Crossing (another) bar

I passed my orals on Wednesday, with distinction. I'm happy, but still pretty exhausted. Lots of socializing that night, and an amazing time with The Poet last night and this morning. But people today told me I looked more relaxed, so perhaps not reading for my orals is agreeing with me.

I ran into The Professor in the Strand, which is funny for reasons I'm not going to write about here. This was good--I was able to make sure he wasn't mad at me.

The fears have lifted, at least for now. A lot's still up in the air about the summer, the fall, and all the rest, but the tired is just tired, not scared, not frustrated. I don't have to keep my arms wrapped so tightly around my body. And one of the really amazing things about the last few days--the last week and a half, even, was being reminded of friendships and people wanting to be my friend, and being able to be friends to people. Even if it's just a matter of some strategic Facebooking. It makes me feel less isolated, and though it doesn't keep all the demons and desires back, it makes a nice break occasionally. (Interlude: I worked in the library on Monday and walked past K there. I didn't talk to him, but I felt his presence in my entire body. It was the most vivid physical sensation I had all week.) Oh, and it was actually really cool that E. remembered my exam and emailed to check in on Thursday--I mean, I know he had to put it on some calendar, but even so--I'd only mentioned it in passing when we were emailing around his birthday.

I'm off to Wisconsin in the morning. I should really pack for that, but instead I'm trying to sort through several enormous piles of paper while watching Dirt online. I should probably also sleep. I'm trying to make this a real rest / vacation--while I do need to hit the ground running when I get home, I don't have anything that has to be done before the end of the month, so I'll let the ideas come slowly. I'm not even taking any theory with me--just the first volume of Richard Holmes' biography of Coleridge, a book on Zen practice that The Poet gave me, and the last two issues of the New York Review of Books. Okay, I may get jittery and throw in some Trollope. But, seriously--I'm not bringing anything crazy like de Man or Nancy. That's huge.

The other thing I will be doing--probably not so much when I'm in the woods, of course--is beginning to repair some of the relationships that got crushed under the juggernaut of reading and other stress. There are phone calls to return, Facebook messages to reply to, and hanging out to be done. Hopefully the summer will be good for that.

I'm also turning 28 tomorrow--well, in about 10 minutes, actually. I hope that being 28 is less stressful than being 27.

A quick sigh

I'm about to read a couple of chapters out of D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police for my impending orals.

I wish I could tell The Professor, and I hope he'll still be my friend when all of this is over.

Also, briefly: am pretty sure I made it through the dept. party last night without doing or saying anything untoward (at least not that anyone will remember). With that being said, I am pretty sure I met a few people whose existence I only knew about from Facebook--you know, the people who know like 30 of the same people that you do, but you have no idea who they are--and that might have been creepy. I know I told a handful of people I was sleeping with The Poet, but no one who I think would super-care. I'm not sure how I ended up with a bottle of wine at the end of the night, since I was mostly drinking whisky. It was a good party, but an encounter I had in the library right before reminded me of how much of this is a play of surfaces. Was also reminded of that when I saw that I didn't make either of the committees I was running for. (I'm the alternate for one that was actually reasonably competitive, but the people who made it aren't the types to flake.) There is an element of the races I was in that felt like a bit of a beauty contest, but I'm trying not to care too much. After all, I do run my own club and can be pretty sure that I will do so unchallenged until I graduate. And lots of good people got other good spots. But, yeah, there was that brief high school moment when they posted all that.

Also, I woke up today with that tickle in my throat and the utter exhaustion of an impending cold. So it's been rather terrifyingly unproductive in these parts today (hence the sitting down to read Miller at 11:00)--it's too bad that "blogs that recap the Babysitters Club and other YA series with plenty of snark" is not one of my three lists, as I did quite a bit of that today. I am sure I will be fine on Wednesday regardless of what happens, even if I stopped reading now. But I won't, and I do really want to get to the rest of Excitable Speech and at least read the periperformative chapter from Sedgwick's Touching Feeling, and I haven't braindumped the vast majority of my poetry readings. Ideally, all I will do on Wednesday before my exam at 4 will be to grade my students' papers, turn in grades, and just think and outline my preliminary remarks. Though I have a feeling I might be re-reading Jude The Obscure instead.

I also probably need to raise a posse for Wednesday after the exam, as The Poet double-booked himself and won't be able to see me until Thursday, most likely. (This too is slightly irritating because there was something else I wanted to do then, but it involves school people and judging from people's reactions last night I think doing something deliberately where we will be seen together may be more trouble than it's worth. I mostly just hope the cold clears up.

I'm turning 28 a week from today and will be in Wisconsin when that happens. Butterburgers and fruit wine will be involved. Mostly, I'm just hoping that being 28 is better than being 27, as being 27 has pretty much sucked all around.

(Speaking of birthdays: because I have no sense of my own best interest ever, I did end up emailing E. on Monday. He seemed genuinely happy to hear from me--I was willing for it to be a 2-email exchange, but he kept asking questions. We may get together in June.)

Okay, Miller. Sigh.

Another Friday, in disjointed form

I'm feeling better today than I've felt on recent Fridays. Possibly the big change being that I woke up to a mouse poop-free kitchen this morning. The Poet helped me pull out the stove yesterday morning to figure out where the mice were coming from, and I sealed up the hole with some tinfoil and about a gallon of caulk. (Left over from when my mom was here and the soap dish fell off the wall in the shower.) And, at least for now, this is holding. That was easier than I expected it to be, but it's still the kind of thing that needed another person and a leveler head than mine to force me to deal with it. I mean, I would have figured something out eventually, but I'm sure this would have ended up being a huge, distracting, and stressful issue.

And that, my dears, is why I need people in my life.

If I can stay in this mood--not exultantly great, but not churningly miserable--for the next five days until my exam, then I should be okay. The exam itself will probably be anti-climactic, but I do feel a little bit crunched with the Victorian lists, in terms of secondary and theoretical sources. I'm also somewhat regretting my decision to put Robert Elsmere on my list, but finishing it seems (irritatingly) central to my Victorianist street cred. So I press onward with Mrs. Humphrey Ward.

