently (because he is kind, because he cares, because after the last six or seven months we achieved a very wonderful coexistence), he would never be able to be the person I need him to be.
But he did text me back, and with no small sense of trepidation and outright panic, I went to meet him on the Lower East Side at 1:00 in the morning.
It was a strange conversation and a stranger couple of hours. Probably one of the hardest conversations I've ever had to have with someone I barely know. I did a lot of apologizing and I don't think it was unjustified. I don't really want to go into the specifics (since that would, ironically, reinscribe and reproduce many of the impulses that got me here in the first place), but suffice it to say that I learned a lot of things about how I appear to other people (especially those who don't know me) and I also realized that I have a long way to go in figuring out how to deal with relationships. And a lot of what he called me out for can be related back to the problems I was writing about at the beginning, the experience vs. representation divide in my own life, and habits of speech and thought that have become kind of disturbingly entrenched over the last year and a half. It wasn't just the high awfulness of Thursday night, but things that were there from the very beginning, things that got exposed in part because that cleavage was there, that I had long since ceased to talk about myself in the way that I wanted to be.
But he came out to meet me anyway (and I him). I'm not sure either one of us knows why. And there's still a long way to go in any of this, and there were a lot of things that had to take place last night that were scary (beyond even the scariness of having someone call you out for everything you'd been feedback looping the self-recrimination about for the past three weeks), but I went through with it because I wanted to be with him. And it seems right and good and we've made some deals with each other (I hate to call them promises, exactly, not because they aren't but because that word seems overdetermined in this context) and I'm left just trying to do the best I can, holding on, relaxing, watching my speech, and trying to put myself back together again from these last couple of days. He's going to Montreal again this week, which means that I have no excuse for not writing my prospectus, prepping the next unit of my class, and all those other things that haven't been getting done. Also, of course, putting things right with The Poet in terms of not getting back together with him.
During the calling out, J. said to me, "You don't know how beautiful you are." But in a way that's almost impossible to parse. It wasn't meant to be flirtatious, it was almost sad and completely heartfelt, and that's one of the things that makes me nervous. It was nicer than when The Ex used to kind of browbeat me into confidence (which only succeeded in hollowing me out), but still...this moment sticks in my throat a little bit.
He's wonderful to fall asleep with, though. I was restless the first couple of times just because I'm used to mostly sleeping alone (and I almost never slept well with E. or The Poet), but it turns out that I can actually fall asleep while he's holding me. At least for a couple of hours. This in itself is immensely comforting, and I want it to bode well for something. Like I want to be my best self for him, to stop overcompensating for the hurts and traumas of 2007 and beyond. Even thought it's not going to be easy.
I don't know if I'll see him before he leaves for Canada. But I'm going to try to deal either way. And I'm still determined to go to the Village Zendo on Monday.
I may begin tomorrow with an eminently skippable prospectus-related post. Really must get back on track with that. And grading.
And there, my friends, was the problem. Is the problem, more likely. I looked around at the beginning of the Fall of 2008 and realized that I was still the girl with all the fucked up stories, the girl sleeping with the married guy and probably more famous than she wanted to be for sharing the more sordid of her stories. In a sense, I started listening to myself a bit more and realized that I sounded kind of nuts.
For whatever reason, not much of this made the blog. I started to get into it in a couple of posts that I abandoned as they got increasingly complicated or whatever. Maybe I just didn't want to admit to some of it. And I think that when things seemed really good with J., it was easiest just to pretend that the rest of it never happened, that from now on everything was going to be fine &c.
We see, of course, how that turned out.
