From the soapbox, the mighty stand tall

I'm feeling a bit grouchier now than I was earlier today; I don't feel well, which is likely a result of too many little sniffly children cuddling with me yesterday.  Mind you, I never pass up playing with the baby, or smooching on my nephews, but they've all been sick, and now I think I am too.  Furthermore, I get frustrated about the pressure to do "something" for New Year's Eve, like it's not just any other night or something, which it is.  I'd rather just stay home in my pajamas and do a puzzle, as lame as that is.  Going out on New Year's is just too much pressure to have any real fun - I find it amusing that it's the night we're ~supposed~ to have tons of fun drinking and kissing and hanging out with friends, but it never turns out that way, does it?  If you stay in, you're likely staying in alone because all of your friends have something going on (and ironically it looks an awful lot like what you're doing - scrambling to be doing something for the new year), and if you go out, you have to shell out a ton of cash to get into any bar - even the crappiest one - and then you have to fight major crowds of other people who are also pretending to have fun.  If you drink enough for this scenario to be entertaining, then there is the issue of how to get home; in our situation, Jamison and I only have fun when we're drunk together.  One of us sober only makes one irritated with the other.  Guh.

So I've opted to go back to my happy space today, which is reflecting on the good stuff.  In addition to the aforementioned great events, there is the issue of my getting to spend almost two weeks in London this fall.  I went alone (though I had some friends living there), and there is nothing more liberating than being suddenly free of all responsibility save yourself.  As a woman, I think it's especially important to push the boundaries of the comfort zone.  I can go to the movies by myself, I have no problem eating in a restaurant alone, and I have traveled to conferences and such by myself, all with no fret whatsoever.  Traveling alone abroad is quite another matter, and while it made me nervous, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life to walk and travel throughout England all by myself and meeting new people and figuring out cultural norms and such on my own.  It sounds silly, but I feel like a whole new person emerged during that trip, more confident and more self-assured.  I am excited to get back there and explore some more.  I miss it, in fact; I was there just long enough to feel comfortable there, and I have to say that the lifestyle suits me perhaps more than the one here at home does.  At least while I'm still young, I'd like to spend some time living in Britain; London is fast-paced and energetic and full of life in such a great way.

There, I feel less grouchy already.

You know the shape my breath will take before I let it out

On this, the last day of the year, reflection seems apt.  Postmortems on the year and optimistic visions of the coming year always seem self-indulgent, but I will participate nonetheless.  This year I'm doing it differently, however; rather than focus on what I haven't done and should do, I'm going to reflect on what I have done and what I will do.  It's a semantics issue, I know, but the shade of meaning is what I'm getting at - my focused goal for the coming year, is, in short, to frame things in a positive way.

The last year has been overwhelming, but filled with all of the things that make life wonderful.  Yes, that's what I said - me, the cynic, the pessimist - life is wonderful.  I had the worst two terms yet at DU in the winter and spring of last school year, and I thought at times that I might not make it through the program; I cried, I screamed, I cursed, but I did those things all the way through to a 4.0.  My beautiful niece came into the world in the middle of all of this - little Ms. Natalie - and put things once more into perspective for me.  It's really easy to be self-absorbed, and particularly in the life I have carved for myself.  My daughter is at an independent age, and my work and studies are so narrowly focused on me and what I'm thinking that I forget to pay attention to what happens outside that world.  Because the world of academia is so internal - that is, I spend a great deal of time inside my own head, even when it looks like I'm doing something else - that one can simply succumb to the intrigue and drama and politics of an English department without a second thought.  When I watched Natalie's arrival - the first childbirth I've ever seen, and mine doesn't count - I remember bursting into tears at the knowledge that I just witnessed one of the greatest moments of humanity.  The moment when someone first takes a breath makes me believe in God and the universe as entities larger than myself.  That someone can come into the world through another person, complete with all of their physical attributes more or less intact, with a personality and spirit all their own, convinces me that our human existence is just one small part of everything.  I like to think that babies choose us - that there is some little soul out there somewhere that finds you, whether you're ready for it or not.  When Natalie was pulled from my sister's womb, she popped her eyes open with an expression of wonder and knowledge, a look that said "you won't believe what just happened to me!"  When I first looked into her eyes, I knew that graduate school doesn't and never did matter as much as this moment - when I'm on my death bed, hopefully in the distant future, and I'm recalling the greatest moments of my life, this will be one of them, not getting a 4.0 at DU.