The big intellectual realization of the last couple of days has been a sense that I'm entering a new (and smarter) phase in my relationship to theory. Like, all of the sudden it's fun in all kinds of new ways because I have a better working knowledge of Hegel and Kant. And so de Man and Bataille suddenly make sense. That was kind of cool. I'm also really enjoying Judith Butler's Excitable Speech. I've--embarrassingly, perhaps--managed to get four years into an English PhD without ever reading Butler until now--I mean, certainly, I get the whole performativity thing--but this book is pretty damn good so far. And I can feel the ideas starting to take shape in my head: the dissertation, the articles that I have to start on when I get home from Wisconsin, and so on. It feels good, but everything I do is also edged with a bit of fear and doubt, too. Self-doubt: not so much that I lack the ability to carry this out but more that I don't trust my brain not to keep turning against me, not to collapse like it has so many times recently, not to get distracted. Fear: what if none of the paying jobs for the summer and fall work out? I can't get through the summer on $2500. I hate worrying about money, worrying about the logistics of feeding myself sometimes. (One of the best things I did for my work this past week was order a pizza that I ate for a couple of days--but I'd like to not get fat this summer.) And so on. I'm not going to dwell. I need to get back to work soon--I don't have a lot of time today, since I have to leave for school around 2:30-3:00.

It's the department party tonight. Last semester, I made a big deal about being very careful not to get drunk and do anything stupid--I even skipped all the afterparties--and that's the night I met The Poet because I told him I liked the poem he'd read. Which is either the most or the least stupid thing I've ever done at one of these things.

He was very kind to me on Wednesday. But there are times when I think the strain will be too much. But this is a better Friday than I've had lately. He's sending me some beginning Zen books to read while I'm in Wisconsin.

I sometimes wish I could love him--that's what that was, last month, almost an attempt at a performative, a self-projection. On a certain level, this would all be so much easier if I loved him. It would help explain why I'm doing all of this. Maybe I will find at some point that I do love him, and that realization will help at least to retroactively transform some of the darkness of this past couple of months. Sometimes I come close when I am with him, but I am never fully off the razor edge. It's still lacerating to admit that I did love K.--and you can say all you want about how of course I would love him because he's the super-inaccessible married guy and of course that's what I always go for: if I think back to the submerged moment, back in October, where all of this became possible, when I felt something drop in my stomach: it was before I knew he was married, and my biggest worry was still, ugh, I can't be with anyone who's a student here.

But of course, if he really wanted to do me a favor he would have left me alone.

I'm not going down this road today. I have to write out some questions for the Romanticism portion of the exam, and do a bunch of Victorian poetry stuff. I wish the weather were less disgusting so I could wear my dress.

I haven't talked to The Professor since Sunday. I feel bad about this because for once it wasn't totally about him. (Though it was a little bit, just not the initial thing that made me angry / sad.) I keep wanting to email him again, but at this point I may just have to wait until my exam is over, keep working without hanging out with him.

I kind of miss my students already, but not enough to grade their final papers today.

Brilliant

I've started to read XKCD more and more often and have, of course, been slowly falling in love with it. One of the quirks that I didn't realize at first was that there's always a message/punchline/commentary when you hover the mouse over the image. But that seems to only work if you look at it on the actual site, at least unless you possess greater html skills than I do. So I'll just give you the hidden text in this one: "The question with Lucy and the football was always whether, on some level, she believed the things she said."

Awesome.

See also: Jealousy and Journal #2 for more of why I love this.

Today would have been reasonably okay if I hadn't come home after my committee member meeting to find a bunch of mouse shit in my kitchen. I'm horrified by the whole thing, but I can't really lay out a trap or anything unless I have someone on speed dial who will come over and take care of it for me. There are a lot of things I can deal with reasonably calmly. Vermin is not one of them. Like so many things in my life, this is something that both isn't my fault and feels like my fault.

"I keep making these to-do lists but nothing gets crossed out"

In that spirit, two passages I will try to live by, at least until my orals are over.

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air your breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.” --John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

“The moment the innocence or authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into question, a far from harmless process gets underway. It may start as a casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unraveled and comes apart. The whole process happens at an unsettling speed.” --Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality"

I am trying to be better today. It's another one that's all cold and gray and pissing rain; at least this time I'm not going outside much, maybe just to the bodega-like grocery story a block away because I could use soy milk and more coffee and probably some lunch.

I want creative work that's something more than self-immolation as performance art.

With less than ten days to go before my exam, I fail miserably at pulling myself together

You know those days that kind of lull you into a false sense of security that makes you think that--even if you know the goodness is only temporary, you don't have to know it in a conscious sense--so you start to relax a bit and have a couple of good thoughts and start to process everything that's gone on in your head and your heart and then all the sudden the day just turns on you and you're on the train crying on your way home?

This was one of those days.

As per my Facebook status of the past few days, I don't really want to talk about it. What's the point, really? It's not that there's much that can be done, when it comes down to it. It's mostly just having to face the reality of my not being particularly good friendship material. In a lot of senses. I'm good at being marginal, the person you see every now and then, I'm apparently great at being the mistress, as well as the girl you'll hang out with until you get an actual girlfriend and then you can't hang out with me anymore. When it happens, it won't be the first time. And you, like K. and E. and so many people I knew when I was in college, will have the satisfaction of waking up to her every morning and looking around and knowing that you did the right thing even though it was hard at the time and no hard feelings, etc. And the story ends with you living happily ever after and I, as K put it in an email to me this week, go on to "negotiate [my] other ethically questionable relationships." Because somehow, as The Professor said and didn't mean to say but kind of did because it sounded so right didn't it--if it happened twice, then it must be my fault.

I was already kind of depressed and a little bit angry, but that's the thing that made me cry.

Do I break up with The Poet simply because I realized this week that I'm not in love with him, and because he's married and all of that? But he calls in to check with me to see how I am. I think he might love me and maybe that's enough right now--at any rate, it's all I can muster--I can barely return phone calls, when they come--especially with the time of the semester and the time of my orals.

Here's my paradox: I'm not hot enough to be your girlfriend, but I'm too hot to be your friend. The "you" here isn't referential--it's the same paradox I've been caught in for years, minus the five-year suspension when I was in an increasingly abusive relationship with someone who was constantly berating me to have more confidence while trying to undermine the things I did have confidence in. So excuse me if I'm a little bit fucked up about this right now.

