Constantly talking does not equal communication

Sorry for the long silence; I haven't had the energy of late to write in this space.  Just like the pizza worker whose last thought is eating pizza at the end of the day, sometimes writing feels too much like work.  I have actually been experience eye-strain from reading and sitting in front of the laptop for too many hours a day.  

My frustration with being at DU now has reached a fever pitch; I can actually feel the weight of gravity as I approach the campus now, and the dream where your feet are heavy or slogging through wet cement when zombies are pursuing you becomes reality as I climb the stairs to the fourth floor of Sturm Hall.  It's as if even the universe wants to prevent me from going there.  It's not so much that I hate it, but that I'm over it.  There are people I enjoy seeing there - Andrew, Tor, Anne, Scott, Ashley, Vicki - but everyone else I want to see I see independently, so my reasons for going there grow smaller each day and the bottom line is: I'm just over it.  

Case and point: I'm sitting in a fiction theory course on Monday afternoon and I should preface this by saying I love the professor and if it were just he and I in the class, I'd love it entirely.  Graduate students - for reasons unbeknownst to me - are almost always require to give a presentation each class, each term.  As a concept, of course, this makes sense since most of us wish to teach and the easiest way to tell who's got it and who's an idiot is the public speaking route; however, nearly every person in this program is under the impression that the class presentation (at the doctoral level, I may remind you) is to hand out a 4-5 page, single-spaced annotated bibliography/collected nonsense full of typos and grammatical errors.  No wonder the future is grim for English departments if the creme de la creme cannot function appropriately.  The person who hands out this kind of document will then, typically, proceed to read every word on the page to the class as we follow along.  Little commentary, little insight, and by the end we all collectively sigh that we can dispense with the kindergarten format of reading along whilst someone drones on.  On Monday, this was again the case, and it was all I could do to not just lose it - to not hand back the handout and ask why in the hell we put ourselves through this process?  When it came time for me to present, I passed round a brief outline of my talk and a quote I wanted to discuss at some length.  It was one page and I did all of the talking.  I didn't read one single word off that page.  I even brought artwork to pass round for further discussion.  The only person who got it at all was Eric (the prof) and he liked it.  So my presentation ended up being a stimulating conversation with Eric in front of a live studio audience.  

I just keep telling myself, a few more weeks to go.  A few more weeks to go.  A. Few. More. Weeks. To. Go.  Sigh.

Keep me walking but never shout

I'm proud of myself today.  I had a hard workout at the gym, walked the dog, had breakfast with the hubby, and all before 11 a.m.  Aside from the fact that it's fucking snowing today, things are looking up.  

I finally got round to talking to my sister after our big meltdown, and it feels good to have said what I needed to.  It feels good to assert myself and to get positive responses.

American Idiot

I wasn't going to and I probably won't go on about it, but why in the hell is anyone still listening to Rush Limbaugh?  It has been so long since he's even registered on my radar that I forgot he was still alive.  That made me happy.  I won't rant about what a ridiculous individual he is nor spend my time complaining about how wrong he is... these things strike me as a given.  In fact, I would not be at all surprised to learn that even he doesn't buy his own bullshit, but spouts his nonsense for the sake of celebrity.  Ann Coulter really is the devil; Rush is just an idiot (his obvious skill at self-marketing notwithstanding), and I wish for one minute we (and I mean the royal we) could stop giving him airtime every time he says something inflammatory.  He only has audience because people are listening.

A plague on both your houses!

DU has been infected in the last week or so with Norovirus - or what we call colloquially "the stomach flu."  And of course I contracted it despite all efforts at obsessive hand-washing and refusing to touch anything from a student all week.  It sounds simple enough, and even the CDC will tell you that it's basically harmless, lasts about 24 hours, and may include "vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, and body aches."  Seems to me they could mention that one might also experience the physical bodily fluid equivalent of a mass evacuation of, say, a small metropolitan city in the shortest time possible with no one permitted back into the city limits under pain of death.  

After spending my third - yes, my THIRD - day in an emergency room in the last six months, I became somewhat despondent.  After all, in my previous 35 years of existence, and up to last fall, I had spent exactly six days in a hospital ever - two when I was born, two when my daughter was born and two more days for good measure in graduate school (version 1) when I got a bad strep infection.  So how is it that in the past year I've had a major emergency surgery and three trips to the ER?  The irony, of course, is that at this point in my life, I'm actually healthier than I've ever been in terms of weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, cardiovascular health, physical strength, and eating well.  Makes me want to go back to smoking, drinking, and eating whatever the hell I want whilst sitting on the sofa.  Ha.

But here I am once more, back at school and today I make no efforts whatsoever.  I am wearing sweats, no makeup and I've even kicked my shoes off for comfort.  I've done no work for the week, and I don't plan to start now.  I'm so tired that I can barely stay awake and so thirsty...