A lot of things happened in the last 36 hours or so. When the Xanax and zazen combination didn't work, I went to the bar on the next block for some $4 happy hour pints and read more of "The Angel in the House" and realized in the middle of all of it that sleeping with The Poet on Thursday had been a horrible, horrible mistake in part because I had been thinking about J. the whole time and after two beers I decided that I needed to text J. and tell him that. I saw it as a last ditch effort. What I couldn't get past all yesterday (Friday-yesterday) was the sense that I had done a horrible thing when I called him on Thursday and that I was engaged in an acute form of self-sabotage without even really knowing why. And not long after that I went home to eat junk food for dinner and catch up on my Thursday night TV and just forget about the whole thing. If nothing else, I told myself, I've learned that being with The Poet no longer solves all of my problems, and as much as I'd like to think differently (because he is kind, because he cares, because after the last six or seven months we achieved a very wonderful coexistence), he would never be able to be the person I need him to be.
But he did text me back, and with no small sense of trepidation and outright panic, I went to meet him on the Lower East Side at 1:00 in the morning.
It was a strange conversation and a stranger couple of hours. Probably one of the hardest conversations I've ever had to have with someone I barely know. I did a lot of apologizing and I don't think it was unjustified. I don't really want to go into the specifics (since that would, ironically, reinscribe and reproduce many of the impulses that got me here in the first place), but suffice it to say that I learned a lot of things about how I appear to other people (especially those who don't know me) and I also realized that I have a long way to go in figuring out how to deal with relationships. And a lot of what he called me out for can be related back to the problems I was writing about at the beginning, the experience vs. representation divide in my own life, and habits of speech and thought that have become kind of disturbingly entrenched over the last year and a half. It wasn't just the high awfulness of Thursday night, but things that were there from the very beginning, things that got exposed in part because that cleavage was there, that I had long since ceased to talk about myself in the way that I wanted to be.
But he came out to meet me anyway (and I him). I'm not sure either one of us knows why. And there's still a long way to go in any of this, and there were a lot of things that had to take place last night that were scary (beyond even the scariness of having someone call you out for everything you'd been feedback looping the self-recrimination about for the past three weeks), but I went through with it because I wanted to be with him. And it seems right and good and we've made some deals with each other (I hate to call them promises, exactly, not because they aren't but because that word seems overdetermined in this context) and I'm left just trying to do the best I can, holding on, relaxing, watching my speech, and trying to put myself back together again from these last couple of days. He's going to Montreal again this week, which means that I have no excuse for not writing my prospectus, prepping the next unit of my class, and all those other things that haven't been getting done. Also, of course, putting things right with The Poet in terms of not getting back together with him.
During the calling out, J. said to me, "You don't know how beautiful you are." But in a way that's almost impossible to parse. It wasn't meant to be flirtatious, it was almost sad and completely heartfelt, and that's one of the things that makes me nervous. It was nicer than when The Ex used to kind of browbeat me into confidence (which only succeeded in hollowing me out), but still...this moment sticks in my throat a little bit.
He's wonderful to fall asleep with, though. I was restless the first couple of times just because I'm used to mostly sleeping alone (and I almost never slept well with E. or The Poet), but it turns out that I can actually fall asleep while he's holding me. At least for a couple of hours. This in itself is immensely comforting, and I want it to bode well for something. Like I want to be my best self for him, to stop overcompensating for the hurts and traumas of 2007 and beyond. Even thought it's not going to be easy.
I don't know if I'll see him before he leaves for Canada. But I'm going to try to deal either way. And I'm still determined to go to the Village Zendo on Monday.
I may begin tomorrow with an eminently skippable prospectus-related post. Really must get back on track with that. And grading.
