The Way of the Beatrix

Another Long Absence

2008-12-18T08:02:00.001-06:00

It's been another long absence. Eh. I think cataloguing my daily life is a little too much for me. This is just here for me when I need it.

As has often been the case, I need this most when I am not sleeping. Again, I am not sleeping.

I drift off but I dream so loudly that it does nothing to make me feel rested. I wake up in the night with odd pains. This morning at four, I was such that my ear was being crushed into dust, that it would rot off my head in a dry husk and blow away. I woke up, and sure enough, though I have slept on my side since I was a child, sleeping on my side this night was crushing my ear. Curious.

I am lucky to have the job that I have but it bores me. I wish I could do something with art full time. If I could be paid to knit for eight hours a day, I would truly be free.

The Solstice is this weekend. The longest night of the year. Eyes on the prize. Surely things will look up from there.

2008-07-16T22:55:00.002-05:00

Dear Seals of La Jolla,
I'm sorry that people keep swimming on your beach. Some people, dear seals, as simply assholes. Having been around dolphins, who I hear are also assholes, I'm sure you can understand this.

While I did enjoy our conversation, I admit I was rather let down at the very small pool of topics we could discuss. Fish, fishing, being near fish, hunting fish, swimming with fish, eating fish, and thinking about eating fish are all well and good, but might I suggest a fucking hobby?

Please understand this letter is meant as a tough love approach to what I only hope is your safe and secure future. I mean, no offense, but maybe if you strove to be more worldly you wouldn't be endangered. I'm just saying.

Next time I come out there to visit, how about we each promise to have read a book? It can be something high brow or just fun. I hear Le Divorce is some great chicklit! Then we can all watch the movie with Kate Hudson and the other blonde lady that used to be Nicole Kidman's date all the time.

In anticipation of that time, let's also work on the barking, ok? When we went to see Love Actually I nearly missed all the soft core emoti-porn undertones of the film with all your noise.

See you again soon,
Best wishes,
Bea

2008-06-27T07:22:00.001-05:00

I haven’t written anything in a long time. I’m slipping below the surface again. I have a cold and it won’t go away. I feel like all I do is go to work, eat, make waste, and sleep. Sometimes I feel like a cancer on the earth. My existence seems all about consuming, and I don’t know what I’m giving back.
I think about Roman graves and women with gauzy dresses who lived thousands of years ago. I wonder if they ever felt the same way. No one is here to remember them now. What was the point?
Life keeps happening to me. It is so much bigger than I am. I keep waiting for something to sweep me along. And there is nothing. Nothing happens. I keep moving myself to better and better shores from which to catch a breeze. But the breeze doesn’t come. My favorite dreams are the ones in which I fly.

2008-05-06T07:06:00.000-05:00

I have not slept in five days.

If you are reading this, it's possible you know me. Or that you know that fact about me. But then agian, maybe you don't know me at all.

When I say that I've not slept in five days, I don't mean that I've slept poorly, or fitfully, that I've grabbed a couple hours here or there, but am still, on the whole, sleep deprived. I mean I have not slept. For an instant, for a moment. In five days.

You know how other people wait for a miracle during their lives? They wait for the lottery, or for the small miracle of the end of the workday. They wait to find the perfect pair of jeans. They wait to hear that they're pregnant. The pray to hear they aren't. I wait like that every day for sleep to come back to me.

When I drove to work this morning, grateful for somewhere to go, I saw traffic lights in the distance twittering along the concrete horizon line. It was so beautiful, this moment, that seemed like it belonged only to me. The morning was steel blue grey, and the lights looked so warm. They began to synch up to the soft swedish voice lilting in my car, and I felt so incredibly happy.

And just then a crow flew across my eyeline. His flightpath took him to the county highway sign just to my right. He cocked his head when he looked at me, and the world slowed down. All as if to say, remember you are fallible. I wonder if he knows who's been stealing my sleep?

2008-04-22T08:06:00.002-05:00

“Come on. You can tell me.”

Is there a greater lie than someone can tell you when your heads are close together, sharing the clean space of a pillow?

If I could tell you, I wouldn’t be so anxious. You wouldn’t be asking for the name of the elephant in the room in the first place.

I can’t tell you my darling because of what I know it would do to you. I know what it would do to you for me to tell you that I still think of him. That I think of him everyday. That he accompanies me everywhere that you cannot- work, dreaming, imagining. We have no relationship of desire, this specter and I. We have an understanding. That we have to continue on, bound together, until something.

Did you know that at night when I lay awake, I am not worrying? You stroked my hair last night like you were soothing a colicky child. It was sweet, this little gesture, as many of yours are. But, again, it was the wrong one.

When I lay awake at night, I hear sounds from the day- just certain ones- play over and over in my head. Things lodge there. Little memories that don’t seem like they should mean anything. But the minute I hear them during the day I know they’ll be with me the rest of my life. The way that fantastically exotic actress said the name of Borges. I heard that for almost a week. Bor-ges. Bor-ges. Bor. Ges.

I see images too. I see the way he laughed at one of my jokes too heartily with his lips stained with red wine. In that moment he seemed so vulnerable to me. And I felt I could see his life stretching in front of him as a thing alien to him. Every moment of the future falling upon him like an attacker from the front, wholly unanticipated, a complete miracle or tragedy. This was a man with no foresight.

I see the woman in the front row of the staff meeting, who ducked out of that room of 2900 other people to go to the bathroom. But she didn’t go the bathroom. She returned with a closed left hand. And later I saw her sitting there, closing her thin lips over the fat red strawberry she’d smuggled in. She’d left to sneak a treat from the lunch tables being set up outside. I loved the way she ate it. Lips first, then teeth. In several bites, each time fingering the dry green leaves at the top, readjusting that velvety handle. She lodged in my brain too, and I saw her last night while the woman whispered over and over,

“Borges. Borges. I would be sitting on a beach, reading Borges.”

bits and pieces

2008-04-01T10:11:00.002-05:00

I'm not doing much writing these days, though I'm getting the itch again. It's hard for me to stick with this blog, because it represents feelings during a time and in a place that I am so glad to have escaped. I sometimes wish all that had just never been. Even though I know I had to leave school, I feel a twinge of shame and failure over it. I wish I was one of those rare people for whom that life is fitting. But I'm not. Now I work in Wisconsin at a desk job. And may my teenage self and the ghost of Jack Kerouac forgive me, I like it. And I am struggling to forgive myself for that.

And I'm getting married.

And while I love the person I'm marrying, and while I said yes, I can't send my fabric off to have my wedding dress made. Because then I feel like it's really going to happen. And if it's really going to happen, then the wedding becomes incredibly funereal, and I am going to throw all my old dreams and visions of myself onto the fire.

Who will I be afterwards?

It isn't as though I just took off for adventures into the wilds of life while I was dating him. Or while we lived apart for three years. But I guess I could have. And now I really can't. Now we'll start nesting and start to gather the years in around us, like little gaudy treasures. We'll start to drip with time, and we'll be caked with property and commitments. Making a change and turning a new corner will be harder now. He says it will be easier, because we'll have someone else to help. But I think you travel easiest when you travel light. And besides, he's assuming that we'll always be on board with eachother's little flights of fancy. He always assumes that change pushes us into better and better worlds. And no matter how many times life has shown otherwise, he never reconsiders this. It isn't dogged determination to look on the sunny side. It just doesn't occur to him to put all these peices together. Maybe that very ignorance should finally occur to me.

Dear My Boss

2008-02-13T15:35:00.002-06:00

When you came by my office, I got scared. Because I was looking at Facebook. But I know you're on facebook at work too.

There is no need to fear, because you just came by to tell me about emotioneric.com, which is now in my favorites on my office PC.

I wish all bosses were like you.

a new website

2008-02-13T15:34:00.001-06:00

Check this out:

http://grossfood.blogspot.com

2008-01-20T12:23:00.000-06:00

He says its like watching a baseball game
and wishing you were a professional baseball player.
Or wondering why you're not.

I hope what I want isn't that far away. I hope it isn't that fanciful.

I want to feel like my life on this earth will leave behind it some semblance of a damn
for this world, for its lives.

So long ago under a full moon I chose to stay. I heard the goddess speak mercy to me, and I decided HERE when it would be hard and ugly and brutal and full and so gorgeous my throat would close up
tightening on the sweet air
of rotting autumns.

And now I'm not sure who I was promising or telling. Heaven? Me? My imagination.

Goddam you. I'm not sorry I'm not a golden glove or a five time mvp or a whatever the fuck that all is. I'm not sorry that I have a shitty car or that my apartment is lame. I'm not sorry that I'm not famous.

When I am gone from this place I feel I will leave no trace behind me.
My heart is weak and I don't think I could keep from breaking if a child asked me to explain the things that still keep me up at night. I don't have enough answers, and I know she'd be full of questions.
I can't even answer myself.

I want to help
I want to make things better,
I want to feel proud like I'm doing something to clean up and make stronger and leave it better than when I got here.

And I am so afraid this is all as far away from me as a man and his bat in miniature
swinging through the two dimensional space of my tv set
while I watch
hundreds of miles away.

a most unwelcome guest

2007-11-01T08:35:00.001-05:00

The knitting proceeds, but perhaps this is not destined to become a knitting blog just yet. I think this blog still has a purpose to serve for me outside of the work of my hands.

I live in Wisconsin now. And that’s fine. I have left graduate school behind. I got my master’s degree and split. I don’t miss it. I don’t think I ever will. I feel lucky to have pulled the escape cord when I did.

My job is fine. My apartment is fine. My dog is fine.

Despite all this, I am slightly less so.

Something is not right these days. A cyclical visitor is making its way back to me. I am full of doubt and chaos.

I am a witch. At least, I fancy myself so. I want to be. But oftentimes I feel that I am somehow not magickal enough. I am not spiritual enough. I am not feeling the right things, dreaming the right dreams, seeing the right visions. Whatever that means.
I listen to other pagans share stories of magickal events that occur around them. Synchronicities, abilities, moments of wonder. I do not see any of those stories in my own life. Am I just not looking hard enough? Am I thinking too hard? I have no idea.

Last night was Halloween- Samhain. I sat and stared at a candle flame for a while. Nothing.

Eventually my head felt heavy and I felt a little trance-y (like being drunk but without the stupid feeling).

I got more out of the walk I took earlier with my dog. But during that walk I simply felt sad for our earth, as I do so often when I walk in the city. Sometimes I think Gaia is sad and a bit angry at the wrongs we have done her. I almost swear I could hear her cry out and say am I not beautiful enough as I am? Why have you done this to me?

But is that me talking? Is that really some message? Or is it me daydreaming while I walk? And truly Gaia cannot be in that much pain, can she? I suppose she could.
I keep thinking of what I’m supposed to be doing here. Who am I? Am I on the right spiritual path? What are my gifts? Talents?

Sometimes I swear I have none, I cannot see any. Other witches are blessed with abilities to heal or teach or sing or feel or whatever. The list goes on. Today I cannot name a single thing that I feel I am.

Sometimes I think I might be an empath. But then I read about the characteristics of them and I think no, I cannot do those things. I cannot sense people’s feelings if I am not near them or speaking to them. And then I begin to dislike myself immensely for thinking I might’ve been someone as rare and special as an empath.

Today is a darker day for me. I’m sure the sun will shine again on me tomorrow, but as long as this visitor of doubt is at my hearth, I am gloomy.