What I will miss about K is not the sex. That only happened a handful of times; I knew I wasn't going to sleep with him on Monday, and I didn't and it's fine. What I'll miss is the chance to put my head on his shoulder and watch the local news. And that's something you can't do on the first date.

Except with E, who I've been thinking about a bit more lately. (Hey, what's a few more dredged up traumas while we're at it?) Because I think we did watch a movie that first night, and that was usually a part of things. That sounds dumb, too much like a routine, and maybe that's why I wasn't the one he fell in love with. But at the time it was wonderful, and the only other person I did that with--have done that with, in a long time, was K. E is turning 40 tomorrow--I recently removed this from my Google calendar, but it's hard to forget the person who got you pregnant and happens to be exactly 12 days and 12 years older than you are. Once when we were in bed he asked me if it was going to be weird when he was 40 and I was 28 and I said I didn't think he was planning on keeping me around that long.

I should pretty much stop talking, ever.

I have so much work to do before the 21st. So much actual thinking. And I need to be not wretched to do it, or I have to find a way to work through the wretchedness. I'll start by finishing Oliphant's autobiography before I got to bed. This is an oddly appropriate choice, though readable only to those of you familiar with her novels.

Virtual bookmarking--Bataille on erasure

I'm copying this as it's quoted in Writing and Difference (266) so I don't forget to go find it in Inner Experience when I take up Tennyson again. Just go with me here.

If one goes to the end, one must erase oneself, undergo solitude, suffer harshly from it, renounce being recognized: one must be there as if absent, deranged, and submit without will or hope, being elsewhere. Thought (because of what it has at its base) must be buried alive.

Mostly better today. Brunch with The Professor and working at school. I think I've been more productive in the last hour today than I was all of yesterday.

Telegraphic: Bataille on Hegel on sovereignty. Also, shoes and the radio.

“The essential thing is that one cannot attain it consciously and seek is, because seeking it distances it.” --Georges Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice"

This comment feels rather widely applicable right now. It also somewhat misrepresents how I've spent my day. I was pretty listless, took a long nap even though I had already slept for eight hours or more the night before. Did too much poking around on Facebook. (I'm now friends with someone who works for Focus on the Family--how crazy is that?--But he's an old friend of mine, someone from camp who was really, really cool back in the day--or at least I thought so 10 or 12 years ago.) So I decided to drag myself over to Atlantic Center to use the two DSW certificates I had that were about to expire. I think I'm taking one pair of shoes back, as they aren't fitting as well at home as they were in the store. A much better (and, as I cannot help myself from saying, fiercer) purchase were these. I'm not sure the picture does them justice. The heels are about 2in, which is still a little high for me, but they don't feel as high as my other pair in that height--possibly because of the slingback thing.

This may seem like an entirely frivolous post, except for the fact that a year and a half ago, I didn't have any shoes with more than a 1-inch heel that weren't platforms. This might be a transformation worth thinking about at more length at a time that isn't now.

One of my greatest pleasurs of staying in on a Saturday to work (besides not having to be around a bunch of yobbos and frat boys) is listening to Danny Stiles on WNYC.

Speaking of that work, I think it's time to move on to some Derrida. As you might have guessed, I have not even gotten near De Man yet.

My conversation with The Professor, &c.

(Scene: yesterday, at West Village Coffeeshop.)

"But at one point, you were talking about love [with The Poet]."

"Yeah, but I pulled back from that--all of the sudden, I was like, wait a minute, what the fuck am I doing even entertaining the idea of that?"

"So that cryptic post wasn't about [The Poet]?"

"No, it was about K."

"Then he's the one you're in love with."

And that's when I started to cry.

----

I don't really remember much about yesterday after I met with my committee chair, a meeting that was mostly about my exam in 11 days but I kept slipping, almost schizophrenically, into these other modes--I will have to pull myself together before the actual exam, stop taking all of these poems so damn personally. (Seriously, though, Augusta Webster is *amazing*: "The Castaway" is what did me in on Thursday night.) It makes me a good Victorian, but possibly gets in the way of my being Victorianist. And then it was back in the lounge and there were all these people there (there always are around that time on Fridays, but still) and people were showing these amazing art projects and it was all very warm and fuzzy and smart but I was feeling a bit shredded. Somehow managed to stay and have a long conversation about Mary Wollstonecraft and madhouses with a guy from my program who I don't know that well and then to dinner with more people I don't know that well, and I know I was *not* entertaining because all of the sudden my life doesn't feel all that entertaining; it hurts and it hurts bad and I know there isn't anyone I can really blame, but tell me: how can you really control who you fall in love with? If I could, I absolutely would...and I've tried, don't you realize? I vowed I would never love anyone like I loved The Professor (and I've even told him that before), and I have stuck to that. But there are apparently a thousand wrong ways to fall in love (and to be loved) and the odds of hitting upon the right one and the consequences of more and more wrong ones--what's a girl to do? How do you go back? I'm not sure I can. I wouldn't know how to be first in someone's life. Even with my ex, I always played second to him. It almost seemed safer just to go along with K or The Poet--trying to live out a certain always already, but that's clearly failing too and I'm no longer sure that I like The Poet enough to go through all of this, to risk so much, to put up with so much. But what do I do? I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to keep myself in the game rather than curled up shaking in a corner.

The weather was horrible yesterday, in part because that cold, pissing rain makes it impossible to maintain one's dignity of appearance, and that's all I had going for me yesterday. But the consolation prize is that you can explain a lot away by having walked there in the rain without an umbrella.

I'm hoping that today will be better. Got all of my TV watching over when I got home last night. And then even watched a movie (The Usual Suspects--damn, Gabriel Byrne is hot), which I never do. So hopefully all the goofing off is over in one blow. Today and tomorrow I'm doing a big theory push: Bataille's "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality" (which I'm hoping to be able to actually understand), and three Derridas: "From a Restricted to a General Economy" (great theory, hard way to live, as The Professor and I also noted yesterday), "Psyche: Invention of the Other" (an all-time favorite with me), and "No Apocalypse, Not Now." It's hard not to be cheered by this list, which will allow me to put off grading, thikning too hard about Aurora Leigh and hopefully will let me get the churning in my stomach under control. I'm supposed to get some important medication today as well, but I' not entirely optimistic since it's coming via UPS and I've had really bad luck with UPS in this neighborhood. But maybe.