What a pointless entry.

Rant, rant away

Be forewarned.  This is another school-specific rant that will likely go on far too long and mean nothing to you unless you're affiliated with DU.  By the end of this, you may wish you had these few minutes back.  Read at your own risk.  

I'm generally feeling better, getting things mostly done, and maintaining during this chaotic time.  To keep up this warm little center, I have been eschewing all discussions of departmental politics and avoiding the pretentious newbies of whom I have so highly spoken of late.  There are a couple of the first-years who aren't bad, but I have yet to officially connect with even these folk, and the bulk of them are, well, annoying as fuck to deal with.  Here's an example:

Laura and I have to - for reasons I won't dwell upon here and would require a lengthy tangent - take this two-hour teaching seminar designed for the first-year students.  I actually rather like the experience of talking about teaching, particularly with the professor of this course.  However, I am sick to death of these snotty newbies who think they have not only the right, but the authority to walk into a classroom and say ridiculous, erroneous, or even sophomoric statements and take up the time of the rest of us without a bat of an eyelash of guilt or humility.  This woman in last night's class is an insufferable fool, who, it seems, honestly feels entitled to talk twice as long as anyone else, continue her conversation for 20 minutes past the end of class, and fully expects all of us to care.  But I'm ahead of myself; let me tell you my history with her thus far.

Newbies were milling about the copy room when Laura went in to use the copier; one of them was The Shrew (yes, as in Taming of, which will soon become apparent) and they looked at Laura and asked "are you a graduate student?" with the same superiority usually reserved only for high school head cheerleaders who have previously never acknowledged so much as your existence in the world.  When Laura replied that she was a third year, the tone naturally changed, but I am positively incensed across the board at the lack of their acknowledgment of hierarchical deference.  These are the same people who call professors by their first names without waiting to be told to do so; when you don't know a prof, you always address him/her as "Dr." until they tell you not to.  People in the doctoral program ahead of you deserve at least minimal respect for what they've suffered to date, just as you will expect the same deference when you reach ABD status.  That's just how manners work.  

At any rate, one of the newbies - who looks too much like our current megalomaniac chair of the department for me to ever possibly like her, despite the fact this is not her fault - asks Laura if she knows me.  The Shrew was trying to "find me" because I am currently the only graduate student in the Renaissance/Early Modern period, which is a position I've relished a bit because it means I get the independent attention I need.  Surprising as this sounds, I'm not much of a "team player" and rather enjoy doing exactly whatever the hell I want to without dealing with others.  Ha.  Shrew is also a "Renaissance person" who "studied under a prominent Shakespeare scholar, BUT she's not JUST a Shakespearean."  Guh.  Before I even met her, she annoyed me.  Turns out, she's in the newbies class on Thursday nights, and missed the first week; the second week, she looks across the room at me, over the top of her glasses in that affected way and says, "I don't know you."  I replied, without even looking up from my computer, "no; you don't."  Aren't these people scholars of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE?  This is what passes for manners of speech?  

So before this week's class, Laura and I had come from the gym as usual (and as an odd kind of protest, we refuse to shower after or even change our clothes) and were eating dinner, when Shrew comes and sits with us, stares, says nothing, and then gets up to move.  ????  A few minutes later in class, I realize just how perfectly irritating this woman is - she is certain that all of her answers are correct, she appears sure that each and every thing she says is valid and worthy of attention, and mostly, she talks slowly so it takes even longer to listen to her.  I should add that I don't normally mind the fellow student who dominates a conversation as long as it's interesting or insightful.  It was also her week to "present" and the object of the game is to provide a teaching assignment that incorporates theory for the undergraduate without it being Theory.  I should also add here that during my presentation two weeks before, she asked me only one question and it was ridiculously stupid and short-sighted.  I see now why; she admits to having never taught before (really? at the doctoral level and at her age?), and her presentation wasn't a presentation at all.  It was a forty-minute, wandering, self-involved story about her getting to take seminars at Oxford and how she published part of her master's thesis.  BFD, I say, and it's pretty arrogant in a room full of scholars who have been teaching for years, know their shit, and can smell a pile of it at three paces.