Back at It

2007-10-26T21:37:00.000-05:00

Once more, it's been a while since my last post.

I've been thinking about my blog for a while. But I couldn't seem to post anything.

I didn't want to do a recap of what's been going on. Those always feel so tedious.

But what I do want to talk about- what I'm obsessed with these days is knitting, and my knitting projects.

Will this become a knitting blog? Maybe, I can't tell. But knitting is where this wants to go, and so I'm gonna go with it rather than ignore it. There will be more on this later, when I am home and can use my own laptop- not my fiance's laptop, which curiously does not have an "s" key (I have to highlight an s on a webpage and hit ctrl v everytime I want to hit an s). They give you s on wheel of fortune- you know, RsTLNE- because there are so damn many of them.

Leaving Again

2007-08-21T11:52:00.000-05:00

I'm packing again today. I will be packing and living out of a smaller and less and less homey space for the next 12 days or so.

I hate this part.

I came out of the broom closet over the weekend to my family. They were tolerant, but treated it like a phase. Like I had decided to join the church of my little pony or something.

I didn't like that part either.

I am feeling a sadness within me. I feel cutoff from so many things.

Being a Libra, I need a home. A home with everything in its proper place, with a soft place to sit, and a warm place to lay my head. I like things neatly arranged. This disruption in my space has me feeling nearly crazy.

Lately I have been giving a lot of thought to which goddess I might be meant to follow. I often wonder if it is Hera or Juno. I would never have thought this. But you know, I am an indecisive and fretful person. I rethink my decisions many times. But I have NEVER rethought my engagement, and I don't think I will. It just seems like the right thing. To rethink it seems as strange as rethinking whether or not to wash my face in the morning. It feels like a no brainer.

And the home thing- the home is where Hera and Juno live. And I do so love being in my home.

Dresses

2007-08-20T12:00:00.000-05:00

Wow. All I can say is- wow.

In my preliminary search for wedding things, I've realized quickly there is an entire industry out there just dying to sell you tons and tons of stuff. Stuff you probably don't need- but the idea is to convince you that this day in your life won't be complete without this or that, or a dress whose cost could build four new hospitals in Kenya.

This is where the cheekiness of the internet steps in to just make life a little funnier. I've become addicted to these collection of websites online that archive the ugliest wedding and bridesmaids dresses for posterity. Man. oh. man. They are ug-lee.

Check these out:

um.....Engaged?

2007-08-19T11:01:00.000-05:00

So how many posts can I begin here with the words, "Holly Friggin' Cow"?

How quickly life changes. Since I started this blog so much has become different. Logging my life on here, trying to sort it out, I realize that I- we- do much of our thinking on our feet. From the moment we are born, we are on our way to dying. Bodies set out in the world like huge battery packs, winding down over decades, I think that we learn to process things of the heart and spirit on our feet, quickly, so that we don't spend too much time ruminating. There is just so much to do, and the clock is ticking.

So since my last entry I did indeed Rock The House at CLI. It absolutely gave me a beautiful gift. I know now for sure that I want to teach. I feel like it's almost a calling. I loved it more than I can say. The amazing journey of learning and humility that teaching takes you on tests your mind, heart, spirit, and body every day. My students taught me so much- they were each and every one of them amazing people. Nothing has mad me work harder than teaching. Nothing has ever made me want to work that hard. Nothing has made me eager to get back to work like that. I didn't want it to be over in many ways.

I quit graduate school. Well, really I just took a leave of absence for a year. But in reality, I don't see myself coming back. Best to leave doors open a crack if you can- I try not to board up too awfully many rooms in my house. But, the way life looks from here, this moment, I won't be going back. I am left with a grief about it, though it is of a less intense character than what I expected. As I have said here before, leaving grad school is the death of a dream. Not the giving up of one, but the death of one. And there is a difference. The former is a sacrifice the latter is a painful discovery.

We should all do what we are capable of in this life. And I have come to suspect that I am capable of teaching, and hopefully teaching well. And I want to do what I am capable of. I want to help. I want to sing my place in the whirl of life. I am not here for long, and I want to bring pride and so much shiny-ness to the small little place that is mine for this lifetime.

So the plan is that I will move to Madison, which I'm doing in two weeks. I have a job there- a good job, but not really that aligned with my interests. Anyway, I plan to work the job for a while. A year or more. Then I plan to re-evaluate where I am. If the teaching bug still is within me, I'm going to look to getting involved in an alt. certification program in the state of Wisconsin and teach my heart out.

My boyfriend, or I guess fiancee (how DO you spell that word?!) now, is working on getting a job in Madison and will move up there as soon as he does. He's interviewed for one already, and jobs there in his field come up frequently.

In many ways, I wish I wasn't leaving Chicago. I finally have some friends here that I really like- many through staff friendships at CLI- and it is now that I'm going to up and leave! But moving to new cities is kind of what I do it seems. Going here, going there. So off to Madison it is now.

Oh, I guess I ought to say how we were engaged and all. We went to Madison on August 11 to check out apartments, mostly for me. And then he asked me while we were on the lake. I of course said yes, and the ducks were there as witnesses.

I love him very much. However, the idea of a wedding scares me a little, and marriage itself feels like the waters of a lake or swimming pool that I need to get used to bit by bit. I guess this is what engagements are for- people like me who still think marriage is this thing that other people do.

I think we'll get married in a year. Next September seems like a good idea. That is around the time of all my favorite holidays- Mabon especially. And we both like Autumn.

It's funny, you know- now that I have made this decision about graduate school, I see that this blog was mostly geared towards logging my position on that road. Where was I? What had I seen? What evidence was there to tell me what I might do? Words are like these tiny lanterns in the dark that help you remember the shape of yourself- what your feet look like and your name. Now that I have come out of that road into something new, I feel less of a lonely traveler. And part of me misses the loneliness. Part of me is terrified to give it up to another who wishes to walk beside me for all my days.

I wonder sometimes- will he walk slower? Will he rush ahead of me? Will he want to eat the same things, sleep at the same times, will he know when to be silent and when to be profane?

The journey towards a something is a big deal. The journey towards a someone seems like it is even more.

And I guess that now, that is a the task and the thing to work out.

For those who are about to ROCK- We salute you.

2007-06-28T07:10:00.000-05:00

Holy Friggin' Cow.

I'm leaving this morning to be part of the Civic Leadership Institute at UIC. I'll be gone for three weeks. No dog, no boyfriend, no apartment. I'll be staying in a dorm.

I haven't been able to sleep hardly at all leading up to this. I'm anxious but I can't say exactly why. If I was doing this and could live at home I would be okay I think. It's just the thought that I have to take on a new challenge without all my usual supports. Usually if I get scared to do something I just tell myself- when it's over, you'll come home, lock the door behind you, and sit with just you and your dog. But I can't tell myself that this time.

This isn't exactly a test. But this is a big thing for me to do and do calmly. Because I need to learn from this that home is inside me.

When I saw the Dalai Llama here a few months ago, he talked about how the world is a place that is often filled with thorns. To protect yourself, you could cover the whole world in leather. But that would mean a never ending all obsessive project that would never be done. When would you have time to live? And all in all, there would never be enough leather anyway.

Alternatively, you could wrap just your feet in leather. And then you could go anywhere, do anything, and know that you would be okay.

And that is what I need to learn out of this anxiety provoking experience. Growing up in a house filled with fear, my solution to anxiety now is to try and control everything around me- to make my world very very small, hermetic, controlled. The problem is that this limits what I am able to do. It limits me meeting new people, engaging in activities (like CLI) that I might want to do, but feel I can't because it seems too scary. Too 'putting myself out there' kind of thing. I've been trying to shift myself in a new direction. To believe that deep inside me there is a core that cannot be easily assailed. There is a core that will stand me in good stead no matter how difficult or easy the path, no matter whether I am in an arctic climate or a tropical one, no matter what kind of people I find myself near.

I have often asked myself- what is this supposed to do for me? What do I want out of this? I was surprised to get this job. It kinda plopped into my lap. So, what about it? I think it is for me to prove to myself that I have come a long way. That I am on the path to developing this inner core. That even when I choose to set out into a new experience with nothing but me and some enthusiasm, that I can take care of me. That it will be okay, and that I will rock the house.

Is that enough of a goal? To rock the house? Hmmm. I think so. And I kind of like that goal.

Okay, Bea- ROCK THE HOUSE.

Birdsong

2007-06-13T10:11:00.000-05:00

I'm strongly considering changing the blog title and colors. What do you call that- a blog 'skin'? Beatrix is evolving, to be sure. And perhaps the blog needs to grow as well.

Today is a lovely day. I'm excited to have woken up in it. I never thought that was something I would say. That I got simple delight in waking up in the world as it is, in the moment I find myself, as the woman I find myself to be. Well, perhaps less so on that last one. But regardless- this is a remarkable change for me. It is a joy to discover that I am here.

2007-06-11T19:01:00.000-05:00

School is officially out now. I have submitted grades for students, turned in all my own work. That's it. Bye.

And now I'm terribly melancholy. Which is unexpected. I should be brimming with joy at this moment. But I'm not. I'm anxious, sad, and confused.

The truth is that I've been in school since I was 5 years old. That's about 20 years, with hardly any breaks, except a year off during undergrad, and another year between undergrad and grad school. I've always been a student. On a lot of days, I have felt that it is the only constant thing about my identity there is. And for that reason, it lives nearest my core of how I understand myself. And now, not to be a formal student anymore- to give up on grad school at just a master's, and not stay for my PhD- what will that mean for me? I don't think I wonder where that will leave me so much as I wonder who that will leave me, in a sense. Who am I now, if I am no longer that particular thing.

Phil says I can't stay in school forever. But he's wrong- I could've. That was the point, when I dreamt of it idealistically, of becoming an academic. School was a world I could navigate, a world I understood. One I had typically been adept at inhabiting. But now it brings me hardly any joy, and I find that the amount of effort required to be adept, not to mention the politicking, is more than I feel willing to pay. Grey hairs at twenty? Putting off marriage and buying a house? Working 80 hour weeks? No. I can't afford the cost of living in academia, because I'm just not that person. I'm not that person who does all those things.

So fine, so I'm not. So who the hell am I now.

I feel really lost, and I feel almost like I've failed. Even though I really haven't. I got this far. And I'm leaving because I want to, not because anyone has said, we made a mistake- you aren't sharp enough for this, please leave. And yet, I feel like I've failed to fulfill a goal or a dream of mine. I've failed my aspirations. Academia failed my dream image of it. I failed my dream image of the linear progression my life was supposed to travel. School, school, more school, job in school. The End.

And now I have to make a new way, and I'm not even sure which way to turn. I'm not even sure of my own name in all this. When people ask me next year what I do for a living, what will be coming out of my mouth? In five years? How will they look at me when I say these other things?

I know how people look at me when I say I'm in grad school. They generally go two ways- either mild confusion (they do not know what graduate school is and have never known anyone in it) or the nuanced eyebrow raise that indicates that they believe I am leading a charmed life of the mind in mahogany panelled rooms where people sip sherry and discuss Hegel all day. The latter reaction generally comes with them affording me a sense that my occupation, if that's what it is, is somewhat prestigious in a removed non-applied kind of way.

And now what will I say? I'm a bank teller? A high school teacher? A trapeze artist?

Okay, so I probably won't say the last one.