I have a feeling The Poet will call. He often does on Saturdays, while he's running errands or just done surfing or something. I don't know yet what I'll tell him. I don't have the mental strength to break up with him right now.

I did a lot of snooze button pushing this morning and ended up waking up to this Weekend Edition story on Charlie Brown. When they post the audio, I want to listen to the beginning to figure out what the occasion for it was. It was kind of a sweet piece, nothing too offensive, but now that I'm looking at the website, I'm a bit troubled by their pitching it as "Authenticity and Honesty." I think even for Charlie Brown, it's more complicated.

On the plus side...

I saw a Fresh Direct truck parked on Bedford Avenue on my way to the laundromat this morning. And my investigations turn out to be true--Fresh Direct is finally delivering to my zipcode. With this plus the greenmarket, I could potentially cut the shitty-ass Key Food on Washington out of my life entirely.

On breaking even as a pyhrric victory

You could say, I suppose, that I played my cards the best I could this week, that I succeeded in what I had set out to do, minimize risk, not doing anything that would jeopardize the shred of a relationship I do have--breaking even, at least--no worse off at the end of the semester than I was at the beginning. And maybe running into K. in the library will be less awkward now and even though The Professor and I haven't talked since last Friday and he's clearly not going to Indiana with me in the fall I will still be able to send him my articles as I write them. And the poet will be around most weeks to spend a night in Brooklyn and leave again in the morning back to Jersey and the rest of his life. And I'll fix the stupid health issue that I've let go on too long already, and eventually the school I want to adjunct at in the fall will let me know about that, and my friend's husband and I will work out my working at his firm, and I'll go to the library on the days I'm not there and I'll write my articles like I said I would. And the summer will pass this way--maybe I really will go shopping at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket on Saturdays and start going back to the Cafe on Sundays and keep up the gym going even when / if my ID card doesn't let me keep my gym bag in my desk. And perhaps I will learn to play by the rules again and maybe--well--I don't know. I'm done hoping for right now, I'm done asking, and I say these things knowing I'm not. But I'm so tired of living like a Liz Phair song and all the books and poems I'm reading tonight remind me that it's one thing to become disillusioned with the straight path that life has to offer, but it's another thing to let go of those illusions, and I've never claimed to like this only to accept it, but in the end it may not matter how much I set out trying to do the right thing, how much I tried to suspend judgment and take what was there, not trying to ask for more.

Right now I am playing for the present, playing to avoid the return of the abyss of a couple of weeks ago, playing to avoid being as wretched as I was in January and February because I will not be able to write a dissertation under those conditions. When my life works, as it did, in various fleeting moments over the past three weeks or so, it was wonderful, inspiring, exciting. But these things collapse so fast. And it's all quicksand. There is a part of me that wants to play for keeps, that maybe wants a reason to consider staying in New York once I graduate, something more than all of this, than being the other woman. But it's hard to go back. I don't have much more to risk--I don't want to let go of what I have, even if it's basically a 56-year-old guy with a wife in New Jersey. At least he cares enough not to make promises he can't follow through on, not to be so rigorous in pushing me away.

But on the other hand, I don't see him as a friend in the way that K and the Professor were. Our relationship is sex, literature, and drinking--with some humanity mixed in. (After all, he did bring me a drink token from the night he spent at the L&L talking to me on the phone.) But it doesn't have that same stomachdrop excitement to it. And of course I'd have to trace longer genealogies here that I don't have the time for--K is a distinct improvement on The Professor in that he actually finds me attractive and pursued me for it--there's just that huge other glaring problem. And he's right, in a way, that him 10 years younger and single probably would be a good match for me.

Somebody please find me that man and make me fall in love with him.

Yet in terms of the spring semester at least I am no worse off than I was when I started, not really. Some wasted efforts of course, but not all lost in that they carried me through those long middle sections--The Professor and I renewed our friendship just long enough for him to read my conference paper and K probably kept me from going insane while my mom was here. So I try to stay thankful for these tiny things even though right now they hurt, hurt badly. But this was the game I was playing. I wish I wasn't playing it.

And the rules don't work in the subjunctive, so I do what I have to do again, pull myself together for another hour of reading and the meeting I have to plan for tomorrow. Take a deep breath and tell myself that my orals reading will all get done. Wonder if I should tear those last couple of pages out of my journal. Send one last email to say, yeah, we'll see each other in the library, and it'll be fine and that's how we'll be friends and it won't make me miserable this time, I promise.

Do I sound self-pitying? I'm not trying to, actually. But I have been reading a lot of Victorian women poets lately, and am probably overidentifying. Suffice it to say that Aurora Leigh, even as it reasserted itself as perhaps my favorite 19th century long poem, was also very much behind that collapse at the end of Spring Break.

And I still think back to my "September 10th" moment--literally, though perhaps disingenuously--but, really--the last time I was entirely happy was on September 10, 2007. It was the first day of German class, and the most perfect date I had with E. It was the night I got pregnant, and in the overnight my grandmother died. And everything's been out of joint since then. I wouldn't even know how to put this all back together again.

The details I will want to remember later on

Coming back to your house, but the first time I've ever been there from the train, or from this apartment.

The first time I let my head fall against your shoulder again.

The one thing I didn't tell you.

Next time we'll try to do what we said we would, and not do what we said we wouldn't.

We are always, have always been, doing the impossible, at least since the night I returned your glance.

Wondering what it would be like to love someone and not have it be too late.

Driving back to my place along Ocean Ave. and "Onward Christian Soldiers" and long Bible reading past the Museum and on to Eastern Parkway. Anyone but the two of us would have changed it.

Perhaps I can't really love anyone unless it is impossible. Which isn't to say--

It would have been different if I'd had my space.

While writing the line about the next time I had the sense that I had already written this post in a dream--because nothing saves a cryptic, telegraphic blog post like a reference to deja vu.

It's not that I don't want everything to align in one person, or anything like that. But that's not what's coming my way right now--so I try to put together what I do have the best I can. But there aren't even comparisons to make.

