Almost Heaven, West Virginia

So Meridith is moving across the country tomorrow, a fact with which I have been coping through good old fashioned denial.  It ain't just a river in Egypt, people.  I don't see her so often that I cannot for the most part pretend she's still right where I left her and just busy, but I was listening to - of all things - John Denver this morning on the way to work and it struck me.  Not that I'm losing anything, but for reasons unbeknownst to me I suddenly could feel that which has already been lost.  

When I moved to Denver from West Virginia as a child - it was 1984 and I was almost 13 - the song "Country Roads" was the song playing on the radio when we pulled away from our house on a street I called home and one which I have never seen since.  As a hormonal preteen I realize that my emotion got the best of me at that moment and I cried and felt a deep sense of resentment at my parents, who seemingly packed us up to move across the country without so much as asking me how I felt about that.  Even more infuriating retrospectively is that my father said to me, "don't worry, you'll like our new house much better."  Not only was that not true in any way, but it was so patronizing, like a child of 12 couldn't possibly be suffering something deeper than leaving a house when listening to "take me home, country roads, to the place I belong, West Virginia."  I know now that what I felt was a profound sense of loss ahead of the fact; I knew at some level that I would never be in that spot on that ground again, and if I were ever to return, it would be a different place entirely.  In fact, I have not gone there on purpose because I don't want the idyllic memory of that home destroyed.  Of course it was never as wonderful as I remember it but I can't see any reason to prove that to myself.  

On I-25, right about 8th Avenue, that song came on the radio and I sang along with nostalgia and quite to my surprise, teared up and nearly lost it.  I scarcely think about life in West Virginia anymore except in the idealized parts of my youth there, but it's part of me.  I know that I could never have stayed there, and had I done so, would probably be a fat housewife in a trailer with four or more kids, chain-smoking generic cigarettes and living on a coal miner's salary.  That's a cliche, but it's also a fact for a large percentage of people in that state and for most of them, it's all they know and they live on in ignorant bliss and attend church on Sundays.  But I am well aware that my own sense of the world would not have permitted this kind of life and I fear that I would have buckled under the pressure to accept it and be miserable rather than breaking those bonds and venturing out in to the world.  It terrifies me to think that I may have been a completely different person had we not moved to Colorado and yet something in me yearns for the simplicity of youth and country roads.  It's not real, it never was real, and perhaps that is the saddest part about it all.  Sometimes you cannot go home again.

If you complain once more, you'll meet an army of me

Here I am, awake at 1:34 a.m.  Can't sleep and my mind is racing with the quirky combination of the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy, the words to a former American Idol's radio hit, and the query about whether Fanta orange has caffeine in it to explain this waking phenomenon of mine.  The blue glow from the nifty LED nightlight in the bathroom had cast enough shadow on the ceiling fan that, sans glasses, alternated between looking like a massive black tarantula (disconcerting) and a chihuahua with one ear longer than the other.  I have taken a crapload of Benadryl in addition to Lunesta tonight which typically equates into a state just shy of a coma for me, but alas.  Wide awake.  Nothing to be done.

So I thought I'd manage to be productive.  I'd come up and finally grade those papers I've been ignoring all weekend.  Maybe write some fiction.  Perhaps conduct dissertation research.  Balance my checkbook.  Pay bills.  Return emails.  Can you tell I'm hopping right on those things, even at this wee hour.  My brain is too busy even to write this, and it's doing everything but sleeping.

I needs must curse!

The weather is getting to me.  Really.  Enough already with the fucking snow.  It's only 9:06 on Tuesday morning and I'm cranky as hell.  A large percentage of said crankiness is the fact that I'm at DU, the lesser deals with people in general.  These are the things I'd like to know:

(1)  What in the holy hell gives semi-truck drivers the right to travel in the left lane of the freeway, particularly during heavy traffic?

(2) Why must stupid text-messaging girls text on the stairway and walk down the center so that no one can get past them?