What will people see then- when I don't say I'm a PhD student. They won't assume that I'm good at school. Which often I think is my only positive trait. Robbed of that, stripped of it, I imagine people seeing someone who doesn't know what she's doing, who is uncomfortable in social situations (but tries every time to pretend she isn't and hope no one finds her out). I fear that people will see me, and so help me, I know this is terrible, but I'm so afraid that without that veneer of 'student' they will not excuse away what I always think is my dowdy and sad appearance. I know that shouldn't matter to me. And as a feminist, I hate that I feel these things about myself. But denying these things doesn't make them disappear, and feminism doesn't make my insecurities any less real- it merely frames them in such a way that I understand them as tied to political and social ills.

That said, I have lost who I am. And I'm so afraid I will never feel capable again.

School these past 2 years- that is to say, then, grad school- has made me miserable. But it has also been familiar, and has been part of 'the plan.'

I remember this car I had when I was 16. It was a beat up 13+ year old volvo. It had been someone else's, and then my dad bought it used. It was his. Then it was my brother's, then it was my sister in law's, then it was mine. By the time it was mine, it leaked oil and the water in the radiator needed to be replaced about every other day. The electrical system didn't work unless you put the key in the ignition just the right way, and the radio wouldn't get any FM stations unless you knew where to knock your fist on the dashboard before you turned the radio on. In addition, the doors wouldn't lock because the driver's side doorhandle stuck, so you had to know how to unstick it to get all the doors to lock and latch. And finally, sometimes the car would stall out at the first full stop of a car ride unless you jerked into the stop by tapping the break and alternately revving the engine. No one knew the secrets to my baby, that car, like I did. And for anyone who borrowed it during my tenure with it, the would get deeply frustrated with the old thing and say, "how can you stand this hunk of junk?" I would explain that she was temperamental but not recalcitrant altogether. I pointed out her good qualities- 190k miles and still the engine ran like a charm (sort of). She had good tires, and handled well in bad weather. My brother would always ask why I made excuses and put up with a car that needed me to look under the hood every couple days to add this or check that, and why I was willing to do this rather than see her go to a junk yard- my dad had offered at several points to go half with me on a new (to me) vehicle, which I could've afforded at the time.

And at the thought of letting her, my first car, my ticket to freedom, my companion, go, I felt a slight smothering sensation. And all I could tell my brother by way of explanation was that, this may be a terrible car. It may not do all that cars ought to do. And it may not always deliver on what it, as a concept, promises. But it's my car, and I understand it, and when I drive it, I know exactly what I'm getting into.

And there it is. Marginally functional yet familiar wins out over new and probably improved. This is where I've found myself with school. The thing is- when that car finally did totally and utterly crap out, I cried and grieved and insisted that I be allowed to take the grill off the front of the car to keep before it went to the salvage lot. I mounted it on my bedroom wall at my parent's house. And then the car was gone, forever. School as a concept is much harder to deal with. I can't mount a university on my wall, and schools will be there long after I decide I've gotten enough credentials and taken all the value I can out of what they offer. I guess I could put a university parking ticket up next to the grill on my wall (I have quite a few- most pristine and unpaid), but I somehow doubt this will have the desired effect.

The Gospel of Mary Tyler Moore

2007-06-05T19:16:00.000-05:00

I love Mary Tyler Moore. I mean, I really love it. Well maybe I don't love MTM the lady, in real life. I don't know much about her except she was quite funny in Flirting with Disaster and that she's all about loving animals. But I will say that I love her show. I love the character Mary Richards, and I love the way MTM played her.

Since school's been out these precious few days so far, I've parked my rear on the sofa and have been watching MTM on dvd. I bought the first season for myself the week I found out I passed my Master's Degree program. I made it after all, didn't I?

Oh, Mary. What a lady you were then in the early days of the new feminist movement. Going out there on your own, not needing a man, a single woman with her good friends taking on a challenging new career. What I love about Mary is that she isn't Marlo Thomas. She doesn't magically have a ton of great clothes, always have a full pocketbook, and a perfect man hovering around her charmed life. Mary runs short of money, gets robbed and has to buy a new wardrobe, and wears the same dresses over and over. She doesn't have perfect friends, either- Rhoda and Phyllis certainly have their flaws. The wonderful thing about Mary is that she makes it work. Mary always gets through with tears, laughter, or a smile. She has a core inside her, and can take care of herself, even if she has a semi stalker for a date (remember Howard Arnell, the recurring obsessed boyfriend? I sometimes wonder if the Simpsons character of Arty Ziff wasn't based on him), even if Lou has crossed the line from loveable gruff to jerk, even if her job is in jeopardy, even if she fights with Rhoda, even if she has to work on Christmas, even if she gets robbed of her worldly possesions.

And why can she get through all this? Because she can turn the world on with her smile, and she's gonna make it after all.

So throw that hat up in the air, MTM. Even at the busy intersection by Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis (where, by the way, you could get killed by a car pulling a stunt like that). Cause love is all around, and because despite the funny way that old woman is looking at you, I have total confidence that you catch your hat in the end, and that you find happiness at WJM.

Dear Sleep

2007-05-28T12:55:00.000-05:00

Dear Sleep,

I have tried to begin this letter to you now three times. Each time I dive in, telling you I miss you or asking where you've gone. And each time I think I sound over eager, so I erase what I've written and wonder whether or not even trying to contact you is a lost cause.

So here it is all on the line. I miss you. Where are you?

You left me so suddenly- things, I thought, had been great with us. Lazy mornings together, even quickies in the afternoon from time to time. I even thought you liked my dog. Remember how the three of us used to cuddle in bed on cold winter evenings? Wasn't that nice?

Even our arguments seemed relatively innocuous. Remember the time I came home with those red sheets? I was so excited about them, and it took you a while to tell me that you didn't like them. You preferred plain white. But I listened, didn't I? I eventually changed the sheets, promised never to use them again, and things were better than they'd ever been. At least I thought.

But then things got tough at school, and I guess if I'm honest with myself I started ignoring you. I would come home late and instead of making time for you, I'd keep right on working into the wee hours. I guess I thought at the end of all that you'd be there whenever I wanted you. But I guessed wrong. Eventually, I guess you got fed up. All my early mornings and late nights, taking you for granted. I assumed we could put eachother on hold, and go back to the honeymoon when I had more time. But we couldn't, and now I'm afraid you've found someone better, someone you like more, someone who appreciates you and never sacrifices the time you share.

I miss you- did I already say that? At night especially, but in the early mornings too. Which is mostly when you miss things that are gone. The dog misses you too. At about five this morning, when I thought I just might be on the brink of dreaming of you, thinking you were just outside the door, he started crying, sending the cold reality of your absence back into the room like a blast of freezing air.

I stood up, put on my shoes, and took him outside on a leash. A tiny part of me still hoped you'd be there when I got back- returned to me without a word. True love means never having to say you're sorry, or something like that, right?

But you weren't there. The apartment was still empty, my bed still perfectly made. You hadn't come by- not even to pick up the rest of your stuff- slippers, eyemask, all those little things. Don't you want them, or did you leave them behind on purpose as talismans to make your absence feel all the more acute?

At this point I want to call you dirty names and tell you that you've always been too mercurial. That you're flaky and selfish- you never think about the fact that it is exactly when I have fewer hours to lavish on you that I might need you to stick it out with me the most, stealing moments where we can.

But I know none of these angry words will make you come back to me. In fact, I have absolutely no idea how I might lure you back.

Let's forget, for the moment, about who abandoned who, about questions of love, or the finer points of our incredibly long history together. Let me just say, that in these past weeks, since you left that Monday morning and just never came home, that my longing for you have only increased, my pain seeping deeper into my bones, settling into my limbs and collecting near the back of my neck. Aside from the pains of the heart I suffer at your absence, I feel a madness taking over my brain. I feel a visceral reaction in my cellular structure. I need you. My body needs you, and my mind needs you, even outside of the desperate longing of my heart.

Remember the vacations we took together? To places in time, historical settings, wild cartoon dreamlands where elephants spoke? We can have that all again. And this time it will be different, baby, I swear it. This time I'll put you first. Think about it. The nights are too long without you.

Beatrix

What to do, what to do

2007-05-04T09:29:00.000-05:00

For a while, this blog has drifted away from the personal narrative and become a conduit for the little things I like to write. This time, I need to get something off my chest so I can look at it, outside myself, and start understanding it.

Here's the story-

I've been dating the same guy for about five years now, and we're starting to talk about the possibility that we would move in together and/or be married. He is agnostic, I am Wiccan. He has always been supportive of my witchy practices, and is really respectful about beliefs he himself doesn't share.

His family, however, is Christian. Very devotedly Christian. And my family is Christian as well, though of a less, I would say, vigorous variety. Because he and I have not ever lived in close proximity to our families in the last five years we've spent less time with them than you might think. I'm not out of the broom closet, as it were, to my family, and I'm certainly not to his.

I tend to think people's spirituality is their own business. However, I can see that it might be a nasty shock to come to a wedding or someone's home and find out you're actually at a handfasting, or that the person you assumed was just like you is actually pagan.

I have no idea how my family or his would take this, but I can imagine not very well. Recently my father has been asking me about church, and his family has been asking him to return to church as well. I don't know what to do. I don't feel that as a Witch, I need to just out and out sit people down and have some big conversation with them about it. I am who I am, and people find things out about me as they get to know me, right? But in this case, I'm wondering if I need to say, hey boyfriend's family, your son is dating a Witch. And if we make moves to bind ourselves together as a new family, he and I, this new family will be at least one half pagan.I'm wondering if I need to tell my family that too.

If I'm honest with myself I feel fearful about talking about it, too. The stereotypes about Wiccans that people have make me feel really disappointed in the people that have them. And part of me has no desire to engage with those stereotypes directly. I also don't think that my spirituality ought to be anyone's business but mine. However, there is that gap between theory and practice, and in practice, other people's religious proclivities are other people's business, especially when it comes to biological family structures.

So what in the world am I going to do.

The Butterfly Lamp

2007-04-27T22:33:00.000-05:00

This morning I am at a coffee shop waiting for a friend I do not particularly want to see, though I am feeling unusually charitable towards her today. Towards everyone, really. And yet, I am almost sad and I feel that tears are somewhere very close by.

I think my life is about to take a strange and wondrous turn. But this has me scared. It is both terrifying and beautiful to see how divergent my life has become from the plans that were made for it- by me, my mother, my teachers, anyone who cared to impose a guess on me of what I ought to do.

This randomness permeates me utterly. And it is a great and terrible beauty. I like this coffee shop because of its atmosphere. On the window sills there are various knick knacks. An old folk artish looking lighthouse, about a foot tall. A blue jug. An African mask. The ugliest birdhouse I have ever seen. And a copper lamp that's it's own screened in room. It has four tall sides where butterflies and plants snake upwards. The top is geometric and the whole thing looks it was made by someone who likes Frank Lloyd Wright houses. You can put a candle inside. I wonder if anyone will ever put a candle inside this one again, or if they ever did.

Tomorrow afternoon my boyfriend is going to come and visit me. We'll talk and sit around my apartment together like we do every weekend. We'll have the same complaints about our jobs and the 90 or so miles of distance between us. And we'll trade the same jokes, which is our way of saying, we're still us, right? Right. And he will tell me about his week, and he will ask about mine. And I'll remember that lamp, and wonder if I should bring it up. Because it might change in the telling, or I might just fail to convey it utterly, and I want the lamp to remain what it is. Here, just like it is in the windowsill, innocent, our relationship utterly hermetic.