The class ends at 7:50.  She had spoken without so much as a breath or coherent thought or POINT until 8:05, when her assessments of Renaissance drama were so fucking wrong and uninformed that I had to interject.  I don't think of myself as being openly contentious in the classroom, but there are certain things I cannot abide, and people who dare to speak of things they know nothing of as if they do must be interrupted at the very least.  I admit that I'm not much for, say, American literature, and while I will sit in a class and talk about Henry James, I would never dare go beyond that which I am sure about in a room full of people whose specialty is James.  I am not afraid to admit to what I do not know, but dammitall, I fucking know my Ren drama and I'll be fucked silly if I'm going to sit there and listen to her just be WRONG fifteen minutes past the time I thought I'd be on my way home.  She claims to have "invented" her own theory - with those prestigious colleagues at OXFORD - about "dissidence" in Shakespeare, and then some damn thing about Catholics and Jews.  Whatever.  George Bernard Shaw did the same thing over a hundred years ago.  She talks of The Merchant of Venice as "anti-semitic" and says that The Jew of Malta isn't.  If you know anything about either of these plays, you know that it's pure shit and she hasn't a clue about any of it.  When she asked me about my dissertation work and I started to explain it, I got no further than two words, one of which was 'pamphlet' and she was off talking about herself and this book I should read about the Catholic/Protestant rift in England.  Huh?  I corrected her that my dissertation had nothing at all to do with that, but I had a digital side project about the debate over The Book of Common Prayer and that many people completely miss the point of said rift.  She didn't even register that I had spoken at all.  Shrew.

When I asked her in class what makes what she's saying any different than New Historicism, she went on some inexplicable tangent about Stephen Greenblatt and how his name is Jewish, and this thing she read that he wrote about Hamlet.  When I pointed out to her that everything she was hinging her "argument" upon is not only nothing new, but also that she had overlooked the other major playwrights of the period (who, incidentally, were all doing the same thing), she nodded as if she knew what I was talking about but clearly she didn't.  She is one of those scholars who studies only in a vacuum, is unaware that things were written before Shakespeare, clearly doesn't know shit about the medieval period (which you pretty much have to know to do Ren lit), and isn't willing to admit she doesn't know.  She is one of those people who would never see the value in reading V for Vendetta alongside Macbeth and Faust.  I would have brought this up to her, but no way am I giving this woman my good ideas.  No way is she latching onto me to listen to her, either.  I tried to be nice in correcting her fallacies of comprehension, but she kept putting me on the spot, literally calling on me, and finally I just told her in the nicest way possible that I thought her idea wouldn't work.  But what do I know?  I'm only two years ahead of her, have way more experience in the classroom, am more well-read, probably better published, and have a mind of my own (versus the parroting of folks who thought about this before me).  Guh.

And this, friends, is what I hate about graduate school.  I can't wait for my parole hearing - er, graduation.

We do sugar o'er the devil himself

I've been teaching V for Vendetta in my fiction course this week - the graphic novel, that is - and while I typically meet with a great deal of resistance to the comic form, the students never seem to be able to stop talking about it.  I find it amusing that from among the myriad complaints arises insightful commentary and the startling ability to relate the story to our history and our present.  What a lovely thing.  

Speaking of lovely things, my class last night was observed by my former writing coach/advisor to my undergraduate program in creative writing.  She is in her 60's now, and in the interim of being her student and now, we've become friends and I respect her a great deal.  She has slaved at Metro for 40 years with few thanks and (I assume) a paltry paycheck for her services; she is a brilliant poet and a unique woman, but in spite of her grousing, I know for fact that she is far too bright and worthy to have stayed at Metro so long except by choice.  She does it for the same reasons I do it, and it is in large part because of her that I am where I am now.  All faculty must undergo an observation each spring in our department, and names are drawn for this purpose.  We are to have a different person each year observe us in different classes, etc.  I was delighted of course to find out that she would be sitting in on my class this year.  She drove to the satellite campus, stayed the entire three hours (compared to the average 15 minutes I have gotten every year prior), and said she really enjoyed the graphic novel discussion and had looked forward to watching me teach.  It was akin to a parental kudos to hear that I "had come a long way" and that while she "wasn't surprised," she was "delighted to witness my artistic, natural style" in the classroom firsthand, and this means more to me than any comments I have ever received since I began teaching.  

It somehow feels like after all these years, I've finally officially impressed her - this woman who gave every single piece of my writing a "B" because if she gave me an A, I'd stop working on it.  She gave me A's in the end, but for years the B's infuriated me when lousier writers got A's.  I see now, of course, that she was right: give the A to the person who doesn't care to work harder; give a B to the one who will edit and rewrite and perfect endlessly to encourage rather than discourage.  It's an odd theory, but I find myself employing it regularly.  I'm happy in my job, and that is really saying something when I watched my parents struggle through daily work under the assumption that work is something one has to do and no one ever said it should be enjoyable or fulfilling - you just did it and shut up about it and watched TV all evening until it was time to go to bed and wake the next day to do it all again.  No wonder they were always such unhappy people.  