4.25.2008
I was okay for a bit, but then I blinked
The week after the conference was great. And then, the slide again. Today has been a full-on nervous breakdown, the reactivation of every possible abandonment issue, the occasional and necessary collapse that happens when, like me, you find yourself cobbling together the scraps of relationships to try to approximate something like what you used to believe you could get from one person--isn't that the way these things are supposed to go? And it's why you can't go sit in the park anymore all the daddies and nannies and couples and the old Pakistani man who walks up to you and starts asking you personal questions because you obviously deserve it, being there by yourself, and they always say that I shouldn't put up with the things I put up with, but most of the time I am on guard against asking too much of people--the Ex and the Professor (who may be returning to ex-best friend status and he will no doubt blame me for it) always have a way of making me feel like I'm asking too much and I'm hoping to get a job at this law firm for a couple of days a week this summer not because I entirely have to (the money will be nice, but my parents would have tided me over) but because I am scared of being in this apartment every day this summer and I also think I need to be in Wisconsin on my birthday because it's a Saturday and The Poet spends weekends in New Jersey because he has to and I don't want to run the risk of planning something that sucks or of being alone because I'm too beaten down to plan anything so hopefully I'll just leave town so it won't be an issue and goddamm it what was I thinking even for a minute that I could care so much about someone who can't see me on the weekends and that's where it all began because I realized I cared and then instead of making things less miserable its making things worse and I'm not going to have any friends to introduce to my mom next week and I'll just be hanging around by myself at my brother's wedding because apparently I ask too much and never, never enough and I need to stop this because I have a lot of reading to do and then grading tomorrow and I have to keep running, running, running...
(The Poet called me just now--I'd sent him an email that was basically just like, "I'm having a nervous breakdown, tell me something that will make me feel better"--and I'm feeling a bit calmer. At least he's steady, kind of unshockable in certain ways. But i'll still be ten days or so before I see him again.)
Anyway. Time to pull myself together once again--this is part of what it means to be the other woman, that you are always dressing better than you feel--time to throw myself out into the world, maybe stop by the coffeeshop, go to school to pick up my check, mainly just stay in the world away from myself, read Dobell, Mill, and Swinburne, maybe also some Shelley(s).
You know, I do realize I don't lack friends and that there are many people who would be perefectly happy to go out for a drink with me tonight or grab dinner. But I don't have the energy to find out who.
(The Poet called me just now--I'd sent him an email that was basically just like, "I'm having a nervous breakdown, tell me something that will make me feel better"--and I'm feeling a bit calmer. At least he's steady, kind of unshockable in certain ways. But i'll still be ten days or so before I see him again.)
Anyway. Time to pull myself together once again--this is part of what it means to be the other woman, that you are always dressing better than you feel--time to throw myself out into the world, maybe stop by the coffeeshop, go to school to pick up my check, mainly just stay in the world away from myself, read Dobell, Mill, and Swinburne, maybe also some Shelley(s).
You know, I do realize I don't lack friends and that there are many people who would be perefectly happy to go out for a drink with me tonight or grab dinner. But I don't have the energy to find out who.
3.19.2008
Early to bed, early to...well, at least I woke up before the Brian Lehrer Show came on
(I'm trying to begin my days by blogging or at least journaling. Partly to remind myself to balance reading with writing. Also partly because if I don't write out some of this stuff I either brood about it and fail to work or I feel the need to tell people who don't necessarily need to know it.)
So I really thought that I was going to get up and start working at 6:30 or 7:00 this morning. When I rolled over it was 9:23 and I had been having one of my bizarrely crowded Wisconsin-related dreams. My whole family was at the house and then some. And K kept calling me but we never really ended up talking. Or he might have actually been there. I checked my messages when I got up this morning just in case this particular disturbance was occasioned by him rather than me. (We did have a sort of hurried and possibly planned on his part encounter in the library on Friday, but Friday was really complicated.) In retrospect, I realize the entire scenario was absurd because I don't get cell phone reception in Wisconsin. (Not the whole state, just where we are.) Or it might have been partially in St Louis. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that some of the characters from Friday Night Lights were there.
The point is that, in spite of my best intentions, I was in a dead sleep until 9:23. I must not have even heard the alarm go off. I think I need to get one of those alarm clocks that makes the room brighter because my bedroom doesn't actually have any windows. It's fine because I keep the door open to the living room, but when it's raining (like today) or just plain dark in the room, things can be pretty bleak. This may also be a necessity if I get that adjuncting job that would have me teaching composition in the Village at 8:00 in the morning.