I might risk the lamp for him, though. We'll have to see. I like that phrase, I'll see or we'll see. In parent speak, learned in my childhood, I found it simply meant, 'no but not no right now in order to prevent you from pitching a huge fit.' Now in my childless universe, it means that we leave room for the moment to surprise us.

I think I am coming to terms with not knowing how it ends. I might even like it. The randomness of everything, though, brings me to tears. Things feel so full of possibility that they, by necessity, fold themselves into a metaphor that is day to day sized. And the metaphor is this. That I have met a beautiful woman with shining tears in her eyes. They look like tiny diamonds floating on a lake. And we understand eachother. There is something she wanted to tell me all along, but could not. I had to find it out myself, and now that I have, we are reconciled, she and I, and I am welcome back again to this place that is so expansive it could break your heart.

You too, cookie?

2007-04-25T12:32:00.000-05:00

I'm having a minor meltdown today. I just feel so get-drunk-and-watch-Billy-Wilder- movies. As Addison DeWitt from "All About Eve" would say, "you're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent." Maybe I'll just sit in my apartment playing Leibestraum over and over again, knocking ice and whiskey against the side of a highball glass.

I feel like I can't actually quit school like I want. I feel afraid of my future, like it's all scary and uncertain. I feel terrified that I'm not good at anything. What am I going to do outside school? I feel panicked. Today is a day where I think, who am I kidding. I'm no writer, I'm no nothing. Not a scholar not a student, I'm not anything or anyone. I feel like I don't have anything to give the world or myself. And I wish I did.

I skipped class this morning. Another class I hate- jesus, which one don't I at this point?

I feel like my life right now is fraught with failure everywhere I look. This isn't who I wanted to be at 25. I wanted to be more successful, smarter, something.

I'm feeling just a profound sense of rejection from the world lately. I feel like someone who doesn't fit in anywhere. Where is my sense of home? School doesn't want me- no vocation seems to want me. I just don't belong anywhere. And I'm scared I'm not going to find anywhere to belong. Ever.

I think I'm coming to resent people whom I suspect of knowing what they're doing. People who have careers and families. I think I might hate them a little. Because the nature of their lives makes me feel deficient. They occupy spaces that I would like to go, and maybe places in which I would also like to take up residence. But for some reason I can't book tickets there to save my life. Why do they get to go and I don't? It makes having a mortgage seem as exotic as finally taking that trip to Europe.

My life is all theory and no practice. My brother, in contrast, is all practice with very little theorizing. Instead of contemplating the nature of the universe and the genesis of life, he found a wife and had a baby. Instead of worrying about the sustainability of modern living practices, he went out and bought a house. And I am racked with jealousy over this ability to move through moments of life without stopping to try and make each one pregnant with profundity.

Yesterday I got off the train in a foul mood. I couldn't believe another Tuesday had rolled around and that I had no one to blame for Tuesdays as they were but myself. I signed up for a marathon day thinking this would make me happy- to pack work all into one highly concentrated 14 hour period. Lesson learned. I do NOT like this approach to work anymore than I do to juice.

I walked slowly down the concrete steps at the station because I think this makes me better than others who are rushing. Near the doors, there is a dunkin donuts stand where two or three people are queuing up for coffee. They are all standing in an enormous puddle on the floor, waiting to order. And for some reason I find this deeply reassuring. It makes me almost affectionate towards these strangers. I like that they are in line for something. In a puddle no less. Human nature, in this picture, seems very solid. Coffee is worth stopping for. Waiting for. In a grimy puddle of mystery liquid at a subway station if need be.

I wanted to stop for coffee, but I didn't. Because I had no cash on me. Because I never have cash on me. Because a wallet perpetually full of cash is a hallmark of grownups with real lives and jobs and routines that include going to the dry cleaner and ATM regularly. And with this, Tuesday turned, on a dime, into a big conspiracy against me- every tableau of people on the street looked like an indictment of my delayed adulthood and ungrounded life. Even the cookie I bought three hours later to feel better didn't cut it for me. Because next to the single cookies for single individuals are boxes of cookies. Boxes of cookies imply a series of lives and mouths than can surround these cookies- a group that will be accountable as a team for seeing to the cookies' timely mass consumption. I couldn't handle a box of cookies. My life cannot accommodate that.

So this is where I'm at today. This is how bad it's become. That even the fucking cookies are against me. And I thought we were such good friends. When even the reliability of refined sugar flees from you, it is very clearly your own personal no good horrible sleep it off ides of march kind of day.

Dear John

2007-04-16T09:08:00.000-05:00

This is a time when having a semi- secret blog that none of your friends in everyday life know about comes in handy. I have a big secret to share.

I am leaving school.

Just now, I wrote "I am quitting school" but then I deleted it and substituted in "leaving" instead. Leaving is a better way to say it. It has more agency to it. It implies that I am making a choice, looking to something else, rather than collapsing under a load too great for me.

After this year I will have a master's degree. If all goes well, that is. After that I am meant to stay for an indefinite number of years and get my PhD. When you visit the school I attend, they tell you that most graduate students finish the program in 5 years. They are lying. Most graduate students finish in 7 years if they are lucky. Nine is not unheard of.

Ever since I was young, I wanted to live a life of the mind. In fact, even as a child I did this in many ways. I wasn't very good socially. There was always a lot going on at home, and I didn't want people to know me too awfully well. They might find out what I really was- what my life was really like. And I didn't want that. Plus, I preferred to read rather than run. I couldn't get dirty because of the hell I would catch at home. So I ended up being a very bookish child who said all the right things to get her ostracized and picked on. Things like, "no, I can't get my dress dirty." or "in answer to your question, no I did not think that test was hard/unfair/stupid." I had not yet learned that when people ask you certain questions, they are engaging you in a call and response ritual rather than actually seeking information that they currently lack.

I always thought that once I got to high school things would be different. They were, of course, worse. And then I thought once I became and undergraduate things would be different. They weren't. And then I said to myself- I'm going to graduate school. And there things will most certainly be different. Then I will belong and life will start to flower as I had hoped. Things are different. But they are not flowering. In fact, now that I have experienced graduate school with all its cultish properties, unreasonable sacrifices, petty politics, and cloistered existence, the very idea of a delicate purple bloom rising from the dirt and opening its heart to the sky seems such an inappropriate metaphor as to be an ironic sight gag.

This is not the life for me. I could list a million reasons why. And I have- in my head, in talking to my boyfriend, in preparing what I will tell people who ask me to explain myself. But I don't think listing all the reasons here is that important. The fact is, the fit with graduate school/academia and me is an ill one. If pressed, I would have to say that academia is decidedly too tight in the waste, too long in the leg, and makes my ass look incredibly fat.

The real problem, though, is that dreams are not like pairs of jeans. They are like a great many things, and I'm sure that all these things dreams are like have been thoroughly covered in the collected acts of toastmastery of the human race. But for me here, it does better to say what a dying dream or a leaving dream feels like. It feels like someone you know and love is dying. It feels like your dog has run away. It feels like betrayal, abandonment, and finally settles in to the stale feeling of grief.

The idea that one day I would live this particular academic life was an imaginary friend I turned to when I felt lonely as a child. It was something that gave me succor and reassured me. Like an ancient Hebrew wandering the desert with Moses, I just kept telling myself- one day you will find this place of milk and honey. And then everything will be beautiful. And you will feel right. Academia was a panacea. I wouldn't be depressed, I would be honored for my talents, I would be understood, successful, even in some strange way- popular? I pictured cocktail parties in wood paneled rooms where people sipped sherry in the afternoons in front of fireplaces. The conversation and the glasses would be sparkling and I would be proclaimed a witty fabulous treasure. In time, perhaps I would amass a cadre of students who looked up to me, and whose reputations I would mold under the shadow of my own large one.

In the outside world, people would ask me what I do and I would tell them about a project of mine. I pictured work a day suburbanites looking at me strangely as though I were a rare object. Like a piece of African tribal art someone's weird and perpetually unmarried globe trotting aunt sent them as a wedding gift from Burma. Interesting but so- foreign. I would become a living breathing conversation piece.

In the end, I got here and found out that none of this was going to be my life. My department didn't have a lot of money and people drank out of plastic tumblers at department gatherings. The fireplaces in the old renovated house where our offices were had been sealed up decades ago. One housed an old broken overhead projector someone had shoved in there for no real reason other than it was a blank space. Judging by its layers of dust, that same person may have worked for the Eisenhower campaign or known someone who had.

The dream had left me, been taken in the night, or simply passed away suddenly but peacefully in its sleep of a brain aneurysm. The point is that one day, when I felt shaky and reached for this dream for assurance and calm, it wasn't there anymore.

I will have to now reconstruct my vision for my future. From scratch out of totally new materials. I will have to build this goal out of things that I want and want to be. This presumes that there are things I am not that someday I would like to be. This is very different than the old dream, in which I am finally paid my due by a world that for so long has frightened me, a world that I felt someday would hand me an apology for all the times I wasn't allowed to play.

Seeing it this way, I wonder why my old dream didn't leave me a dear john letter. All those years together, and no notice. What would it have said?

Dear B,

This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write.

[Yeah, right, I'd say to myself at this point in the letter- they all start out that way. If it's so hard, don't write it. Stay.]

We've had a lot of years together. But it's time for me to move on now. I know a letter is a really chicken shit way to do this,

[you got that right!]

but this seems like the only way.

I know you won't believe me, but this is the best thing for both of us, if we just remember what we had- the good times- and go our separate ways.

I'm going to give you a reason because I know you want one, you deserve one, and let's face it- isn't that what these letters are for anyway?

The real reason I'm leaving, B, is that I am not real anyway. I am a figment of your imagination, a conjuring of your own mind. And when you tried to bring me to life, to make me a real boy as it were, I just dissipated. You found out the rabbit was in the hat all along and that the coin has two heads on it.

I am so sorry. I hope one day we can be friends.

~Your Dream
PS I'm taking the lamp in the living room because I bought it for reading Foucault in the evenings. I am also taking your tweed skirt suit for reasons I think you already know.

If I Had a Bell

2007-03-29T14:23:00.000-05:00

Spring break came and went as did a throw down confrontation with a friend of mind, which I did not initiate or really understand. Anger makes me dumb- intellectually, emotionally, and literally in a verbal sense. I turn off and find it hard to decipher anything through that veil of fire and malice.

Moving on after that has been difficult, but wouldn't you know- things feel exciting and joyous today. They always do eventually. In that spirit, and after listening to several Peter Paul and Mary songs, I have come up with this. I'm not sure I think it well polished or anything, but it is here, alive and breathing, and I present it to you as a product of the young and naive springtime...

When I was little I thought a lot about my legs. They ached a lot. I have a theory that this was because my childhood bed was too short for me. But it was cute and hand painted, so it stayed a long with all the other items in my mother's house that were functional only in that they looked right to her. Little girls have little girl beds with tulips stenciled on them. A place for everything- and her only daughter in her place.

Anyway, I used to think about my legs in the summer time when my knees were perpetually bloody and skinned. I thought about them when they got sunburned in mid day July, and when they picked up grass clippings in sweaty sticky August. I used to imagine that they were strong and invincible- these appendages of bone and muscle that held me upright. At one point I read a phrase in a book that stuck with me- strong sturdy legs. This was perhaps from my early childhood experience with the little girl horse-book genre that included Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague, but I had translated it easily into human description.