Despite being busier than a one-legged man at a butt-kickin' (<--some southern colloquialisms never leave me, sorry), I'm in a decent mood the last couple of days.  I suspect it has much to do with the fact that I've been sleeping with Prince Valium of late, and drinking less (but better) coffee during the day.  Amazing how much better one feels when "English teacher coffee" is avoided.  You'd think that with Kaladi and Starbucks (two of them, no less) within spitting distance of the English department that we could manage to have some decent joe, but alas, it's the pre-ground, canned, ten-cents-per-metric-ton stuff that comes from Costco and is either made so weak that it can scarcely defend itself or so strong that it has a viscosity rating.  Neither version of which bodes well for the cranky and sleep-deprived zombies we become halfway through a term.  Good coffee and sleep definitely diminishes general snarky-ness.

I didn't get a lot in class, but I know it don't come from a shot glass

I'm generally dismayed with school and all things school today.  It's only Tuesday and it's been a really long week so far.  Yet in ten minutes it will be Friday and I'll have accomplished less than half of what I am supposed to and need to.  I do not know how to balance out my life in any meaningful way at this point.

I want to drink heavily.  The Irish blood calls to me at times like these and says, "hey, it's nothing a pint (or ten) of Guinness can't solve; you can cure that hangover with Irish cream in the coffee and Jameson at lunch."  Sad part is, the little devil on that shoulder is already drunk at 9:30 a.m. and he's a mighty tempting little fellow.  After all, he's having a sodding good time up there and I'm brooding over how I have no structured lesson plan in place for my class that begins in 20 minutes.  Alcohol might actually help, who knows, but the best I've got in my desk at the moment is Oolong tea.

And here I sit writing nonsense when I actually have a few minutes to get to work on something.  Anything would do.  Papers to grade, books to read, essays to begin, stories that need pages to live in, etc.

Meh.

Why we write

It occurs to me this morning that I've turned a crucial corner in my academic career that I did not ever imagine possible: I understand.  Think of the actual weight of a word like "understand" and suddenly that is not a simple thing anymore.  In the first year I spent in the doctoral program at DU, I found myself continually at odds with what I didn't comprehend, and I felt perpetually aware of what was a mystery.  In my neurotic coping way, I simply avoided every single thing that felt uncomfortable (to the degree possible) and went on my way doing that which I liked and shunning the rest.  There is a point in any engagement with academe that this must happen because we cannot know all there is to know and you either accept this, form it into elitist snobbery, or go entirely mad.  At any rate, I'm taking a fiction theory course this term and I continually stun myself with the sudden effortless ability to do what needs doing.  I almost always fret about class presentations because the expectation is high and I seem to always find myself in new terrain which makes it all the more difficult to do.  But this weekend, I sat down with Henry James, read the theory, scanned the novel, and in a flash created a presentation for this afternoon that I have even impressed myself with.  How did this happen?

I have been reading (gasp!) the French Structuralists and I understand them for the first time perhaps ever.  The real power in understanding is that the bullshit parts become abundantly clear and that which is useful becomes so.  For example, I read Todorov and while he - like all theorists - intensely loves the look of as many words as possible on the page regardless of point made, I find the general premise of his work fascinating.  It seems obvious, too, that readers necessarily construct the story, that we naturally and almost always feel the need to fill empty space in a story with the one we've made up, and that characters exist in a real space somewhere and we often fill in those blanks too.  Where did this person go after the story ends?  I ask my students such questions all the time, and they always have answers and they are always remarkably different.  That's a cool thing to think about, even when we do it all the time and never think about it.  It makes me hyper-aware of what I do when I write and read now in an entirely new way.

I have then become obsessed with the concept of construction in a more general sense and how it defines human existence.  How all things are only construction of reality; that we are only ever a construction of the infinity of moments that occur leading up to any given moment.  That we are different people at every single second of every single day.  Todorov would say that when you read a novel, you can only construct the story out of your own reading/life experience; if this is true, it might explain why reading a book over and over can be a different experience each time: we are different people each time we read a text.  Hmmm.  

I know it's Monday morning with the sun shining and the promise of a warm day (finally), and I should not be philosophizing (or trying at any rate) this early and this under-caffeinated.  But last night I was listening to the radio in the car, and heard The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" on an "80's Flashback" weekend show, and the radio DJ commented about this song as being representative, as being one of those reminiscence-inspiring tunes for all of those in my general age group.  I listen to these shows all the time, but it never occurred to me that even though this show reflects MY 80's experience, mine was hardly representative.  In fact, I cannot think of a single time when The Cure was considered cool by anyone except my friends and people of our general ilk.  The radio played shit like Milli Vanilli, hair metal ballads, and only the mainstream version of New Wave at any given time.  The sole exception is KTCL when they were independent and before they sold their souls to Satan (er, Clear Channel communications).  But nobody listened to KTCL - and by nobody I mean the average teenager at my high school.  I was a nothing in high school: invisible, average, silent, shy, malleable.  My friends were more outgoing, and I certainly associated with those who listened to The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Violent Femmes, etc.  We wore Doc Martens, they dyed their hair strange colors and wore black and mohawks and leather jackets and Sid Vicious dog chains with padlocks around their necks.  None of these people, nor myself, were ever cool, popular, or even worth registering on most radar screens.