Why I thought that it would even be possible for me to get up at 6:30 and start working requires a slightly longer explanation. For what it's worth, that's what I did yesterday. But let's go back to Sunday. On Sunday, I gratefully returned to my own home. Not that housesitting wasn't fun, but I was definitely ready to come back home. Also, the cleaning crew showed up at around 9:30 while I was in the shower. Granted, this was an improvement over their having woken me up at 8:25 on Friday morning, but it still increased my desire to head back to Crown Heights, especially since the information I had was that they were coming "midday." Anyway, I reestablished myself at home, then turned right around to go back to school, where I got about half of my grading done (the reading of the papers, but not the commenting or deciding grades) as well as a few other things, all with no awkward or painful run-ins with K. What did not get done, however, was grocery shopping, as somehow by the time I got back to Brooklyn, the Key Food, the fruit stand, and the overpriced yet okay in a pinch bodega fronting as a grocery store were all closed. Determined not to spend more money and time eating out, I went home to scrape together a meal from my extremely bare cupboards.
That turned out to be a mistake. Something I ate, whether the defrosted lentil soup from a couple of weeks ago, the frozen blueberries I had for dessert, or (as I suspect) a couple bites of tahini while the soup was heating up gave me stupid food poisoning. The irony of throwing up at 7:00 in the morning after my first night of sobriety in a week did not escape me.
So that kind of killed Monday. I cancelled my appearance at my field meeting, dragged myself across the street for ginger ale and a single sleeve of saltines that cost me $1.99, and resolved to wait the thing out until I could work again. That never happened. But, as a result, I ended up going to bed at around 9 and getting up at 5:30, and proceeding to work basically a 12-hour day, not including the commuting to teach. I got all the prep done, but had to take about two and a half hours after class to finish the grading. (That was too long, I realize.) After a trip to Target on my way home (I had to get some basic food as well as pens, as I completely ran out of stupid pens over the weekend, too), I was pretty exhausted, so I figured I'd just go to bed early again and get up early again.
Well, thus endeth that experiment. I kind of knew I was sunk last night when, despite being unable to keep my eyes open for even one more page of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, I found myself unable to stop tossing and turning. And I think my sleep was fitful, at best, especially if I was having those kinds of dreams. And I think my plans for the day were at best overly optimistic. If it continunes to rain, I'm not going ot the grocery store either. It's far enough away to be a pain in the ass and enough of a shithole not to be worth it if it's raining. This doesn't bode well for my newly-formed resolution to eat fewer processed foods and do more cooking, but, well, I live in the hood. People here clearly don't *want* decent grocery stores. And no matter what A. says, not all of us can just zip up to the Union Square Whole Foods to grab some fish. My friend M says she's going to start bringing me to the Fort Greene Farmer's Market to meet both seasonal produce and age-appropriate single boys. That may help get this resolution off the ground. I may also start trying to patronize the Flatbush Co-Op that I just read about, but not until my conference paper is written. That kind of excursion would also entail a fairly high probability of running into the K, since as best I can remember, it's basically around the corner from his house. Brilliant.
Yes, I realize this was an incredibly boring post, and one that's probably not going to be improved if I mention things like having rearranged my living room furniture, deciding that I need to slightly alter my approach to orals note taking, or saying that my plans for the day involve adding Victorian women poets to one of my orals lists, typing notes for Rousseau, and writing a draft of my Tennyson paper.
On the other hand, this may all be a fascinating placeholder for some of the other things that are going on. I'm still a bit emotionally hung over from Friday. For some reason, it was just so damn *complicated.* Suffice it to say that I did not, for example, expect Thursday night to end the way it did. It was something I'd thought about in a general sense, but apparently I'll do all kinds of things after that many drinks. (I haven't decide if I'm blogging that in full yet.) The morning was weird and restless, even when I had a decent seat for a couple hours at West Village Coffee Shop, then school was a bizarre series of run-ins. Not just the K, but some dude that I know from a completely different social circle and had an awkward non-sexual night with in December (I actually just saw and avoided him, feeling cowardly). And, potentially, at the back of the room where our recruitment event was being held, someone who may actually be responsible for the absolute worst thing that happened to me last year, something that I have told very few people about and may never blog. Plus a bunch of other encounters, renewals of friendships, long discussions--well, suffice it to say all I did during the day on Friday was sleep on the couch where I was housesitting and finish Confessions.