My package of childhood eccentricities back then included a running inner monologue in which I narrated my own life. In times of stress, pain, or crisis, this urge kicked in to include moments of narration that did not even apply to my own situation. I would be sitting on the stairs, listening to my mother yell at my brother in the kitchen next door and suddenly the phrase “What a lovely day, she thought, as she walked along the path,” would pop into my head. When times got especially tough, I would narrate my own simultaneously occuring attempts to name all the presidents from Reagan backwards. Because I was only six or seven at the time, this never really went anywhere. I was spotty after Carter and usually landed at Nixon and Kennedy. From there it was a long dry desert to Lincoln, which led directly to Washington. She thought as she sat in a chair facing the corner of the room. What a lovely wood paneled wall this is.

What sturdy legs she had. What a pair of strong sturdy legs. This was a narrative trope in my head that became nearly as popular as walking along that damned path- wherever it was supposed to be. I used to think this at night particularly when my legs ached and I was up late, standing in my nightshirt with curlers to form my hair into marginally functional and unnecessary ringlets that got me picked on at school, begging for a glass of water from a parent I had awoken. I used to want my legs, in those moments, to feel tired, like I wanted the rest of me to feel tired. I wanted my legs to feel sore in a labor intensive sense- sore like someone who had been lifting things all day, or better yet, someone who had walked for miles and miles, straight to the horizon line and around.

Having grown up now, I have stopped narrating my life so much in my own head. I write more now, which is less eccentric, but the core activity has changed little, especially since I write to extract thoughts from my head that are buzzing around sometimes pleasantly by almost always noisily.

While my legs get fewer aches and skin abrasions, I have more adult injuries to them. I pulled a muscle once helping a friend move, and gave myself shin splints two summers ago during the time I flirted with becoming a runner. This flirtation culminated in a 5k run for me and the purchase of a t shirt with a fat penguin on it in a sweatband who was floundering his way down some nature path. Yes, a damn path.

It was also around this time that I realized I did not have strong sturdy legs, and that the activities that could potentially provide me with proof that I did have those kind of legs- like long thoroughbred racing legs, involved sweating, lungs aflame, and joints shooting with pain of constant impact with pavement. In short, I finally realized that this was an odd quality to ascribe to a human being and indeed better suited horses or other beasts of burden. I began to wonder where I ever got the decidedly odd turn of phrase to begin with and when I decided to remove it from its probably animal related context and adopt it into my own version of my self.

The idea of sturdy legs held a certain romance for me precisely because of what it suggested in a fantastic and metaphoric sense. It suggested that I perhaps was some kind of horsewoman hybrid, a woman with wild hair who was strong, untamable, and thus impervious. Someone who forged ahead regardless of anything because she was resolute and because she could. Someone with strong sturdy legs, like a horse, knows that they can indeed run or walk or continue to stand upright for hours and hours and miles and miles and trust that they need not fear physical fatigue, or in a more abstract sense, the fatigue that threatens when you cannot find it in yourself to love or keep believing anymore.

It is at this point that I find myself often these days. This point upon a knife edge when I feel afraid that the protaganist- me- will give up and won't make it to the end. I want to trust to myself to keep moving and going. Someone with sturdy legs keeps going even when she is blind and does not know the way, even when she is tired, she keeps intact the assumption that she that will never stop standing or moving. It is at this point that I want her- me- the main character- to hold into the faith that the answer is somewhere in front of her, that she will find laughter and joy again if she just promises not to lay down.

In the end, I am struck by a certain sense of irony that my monologuing about my sturdy horse legs occurred mostly at night when I was unable to sleep, begging my parents for water and keeping them from bed when what I really wanted was to not have to sleep in a dark room off the attic by myself in a bed that felt like a coffin. Tulips or no, it was still small and smelled of pine.

I did not want to lay down then, as I do not now- in stories or in life.

Consumer Non-Professional Audio Products

2007-03-18T20:56:00.000-05:00

This is a short story that I really wanted to turn into a submission for NPR's This I Believe. It decided to be something else, though. In the end it knew better than me and I am happy with what it is. I'm going to give this story to my Dad for Father's Day. It's all true...

I believe in big, black headphones. The kind that cover your ears and have soft padding on the insides. The kind that you know, if pressed, you could use to protect your extremities on a cold winter night should you lose your earmuffs or hat. The kind that are meant to block everything else out, and make a statement to anyone who should see you- I am not to be disturbed. I have chosen to remove myself from the real world.

The pair that currently belongs to me is black with silver lettering on them, showing the company’s brand name. After 8 years, they still work perfectly. Tracing their history backwards in time, they have moved to graduate school with me, to a go nowhere desk job in Minneapolis, to my first apartment alone during my undergrad career, to my disastrous living arrangement with the one insane roommate everyone gets in their life, to a cramped inhumane state college dormroom reminiscent of those PETA films on the living conditions of chickens.

I got them as a gift the day before my father was going to drive me to college. And leave me there. I was a year younger than everyone in my class- I had been since I skipped a grade just before high school. That summer I worked at the public library in between slipping further into anorexia and severe depression. I liked moving among the silent books, touching them, adjusting their order. I loved bringing order to the world in some way, when I could not seem to find any in my own life. Sometimes I would open some of the art books just to touch the pages, because they seemed so perfect and totally smooth. My dad got me that job. That job where I could chatter away to myself in my head for 12 hours a week. He probably sensed I wasn’t ready to leave for school. He certainly wasn’t ready to let me go- but who knows if he ever would have been. I am his youngest- ten years separate myself and the oldest of my 2 older brothers. And I am his first and only daughter.

My father is man of worries. He is somewhat feminine in that way, I guess. He gets a wrinkle between his eyebrows. A vertical one, about an eighth of an inch long, appears whenever something is bothering him…usually this involves fearing for the happiness and wellbeing of his loved ones. As a small girl, I remember him as a man with less grey in his hair than he has now, with skin tighter near his chin and neck, and thinner- a whisper of the gangly figure he had been as a young man. But that little vertical mark has always stayed.

One of the ways my father deals with his worries is to direct them as small, solvable issues or tasks. He is a list maker and an organizer. Hell, I’m an engineer, he’d joke. What do you expect? In catering to wired parents everywhere, my chosen future alma mater had published a list for all incoming freshman. Like one of those lists you’d get in the mail before going to summer camp, advising your parents that most campers can do with a flashlight, a bathing suit, and an investment in insect repellent that would make Solomon himself blush. To this list for college freshman, which included things like a laundry hamper, shower flip flops, phone cards, and easy mac, my father directed absolutely all of his nervous energy. If the list suggested a good pair of walking shoes for the sprawling Midwestern campus, we had to go to three specialized hiking shoe stores in the mall before special ordering a pair of day hiking shoes from somewhere in Canada. When the list suggested some elementary pharmaceuticals like ibuprofen and vitamins, Dad went to Sam’s club and bought me 800 ibuprofen pills and the tub full of calcium pills that I could probably have bathed out of when it was empty. As though it ever would be.

Onto this list he had projected all his fears and worries over his rapidly shrinking daughter, so silent and grey in comparison to the bouncy little round girl with pigtails and a never ceasing verbal narrative on the world around her. Perhaps in the excess of his purchases and the attention to detail, he hoped he would pass on some notion of excess to me. Get me to feel that slight sense of abandonment that one needs to believe that the world is a safe place to walk in. That notion of excess that preaches- go ahead, taste the heavy soft fruits of this earth.

Last on the list were a few accoutrement aimed at dealing with possible roommate friction. In such small quarters at such a difficult life moment, I later thought they would’ve done better to simply assign us all therapists, or build larger dormitories. Instead, they recommended headphones.

The list indicated that every freshman really ought to come to school with this. The reason was that many roommates became irritated over each other’s musical taste and listening habits. Headphones avoided the problem all together. While I was not a particularly invested music listener, I was a teenager. And to a teenager, especially one mired in the fear and angst that has bred so much wonderful music over the decades, music was important to me. I liked U2 back then. A lot.

The night before I was to leave, we were sealing up boxes and zipping bags shut. I couldn’t tell my Dad this at the time, but as I watched him stretch packing tape over the top of a box with a tape gun, I hated him for just a tiny moment. I hated him in that moment for being nice and gentle and kind. In that moment, I wanted him to be like some of the fathers I knew other girls in my high school graduating class had. Tyrannical unfeeling men who sent the women in their lives crying and fleeing into other rooms behind slammed doors. Men who exerted control over people, not just objects, when they felt tense and who ruled their household as absolute patriarchs. I hated my father for not being that kind of man. That kind of man, I thought, would not send me away. That kind of man would forbid me to leave and trap me here, and I could pretend to be angry at him, never having to say I’m scared. I’m not ready. Please don’t make me go. I feel like we’ve just gotten to know one another.

The moment passed and I zipped my luggage shut and ticked off boxes on Dad’s self-titled master list, “MOVING TO COLLEGE: ANN 1999: MASTER LIST.” I had the urge to make some joke about how we really should’ve given the whole enterprise some kind of code name, like a military operation. But I couldn’t think of a clever name, which made the joke seem kind of lame. Making jokes had ceased to be in my immediate nature months ago.

I drifted out of the dining room where the boxes were stacked and went to lay on the couch. Anorexics get exhausted quickly. But dinner was cooking in the next room and the smell of food was making me sick. I thought I might begin to cry. So I told everyone I was leaving and rushed out the house, called my step mother’s old German Shepard mix to me and we set off, as we had so many times that summer, to walk the hot country raods of central Illinois. When I got to the old cemetery just down the road, set off on a hill, I sat down to watch the sun. I burst into tears while Brutus, the dog, sniffed and marked various lichen encrusted headstones that no longer bore any names. I had realized that this was my last walk before I would forever be a visitor. I was devastated by the finality of the moment, which so elegantly contained the enormous life transition I so desperately wished to escape.

Eventually I came back home. I had avoided dinner. My family had stopped waiting for me to eat with them that summer, knowing that I just sat silently at the table sipping diet Pepsi, or pushing the food around on my plate that my stepmother, in her attempts to help, would insist I take.

I asked her where Dad was. She told me he’d gone out. When I asked where, she said she wasn’t sure, just that he said he was “goin’ into town.” In our lexicon, that meant he was going to drive 30-40 minutes to the city to buy something he needed. I couldn’t figure exactly what he needed now- hopefully not a gallon of shampoo for me or a package of 200 tubesocks. With Dad, though, you never knew when he would just get a wild hare to go do something that had been lurking in his mind, unbeknownst to the rest of us for weeks. I assumed this was one of those things. He might come home with a bottle of champagne, wanting the family to see me off, or he might come home with a new camera, or he might come home with a pack of Big Red. You just never knew.

When he did come back, he had a yellow bag from Best Buy. He came through the door, and said with a tinny voice that was overly cheery- what’s this in here? I wonder what’s in this bag? I just don’t know. Can someone help me? Annie- maybe you’ll look in the bag.

This was his way of reviving a childhood game with me. We enjoyed doing this kind of thing together during that summer. It had an amazing way of relieving tension in the room- as though by returning in our verbal repartee to a simpler shinier time, we could revive those feelings of love and joy without having to talk about why my spark seemed so close to dying out.

I reciprocated as best I could. Getting up from the couch, I saw the room spin, as it often did in those days. I slowly made my way toward him, accepted the bag, and looked in side.