My own daughter, my beautiful Sami, turned 13 this year.  While it's hard to believe I could possibly be the parent of a teenager - particularly since I still feel like I'm figuring out what I'm going to be when I grow up - it's also a great experience to get to parent a child when my own teenage years are still so fresh in my mind and I feel like I can at least try to be a better mother to her than my own mother was to me - largely because her life was so different from my own.  Because I got to teach an extra class this summer, I was able to do the greatest birthday celebration possible: I surprised Sami with a trip to Disneyland.  I got to hatch a plan, pack bags, and head out in a white limo to the airport just moments after she found out that's where she was going.  She wrote in her online journal that it was the best moment of her life so far...how could I possibly not be proud of that?  For her, it will be the thing she remembers later in life - I hope - as something her mother did that really rocked.  It was still one of the best vacations I ever had, and when I told Sami whilst standing in line at Space Mountain that I wanted to take her to Disneyland because she's thirteen now and my time to do this is running out, she looked at me questioningly.  I explained that soon, taking a trip with Mom won't be fun or cool, and Disneyland will lose its charm.  She rolled her eyes and asked "are you crazy?  This will always be fun."  That's my girl.  After all, I still love Disneyland as much now as I ever did, and perhaps more.

The week-will-shall-not-be-named came and went, and while it sucked, I survived it and that's all I have to say about that.

For the first time in my life, I can report that I actually focused on myself this year in a positive way.  Yes, I do focus my life on myself in large part when it comes to everything else - school, work, home - and I can pour myself into nearly any task as long as it doesn't translate into taking care of me specifically.  I have been getting regular massages; I get my hair coloured and cut at a salon, and best of all, to date I have lost 48 pounds since July.  I shop at Kohl's and J. Jill and Macy's, and not in the plus size departments.  This is a major coup, and perhaps one of my most proud statements for the year.  We took family pictures at Christmas, and the difference between me this year and me last year is remarkable.  I encountered someone at a Christmas party a little over a week ago who quite literally didn't recognize me, and she's been to my house two times and had entire conversations with me.  It's wonderful to hear "you look great!" especially from people I haven't seen in some time.  I ran into a former student at the end of last term, who did a double-take and then said, "no offense, but did you lose like a million pounds?"  Ha.  

There's likely to be more of this nonsense later... 

The song has been sung

Well, I've done it - I've officially read my second novel for (gasp!) fun.  Who knew this was still possible?  Graduate school has apparently not entirely broken my spirit or love of language.  The best part is that I read something completely pop fiction - Jennifer Weiner - and I have no shame about it.  Ha.  I read a mediocre novel with a few great jokes and implausibly strong female characters and I actually enjoyed it.  There were no deadlines, no pressure to say something clever or poignant about the story or the theme or the author's use of meta-narrative, and - thank God - not once did Michel Foucault and what he might have said that I could apply to this novel pop to mind.  In fact, for the past couple of weeks, I haven't even really thought about school or my dissertation or anything of any significance whatsoever.  

I have watched Dr. Phil every day this week and have hollered at the television the same way others would holler at a football game (a fact that vexes me not a little), and I now know that if I sit through 9 News at Noon, Extra will come on after, and then not one, but TWO episodes of Judge Judy will follow.  I have worn pajama pants and an Oxford University tee shirt for an overwhelming percentage of the last five days, given that I sleep in this ensemble and wear it as well anytime I am at home for more than a few minutes, which is all the time of late.  I have completed exactly seven 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles in the last month, have scarcely walked into my office, and have delighted in seeing all my email boxes empty on a daily basis, save some straggling and entertaining spam promising me that if I had a penis, it could be incredibly large, virtually unstoppable, and based on these products advertised, capable of taking over the better part of the Denver Metro area with its massive girth and sheer rigidity.  My makeup bag has dust on it, my legs are unshaven, my house is untidy - though not dirty - and finally, the best part of all is that I am sleeping through each and every night with no pressure whatsoever to wake to an alarm clock.  I am sleeping well, because I have these long, connected narrative dreams which tells me that I'm engaged in deep sleep for a long period of time.  This morning my dream had something to do with a large percentage of the cast from the movie Snatch, but only the ugly and odd Brits - not Brad Pitt.  Don't ask me why - I've seen the film exactly once and thought it only average.  

I did watch the third Pirates movie tonight, which I got on DVD for Christmas.  While I admit I liked it in large part, I am still a complete sucker for the first film and I kind of wish they had left the story alone.  Clearly the second and third movies were meant to go together, but they are far inferior in terms of their cleverness - I mean, the Davy Jones/kraken/Calypso thing is so contrived and each one of those legends/myths has nothing at all to do with the other - and in this way, I suppose I never stop being the over-educated English nerd who is hyper-critical of all things improperly researched.  Damn, and I was so close to a scholarly-language-free entry here.  I'll try to be more slackerly next time.

By the way...