I didn't do a lot of reading today; I should try to finish some Ruskin before bed. I need more time than I have, but at least my mother is going home--after eight days--tomorrow.

Somebody said they saw me swinging the world by the tail

I recovered from last week well enough to cope with the rest of my weekend--a day of grading, another of working, trying to prep the rest of the semester, and cleaning this place up. Then my mother came on Monday. The plan was that she was going to be there until Friday, but through a chain of events involving a mistake with the calendar, she's actually not going home until next Tuesday. This is a long time. It's not particularly helpful for my orals being in three weeks. Or for just my being myself. It's the wrong kind of interaction with other people--I haven't really been alone at any point--even if my mother's out, I still have to be on the line for stuff.

Meanwhile, back in St Louis, my little brother got his appendix out last night.

It's okay, I guess, and I'm getting a few things out of it--mainly a new bed, hopefully--but still. It's disruptive. I like to be able to choose my disruptions better.

Other things. It looks like I'm getting an article out of the conference paper I gave, as I have gotten a couple very charming emails from the very important scholar in my field since then. This means I'm basically writing two articles this summer. I have to keep in mind that I'm not working from scratch, that one is basically a revision (albeit an extensive one) and the other is more or less a chance to work up everything I cut out of the conference paper. But, in order to be able to eat, I'm also trying to get a job at the law firm where the husband of a friend of mine is a partner. Best case scenario would be that I work there 2-3 days a week, spend 10 hours in the library on the other days. This kind of arrangement scares me, though, and that was partly what last Friday's meltdown was about. I say that only because I combined the working / paper writing thing during my first grad school summer and I remember it being miserable and lonely. But I'm trying to convince myself that the structure wasn't the problem and that I was miserable and lonely because my ex (then boyfriend) was making it so. Also, I really do think the first summer of grad school is awful. So I'm hoping this will be better. Also hoping that I get the class(es) at Not My School for the fall, since that would allow me to make some decent money for what will in a lot of ways be different and hopefully slightly less frustrating work.

The Poet has been in Chicago for the last couple of days on a business trip partially scheduled to coincide with my mother's visit. I sent him to the L&L a couple nights ago, and he called me from there. Somewhat ironically, the fact that he's in Chicago means that we can actually talk on the phone at night, which we can't do when he's home. It's nice to be able to do this, gives me the closest thing I've had to private space this week. I think he's coming back to New Jersey today, though, and it's still going to be almost a week before I see him. Needless to say, I have been pretty quiet on the issue of this whole relationship while my mom's been here--I've said merely that he lives in Jersey, is in my department but also has a real job, on a business trip this week too bad you can't meet him. Oh, and he makes me happy. In the meantime, we had dinner with The Professor last night and have made tentative (and work-killing!) plans to go to the Cloisters / Upper West Side with him on Sunday. My mother pronounced him charming but didn't seem to be too disappointed that we aren't a couple.

Also, K. called me on Tuesday night and we talked for awhile. That was the one real bright spot / personal-life accomplishment of Spring Break--becoming friends with K. again. I can thank Facebook for providing the space to let that happen. Well, Facebook and my being drunk enough to finally resolve just to add him as a friend and see what happens. But it was good. We exchanged several emails that allowed us to establish a kind of common narrative about what happened--a nice change of pace from recent experiences with that. And, if nothing else I think we're finally moving past the whole slightly hurtful stressy non-encounters in the library, maybe even figuring out how to be friends. I think to some extent our friendship will always involve a bit of playing with fire, but maybe that's okay. I'll probably have a little bit of a crush on him for awhile. But I can live with that. We're tentatively planning to hang out next week when my mother is finally gone. But I kind of want to see The Poet more. That's how things probably should be.

I read a lot of Shelley for my committee member meeting yesterday. I'm in a very different place with Shelley than I was two years ago. I found it very hard to get past the biographical elements of "Epipsychidion"--in part because I feel like there's an enormous ethical problem with turning women into heavenly bodies. And even as I knew that my response was incredibly simplistic in a lot of ways and tried to fight it (I spent a lot of time reading Shelley when I was in coursework, so I do *know* more or less what I'm supposed to get out of a sympathetic reading of him), I couldn't really feel comfortable with a lot of it. (Oddly, I still really love Prometheus Unbound in some ways.) A lot of this has to do with my ex, who really does have a Shelley complex--this sort of totalizing visionary existence, where anyone who resists you on anything can't ever be doing it for legitimate logical or ethical reasons, rather they must be stupid or perverse or fearful. I had that feeling while reading Shelley this week and it really did bring me back to that relationship. And I'm sure it's not a coincidence that I loved Shelley most when I loved D. the most.

On the other hand, I reread Frankenstein kind of reluctantly, but have never loved it more--in part because I'm finally at the point where I can geek out on the romanticist intertexts.

I'm actually done with all the primary texts on that list. Not so the others, and it doesn't help to not really have time to myself this weekend. Tomorrow is the big Victorian conference that my department holds every year. I'll be moderating the afternoon session and am apparently going to have to find the bios of the people myself. Should probably get on that while I can still print them.

I'm sure it will all be fine, and that next week at this time I'll have a real-person mattress and will be with The Poet.

Unrelated side note (because everything else in this post has been so coherent). There's an actual real live bar in my neighborhood--like a block away. This is the most lovely news I've gotten about this place in awhile. Who needs a decent grocery store when you can stop at the beer garden on the way home from the crappy grocery store? This news somewhat mitigates the fact that the soap dish in my bathroom fell off the wall while my mother was in the shower. I may have perhaps been overzealous in scrubbing the tiles last weekend--all that cheap white paint really is holding this place together.

Breathing

I think the worst part is over, though it hasn't been an entirely easy--or productive--day. The Dobell I read ("The Nature of Poetry"--not his actual poems) was pretty fascination, especially in terms of Kant. The Mill is going more slowly, and the coffeeshop was a bit too crowded for comfort. Have been struggling to find a place to calm down at school, ran into a friend who was able to save me a bit, and The Poet called me a couple of times just to check in.

Hopefully this means I'll be able to go out tonight after all and not worry anyone else.