(3)  Why, why, WHY do people decide it's okay to cut you off or nearly hit you because of their own driving faults and then flip you off?

(4) Why do stupid, testosterone pumped men decide that you telling them they are bad drivers when they nearly run you over in a parking lot crosswalk think they can wait for you to come out of the supermarket to personally threaten you with physical violence (true story, Jamison, last night at the Safeway)?

(5) Why must everything having to do with cell phones, cable companies, banks, and university administrations be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to manage?

(6)  Why do most of the girls at DU look like clones of one another, and subsequently, clones of Britney Spears?

My teacher at my class at the gym tried to kill me last night, and nearly succeeded.  I love her class, and both my body and mirror image owe her a debt of gratitude, but damn.  I worked too hard, got my heart rate and blood pressure too high, sweat out too much fluid, and found myself feeling nauseated and achy the rest of the night.  To no surprise, I still feel that way this morning, which only adds salt to my already briny state of mind.  I am tired.  Of.  Everything.

Yesterday's Fiction Theory class was, again, nearly unbearable.  Turns out the guy sitting next to me was "presenting" and thus I could not sit and grade papers without being blatantly rude.  It was another many-paged, un-proofread document that made me want to punch people or claw my eyes out just so I wouldn't have to look at it.  Again, I like the class itself (that is, the reading, the discussion with the prof, but my classmates... I won't go on about them anymore I suppose except to say that a few of them may not scrape by this term unscathed if I have anything to say about it).  

Let me sum up by saying: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Been running so long, I've nearly lost all track of time

Some days I'm convinced that I'm swept up in a whirlwind.  Completely at the mercy of nature.  I move from one place to the next so quickly I never know what time it is, what day it is, where I'm supposed to be at any given moment unless it's on the computer screen in front of me - yes, I know that this is the same litany as my last entry, but for the sake of emphasis, I thought it was worth repeating.  

This week has been perfectly insane.  As the last week of Metro classes comes to a close, classes at DU have reached their peak.  But that is not all; my allergies are at their worst right now, and at any given moment, I can go from feeling relatively fine to watery, itchy eyes, wheezing, sneezing, and generalized itchiness.  The only thing that helps significantly is Benadryl, which is a lovely thing but makes me so tired I cannot function.  I get so angry at Claritin commercials because Claritin and all forms of it do exactly nothing for me, and neither does Zyrtec.  Remember Allegra?  It was the wonder allergy drug that "does not cause drowsiness" but had me in a virtual coma by mid afternoon every day when I took it.  Can I tell you how lame I feel not being able to go anywhere near my friends' homes because they have cats?  That before I can accept even the most innocuous invite to dinner, I have to ask what pets they have, if they smoke, etc.?  The last time I encountered cat hair, I thought my throat would actually seal shut before I got enough antihistamine into me to stop it.  Oi.

Then there's the yard at my house.  It's a great yard.  Pretty, with grape arbors, two huge apple trees, lilac and honeysuckle bushes, lemon mint, and the front yard has my roses and snapdragons and bluebells and two kinds of climbing ivy.  I love this fact, having lived apartment and condo life for so long, but I have yet to be able to plant my new flowers, pull weeds, or in any other meaningful way participate in the yard work because I get hives.  That's right.  HIVES from pulling weeds, even with gloves on.  I raked the dead stuff out of the front yard two weeks ago and it took me three days to recover.  I'm sick to death of the allergy thing and there appears to be nothing I can do about it except live with it.

Yesterday was the last day of my Metro stuff and I feel strangely bittersweet about it.  I am glad to have them done with because it means less I have to do, but I will miss them.  Part of what keeps me going is the energy I derive from students, and despite the several poisoned apples, this was a particularly sweet and energetic bunch.  I was overwhelmed with their feedback about my class and about me personally.  I admit that I feel confident that I'm a good teacher, but I didn't know that they all thought so too, and adamantly.  It's nice to know that, and it helps me remember why I do it.  Especially when those above me in various locales do not seem to acknowledge the kind of passion and energy I give to the job.