So what the fuck is this Cure song doing on popular 80's weekend radio shows?  Because after Nirvana, "alternative" became "mainstream" and suddenly it was all cool to listen to.  Call it revolution; call it a sell-out of punk ideology.  Whatever.  What bothers me is that this ideal 1980's that never existed has been constructed by what became cool in the 90's.  How can people who were creating "mall bangs" with AquaNet, matching their neon tee shirt to their socks, and listening to Poison remember the 80's as being all about "Just Like Heaven"?  How is it that a little band called the Violent Femmes that no one ever heard about and certainly never got popular radio play, can now be so ubiquitously associated with the 80's that it's a fucking Wendy's or Burger King commercial?  I am positively incensed that Alice radio plays "Blister in the Sun" with such regularity I am sick of hearing it.  

If we can reconstruct the past into something ideal, something we long for, in a way that it never was, it makes me put all other past eras into serious question.  I questioned them before, and from the time I was very young, of course, but now I feel certain that the past doesn't even really exist.  If memory is flawed, minds are fallible and finicky, and people choose to define themselves after the fact, what is history?  

Pay no mind to what they say; it doesn't matter anyway

I had a good day today, which stands in stark contrast to the rubbish one yesterday.  In short, my sister and I have found ourselves at a curious impasse and this is unexplored terrain for us.  We are fighting, which I cannot understand as we never fight; the last one was something like a decade ago and it was over something stupid, as familial battles often are.  But this one feels in some way more poignant because the points at which we disagree are at the personality level, about issues that run deep between us that perhaps need to change.  

I have changed in some fundamental way in the last six months or so, and I may have been incubating these changes for even longer.  But I feel good about this change; it feels somehow like I understand things differently; I engage my world in a new way now that requires more of those in my life than it used to.  

What I learned in therapy - as lame as it sounds - is that much of my life has been lived in the service of others.  That is, I am often the one who is leaned upon, and mostly regarding my family.  My parents put me in the middle of their war when I was very young and I always mediated their fights, debates, controversies, etc. when I should have been an ignorant but happy child.  I know things about each of my parents that children should never know; I never want to know bad things about either of them and yet both of them have never had any problem telling me such things for reasons that are still basically unknown to me.  Was it to get me to "side" with them, to effect some kind of change to their relationship, to "one-up" the other?  I cannot and do not want to know this.

I am the oldest kid and was always responsible for the other two from the age of about nine or ten; I was the babysitter, the chore-enforcer, the tattle-taler, the one who fixed things.  In retrospect, this has served me largely well in that I'm able to take care of myself and others well, it makes me a generally good leader, and it permits me to feel confident as a decision-maker and advice-giver.  But it also, retrospectively, wasn't fair to me.  I had to be a grownup at a young age, and at no time was I ever granted permission to disobey - I had an early curfew, rules about the car, about boys, and I stuck to them religiously because I knew that the hammer would fall hard on me if I didn't.  My sister, on the other hand, outright ignored all such rules with almost no repercussions.  Sure, my parents were frustrated at her refusal to comply, but consequences - if any - were light at best.  By the time my brother was a teenager, he got condoms and something like "don't get anyone pregnant."  He came and went as he chose, knowing full well that consequence did not really exist for him, that he could behave any way he liked and someone would excuse it.  I fell into the camp of a parent, able to keep their secrets and advise and not to judge indiscretions and missteps.  But who was there to keep mine?  To advise me and not to judge?  No one, until I was into my adult years and had the guts to impart any of the desires for these things to another person.  It happened to be my sister in large part, and it wasn't until this point that we could ever be friends.

Ultimately, though, I think our relationship was still always a bit imbalanced by the fact that I'm the older and supposedly wiser one and did things "first."  This is in no way my sister's fault, of course, but my role as de facto parental unit was established when we were kids and I felt had no real ability to change.  

In therapy, and after Sami's surgery, I came to a stark realization that a large percentage of the people in my life are the recipients of my mothering - even my parents - to the degree that it is never reciprocated.  When I really needed support during the hospital thing, I was shocked by how few directions it actually came from.  It came from Laura, who called me every day and asked how I was doing and actually paused to hear the reply.  She offered to come have coffee or lunch.  She didn't care that I was frustrated or snotty or unwashed.  She even let me hijack her chai with another friend in order to vent my frustration and madness and later insisted I need not apologize.