I have to remind myself that this is all basically like hitting the reset button. It might have been easier this time if I hadn't been so convinced, oh, about a week and a half ago that my life was fine. Good, even. I said to The Poet on the phone this morning, I don't know what happened, I just kept repeating that--I don't know why I got so scared or why the things that were okay last Wednesday weren't okay yesterday. I have partial explanations but they don't add up.

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.

Quick update

* I may have my best friend back. Which is awesome.

* The conference was a huge success.

* I may also possibly be in love.

* I also love that hulu.com has the first season of Picket Fences online.

* Spring break is soon and then I'll post.

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.

Finally, an accomplishment. And other miscellaneous notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An open letter to my unconscious

...an anxiety-producing dream about having to re-take the comps? Really? Good grief, 2005 called. It wants its fears back.

(The dream I was having from before was pretty interesting, but I don't know how I'd explain it. Now I have to get moving to West Village Coffeeshop.)

What Claudia Wore

My lovely friend M has turned me on to what might be the best blog ever.

I did actually get a decent amount of work done today on prep, Coleridge, the conference paper, and Gaskell. Also went to Target and finally bought some decent curtains. They improve the look of the place immensely. And I made a special trip to Teaching College to use the gym. This would be more virtuous if I wasn't trying to make up for eating a bunch of processed crap, as it is easy to do when working from home.

Hopefully, I will be able to keep up this pace through Thursday. I would definitely like to be able to send out versions of that damn paper to a few people by tomorrow night.

I redacted a few things around here in a fit of what is hopefully unfounded paranoia. I think I'm more than a little bit nervous because of the home invasion / sharing dreams I've been having lately.

Also, I think it would be fun to revive the word "coxcomb" as a synonym for "douchebag," which is a word I've never liked (even if there are occasionally times when it seems apropos). Perhaps I will simply start to make the switch on this blog, and my five readers can spread the meme.

Learning from the sublime? A Coleridgean footnote

This is from the end of a long footnote in chapter 4 of the Biographia where he's discussing the hostile reaction to Lyrical Ballads. I record it here so I can come back to it when I'm working on my important summer project:

“the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels, as if he were standing on his head, though he cannot but see that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with the person who occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician” (BL 1.73n).

Monday Morning Dream Analysis

I have dreams probably twice a week in which random people are in my apartment or tring to get in, whether for benign or more evil purposes. Sometimes the door gets broken down. Other times they are just here. Occasionally I know the people. More than often I don't. I'm pretty sure my old landlady from Astoria made an appearance in last night's dreams. I can't tell if I'm lonely or just still can't believe that I live by myself after so long with others.

The dream that woke me up at 4:28 this morning involved another favorite theme: Wisconsin. (Although this "Wisconsin" house could have been in suburban Chicago--I do dream weird Chicago-and-suburbs-scapes every now and then as well.) I was in a guest bedroom with a bunch of framed family pictures on a side table. Somehow the door hit the table and a couple of the pictures fell off, breaking the glass. They were both pictures of me (one that looked a bit like my Facebook profile). I went into the kitchen to ask my parents whether it was bad luck to break frames with your own picture in them and woke up before they could give me an answer.

Text and the single-ish girl grad student

See, now, I know this New York Times essay about making decisions about romantic partners based on the contents of their libraries is supposed to be aimed at people like me. And, given that it's the most emailed article at the moment, it's clearly working on some level. And I won't say that I didn't put a bit of thought into how my bookshelves are arranged in my apartment, and I won't say that when I was in college I never slept with a dude because of his books, and I won't pretend that books didn't figure rather heavily into my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. And, okay, there was that one moment with K where he was over here and said in this kind of plaintive what-if voice, "we even have the same books"--and I'd be lying if that wasn't one of those things that made me think (wrongly, as it appears) that we could be friends after the whole kind of sketchy affair thing was over.

However. I still affirm that some of the best sex I've ever had in my life was with The Lawyer, a man who owns almost no books. Like, I think I saw maybe three in his apartment in all the times I was over there, and I'm pretty sure at least one of them was one that I brought and took with when I left. A younger version of myself would have found this to be anathema to everything I stood for, and I have to say that I had at least a moment of pause when I realized that. (It's not like he didn't read things ever--he is a pretty big-deal lawyer and reads a lot for a living. He also told me once that he has some books in storage.) But I got over it and at some point realized it was kind of hot, especially coming off things with my Ex. (Those of you who know him know what I'm talking about.) And I don't think it's just me, either. As far as I know, most of the women that The Lawyer (you know what, let's just call him E) dated from Nerve were academics in one way or another; if I'm remembering correctly, he ended up dumping me for an art history professor. And we had a conversation once where I told him my theory about how all these academic women were attracted to him because having sex in a room without books in it was probably dirty-hot for a lot of us.

It is more than that, though. The one comment in the Times article that totally makes sense is the one about how shared books can generate a false sense of shared ideas:

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.

I mean, there's something to be said for someone who gets a lot of your references and all. The Professor and I started hanging out together because we could talk Derrida together and shared an appreciation for a certain Victorian novelist who isn't Dickens. In general, though, and especially with men who are not themselves academics, books can be more trouble than they're worth. Obviously, I would like to end up with a dude who does more than watch Rock of Love all day. (On the other hand, I completely prefer the elliptical machine near the TV playing Rock of Love to the elliptical machine where I'm left to the company of my New Yorker when I'm at the gym.) And obviously, I don't want to have to continually defend my reading at all to someone. But that's not the experience I had, at least not on the internet. What I got from Nerve were all these guys who weren't academics but kind of wanted to be and to some extent were crazier autodidacts than I was, and with me this translated into an alternation of fetishizing what I do for a living (is what I do for a living kind of cool and awesome all the time? Yeah. Is it also just another profession among many, and one with perhaps more of its share of demands and ridiculous hoops? Yeah.) and giving off the impression that I am somehow falling short of their expectations because I don't want to be cool and literary all the time. People who mostly know me in academic and other mostly non-sexual contexts are always surprised when I tell them that there's a group of dudes in the world who find me shallow--these are often the same dudes who buy me a drink and expect me to validate them for reading Moby-Dick. Have I read Moby-Dick? Yes, I have. Do I need to troll the internet for strangers with whom to discuss it? No.