But you know the old saying: The curse of the highly competent is perpetual servitude.

I'll accept with poise, with grace, when they draw my name from the lottery

I cannot wait until this semester is over at Metro.  There's only one week left and I'm at the point where I practically salivate at the notion of having two fewer things to worry about.  It's come to that time when I'm exhausted and can no longer think for myself, have no idea what day it is, and would be utterly lost without my laptop telling me what to do every minute of every day.  The items on my to-do list include not only grading papers, attending various meetings and classes, but also things like "feed the dog," and "brush teeth," and "eat breakfast."  You think I exaggerate.  

The other thing needling me of late is my being at a crossroads and recognizing it.  I miss the days when I was oblivious to tidal changes in my life and was only aware of them after the fact.  Granted, that made them somewhat more difficult emotionally, but still.  As I near the end of my doctoral program (thank God for that), I am poignantly aware that I'm not quite there and that puts me in no better job position than I was three years ago.  I am still at the mercy of the various departments, qualified mostly for adjunct jobs, and working my ass off (but sadly only metaphorically - my real ass maintains its stubborn enormity).  This frustrates me because, for example, next fall at DU I am slated to teach only one class that they scraped out for me, and it's Business and Technical Writing, which I'd rather take a beating than have to teach ever again.  Business majors, by and large, are humorless, dull, and in no way interested in anything interesting.  That's unfair and generalized, I know, but I don't think I can take it again.  Further, it's at the Women's College, which has promise, given it's older and working demographic of women only, but that means teaching either Friday night or all day Saturday, which I don't think I'm willing to do, even for the money.  Oi.  How frustrating.  But I have applications out all over the place and have hopes of something perhaps better, but who knows.

And in the meanwhile of working to make the mortgage and such, I still have to finish my Ph.D., and all of this, today, makes me just feel tired.  Wait, more than tired, it makes me comatose and incapable of action.  Instead of jumping in and swimming, I've opted to shut down and just sit on the grass near the pool and stare at it as though it were incomprehensible to me.  See?  Even my analogies are lame today.  

A Vapourish Despondency

Part of what I'm working through as an adult (like I imagine we all do) is to come to terms with how I was raised and what I've been taught to do, believe, and think.  I also think that becoming an adult requires this kind of reconciliation and that it's necessary to take inventory of how you assert these things for yourself against upbringing and decide what you keep and what is bunk.  

I had a conversation yesterday with my mother which I knew would go the way it did; I knew I was instigating, but I couldn't help myself.  On the coffee table in her living room is a three-ring binder from her bible study that reads: "Christianity: Why We Believe What We Believe."  My mother still attends a local church, volunteers her time there answering phones and doing mailings, and she has friends there.  I don't begrudge her community involvement and sense of belonging; in that sense, I think churches can be wonderful places of connection to others, refuge for those who need it, and places containing overall peace.  In fact, I think that's what they're supposed to be, and I have often discovered "religious" moments inside certain places, like being in Southwark Cathedral in London and listening to the choir at Even Song, or standing in an empty Brompton Oratory in Kensington and then sitting quietly listening to the sounds of Latin prayers.  These are lovely moments when I truly believe in God and where I feel connected to the universe in a higher way that makes me feel quite contented.  I understand the desire for this feeling and I believe that it exists.