Anyway. I do have a lot of things to do today that I should probably start on, especially since I'm not into my fourth hour of work like I thought I was going to be, and also because I am seeing the Poet (my new pseudonym for the guy I don't really know how to talk about since he is absolutely 100% wrong for me and far too old and probably deserves to have a reputation as kind of an ass and yet makes me fairly happy at least in the sort of half-relationship that is all I am able or willing to have with him) tomorrow night which means I really must dispense with most of Rousseau today.
Okay, working.
So I really thought that I was going to get up and start working at 6:30 or 7:00 this morning. When I rolled over it was 9:23 and I had been having one of my bizarrely crowded Wisconsin-related dreams. My whole family was at the house and then some. And K kept calling me but we never really ended up talking. Or he might have actually been there. I checked my messages when I got up this morning just in case this particular disturbance was occasioned by him rather than me. (We did have a sort of hurried and possibly planned on his part encounter in the library on Friday, but Friday was really complicated.) In retrospect, I realize the entire scenario was absurd because I don't get cell phone reception in Wisconsin. (Not the whole state, just where we are.) Or it might have been partially in St Louis. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that some of the characters from Friday Night Lights were there.
The point is that, in spite of my best intentions, I was in a dead sleep until 9:23. I must not have even heard the alarm go off. I think I need to get one of those alarm clocks that makes the room brighter because my bedroom doesn't actually have any windows. It's fine because I keep the door open to the living room, but when it's raining (like today) or just plain dark in the room, things can be pretty bleak. This may also be a necessity if I get that adjuncting job that would have me teaching composition in the Village at 8:00 in the morning.
Why I thought that it would even be possible for me to get up at 6:30 and start working requires a slightly longer explanation. For what it's worth, that's what I did yesterday. But let's go back to Sunday. On Sunday, I gratefully returned to my own home. Not that housesitting wasn't fun, but I was definitely ready to come back home. Also, the cleaning crew showed up at around 9:30 while I was in the shower. Granted, this was an improvement over their having woken me up at 8:25 on Friday morning, but it still increased my desire to head back to Crown Heights, especially since the information I had was that they were coming "midday." Anyway, I reestablished myself at home, then turned right around to go back to school, where I got about half of my grading done (the reading of the papers, but not the commenting or deciding grades) as well as a few other things, all with no awkward or painful run-ins with K. What did not get done, however, was grocery shopping, as somehow by the time I got back to Brooklyn, the Key Food, the fruit stand, and the overpriced yet okay in a pinch bodega fronting as a grocery store were all closed. Determined not to spend more money and time eating out, I went home to scrape together a meal from my extremely bare cupboards.
That turned out to be a mistake. Something I ate, whether the defrosted lentil soup from a couple of weeks ago, the frozen blueberries I had for dessert, or (as I suspect) a couple bites of tahini while the soup was heating up gave me stupid food poisoning. The irony of throwing up at 7:00 in the morning after my first night of sobriety in a week did not escape me.
So that kind of killed Monday. I cancelled my appearance at my field meeting, dragged myself across the street for ginger ale and a single sleeve of saltines that cost me $1.99, and resolved to wait the thing out until I could work again. That never happened. But, as a result, I ended up going to bed at around 9 and getting up at 5:30, and proceeding to work basically a 12-hour day, not including the commuting to teach. I got all the prep done, but had to take about two and a half hours after class to finish the grading. (That was too long, I realize.) After a trip to Target on my way home (I had to get some basic food as well as pens, as I completely ran out of stupid pens over the weekend, too), I was pretty exhausted, so I figured I'd just go to bed early again and get up early again.