At the bottom was an enormous set of – yes. Big. Black. Headphones. The kind with the soft inside. The kind with the super long cord. The kind that said, go away. I’m on vacation.

I looked up at him and put my arms around his neck and thanked him. He told me I was welcome, and proceeded to re-enact the conversation he had about headphones with the salesman at best buy, who in all likelihood had been in a cap and gown with me for the commencement of the class of ’99, Glenwood High. Once again, Dad had ferreted out the facts, asked incisive questions to determine the best headphones for my needs. Because the list said I needed them. And they were the last thing left to get.

That last thing left to get saw me through many moments in life. Over the years that we have lived together, the headphones and I, I have become surprised at their versatility, their usefulness. First, they helped me transition to college. They helped me over that huge hump of fear. Totality and finality has always scared me. Even as a child, I remember eating Popsicles on hot summer days and thinking that I would never again eat this exact Popsicle at this moment in this day in the year 1986. Sometimes this concept would bring me to tears, exasperating my already hair trigger tempered mother.

The headphones, somehow, abated this neurosis. I cut off the plastic display casing, and put a finger on the soft insides of the half sphere ears. I loved that padding, the way it squished like a pillow. So inviting. I felt the same thing when I was a little girl, and again when I was ten, when I would play with my dad’s enormous harvest wheat colored 1970s headphones. The kind with the fat end on them that only fit into tuners for LP players. When I was little, we kept those in the basement near the TV, for reasons I still don’t quite know. They disappeared at some point, and I stopped sneaking down there to where them while I watched movies, turning the volume on the TV up very high so I could hear through the padding (the headphones themselves didn’t hook into anything). I liked thinking they were my dad’s. And I liked sitting and running my fingers over the soft circles on their undersides. It felt so completely tender. When I was ten, I saw the headphones resurrected in my father’s apartment where he lived when my parents were divorced. By that time he bought a jack that would convert the headphones for use on modern machinery. By that point, I felt jealous of them. They were a symbol of the young man’s life my father had once led. But now, no longer safely integrated and appropriately forgotten in our family home, they took on a wild, ominous quality. They indicated that he had outside interests, and that he did things when I was not there. He had personal interests like a real autonomous person. How completely unjust.

The fact that these headphones now brought me back to two totally opposing moments of faith and revolution gave me an odd sense of comfort. All in all, I wasn’t sad about those Popsicles anymore. In fact, I rarely thought of them. In the same way, I had lost my anger towards my father over his choice to obtain a life apart. I had made the same choice earlier that summer when I knew I could no longer be my mother’s keeper. And he who had gone before me was the one who best understood.

Even now, in graduate school, life is still overwhelming to me. I cry a lot. I’m a crier- it’s just who I am. I still struggle with food every now and then, although more successfully than before. If you saw me on the street, you would think I looked like any other woman, instead of a startlingly emaciated husk. My life is no longer grey, but very colorful. And I live alone now. Well, sort of. I share an apartment with a little 2 year old welsh corgi. But he is a tight-lipped character and keeps most of his opinions to himself.

On days when I cannot take the world anymore, when things scare me and I lost my sense of abandon, I reach for those big black headphones. They still work wonderfully, you know. Just like the day I got them. I plug them into an ipod now instead of a discman or desktop PC. And I listen to podcasts, music, and radio stories. Lots of radio stories. I lay in bed and stare, sometimes I cry, and my dog jumps up and curls up next to me with his head next to mine. I listen to other people’s stories and I go away for a while. I go away for hours this way, trying to regain a foothold on whatever terrain I’m fining so unfriendly.

I have three other pairs of headphones. The ones that came with the ipod, an old school pair that go across the top of my head but have lost the foam coverings for the ear speakers, making them scratchy, and a pair I use for running. My boyfriend gave me those, and they hook over the tops of my ears. Very clever.

But the pair I use for my vacation escapes, when I go far into myself and listen to the world privately, just me, are the big black headphones. They are so comforting, so soft, and as Dad said, have a great track record of lasting for years while providing good range of sound for a consumer non-professional audio product.

Knitty Gritty

2007-03-03T13:53:00.000-06:00

Oh my things are moving along. I just finished this penguin from Knitty.com: http://knitty.com/ISSUEwinter04/PATTpasha.html

I'll have to post a picture of my finished penguin. He looks a little different than the designer's finished product. I didn't use plastic eyes and I stuffed the beak a little more than she did.

I have to decide if I think it looks good enough to give as a gift. It was intended for a babyshower. Hrm. Maybe it'll just go to my dog. He's been eyeing it...

Next project: the felted bag from Stitch n Bitch Nation. I love brightly colored bags, and I'm knitting this one with pink, red, white, and a thin stripe of lemon drop. It's going to be crazy eye catching. I rarely knit things for myself- this one I might keep. Although my lovely and talented step sis is just about to graduate from Vet school and I need a gift for her. Maybe I'll make her the laptop bag.

In other news, I'm trying to decide on classes for next quarter, and wrapping this one up. I have no desire to work. I want to knit all day! I have 2 classes down that I'm definetely taking: theory of something er other, and then sociology of religion. My third choice is going to either be film theory or a class called "being animal being human," which seems right up my alley. I have no idea which way to go.

In other news, my clouds have blown away and I'm much happier. I think I just had to remember that I'm just myself, moving through life, doing what I can for me. I think it's better, in the end, to try and view everyone around you horizontally and not vertically. Not ranking and comparing, but being interested in them next to you, if that makes any sense.

Teaching is over this quarter, and I'm kind of bummed about that. Maybe I'll get another teaching assignment for next quarter, but I doubt it. Probably just another round of glorified grading. Oh well.

Anyway- let's see if I can't finagle a picture of Roald here. I've named the penguin Roald after a character in Animal Crossing.

Down to the River

2007-02-25T21:47:00.000-06:00

This has been a very hard week. I miss my Dad. I cried when I had to leave home last weekend, when my visit was over. I cried just like I did when I was 17 and had to move to college when I didn't want to go. Ever since I've gotten back, I feel so permeable and sensitive. I'm bruising easily, and I fantasize, at least once a day, about running home and hiding under my bed. Me, a 25 year old woman with a credit history, a lease, and a near master's degree. Yup, that's the woman who wants to slither under the bed and lay down with her teddy bear sitting gaurd.

Tonight I finally started crying. It all just became too much and I finally felt like letting it out. I was at a school function- an informal group meeting of colleagues and a faculty member. We're supposed to be there for a research support group. But, the typical semi nastiness is going on. Academics at their most collegial can only be described as young lion cubs, biting and nipping and pulling, just enough so as to not quite break the skin. I am in no mood or condition now to play this way. Not that I commonly am anyway.

The evening, which I exited early, left me in tears. This was due mostly to some rough handling that was not meant personally, but certainly felt that way when one of my suggestions resulted in peals of laughter and eye rolling.

I realize that I do not let go of things well, and that I search for things to take with me- good or bad- because I seem not to be able to NOT do that. I'm like an experiential magpie.

I came home and what to do? How to cope? Nothing seemed like it would help. Even tea could not cure this. And the book that had recently been my refuge was finished this afternoon.

I decided to see about reading one of the poems excerpted in that book- Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, A Woman, and the Wild.

The poem was by Rumi. I googled, and found two that felt important.

Rumi says this-

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

A Star Without a Name

When a baby is taken from the wet nurse,
it easily forgets her
and starts eating solid food.

Seeds feed awhile on ground,
then lift up into the sun.

So you should taste the filtered light
and work your way toward wisdom
with no personal covering.

That's how you came here, like a star
without a name. Move across the night sky
with those anonymous lights.

These poems did some amazing trick in me, and now I am better. It's like they struck a match inside me, and in a few moments, all the ice encased around me slid away, melted and completely innocuous.

I feel that books come to us at certain times for certain reasons. This has always been the case for me. Shadow Mountain changed my life. Other writings have offered comfort at the right moments, too. In considering this, I see a narrative to my life, a progression and a story. Things are interwoven. I know it. Other poeple that don't view life that way, well...I don't know what keeps them going and I don't exactly care. But they belong to a group outside of my understanding, as I lie outside of theirs, and thus often, their approval. The room in which tonight happened, was only two hours and a finite small amount of cubic feet. Real life for those hard bitten academics happened in that room tonight. For me, real life happens everywhere else and in many places and times. My universe is infinite.

Oh Sisters, Let's Go Down. Let's Go Down, Come on Down. Oh, Sisters, Let's Go Down, Down to the River to Pray.

2007-02-21T20:48:00.000-06:00

This is an excerpt from an email I sent to one of my best friends about my recent visit home. I went there to meet my new nephew, who was born this summer. Historically, I have been alternatively put off and terrified by children, and have feared that they would somehow make me mutate into the thing I feared being the most- the shadow of my mother's violence.

But this is what actually happened....

I have decided that I would make a good mom. I told my dad that and he said, "I always thought so. I'm glad you've accepted that about yourself." And later he said, "it would be hard. It is for everyone. And it would be hard sometimes for you too, but you wouldn't screw it up." And I actually, for once, agree. I wouldn't screw it up, and I would do a good job. That made me feel really differently about myself. I wonder, if in some way, the last vestage of the concept of myself as someone potentially dark and dangerous has crumbled and quietly dropped away. The last piece of me blaming myself, as seing myself as somehow irreversably flawed or at fault seems lost and floated away.

I heard something on the radio this weekend, in which a woman said this about any act of recovery- "there is a point where recovery becomes an act of faith. Where you say, 'Okay. I will lay down my sword.' And you trust that something good will happen to you."

I wonder if I have finally laid down my sword. Am I in the middle of my leap? Suspended in mid-air, excited and uncertain? Am I myself laying down my own body, spreading my legs, and trusting that the miracle of life and love with inspire itself within me in this vulnerable posture? And if that is so, I wonder: How do I now live my life as a woman finally made whole, soft and open.

But I mean, you know, I Luff you, that is to say I Lerv you.

2007-02-11T10:30:00.000-06:00

On the radio this morning, a woman was reading love poems about her husband. She said she was practicing the art of "wabi sabi," which is the desire to see beauty in flaws. At first I thought this was vaguely insulting. Kind of that New York-y intellectualizing of emotions. Things are bad, but that's sexy or vaguely spiritually eastern in some way. But then she breaks between poems about greying chest hairs and socks left out in the bathroom, and answers this question the interviewer asks her. It's a dull question- why do you think when people write about love, they write about it in poetry? Yawn. But then the woman states that this has to do with concentration. And that's what love is, she says. Love is not rules, or promises made for things you will or won't do in the future. It is one person asking for, wanting, and getting just a little bit of concentration from someone else. She goes on to say that this is especially true for women, and throws in many more gender stereotypes masquerading as thoughtful opinion. But by then I've thankfully tuned her out. I just like that idea. And I like the idea that is borne out of this one.
That in all the loud roaring of life, the stress, the turning and turning of meaningless maps, the fog- That there is someone that makes me go quiet, and makes me look right ahead and see clearly if only for a few feet. In those moments of seeing, things become more familiar. Perhaps this is part of that feeling of un-aloneness that love promises to afford us.

This Little One

2007-01-27T19:23:00.000-06:00

I've been listening to This American Life for most of the day. When I haven't been watching Rome and eating pancakes. Pancakes are best on weekends.