I wish I could say that such actions were a theme of this traumatic point, but I can't.  My ex-husband, from whom I have been divorced for twelve years, still depends upon me to do everything regarding our daughter; he feels no responsibility because I will care for her in every way.  My parents (my mother, more pointedly) expected me to care about my brother's hurt feelings that I hadn't called him back after a whole night of my daughter in ICU, forgetting to breathe.  This sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?  But it happened.  My sister was there, of course and was supportive, but with a baby in tow.  Jamison is my rock, and so in tune is he that he always knows exactly what his role is at any given moment - he knows when to sit next to me and say nothing, when to make jokes, and when to stay away.  I may not have survived this without him.

So after this point, I decided to start taking account of this and opted to make some real changes.  But I was a complete fool for thinking that I wouldn't meet with some resistance to my sudden honesty and refusal to stay in the little box certain people have put me in.  When I started to rebalance my relationship to my sister, it was met with hurt and anger, which has taken me by surprise.  It feels good, though, to be saying that which needs to be said between us, and I feel certain that in the end we'll be the better for it.  I want to surround myself with people who meet me in the middle.  I want to hold dear the friend who reads my blog and picks up the phone to find out if I'm okay, and who, when I say I am, will change the subject and just talk to me with the implicit understanding that I don't want a post-mortem or a pity party, but just someone to talk to in a more general sense.  Someone who asks "how are you?" expecting an answer, not as a greeting.  We all deserve this and should settle for no less.

The tears come warm and heavy, and the cross-streets bear your name

What causes us to weep?  One many great mysteries to me is how and why when we feel a particular set of emotions - extreme happiness, loss, frustration, for example - our bodies respond physiologically by pumping saline out of tiny ducts in our eyelids.  We sob and more tears spill over and down our cheeks and sometimes we cannot breathe for such moments.  Ostensibly, we feel better when this phenomenon comes to an end.  Research even tells us that we literally purge ourselves of body toxins when we cry, and that sense of relief is quite real.

But what if you don't feel better?  What if the first tear that falls only creates more of them, and like trying to kill the Hydra by cutting of its head, each tear you wipe away only causes ten more and then twenty more to fall?

As I mentioned earlier, last night was a mess.  Something happened to me beyond the issue with Jamison that I cannot explain.  The art show was stupid, and was really an auction; I may have enjoyed the pieces if we might have looked at them in peace but we couldn't.  More angry still was I to learn this fact; by the time I had conceded to get into the car, going to this event had somehow become an all-important date that he had been looking forward to all week and that I had "ruined" because of my ... whatever you want to call it.  To discover that it was this paltry little insignificant opening attended by a handful of the usual suspects of hipster-ness and pretension drinking PBR out of cans only highlighted the ridiculousness of the whole thing.  I couldn't stay home in my pajamas and watch Lord of the Rings and decompress because of this?  Really?

We decided to stop by a British-style pub for a pint, inside which are photos of various famous pubs of London.  I mentioned to Jamison that in the pubs we drank in there, one of them only had group tables, and it was perfectly acceptable to go and sit at a table as long as there were chairs empty at it.  Last night at Denver's answer to this style of bar, I sat next to one such photo of a place where I had been only a few months ago and suddenly I could scarcely find my breath for the tears of desperate longing and loss I felt welling up and threatening to explode right then.  If I might have willed myself to disappear and found myself suddenly back in that pub, I could have contained it.  Instead I wept silently into my glass of strong cider.  I still don't know why.

Love is a battlefield

Jamison and I did not have a good night.  By Friday evening I'm weary from my week - especially now - and I am cranky.  He wanted to go to an art opening, and asked me early in the week if I would go; I said yes, but with an asterisk.  I'm tired on Friday nights and generally don't like to go out.  He knows this; I know this.  Saturday night is much better, though lately I've been a bit agoraphobic because I'm stressed out.  But I try.  I do.  

I asked him kindly if I could pass on the art thing since he intimated before that it was no big deal but simply an interest of his.  But he does this thing that I hate where he subtly pressures me until I give in that sounds something like this "we'll only be gone a little while; we'll stop in, say hello, look around and come home.  I want to spend the evening with you," and while this is of course a sweet way of doing things (and completely rational - I grant this also), I bristle at it.  I bristle because of old wounds that never healed entirely and the resistance to coercion of any kind is my M.O. now; too many controlling men in my life before Jamison ruined it for him and because I have spent too many years of my life feeling powerless and helpless against tides, against the streams, my first reaction to even the kindest attempts at convincing me to do something I know I don't want to do for whatever reason is abject refusal on my part.  The one thing I don't want to do, however, is force Jamison to have to pay for the sins of others, and this makes me conflicted at another level; I want him to be happy, I in fact wanted to spend my evening with him, and most of all, I didn't want him to be angry with me, or frustrated, or at that point where I'm irrational and his rational mind does not know what to do with/for me.  When he asked if I was ready to go, I said I was tired, and that I had driven from Northglenn to downtown all week, and that I'd had a frantic and busy day from the start.  I wasn't whining.  He knows my tactics, and doesn't hear me at all: he says "put your shoes on; we won't stay long and I'll drive."  