Well, thus endeth that experiment. I kind of knew I was sunk last night when, despite being unable to keep my eyes open for even one more page of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, I found myself unable to stop tossing and turning. And I think my sleep was fitful, at best, especially if I was having those kinds of dreams. And I think my plans for the day were at best overly optimistic. If it continunes to rain, I'm not going ot the grocery store either. It's far enough away to be a pain in the ass and enough of a shithole not to be worth it if it's raining. This doesn't bode well for my newly-formed resolution to eat fewer processed foods and do more cooking, but, well, I live in the hood. People here clearly don't *want* decent grocery stores. And no matter what A. says, not all of us can just zip up to the Union Square Whole Foods to grab some fish. My friend M says she's going to start bringing me to the Fort Greene Farmer's Market to meet both seasonal produce and age-appropriate single boys. That may help get this resolution off the ground. I may also start trying to patronize the Flatbush Co-Op that I just read about, but not until my conference paper is written. That kind of excursion would also entail a fairly high probability of running into the K, since as best I can remember, it's basically around the corner from his house. Brilliant.
Yes, I realize this was an incredibly boring post, and one that's probably not going to be improved if I mention things like having rearranged my living room furniture, deciding that I need to slightly alter my approach to orals note taking, or saying that my plans for the day involve adding Victorian women poets to one of my orals lists, typing notes for Rousseau, and writing a draft of my Tennyson paper.
On the other hand, this may all be a fascinating placeholder for some of the other things that are going on. I'm still a bit emotionally hung over from Friday. For some reason, it was just so damn *complicated.* Suffice it to say that I did not, for example, expect Thursday night to end the way it did. It was something I'd thought about in a general sense, but apparently I'll do all kinds of things after that many drinks. (I haven't decide if I'm blogging that in full yet.) The morning was weird and restless, even when I had a decent seat for a couple hours at West Village Coffee Shop, then school was a bizarre series of run-ins. Not just the K, but some dude that I know from a completely different social circle and had an awkward non-sexual night with in December (I actually just saw and avoided him, feeling cowardly). And, potentially, at the back of the room where our recruitment event was being held, someone who may actually be responsible for the absolute worst thing that happened to me last year, something that I have told very few people about and may never blog. Plus a bunch of other encounters, renewals of friendships, long discussions--well, suffice it to say all I did during the day on Friday was sleep on the couch where I was housesitting and finish Confessions.
Anyway. I do have a lot of things to do today that I should probably start on, especially since I'm not into my fourth hour of work like I thought I was going to be, and also because I am seeing the Poet (my new pseudonym for the guy I don't really know how to talk about since he is absolutely 100% wrong for me and far too old and probably deserves to have a reputation as kind of an ass and yet makes me fairly happy at least in the sort of half-relationship that is all I am able or willing to have with him) tomorrow night which means I really must dispense with most of Rousseau today.
Okay, working.
2.17.2008
Sunday night confessional
(I can do this now that my ex isn't tracking my every textual move, you know.)
* I think Cashmere Mafia is a great show.
* I cried on the train home from the library, and now I know why I felt so awful last week and it makes me angry. But I've decided it no longer matters why I'm mad.
* It's hard to think about the sublime when all I feel is dejection. I hope that will change, or I'll at least forget about it.
* I've now gone longer without having sex than I have at any point since before I met my ex. I realize this sounds kind of obnoxious. I think what bothers me the most is the fear that the longer I go without having sex, the more meaningful it will be when I do have it again, or I will have lost my nerve. I think, obviously, we would all like to find ourselves having not-entirely-meaningless sex (okay, maybe not all of us), but going into it expecting meaning seems to me like courting disaster. I think my happiness depends a great deal on stringing out the casual-ness as long as possible: once things start to have meaning, once I tell you I like you, then it's all over. I'm beginning to think that what changes is less the other person's behavior, but more its weight--that is, what would just be a forgivable, dismissable, par-for-the-course-what-did-you-expect incident when you haven't given anything to the other person somehow becomes dealbreakingly inhuman after you admit to even liking them. I'm merely trying to identify the part over which I have some modicum of control.