Burton's Sweeney Todd completely rocked and is the best modern version of revenge tragedy I think I've seen in this many years.  Loved it.  And not just for its misanthropy.  I can't wait to show it to students, belly-up to Titus Andronicus.  

Propagand-ish

Lately I've been a bit misanthropic, and this wouldn't normally worry me save the momentary realization during the film last night that being Sweeney Todd has its particular attraction for me that is, well, troubling.  Ha.  Seriously, whilst sitting at the movies last night, awaiting the unholy number of trailers for films I have already seen a million times or have never wished to, I was taken aback by the level of programming going on these days.  I'm no slouch and I'm certainly not naive to the fact that we are the unwilling recipients of sales pitches at every single turn; however, I resent the fact that I've paid (and not a little) to go to the movies - in theory to support the film industry - and then I'm still forced to sit through advertisements.  The worst of this arrived last night in the form of a music video by the band 3 Doors Down, promoting the National Guard.  Not just a snatch of a song - oh no - but the whole fucking pseudo-patriotic song, which was then also pitched in the form of a free MP3 on the national guard website, and they were giving away free CDs of the song at the movie theatre.  Are they fucking kidding me?  I'm so incensed by this that I can scarcely find the words to describe it - for all the paranoid future fantasies like 1984 or even The Matrix or something like V for Vendetta, or hell, even Brazil, that people claim is entertaining because of its distance from reality, I'm starting to think that it's entertaining because it's ~not~ far from reality at all.  The pure fantasy element of the man in the Guy Fawkes mask blowing up Parliament with an Underground train is the kind of wish fulfillment fantasy that I latch onto.  What if we could simply play Sweeney Todd and rid the world of the stupid and pointless and make meat pies out of them?  I'm only being partly facetious; I'd like to find the people who came up with the 3 Doors Down/National Guard marketing campaign and send them up for the closest shave they've ever known.  Them, and the folks who decided that an elephant with a British accent, who's married to a centipede, is a means by which to sell us air fresheners.  Part of me hopes the Revolution is on the way.

Gravity won't get you through the mazes

What is it about winter that depresses people?  I know it's not just me because I can feel it in the air; the world feels like a balloon that's been partially deflated and people around me all have a flat quality.  I know this because the upside is that when something shines bright it breaks the spell if only for a moment.  My niece, Natalie, is a pure ray of sunshine no matter what mood I'm in, and there is something about baby giggles and clapping that re-inflates the world around me.  She just learned to wave hi and bye, and her pudgy baby hand twists delicately at the wrist and she grins at you with a mouthful of half-grown in teeth and sparkling blue eyes.  She is the very embodiment of joy.  

It turns out my heart skipping thing is nothing at all to worry about.  In fact, it's not skipping at all.  I saw the doctor today about it and he listened to my heartbeat for some time; naturally, it sounded perfectly normal the entire time, despite my attempts to replicate all behaviors that seemed to bring it on in the first place.  I explained the effect in great detail and he was completely unconcerned.  He said it's normal, happens to most people at some point, and is in no way harmful to me.  Not to mention, I felt a little silly when he reminded me that he did an EKG on me only a few months ago to make sure I could take the meds he prescribed.  It was healthy, my blood pressure is low, and apparently one does not just suddenly develop heart disease.  He said the most likely cause was low electrolytes and he took some blood to check it out; he said that I could drink all the coffee I like, but mentioned in passing that I might consider doing half-caff at least - I'm guessing that was a hint regarding my state of anxiety.  In any case, I'm going to live and he assured me not to be frightened.  It won't prevent my secret panic, of course, but it's nice to know that when I have lucid moments, I will know I am fine.

Memories for Matinees

There's a song by Neko Case called "South Tacoma Way" that I love so much but can barely stand to listen to because it makes me weep for no reason at all.  Since I've been in a maudlin state for a few days, I thought I should work on jigsaw puzzles of European landmarks in pajamas (mind you, the ~same~ ones all week...) and listen to Neko until I couldn't cry any longer.  The human emotional system is inexplicable.

My heart keeps skipping beats, for real, and I'm growing quite concerned.  So obsessed am I that I have been taking my pulse nearly every hour just so I can feel the sludgy missed beat via the artery on my neck.  I've consulted Jamison, my sister, and countless internet sites, and according to all sources, this is nothing to worry about and is likely the result of the unholy amounts of coffee I consume in a day coupled with my prescription meds.  90% of heart arrhythmias are virtually harmless, and often no treatment is needed.  I will consult my doctor first thing tomorrow morning.  Does this put my mind at ease in any way, shape, or form?  Not a chance.  I've been convinced all day that my heart is faulty and I'm going to die of some wretched heart disease just after I spend the next several years in some kind of excruciating pain, hopped up on a million drugs, installed with a pacemaker, and of course all of this will occur only after I've been forbidden to do all things I enjoy and get fat again and die alone one of those horrible deaths where concerned neighbors phone the paramedics who find you rotting and half consumed by your own dog.