Inside my head says "this man is not going to tell me what to do" without regard to who is saying it.  Rather than hurting his feelings, I retreat silently to the kitchen to run the dishwasher.  Already, I've said that I don't want to go (nicely), I've told him more or less my reasons for not wanting to go, and I've stated clearly that I want to spend the evening with him but I'm not up for going downtown or talking to people.  He spends all day in a tiny room at work, so I get that he needs socialization at the end of the day; I, however, spend the day with a million people - a large percentage of whom demand various things of me - and sometimes I need to be alone inside my own head.  He comes into the kitchen and once more asks if I'm ready to go; he has clearly decided that he's "making" me go in my own best interest which I also hate.  I don't want to be "handled" or taken care of this way; I don't want to be told or even hinted toward that he thinks he knows what is better for me when I'm feeling anxious than I do.  I know for a fact that he does this out of love for me and not in any way to control me, but try to tell that to my brain.

I lost it in the kitchen.  When I restated that I didn't want to go, he got angry and informed me that I never want to go anywhere anymore, that I am no fun, and that most of his friends think that I don't like them or that I'm a snob.  He has told me these things before and it hurts my feelings, not because I care about any of those things specifically, but because it means that out of all the people in the world who don't get me, he's now one of them on this level.  Unless you've been there, you cannot possibly fathom what academic life is like - what graduate school is like - the pressures and the continual engagement required of you.  I never get a break.  When I leave work or school, it's only physically; I am always engaged in the loop of what I have to do today, when I can call people back, what emails need to be answered, which students need "come to Jesus" talks, and what I have to read, write, submit somewhere, edit, plan for or do.  When and if those things get done in the current space, I had better sure as hell be planning for the next round before it sneaks up and bites me right in the ass.  It's an overwhelming life I lead that encompasses at least three full-time jobs and I feel lucky most days that I'm even capable of complete sentences.

In any case, I screamed at him, told him about the million things I've done all day (just today, even) and how all he did was go to work and come home, and that his job is the same each day and when clocks out, he's done.  His response: I work hard too, and sometimes I'm stressed, but I still do what you want me to.  This may in fact be true to some extent, but I can say honestly that I wouldn't give him one ounce of shit if he wanted to pass on something because of being tired or stressed from work.  Not one ounce.  Instead of losing it, I said "fine; I'll get my bag and shoes."  I wanted to cry but didn't; I got my things together and got into the car in cold silence.  Obedience, even, goddammit.  Then he wants to be fucking nice to me and I felt so defeated, so helpless, so completely misunderstood.  This is not the first time we've had this conversation/disagreement/issue.  He takes my hand and says "I love you" which frankly only makes it all worse.  Somehow I'm the bad guy, the one who needs "handling," the head case, the bad partner, and if I remain angry, I'm a bitch too.  Then he decides we should "talk about it" and no matter what I say, it doesn't sink in for him and only makes me feel worse because I cannot express myself in terms he can understand. 

And words and expression are my power.  Without them, what else is there?

Throughout the evening, he tried to be tender, sweet, attentive, considerate but all the while I could only think about how much my feelings had been hurt and how desperately mad it made me.  He made jokes this morning about how I'm not talking to him and I don't know how to bridge this gulf of comprehension (or lack thereof) between us.  He is not a bad guy, has never been one, and yet I can't make him understand even the most basic center of who I am in this way.  I suppose it's part of our human condition - this inability to ever really make another person grasp that inner part of you that doesn't make sense - but it doesn't help to know it.

I'm as I've always been, right behind what's happening

I'm a grouchy bitch today.  Grouchy enough to be irritating myself, in fact.  If I could leave my own body I'd stay far away from me today.  Yikes.  This does not bode well for the long day ahead of me.

Starbucks this morning: the S on Evans has exactly seven parking spaces and two on the street in front of it.  It began with the unreasonably large Suburban that took up two entire spaces and thus occupying the only one remaining in a one-block radius.  It did not help that the dippy bitch driving it looks uncannily like someone I intensely dislike at the moment, and keeps getting in and out of said vehicle as if she plans to leave but isn't really.  She smiled kindly when I looked at her and it was all I could do not to run her over, and then back up and do it again

and then back up and do it again.

Where does this rage come from?