* The obnoxious reversal on the foregoing is that I'm far too fragile and emotionally run down for one-night stands anyway. So I'm kind of stuck and I hate it. That's not why I cried tonight, but if anyone asks, it is.
* I think Cashmere Mafia is a great show.
* I cried on the train home from the library, and now I know why I felt so awful last week and it makes me angry. But I've decided it no longer matters why I'm mad.
* It's hard to think about the sublime when all I feel is dejection. I hope that will change, or I'll at least forget about it.
* I've now gone longer without having sex than I have at any point since before I met my ex. I realize this sounds kind of obnoxious. I think what bothers me the most is the fear that the longer I go without having sex, the more meaningful it will be when I do have it again, or I will have lost my nerve. I think, obviously, we would all like to find ourselves having not-entirely-meaningless sex (okay, maybe not all of us), but going into it expecting meaning seems to me like courting disaster. I think my happiness depends a great deal on stringing out the casual-ness as long as possible: once things start to have meaning, once I tell you I like you, then it's all over. I'm beginning to think that what changes is less the other person's behavior, but more its weight--that is, what would just be a forgivable, dismissable, par-for-the-course-what-did-you-expect incident when you haven't given anything to the other person somehow becomes dealbreakingly inhuman after you admit to even liking them. I'm merely trying to identify the part over which I have some modicum of control.
* The obnoxious reversal on the foregoing is that I'm far too fragile and emotionally run down for one-night stands anyway. So I'm kind of stuck and I hate it. That's not why I cried tonight, but if anyone asks, it is.
2.11.2008
Independence Day
It was a year ago--February 11, 2007, that I walked out on D. and ended our relationship.
I know that I'm better off without him--there has been exactly one time in the past year--and that after another superlow point--that I thought otherwise, so don't get me wrong. But there are times in which I have to say, if this counts as better, than our relationship was pretty bad. Which, in many ways, it was.
I feel like I should mark the day in some way. Not, of course, by making the formal announcement at the other blog--that would be too easy, and besides, I already pulled that one when I shut down my LiveJournal on February 12.
I do have to say I don't feel the power that I usually do at this time of the year. (I broke up with R., my first college boyfriend, on February 12, 2000, for instance, and of course I met my ex on Feburary 10, 2002.) It could just be an off-year or, equally probable, I have nearly refined my personal life out of existence. Sad but true. There are two big dangers here. One is getting fat. The other is getting bored enough to do something stupid. The former I can be a bit proactive with, in terms of forcing myself to the gym at the college where I teach whenever I'm there and making a point of going at least one or two other times in the week. (Like tomorrow.) The second? Well, nothing can really happy until I get rid of my latest "more or less innocuous but still more or less kinda gross and embarrassing" problem that keeps me going back to Planned Parenthood (seriously, I see the people there more than I see most of my friends, but my friends are not quite as intimate with my cervix--whoops? TMI? And even before the blog-warming party I'm planning to throw myself. Um, anyway.), but once that's solved...well, as long as I keep on that beaten path between my home, teaching college, and school, I should be okay. Well, unless I get really bored and decide to do something with the dude in my program who's over 50 and bears more than a passing resemblance to Brad Leland, the actor who plays Buddy Garrity on Friday Night Lights (which I am totally obsessed with now, thanks to hulu.com--the girl who plays his daughter, Lyla, is pretty amazing in being able to pull off perfection and absolute soullessness and self-loathing), except that he's a poet and a socialist. But, um, yeah. I know I don't need to go there.
And yet. The Lawyer isn't particularly following through on his promise to find me a friend of his to meet. I see K (who merits his own blog post one of these days) in the library at least three times a week (I'm there more often; he isn't) and tonight I asked him if he knew any *single* guys (we note the emphasis, yes we do) and he said he would have to think about someone who would be both "worthy" of me and "not afraid of" me. I asked him if he was afraid of me, and he said yes. I think we're going to have to have the conversation soon about why I remain not totally his friend. I also miss The Lawyer because he wasn't afraid of me.