I do know a lot of my personal reaction to this has to do with the specific terms of my relationship with my ex-boyfriend and especially the pressures he put on me because I was doing something that he, through an unfortunate convergence of circumstances and bad planning, couldn't pull off himself. In a broader sense, though, I think I spent so much time in high school and college pushing people off because I wasn't sure that they only liked me for my mind that I ended up making my life then much harder than it needed to be. I'm more comfortable with being liked for other reasons now, and I'm trying at least in a halfhearted way to keep those other reasons in play. (Ironically, I only really shop when I'm depressed, so I haven't bought anything in awhile. I should be able to justify something for the Toronto trip, though.) I joke that the longer I spend in grad school, the more vain that I get. It's not totally a joke, it's more a combination of trying to control the few things I can control and of still finding it wonderful not to have my Ex putting pressure on me all the time.

With that being said, I should finish making my presentation assignment handout and contemplate a trip to the gym tomorrow. I didn't go at all last week, and I'm sure that's partly why I got so damn manic.

Not exactly archive fever

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

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

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

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

On Mary Wollstonecraft and running to stand still

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

Now off to Williamsburg for drinks and dinner.

Speaking of static on the radio...

Tuning in to 1860: Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison. Via NYT.

Just, wow. I think it's good sometimes to be reminded of the hauntingness (and haunted-ness) of recorded sound.

Undedicated: Jim White, "Static on the Radio"

In another life, this is the kind of song that would have me stop whatever I was doing and smoke a cigarette for its duration. In my current life, it's still pretty cool and haunting and I still stop everything I'm doing to listen to it and it makes me want to go driving in Wisconsin at dusk.

The important parts

He's nice to me. We enjoy each other's company. He makes me happy. I may like him back.

That's enough for now. The rest will work itself out, one way or another.

Back to writing.

Your loyalty is not to me, but to the stars above

(No reason, really, for the subject, just a line I kind of like from the Bob Dylan song currently playing on Radio Paradise.)

In one of the numerous ironies that characterize my life at any given time, I--who still maintain that I really shouldn't be in anything approaching a full-fledged relationship--seem to have spent the larger part of this weekend engaged in "where is this relationship going" conversations with not one but two other people. One is actually (I think) pretty simple and straightforward, something that I accept my complicity in and so on. The other involves The Poet and is still eating at me in a certain way because it so vastly changes certain calculations that I had made to allow this to be okay. It's hard to explain without getting into wildly unbloggable specifics, but, suffice it to say that I had to puncture a couple of illusions once and for all in the "I have nothing to give" conversation--he took that as being all about the sex, I told him that was the easy part--and I'm still unhappy about being placed even momentarily in a situation where I was risking more than I thought I was. But, on the other hand, I also find that I really like him, even given all the reasons I shouldn't, that he makes me happy, and that I don't have to listen to him complain or worry about things--while that last one is partially what contributed to the situation that pissed me off, these are all really huge things for me that I don't often find in people. The problem is that I don't want to be his girlfriend and I don't completely trust him not to accidentally fuck up my life. Stupid paradoxes. We're planning to meet up tomorrow night. I'll see what happens.

But I probably should revise what I said about Hegel on my other blog--it's not so much, perhaps, that there are a thousand ways to be unhappy, it's more that there are a thousand ways that your life can get fucked up.

Speaking of which (ah! transitions!), the Professor and I returned to West Village Coffeeshop today to work in tandem. It's possible that certain things are coming full circle (this is mostly true work wise), and that most of the bitterness and hurt has finally been bled out of our interactions. It's not just like it was, but I don't miss the differences. And it's nice to have my working buddy and best reader back. Between him and my friend S., I talked out how I need my conference paper to end, and I can see an end in sight and--more importantly--a non-sucking presentation in my future.

I went up to school to make some photocopies (why, why, why, have I never read The Madwoman in the Attic?? Who knew there was a chapter on "The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe??") and get a few other things done. No trip to the school library, of course, would be complete without seeing The K. He made eye contact with me this afternoon, which was a new thing. I alluded to his part in the weirdness that was new student recruitment Friday--a combination of weird tension in the basement computer lab, then his kind of swooping down on me from the second floor for a weird fasttalking conversation as I was on my way out. Every time I see him I feel a bit less, but I'd be lying to say I don't feel anything. I don't know if this is so much a question of being "over" him (I came into the situation more or less being already over him, knowing his position) as it is a kind of lingering sense of--well, something suspended, that keeps getting shaken up when we make eye contact or pretend not to see each other. And it's all very high school and I certainly don't want to continue the affair, such as it was, but I...I don't know, I guess I sort of feel like there should have been more, somehow, somewhere. And that's sort of silly, I know. And it has a hell of a lot to do with why I'm trying to keep The Poet at a certain distance. And I may well be kidding myself if I think I could really be a decent friend to him. Because we really were very kind to each other for a short time--and I guess that's what still...I don't know. Perhaps this is all to say that, even though I sent him that well-deserved "are you fucking kidding me" response to his notorious "douchebag" email, I don't have the heart to be that person all the time.

Believe it or not, I've also had a pretty decently productive weekend, in spite of all this. Friday was something of a lost day, but I made up for it on Saturday, and I get to read Godwin and Wollstonecraft for my committee member this week, which can't fail to make me happy. And my students are going to the library tomorrow, which gives me a reprieve on any formal preps.

At the moment, though, I have to turn my attentions to where I can find a loaf of decent bread on my way home. I have been dreaming of a bruschetta-like combination of avocado, corn, and Parmesan with some roasted asparagus all day....

Groggy.