Then I finally got a space (normally I would walk but it's a teaching day, I'm wearing heels, have bothered to put rather expensive product into my hair, am wearing a cashmere blend, and thusly do not wish to do so in the rain), and subsequently my Earl Grey cambric (<--yes, that's of course redundant as a cambric is Early Grey and milk, but try telling THAT to an overly cheerful Starbucks worker bee who insists on calling it "misto").  After loading my tea with an unreasonable amount of artificial sweetener, I pull out of the parking lot to find that someone has parked in the street where I need to turn in order to obtain his/her morning fix.  I actually had to wait for traffic to pass before I could proceed down the street.  Where are the cops when this goes on?  Ten bucks says if I even considered doing such a thing, the entire Denver police force would know it instinctively and be lined up to write me a ticket or ten for each and every infraction they could imagine.  I go around finally and some motherfucker in one of those stupid square box Scion things throws his vehicle into reverse to park without so much as looking in his rearview and almost hits me.  I tap my horn as if to say "hey, I'm back here" and then he flips me off.

Now I understand how Chuck Palahniuk can write a story in which a character can simply think a culling poem and another person will drop dead.  Thank god that is fiction and not reality; there would be a swath of dead bodies in my wake this morning.  Individuals I like, but I simply hate people sometimes.  

Hearing Fate in the wing-beat of a bird

My students have just finished working with Oedipus Rex and the question I asked them today is this: how can we account for Fate and free will (whatever your religious belief may be) when they are so completely opposed?  If you trust that your life is predestined, then how can your choices make any difference?  If for example, I live under the illusion that the choices I've made of what I consider my own free will have led me to the point I am, versus a destiny that dictated it for me without my knowledge - how can I ever know?  Like Oedipus, I would never know this until the moment that the shit storm fell down on my head and - if I was lucky enough to have the benefit of an oracle - I would know that I was merely fooling myself into thinking that I had any power over my own life.  I think I need a new train of thought here...

I didn't realize it at the moment, but I think I sent my poor students into an existential tailspin, which shames me a bit because they're all so young and fresh-faced that I hesitate to burden them with harsh realities before they must face them down.  It's like telling a four-year-old that there's no Santa Claus - clearly he will at some point know this just as you do, but why ruin a good thing while he's got it?  It's not the hanging that bothers us; it's the waiting till dawn that really hurts.

In any case, I'm supposed to be working and alas I am not, so I thought I'd wax philosophical in my own shallow, uninformed way for a bit in this space.  I'm still thinking more consciously about how I live in the world, how I exist within it and against it.  It seems that at the root of all humanity lies paradox and this both bothers and comforts me (quite paradoxically... that was so lame).  Perhaps it's because I'm taking a series of courses this term steeped in theory that my mind is going where it is, but one of my professors asked us to define what it is we "do" as English professors.  My immediate response in my head was, oh sure, I can do that, I've been thinking about it for years.  But then it happened; I couldn't necessarily quantify or qualify it.  In no way was I able to give a succinct job description.  It's all quite nebulous:

I teach English [that's easy, but why do we need whole courses in our native language in order to understand it?] and that entails writing instruction [how do you teach someone to write well?  Is it grammar, mechanics, spelling, and punctuation?  Is it tone, appropriate language, the 5-paragraph essay model?], rhetorical instruction [how does one teach this?  Is there a tried and true method or formula for how arguments develop, break down, work or do not work, fail or pass?], how to do research [this is the most entertaining element of my job, because I myself don't have the answer; it is ever only a haphazard experience of fumbling in the dark and hoping to find something useful], documentation style instruction [shockingly, this is the most 'objective' part of what I teach and yet it's the one thing they never, ever "get"], reading aloud [why do they need me for this activity?], discussion of the readings and instructions [is there any conceivable way to validate this and make it concrete?], response to the world of popular culture, politics, religion, family, economics, ... [too long a list], the teaching of literary terminology and critical reading techniques [why?  I don't believe in half of them myself and every time I teach them it's a bit different].  

None of the aforementioned accounts for the additional parts of the job such as social work [once I had a student who ended up homeless and the mom in me could not abide this fact; I went to the university, helped him get a case worker, a job, and a place to live], mothering [having to tell people to be on time or you'll punish them; having to scold them about using their phones to text message in class; needing rules for people over 18 such as "do not sleep through class or I will count you absent"; having to take roll at all; having to quiz them to make sure they read their assignments], and my least favorite aspect of my job description: always having to be the bigger person.  It's my job to always take the high road, to deal with abuses and ill behaviors from a detached, reasonable place and pretend I like each student equally when I don't.  Some of them I so perfectly adore, some I like just fine, many are merely faces and papers whom I have little opinion either way, and a handful of them I would slap and kick out of my class if I knew I wouldn't get fired for it.

If I had to justify what it is I DO in the world I suppose it would be this: I try to lead and cheer on those who seek knowledge in the hope that they will find it, go out into the world and resist the urge to be one of the sheep.  It's an entirely subjective and nebulous role, but it feels like an important one.  Whether by fate or my own doing, I'm here right now and I have been given or have earned said power, and I plan to keep using it the best I know how.

At least until the blind man shows up to tell me that I've been mistaken all this while.