The week resolved itself just fine. It was an immensely busy week, but I managed. The professor I'm working for continues in his gruff manner. It has become a source of comedy for me. He offered a one time extension on papers to all students- to be used at any point during the term. Many students took the extension this time. The only rule was that both of us, the instructors, had to be notified by email prior to the due date. He felt the need to respond to each and every email and CC me as well. This flooded my inbox with gmail conversations that should've just been one time clipped missives.

I did check one of his responses. A freshman frizzy haired piano performance major emailed him a couple days before the due date with an excuse, which was unnecessary in this case but included nonetheless, that she couldn't finish the paper on time because she had a deep emotional investment in last week's Bears game. It was her brother's alma mater, she said. Curious.

Georgi curtly replied, "PERMISSION GRANTED. ONE WEEK!" I pictured him saying this, banging his open palm on a hardwood table top after the first phrase, and pointing at her in warning of the time ticking away after the second. I laughed out loud alone in my department's computer lab.

The entire affair reminded me of a moment during my childhood with my paternal grandmother. We all call her Mimi. After listening to an episode of This American Life concerning two children and their strange relationship to their mother, I remembered the pain of growing up with my own mother's confusing combination of great love and sadistic malice for me.

And I remembered how there were these few shining moments during those dismal years when my grandmother would come steal me away for weeks in the summertime.

And I remembered that with her things were always more fun, brighter, safer, with much more magical.

I told her once that I thought her elaborate cupboard, which consisted of a system of hinged shelves and cabinets that unfolded to reveal an extremely efficient system of organization and space management, was in fact, the last doorway to Narnia. I only told her this when I was an older teenager about to leave for college. By then I doubted I was going to find Narnia. Probably too old for it, and too jaded. She laughed and her eyes became wet when I mentioned this to her over a farewell lunch she had made me. When she asked me why I thought I had conjured this tale, I didn't have an answer immediately; beyond the fact that the cupboard in question seemed magical to a child to begin with because you couldn't see the back, and there was no real telling how the thing was packed into a small space. I eventually told her that it was perhaps also that her house was always full of books and art projects, and hence a great deal of imaginative energy. In reality, I think the strongest reason is that she made me feel like the world had color and spark. She made me feel like there were doorways beyond doorways, out of the tenuous life I had at home everyday.

But back to how this relates to a gruff professor.

Beyond being a woman of great skill in playing with and caring for children, Mimi has an unshakable steely core. She was and still is, a tiny woman. Short, thin, with penetrating blue eyes and slender hands. She hates to sit still and is always busy accomplishing some task or starting some new project. She had the voice of a bird once, recorded on an old reel to reel tape recorder my father brought home from college when he was a young man. It is lost now, but when I was a little girl I begged Mimi to play it for me just once. She did, and I heard my grandmother as she was in her late 30s. Still a nymph-like beauty, perhaps with rougher hands than in her girlhood, but with a melodic and vibrato laden soprano. She sang "Sentimental Journey." Her eyes went far away while I laid on my stomach on her sofa, chin on my raised arms, balancing a sandal on one upheld foot. I was watching her, but she was watching something else. Perhaps an image of herself a long time ago. We both started when the recording ended. I think we felt embarrassed about returning to real time.

The song only reminded me of the fact that my grandmother was always a proud woman. Sometimes her pride made her ugly and drove her jealous possession of grudges for years as though they were heirloom quality gems. But more commonly, she was a good natured terrier. Small, tough, feisty, and a bit of a social butterfly. As long as all was quiet on the range, of course.

Once during one of these summer holidays to Mimi and Papa's house, she and I decided to take a day trip into the mall. This was called, "going into town," which really makes our lives sound much more rural than they really were. The fact was, they lived in a town, but it was a small one. And the closest grouping of large numbers of people, shops, and thus a mall, was a thirty to forty minute drive.

I was only a little girl, but I loved going to the mall with Mimi. She was still teaching school during that time. So, unlike my own mother she worked outside the home and was a very stylish woman. Or so I thought. We would sift through racks and racks of lovely clothes at Bergner's and Famous Barr while she asked for my opinion on this or that article, and whether or not I thought pink or red suited her better.

I took these questions very seriously, and was deeply flattered by her attention. I felt like we were girlfriends sharing some ritual of being female. My own mother took me with her on errands, but had a habit of making a scenes in public or forgetting to properly wash herself for days and leaving the house looking unkempt and dirty, drawing stares from people. Mimi and I had never had a salesperson ask us to leave a store. In face, the sales people smiled when they saw us. The lack of stigma was relaxing.

Our trip to the mall was going well. Mimi couldn't decide between two sweaters and I convinced her to be naughty and buy both. We giggled about this and she made me promise not to tell Papa what she'd done, even though I knew she would show him what she bought the moment we got home. He is not the point of this story, but suffice to say that he was and is a great big bear of a man and just as warm and gentle as he is physically imposing. He loved nothing more than to see his wife and in particular his granddaughters (they had no female children of their own) spoiled absolutely rotten. No way were either of those sweaters going back to the store.

After making this grand decision, we both decided we needed lunch and were going to eat some pizza. We got in line somewhere near the Cookie on a Stick and Pretzel Hut. Our mall was older and at that point food courts were only in bigger malls in bigger cities. We had small shop fronts that served food, and had a handful of tables in them. People would line up at each one, spilling out in to the general area of the mall. This place had just opened and we took our place in line.

As we got near the front, I could see that the counter was set on a dais of sorts- higher than the customers by several feet. The men behind the counter were taking orders and working dough. They were all as you'd expect form a Brooklyn pizza shop rather than something in a po-dunk Midwestern mall. They wore white pizza aprons, white undershirts, and were sweating like pigs. They were all big men with short black curly hair and red cheeks. And they were all native speakers of Italian.

I was only six or so at the time, and was pretty unworldly even as six year olds go. My obsession with staying out of direct sunlight and reading books all day had given me a strange combination of knowledge without any real world context. As a result, these people looked like exotic creatures to me.

Reaching for something in my mind to connect them with, to make sense out of their accents and larger than life appearance looming over me, I pictured them having sailed to our little town with Magellan or having ridden here on a horse with Marco Polo. I wondered if they thought we were exotic, too, and I wanted to ask them if they knew that Americans eat cookies on a stick. There were very good ones at the shop next door. Or that we don't live at the mall even though there are clothes, food, and beds here. I wondered if I should tell them that this was not the spice road and that they had not found a special way to get to China.

As I pondered this, the line kept moving forward with my grandmother's hand on my shoulder. I began to picture their reactions to my information. What if it was shocking to them? What if they asked me where China actually was, then? I tried to think of which way I would point. Beyond Happy Wok near Sears, I couldn't think of how to direct them. Worse, what if they asked me things I didn't understand? What if they mistook my benign attempt at assistance for deceit, and became angry? Weren't sailors untrustworthy? Or were those just pirates? And were these people pirates or just explorers? Looking back, I am unsure as to exactly when in the few moments we were waiting in line it was that I decided these people fit into the category of "men of the Renaissance maritime," but it was all I had and I ran with it.

As we neared the head of the line, my grandmother asked me what I wanted. I choked and couldn't answer. What did this place serve, anyway? I had completely forgotten. I tried to find a menu board somewhere with pictures that would indicate what was available here, but all I saw were fluorescent lights gleaming on oily semi bald heads above me. I had no idea what to do and we were fast approaching the register where the fattest, loudest, and sweatiest man waited, gesticulating wildly over a protruding belly stained with red tomato sauce.

My grandmother asked me again, and all I could do was shake my head. She would have to decide for me, as I had allowed my imagination to totally overwhelm me.

My heart had begun to occupy some new quarters in my neck when my grandmother finally reached the head of the line and began interacting with this booming man. She looked even smaller than she usually did as he filled up the space around him with sound and gleaming flesh. His belly looked like it was looking down at Mimi- its horrible great red stain sizing her up somehow. I grew even more nervous at her interaction with this possible scallywag fresh off the high seas.

However, my grandmother seemed to have no fear of this man and stated our order plainly and primly. She paid the man and nodded to him as he handed her her change. I saw only a slight look of distaste on her face as he nearly deafened her with his pronouncement that, I hoped, was an invitation to enjoy our food and return at some future point. She began to step away from the counter when, sensing I was not following her, she turned and took a half step back to retrieve my hand. She then led me forward in my debilitating state of shock brought on by an excessively active inner monologue.

As she drew me past the counter, the giant red and tan man shoved a large sausage like finger in my direction. Startled, we both stopped in our tracks. I felt that this was going to be my moment of- something. One of those moments in books where the character changes forever, or the thing sought is found, or the food runs out and the matches are wet. That type of thing.
The man's booming voice rained down on my head from what seemed like miles above. "WHAT CAN I GET FOR YOU, MY FRIEND?" And then he brought that same hand down, palm open, on the counter in a wet *crack* to punctuate his aggressive demand for information.

Still frozen and with an open mouth, I heard a sudden intake of breath in what amounted to a gasp. It was coming from me, and I thought I was going to wet my pants. Time stood still and all the sound ceased for a just a moment. In this little pizza nook in the mall, a spotlight shone on me, this man, and the space between us while all else faded into black.

In what I'm sure wasn't even the space of a second in real time, my grandmother emerged from these shadows and stepped into my mental frame next to me. She laid a tiny hand on my shoulder, and the steely strength in those fine bones gripped my collarbone firmly. She leaned into the man behind the counter and proclaimed simply, "this little one is with me." And then we moved out of the way of the customers behind us, who had suddenly materialized out of no where, and beyond the purview of the busy men and their monumental counter.

We were both silent for the remaining minutes in which we waited for our food that we would take to a plastic table somewhere and eat with the soft cloth napkins my grandmother carried in her purse (she did not approve of napkins that came from dispensers, as she was convinced they could not be trusted to be totally clean). In the time that we stood there, my grandmother's hand had remained on my shoulder, fanning out over my chest as she kept me pulled near her, out of the way of the other bustling customers.

Just as our food was called by another of the white clad men, my grandmother stroked the top of my head, something she would only do for the short period of years in my life before I surpassed her in height. I looked up at her and she said, "I got cheese pizza for you. I hope that is okay. I think most of you kids like that." I said that I did, and it was true.

She went to collect the food while I was sent to scout us "just the right table." Hardly a herculean task considering there were only three options and each was an identical molded plastic affair with a table and booth seating arrangements for two. But I liked that she asked me to do this while she took on the braver task of approaching the counter again. That way I wouldn't have to either die and/or wet myself in my recovery of our food, or worse yet, admit that I was scared.

A note about being scared. Being scared was not an option in my own home growing up. Tears and the fear that stood behind them were signs of weakness that my mother would not tolerate. As an intensely shy and bookish child, ordinary social interaction mortally terrified me. Once, my mother sent me to a new neighbor's house to ask them for a few things she needed for baking. Actually, it was to ask for half the ingredients to make brownies for my brother's school bake sale. She insisted that it was I who had stolen the flour, brown sugar, eggs, and milk she knew she would not have forgotten to buy. Therefore, it was I who would have to recover them.

I begged her with tears in my eyes not to send me out to confront the unknown for the sake of a request that seemed unlikely to be an appropriate one, even among adults. She pushed me out of the door, disgusted at my obsecene display. The door locked behind me and I didn't come back until after dark. My mother had finished making the brownies by then, but was no less displeased to see me in a decidedly eggless state. I spent the day in a tree in our backyard.