It's clear I am getting no more Wordsworth notes transcribed tonight. I should stop drinking wine and go to bed. I would like to get up early so I can have time to work and edit the talk on Wilde that I am giving at noon tomorrow and also think about the discussion I have to lead at 4. I have a feeling I may end up being the only person reading PMLA in the gym at teaching college tomorrow.
I want to believe that I will write more interestingly here than I did there. But bear with me. I'm repressing a lot right now--the shit in Kirkwood, knowing what day it is and all, starting to stress about certain professional commitments, and a general lonliness / solitude that makes me just enervated enough to not use my time wisely and blog stuff like this. So now I'm going to bed while the wind beats against my windows. Last night it was about 40 outside and 125 in here.
I know that I'm better off without him--there has been exactly one time in the past year--and that after another superlow point--that I thought otherwise, so don't get me wrong. But there are times in which I have to say, if this counts as better, than our relationship was pretty bad. Which, in many ways, it was.
I feel like I should mark the day in some way. Not, of course, by making the formal announcement at the other blog--that would be too easy, and besides, I already pulled that one when I shut down my LiveJournal on February 12.
I do have to say I don't feel the power that I usually do at this time of the year. (I broke up with R., my first college boyfriend, on February 12, 2000, for instance, and of course I met my ex on Feburary 10, 2002.) It could just be an off-year or, equally probable, I have nearly refined my personal life out of existence. Sad but true. There are two big dangers here. One is getting fat. The other is getting bored enough to do something stupid. The former I can be a bit proactive with, in terms of forcing myself to the gym at the college where I teach whenever I'm there and making a point of going at least one or two other times in the week. (Like tomorrow.) The second? Well, nothing can really happy until I get rid of my latest "more or less innocuous but still more or less kinda gross and embarrassing" problem that keeps me going back to Planned Parenthood (seriously, I see the people there more than I see most of my friends, but my friends are not quite as intimate with my cervix--whoops? TMI? And even before the blog-warming party I'm planning to throw myself. Um, anyway.), but once that's solved...well, as long as I keep on that beaten path between my home, teaching college, and school, I should be okay. Well, unless I get really bored and decide to do something with the dude in my program who's over 50 and bears more than a passing resemblance to Brad Leland, the actor who plays Buddy Garrity on Friday Night Lights (which I am totally obsessed with now, thanks to hulu.com--the girl who plays his daughter, Lyla, is pretty amazing in being able to pull off perfection and absolute soullessness and self-loathing), except that he's a poet and a socialist. But, um, yeah. I know I don't need to go there.
And yet. The Lawyer isn't particularly following through on his promise to find me a friend of his to meet. I see K (who merits his own blog post one of these days) in the library at least three times a week (I'm there more often; he isn't) and tonight I asked him if he knew any *single* guys (we note the emphasis, yes we do) and he said he would have to think about someone who would be both "worthy" of me and "not afraid of" me. I asked him if he was afraid of me, and he said yes. I think we're going to have to have the conversation soon about why I remain not totally his friend. I also miss The Lawyer because he wasn't afraid of me.
It's clear I am getting no more Wordsworth notes transcribed tonight. I should stop drinking wine and go to bed. I would like to get up early so I can have time to work and edit the talk on Wilde that I am giving at noon tomorrow and also think about the discussion I have to lead at 4. I have a feeling I may end up being the only person reading PMLA in the gym at teaching college tomorrow.
I want to believe that I will write more interestingly here than I did there. But bear with me. I'm repressing a lot right now--the shit in Kirkwood, knowing what day it is and all, starting to stress about certain professional commitments, and a general lonliness / solitude that makes me just enervated enough to not use my time wisely and blog stuff like this. So now I'm going to bed while the wind beats against my windows. Last night it was about 40 outside and 125 in here.
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