I don't, however, buy any dictated religion or it's business-model, corporate-mentality, brainwashing bullshit designed to take money from people who don't have it in the name of God and use it to build obnoxious "campuses" and send missionaries to foreign countries when a bulk of their own congregations are losing jobs, homes, and unable to properly feed their children.  Even my mother's church - where a glimmer of admiration still flickered for me because the people I know there seem reasonable and nice - hired a "marketing firm" to do their advertising after they spent, literally, millions of dollars to build a brand new church campus.  If they can drum up millions - from anywhere - shouldn't that go where it's most needed?  Couldn't they be sending people to college, helping to pay doctor bills, rescuing people from foreclosures, offering child care to working families, and on and on and on?  If I ever suddenly had millions, I would share it - and I say that with honesty.  Whenever I think of winning the lottery, one of the first things that enters my mind is what I could do with it to help everyone I know and even those I don't.  Every person in my life would get a house, college educations for their children, investment accounts, means to take care of themselves and others.  I'd pay it forward for generations and encourage everyone to do the same.  Did you know that most charitable contributions for things like volunteer work for social services and money donations to homeless shelters come more often from people who are poor than anyone else?  But giving away millions and millions to me is the lottery dream.  Sure, I'd do things for myself, but those things are shockingly humble - I'd keep my house but it would just be paid off and everything in it would work properly; I'd keep my car too but I wouldn't owe anything on it.  I'd fill our retirement accounts and Sami's college fund.  I'd probably do exactly what I do now but I wouldn't owe on student loans and I'd get to spend more time traveling, but I doubt I'd do it lavishly because the real world is far more interesting.  

But I digress.  So I flipped through this book my mother had because I was curious about the answer - why do they believe what they believe?  That seems like a pertinent query, and one I wish more people asked of themselves in a general sense.  The answers were shockingly vague, as always and all boiled down to the same thing: because the Bible says so.  Sigh.  Why is that ever enough for people to hinge their entire world view upon?  That's not a criticism, either, but a real question that has never made sense to me, even when I avidly attended church once upon a time.  It's a book.  It's even an interesting book filled with wonderful ideas and yes, we could all do well with some good advice about how to treat others and be good people.  I can even see why someone would want to follow the general principles laid out in it - they are good ideas.  But how on earth can we take a book written by many people that is incomplete, endlessly translated for centuries, and call it the Word of God?  Doesn't that strike anyone else as being really arrogant?  Inspired or not, how do any of these authors know what the word of God is?  What if they misinterpreted?  What if they brought their own biases to bear?  How can we know who are the real and false prophets?  This troubles me not because I wish to be contentious, but because it's not rational.  If you want to know God - as much as any of us do - look around you.  Watch a baby be born, think about the simple miracle of our human consciousness and its capabilities, cuddle a sleeping puppy, watch a sunrise, stare out into the ocean, look at anything under a microscope.  There's God.

One of the questions the book asked at the end of its first chapter is, "What will you say about the Bible when confronted with a non-believer?"  And it was blank.  So I asked my mom about it.  The rhetoric behind that question is of course what troubles me - the simple tone of the query requires an us-and-them mentality.  She said she had no answer because she is never confronted.  So I confronted her; I said by their definitions, I'm a non-believer.  I'm not a Christian because I don't buy the dogma of what someone along the way just decided was Christianity.  It doesn't mean I'm not spiritual, that I don't believe in God, that I don't strive to be a good person, or that I don't believe that there is life outside of this one that results in what we do here, but that's about all I'm willing to concede because the truth is, I don't know and I don't think we CAN know, and I refuse to have another human being, who is only as in-the-know as I am by virtue of his/her humanity to tell me otherwise.  My mother immediately gets defensive and even when I told her I really was just asking her about what she believes, she replied, "it's just what I've always been taught to believe," which is also her defense for being racist, and seems an unacceptable one to me.  Why is that a sufficient answer for any intelligent person?  By that justification, I should be a gay-hating, racist, churchgoing, amen-shouting, stay-at-home mom with no dreams of betterment because that's how I was raised.  I was taught to believe that white skin is better than anything else, and even though my parents have come a long way with educated children who chide them, they never stopped believing it - they just stopped saying out loud.  I have risen above what "I've been taught to believe" and decided for myself what I believe, and I asked my mother what stops her from doing the same.  She had no answer and it made me really feel sorry for her.  My sister and brother and I did not spring forth from Zeus's forehead as intelligent beings; we got here from this gene pool of my parents, and I'm shocked at how that is possible now that I'm an adult.  