You know, I had a decently productive day yesterday, after all. Sure, I had my period of enervation / distraction / tiredness in the afternoon, but once I put myself back on the timer, I was able to get a few things done. Finding out that the teaching observation that was supposed to take place today is getting moved didn't do much for my mood (it only required shifting around, oh, two weeks of my course planning, right at the beginning of the research unit, and getting the library involved to set the initial date), but, on the plus side, I didn't feel obligated to do much thinking about my class yesterday at all--which is exactly how Wednesdays are supposed to be when one teaches a class they've taught before on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

I wish all of my Wednesdays could be that way--if they had been since January I would not be so terrified that my orals are two months from tomorrow. (However, I'm sure I'll be able to get more done once the conference is over, and spring break is still almost a month in my future.) The problem is, though, that I can't work like that day after day. I woke up this morning (as I often do after a good day of work) much later than I wanted to, and I can tell already it's not going to be much of a morning. I'm sluggish and groggy, not really wanting to focus on anything (including this blog post), and all the ideas that I had while I was falling asleep--the ideas that, most probably, were the reasons why I couldn't fall asleep for ages--have all gone away and I'm sort of spinning my wheels until it's time to go to teach. (Since I do my Thursday office hours before class and have an errand I have to run first, I'm looking at leaving around noon for my 2:30 class.) I will do about 20 minutes of prep and plan to look at their homework and freewriting on the train, in my office, and during the beginning of class. And I'll maybe try to read some Genette or something. I also need to clean a bit. But I certainly had a different vision of what my teaching mornings were going to be, and I sort of hope that no matter where I teach in the fall, I can get something at least before noon.

Anyway. I'll figure out something. Better things are ahead. I'm going out with The Poet this evening. It's funny, in a way, because each time I get a little bit more...okay? with the whole scenario. I may devote a longer post to this later (and, yes, by now you may have realized that the "this deserves a longer post" is a classic blogo-rhetorical move with me), but all I'm going to say right now is this--it's nice to have someone in my life who thinks I'm great, who clearly thinks about me when we're not together. (This, I think, is the one limit that I always knew The Lawyer had--he could make you feel like you were the only person in the world while he was with you, but I don't think he thinks that much about people when they aren't there. Sometimes I wish I could be more like that.) While it would obviously be nice (and far more conductive to my not being the fucked up single older sister at my brother's wedding) if said person was neither married nor nearly 30 years odler than me, that's clearly just not in the cards right now. But we all know that I still don't have the energy for a "real" relationship right now--and I guess I just don't see why it has to be all or nothing.

In which I am the weird one in my family, part #835

My little brother just called to tell me he's about to get engaged to his longtime girlfriend this week. I thanked him for telling me himself rather than simply updating his relationship status on Facebook.

He's planning to get married sometime in the fall. Even as a woman with no real prospect of getting married anytime soon, this seems rather quick. (Then again, A's getting married in July...but that's going to be at City Hall and there are other issues.)

Is it self-centered of me to hope that I will have someone in my life who could make for an even remotely plausible *date* to this event, which I will no doubt have to be in in some bridesmaidenly (ha) capacity? Because bringing someone like The Poet would be...well, let's just say that it would be way more obnoxious than when I showed up for my brother's high school graduation with greyish hair.

I might as well start my summer '08 to-do list now:
* Write article for Important Online Journal
* Work on dissertation prospectus with the hope of getting it approved in September
* Finally finagle something publishable on Tennyson
* Find someone to bring to central Indiana as a date for my brother's wedding.

Oh, ack.

I wonder if M's free for the Fort Greene farmer's market this Saturday....

This has derailed me a bit from slogging through my conference paper in a way that even working on a timer can't fully solve.

Tangential

So, I'm typing my notes from reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and I find myself wondering whether The Matrix isn't, at bottom, an inherently Rousseauistic text. I mean, okay, it's a little bit too communitarian in the end, since Rousseau is all about the solitary individual, but what these works seem to share is the sense that man (against anything that Hobbes et al. would say) is essentially good (think Morpheus's defense against the Agent Smiths in the first movie, a scene that has always bothered me precisely because I am something of a misanthrope [yes! Shocking! I know.] and am also still shaped by a certain kind of Calvinist upbringing and would thus never suffer for those kinds of ideals) and a suspicion of "progress" in general as increasing our interdependece in a way that is ultimately detrimental to ourselves. And the Matrix movies also seem to share a belief that transparency in our language and interactions should be a goal--even if it can't be fully achieved--I mean, isn't that what the point of getting unplugged is?

I could be completely off base here, and it's been awhile since I've seen The Matrix while I was sober. And perhaps I'm being too reductive in limiting this just to Rousseau--perhaps there's a more general "Romantic" element of The Matrix to be explored? Surely someone's done that...(n.b. Google seems to say no to this, but Google also doesn't believe that I meant to search just for "romanticism" and so also pulls up hits for "the matrix" and "romantic," which is not particularly what I am interested in.)

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.

Undefinable Wednesday

I would say that yesterday, though not work-productive, was at least emotionally and personally productive. The Professor called me out of the blue, and we spent a greater part of the afternoon hanging out, doing some work (I got more done than he did, but that's to be expected)--like old times, though without all the fraughtness. And it seems like we're friends again, to a certain extent. It was nice.

The evening wasn't bad, either. There were a certain number of political jokes that had to be made. And, again, I say to myself that it's nice not to wake up by myself all the time.

Now to do some laundry before I go teach. I have a feeling that the next week or ten days or so is going to be kind of a festival of suck, workwise, but at least that means I'll save money. This week has been fun, but a bit on the expensive side.

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.

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.

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.

I think your new haircut makes you look like a fool

...but of course I knew it was you the moment I saw you. I have pretty spectacular distance vision. Lucky me. And then I almost ran into you, when you were sitting on the floor in the aisle that has many of the books I work on but today I'm doing Tennyson not Coleridge so I didn't end up tripping over you.

Not that I'm going to be the one to talk first.

Yes, I *have* been a roiling pot of passive-aggressive angst today, and, no, it *wasn't* helped by having to quit working on my conference paper an hour and a half before the library closed only to spend that time trying to scan a bunch of stuff for my ridiculous workstudy assignment only to find that it's in the wrong file format and thus useless all because some dumbass was hogging the one scanner that doesn't have these problems by doing more than just scanning his documents, which is totally bad scanner etiquette so now I have to go back tomorrow and wrestle with this some more and do a bunch of other crap not related to my conference paper.

(For the record, technological shittiness and related issues of general library angst are the only things I get consistently upset about at my institution. This frustrates me even more than the fact that I still haven't gotten reimbursed for MLA. At least I got something out of that experience.)

The Mill on the Floss is less good than I remember it being.

I am going to drink a beer and then try to revisit what I can possibly cross of my to-do list when I'm in this mood. I'm thinking this would be a good time to tell the student who's missed six of the last nine classes that she's just out, plain and simple.