And this is me sans coffee...

All Alone on a Sunday Morning

Here's the new journal.  I have years of online journals elsewhere, but I'm sure they've all gone to website afterlife by now - buried somewhere undignified in some database somewhere that is simultaneously nowhere.  It's the great technological abyss; when you stare into it, it stares back at you, and armed with pop-up ads, spam, and a million flashing ads for internet porn and dating services.  I decided that this is new-me, yet again.  Like Madonna with less imagination, I hereby reinvent myself for the abyss to archive - evidence I was here and that I had anything at all to say.  I realize as a college professor that this is far more rare and interesting than I previously thought.  So many people, and by people, I mean quite curmudgeonly those who are ten or more years younger than I, who don't read, don't think, and certainly never compose complete sentences except under duress and the threat of a red pen.  Even though the red pen has also gone a similar direction since no one cares about grammar or the English language anymore, I persevere, and if the Revolution comes, I'll be the one not armed with a gun, but with a pen (or a nifty mac laptop...you get the idea).  Thusly, I will rule the world some day as the last brain standing.  Ha.  It is the middle of the night.  I am dismayed at kids my daughter's age, who do homework - if they have any to speak of - plugged into an iPod, text messaging friends with pointless empty messages at 15 cents a pop, all whilst watching the television in such perpetuity that she sings along to all the commercial jingles as if quoting Shakespeare.  My students, who are considerably older, are no better.  Most of them have the attention span of a gnat, and can scarcely go ten minutes without a cursory check of the cell phone and at least one opening of a laptop.  Guh.

It's the middle of the night and I can't sleep because my heart keeps skipping a beat.  That sounds like the start of a song or a poem, but instead it's the truth.  I can feel my pulse beat strong and then gasp and thud back into gear every minute or so; usually the only people my age with this problem are meth-heads and coke addicts.  Who said caffeine is harmless?  I feel strung out like a junkie, stretched thin (metaphorically) like silly putty pulled to the point just before the weight of the tendril breaks and it falls silently into two pieces.  But my pieces now are many, and I desperately want to be mushed back together and shoved into a two-part breakaway plastic egg, and who said postmodern fractured humanity no longer exists just because we're all tired of hearing about it?

I just finished reading a book (gasp) that has nothing at all do with my dissertation.  This alone is its own marvel.  I love Douglas Coupland and I have since I encountered Generation X before it was a hipster's shelf requirement or a buzz word.  Eleanor Rigby is one I hadn't read and frankly didn't know existed until I found it on a bargain shelf in hardback version at Barnes & Noble over the summer.  Naturally, I buy books all the time and stockpile them into corners of my office until every flat surface is supporting an untidy and heaping pile of books.  Some things in my office are even supported by the books, which amuses me further and incites deep sighs from Jamison and the rolling of eyes of my daughter.  But often I have no idea when I'll get to read them, if ever, yet they are there, waiting for the day when I can once more read for pleasure.  I remember specifically that this book was one of a pile acquired during the week that must not be named (save once, it was 'doctoral comps' ... but we shall never speak its name henceforth) and Jamison only laughed at me when I told him I purchased fiction and it had been written anytime after 1650.  Ha.  I still want to cry when I think about the story - but in a good way.

2:30 a.m. now, and I can't remember the last time I witnessed the clock ticking at this hour.  Reading fiction makes me want to write fiction; I often long for the days when as a naive undergraduate I whiled away many an hour and sometimes into the wee ones working my way through the psyche of someone else, trying to understand his/her story, and how I always seemed to locate time to stare into the eyes of photos until I could reach into my head and snatch that one word - that only word - that will do but that I can't seem to say just yet.  Last time that happened, I was writing about Charles I's Eikon Basilike and the concept of tyranny; the word I couldn't find was "reconciled" so I had to get up and do the dishes until it came to me.  Somehow that lacks the romanticism of pondering over whether my manic-depressive and histrionic pathological liar is erudite or perspicacious.  Or perhaps just a dilettante?  Being a writer is cool; being a scholar - whether or not it suits me and I am good at it - is akin to being in a famous rock band and only being responsible for hitting the triangle during one moment of one song.  Whether or not you're playing Wimbledon, it still feels like you're sidelined.

And speaking of sidelines, I think it's time to force my brain to take the bench.

Hello and welcome to The Journal, version at least 10.4.3.  Stay tuned...