How someone so narrow-minded and conformist ever raised me is an utter mystery.

You can't keep safe what wants to break

Thursday at DU and it's fucking snowing.  I admit I like grey, drizzly days in the spring that make me think of London and allow me to imagine I'm not exactly where I am at the moment, but SNOW?  It's 1 May, people, and I'm fucking over it.  

My school headspace also leaves much to be desired today.  I'm prepared to tell the class I'm teaching today that they can just go home, read their Moliere and Wilde, write me a freakin' paper on anything at all related to those things, and we'll just keep the little secret that we never have to meet again and they all get A's.  One can dream... the sad part about this is I'm teaching Drama, which I love to do, and the small group I have is great - they're sweet and fun and smart - but they, too, are limping toward the finish line.  

As one of my esteemed colleagues accused me of about two weeks ago, I am again doing things in an "undergraduate" manner.  Yesterday I played hooky from my afternoon theory course and didn't even tell the prof I was leaving or why.  I just got up during the break and didn't look back.  It felt wonderful, and even though it was pretty lame on my part, I just couldn't take it any longer.  We were talking about Lukacs and Gennette (French Marxists, if you're not in the know there, and if you are, I'm sure you're groaning right about now or trying to re-repress your wretched experience with these writers), and by the time we got to Gennette's mathematical-looking "formula" for fiction, it was either (a) I stand up, crawl under the table and begin rocking back and forth in a fetal position, of (b) leave before I completely snap in just such a manner.  There is only so much I can take at 3:00 in the afternoon on a Wednesday in a room full of pretentious Newbies, and it turns out, that was the straw.  Right there.  Gennette's fucking formula and Lukacs' nonsensical gobbledegook which carries on for many pages and fails to make any marked impact on me in terms of a point.  I don't apologize for this, either.  So much literary theory is utter bullshit and everyone knows it, but few people are willing to say it out loud because critics such as these who can spew jargon and three-dollar words out SEEM to be smarter and thus the impression is we shouldn't challenge them and their often half-cocked or antiquated ideas.  

Clearly my coffee kicked in right about the middle of that last paragraph - did you notice too?

I'm in a good mood, generally, but being here definitely takes it down a notch, like a heavy brick that sits atop my head and blocks the sun from entirely hitting me.  A sun spot.  An interference.  A black hole somewhere in space that affects gravity in the precise spot I sit.  My writing life is great - I'm well into a novel that I feel good about and if given the time, could finish the first draft of in no time flat.  If I had any time, that is.  I'm also really getting into my dissertation, which also feels good.  I know what I'm writing about, I have a clear direction, and it's quite different than what I thought it would be.  So it goes.

I wish I had a time-turner like Hermione got in the third Harry Potter book, so I could actually experience the same time of day several times just to get things done.  Motivation isn't my problem; a simple lack of time is.  But one thing I can say that's different now from this time last year, when I had a nervous breakdown, is a change of priorities.  I made a pact with myself a few months ago to put things in numbered order of importance in my life, because if the to do list is never going to get done (and it won't), there has to be a hierarchy of what gets moved to the next day indefinitely.  I realized that the first things to get axed on any given agenda day were the things that I needed most - the gym, gym classes, cooking dinner, taking baths, massages, hair appointments, and that sort of thing.  It sounds silly and girly, but really - why should I always put myself last?  My new thing is that I am at the top of the list - I go to the gym no matter what; I eat right no matter what, and if something doesn't get done, it's school work.  I sat through a whole week of class without having read one word of what we were talking about and I didn't care because I lost two inches on my waist and my blood pressure was great that morning at the doctor's office.  My skin is clear, I am sleeping at night, my jeans are too big, and I feel healthier than I ever have in my entire life.  Fuck Henry James.  I have things to do and life is too short for ten pages of musing over a Golden Bowl and it's symbolic value.