It was this kind of experience, and many more even stranger and more incomprehensible, that I brought with me every year to Mimi and Papa's house in the summertime. And it was these small moments of what I later knew to be empathic understanding of the strangeness of the world to its children, that my grandmother made sure I took back with me.

Later that day, she told me she didn't think we would go back there, to the pizza place. She said she didn't like her food that much. But, she said, I had chosen a very good place to sit which was something. I agreed.

I think it was, in the end, my professor's clipped, two phrase shouting response that reminded me so much of that sensory rich moment in childhood when I was accosted by an exotic shipmate of Magellan's over an altar-like counter at the local mall. The accent of someone from far outside my own upbringing, the dark hair and tanned skin and the heavy belly became an outline of a man that had now come into my life twice- once as the man at the pizza shop, once as this professor barking orders from behind a desk littered with Soviet era Russian army relics.

In the process of getting over my tears in his office when I had to beg to keep my teaching job, I am discovering the lighter side of what it means to work for this curious and gruff individual. And I smile to myself now, if I don't laugh outright, when the students in the front row insensitively jerk backwards in their chairs when he attempts to imitate Napoleonic cannon fire or demands to know why it is they have never heard of such and such a Turkish general or Polish war correspondent.

I just imagine my diminutive grandmother, striding into that classroom in one of her impeccable outfits, gold bracelet swinging from her minute wrist, placing her hand over the heartbeat of one of those startled kids, and pronouncing, "this little one is with me."

And you, you are always drawing trees in class.

2007-01-21T21:46:00.000-06:00

I usually don't like to write in this blog unless I have something I really want to write, or unless I'm feeling pretty upbeat. Today I really have neither, but I want to be diligent about keeping up this blog nonetheless.

This last week was jampacked with happenings. Most of them challenges rather than gifts. No lottery wins or free trips to Europe for me. Just one thing after another, and one story that ends with me crying in a professor's office.

I suppose that's been the most significant event of the week. I've been considering how I might summarize it, because the dramatic arc is filled with those high school type semiotic bundles- email that said this, body language that got misinterpreted that. On and on in that vein.

Basically, the professor's personality is a layered affair. On top, we have the cosmopolitan, worldly sophisticate. Speaks seven languages, knows famous scholars and politicians, etc. The next layer is arrogance and gruffness clung to in the face of years of midwest socialization to the contrary. Why? Because it maintains the whiff of the exotic. And nearer the core, we have massive immaturity coupled with insecurity. This is always a powder keg of a mix.

Even though teaching is the only thing I look forward to during the week, and even though I spend double the time on lesson plans than I do my own research, he wanted to fire me because I have not seen the film Master and Commander, read Theda Skocpol, and because I draw in my notebook. His threat of taking my teaching away from me had me bursting into tears. I think my sudden display of emotion surprised him. It surprised me too. After he waved his hand in my face and told me my love of teaching was "foolish," he seemed to agree to allow me to keep teaching.

Now the relationship is, of course, quite overly polite and tenuous. I'm exhausted over it.

This kind of interaction is pretty representative of my whole graduate school experience with academics. I just don't know how much more I can take. I don't know how much longer I can exist in this world, or if I want to commit myself to attempting to navigate it my whole life. It makes me sad because I am not succeeding in this world as I hoped I would. I thought it would feel like coming home. Instead, I feel like an immigrant in The Jungle. I got promised a new and wonderful life, which I sacrificed to go out and meet. Now that I'm here, I'm just being exploited every day without the guarantee of anything to show for it. There are days that I feel so broken hearted. I'm sure something will come of all this. Some things already have. But in the moments between remembering those things, I feel bewildered.

Snow Like Diamonds

2007-01-15T23:53:00.000-06:00

Tonight I was walking home from the train stop. It was very slick outside because of a slushy snowfall- the kind that is pretty for half a day until it apologetically turns to grey slime in its inability to really band together in drifts. The streetlamps made the ground look like it was sheathed in diamonds. I thought about writing something like that as a metaphor- snow like millions of tiny diamonds. And then I thought, how strange to describe a natural phenomenon by likening it to another. Frozen water and rock. I thought how much humans value diamonds and love them. I thought of how a diamond isn't a thing from the earth anymore. It is a sacred object. Something we find instead of mine, something we tend instead of cull. A diamond is forever.

What is it with us, anyway? Wanting to hold everything in our hand. Is the heart of the drive to civilize really the desire to stop time? Snow like diamonds. In having the diamond or the cubit zirconium, or even fake snow machines, we can have the vision whenever we want it. Forever, without any pesky contextualization. Are we so afraid we will never see these miraculous things again? Do we need to hold everything in our hand, tuck it in our pocket to really understand it?

The truth is, that snow tonight was beautiful. And no one will ever know this beyond my telling of it. Because only I saw it when I did, where I did, and in the way that I did. My day at school, my life leading up to that day, my particular gait down the sidewalk all collided and coalesced in that one moment. The snow like diamonds was not the gift. The moment was the gift, and the moment was the diamonds. In any other place or time, they would not be what they were. They would not remind me that this earth is beautiful and forever changing.

Do fleeting things bother us because they portend our own mortality? I hope the answer is no. I hope we have not always been so afraid of what is inevitable. I hope we have not always been so out of synch with the natural order of things that we have always been terrified to partake in one of its main rites.

Temporality is nothing to be conquered, avoided, undone. Indeed, if things are fleeting- if there is a snowfall like diamonds just for one night, then all things shall pass, and we can have our faith that life finds a way to remake itself all the time. This is a comforting faith when I go to bed on some cold winter nights, wrapped in a blanket, and assessing a day of which I am not particularly fond or proud.

It is okay because there was a slushy snowfall, and before that, there was snow like diamonds.

Karl Anemone

2007-01-15T23:25:00.000-06:00

After spending the day with Marx and Engels, I have to say that I feel utterly drained. Good reading, but totally tapped out. Trying to write out a lesson plan for The Communist Manifesto has also zapped a lot of my energy. I'm walking a fine line between trying to be open that I am a learner too, while not looking like a guide who doesn't know what she's doing. Tricky indeed.

In tandem with reading this document for class, I started Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild. This thing is absolutely rocking my world. I was up until 4 in the morning reading because I just couldn't stop. Renee Askins is a wise soul and with a musical way of telling her stories. I finished chapter two and just began sobbing uncontrollably. This book resonates like you wouldn't believe. I have a feeling this book has a great deal to teach me, and has come to me at an important moment.

I was just thinking about the portion of the Manifesto in which M&E go into man's isolation from the natural world. Cities have tamed and paved over all that is wild and free, all that makes us connected to a larger web. For M&E, this related to the whole alienation bit that they are going on about. (By the way, I like to say M&E really fast in my mind so it sounds like sea anemone. You have to add the sea bit yourself, but it makes for a fun little private game. ...at least for me, it does.)

From Karl to Renee, this question begins to loom large in my mind's conception of human history. Where did the wild go?

Just in Time

2007-01-14T18:38:00.000-06:00

Lately I've encountered some roadblocks on my spiritual path. Rather than describing them once more, I'll put some excerpts here from an email I sent to my Wicca instructor.

I've been struggling lately in our courses with this idea that I'm going to do something incorrectly, or that I'm not going to practice Wicca the "right" way. In the introduction to "The Witches' Craft," Raven Grimassi mentions that the contemporary emphasis on self written ritual and practice does a disservice to students by not requiring them to learn what he calls the "basic ancient ways." He also stresses that learning the Craft is a journey that can be fraught with many challenges and frustrations, and by allowing students to follow their own intuition initially that they will not acquire discipline.

I know that it is important for a Witch to trust her own heart and speak with her own voice. I cannot say that I agree with everything Grimassi is saying. However, this has only added to my growing pile of doubt that I am not really doing all of this correctly- that my intuition is wrong. I'm also troubled to see this viewpoint out there in the body of work on Wicca. I respect other Wiccan's views on things, but I feel that this sort of attitude that the "old ways" are more genuine or something like that is rather elitist. Who can say how another person should communicate with the wind or the sky?

So that was my message, in part, to my High Priestess. She sent me back a wonderful encouraging response. I'll just share a couple sentences of what was a long thoughtful email:
"There is nothing but you, the earth, and the stars in the sky. There are no houses, no cities, no cars, no family. The earth vibrates through your feet and out into the heavens. When you close your eyes, everything around you disappears, and there is nothing between you and the rest of the universe. It is in this place that you work magick, move energy, and make changes. "

What a wise Lady.

After this, I was cruising the internet instead of working on school (my typical Sunday affliction!). I came across The Desiderata. This is a prose poem wrongly attributed for many years to an anonymous author, supposedly found in a church in Baltimore and dated 1692. Not so, rather it was written by Max Ehrmann from Terre Haute in the 1920s. I guess an Indiana lawyer isn't as exotic as the idea of some Renaissance genius penning the esoteric guide to human existence in a scrap of parchment and storing it in a book bound with vellum. Personally, I think the Midwesterner is more credible- less apt to be a drunk and with better personal grooming habits than your average Renaissance male.

This poem was also featured on Leonard Nemoy's album, "Spock Thoughts" of 1968. Don't let that dissuade you. They weren't really his thoughts. Although I have heard that Leonard Nemoy really could talk to pregnant wales. Yeah.....

So, um, anyway, here are the three concluding stanzas that spoke so loudy to me...

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

Many people will tell you that when the student is ready, a teacher appears. Well, I think that a lot of the time when our soul hungers for words to make sense of things, we have but only to seek, to become quiet, and see if there isn't something speaking to us after all. I'm glad I read this today instead of Karl Marx, though that's on the books for this evening.

By the way, you can see the full poem at this link: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/desiderata.html

It's been a long, long time...

2007-01-14T15:51:00.000-06:00

Wow, it really has. Been a long time, that is. So much has happened! Unstead of trying to narrate it all, which would take forever, I'm going to just bullet it, so the blog will be all caught up, and I can move on from here.

1. August
Moved to a new apartment. LOVE IT. Began studying Wicca seriously with the Firefly Academy (www.fireflyacademy.org). Highly recommend Lady Iris' podcast for the Firefly Academy, which you can find on itunes or switchpod. Oh! And I quit smoking! Woohoo!! Did it cold turkey- highly recommend that method and getting hooked into whyquit.com

2. September
School starts (bleh). Lebowskifest in KY. Decided to start writing my master's thesis about Lebowskifest instead of my previous super-dry project. Discovering more of my independent spirit- no more listening to the FUCKS down at the league office. Woohoo!

3. October
I'm now a quarter of a century old. Going through crazy stress at school trying to get a new advisor for my thesis and TAing 300 people all by myself. Yikes!

4. November
Went home for Thanksgiving, still in a push and pull with a certain professor in my department who is giving me the run around about my thesis. Frustration looms!

5. December
I discover there is going to be one last Lebowskifest for the year in NYC. Make plans to travel and end up going with my Dad. We have a superfun weekend, even if the fest wasn't as much fun as Kentucky. We went to see a Broadway show, Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, all the sights. It was an absolutely wonderful time. I get one step closer to conquering my deep fear of urban spaces. I finish up my TA assignment, thank god, and decide to let go of trying to deal with this awful professor who will/won't be my advisor depending on his mood. I get an independent study with the professor I TA'd for, and things begin to look up. On the down side, a dear friend passed away just before Yule. He was hit and killed by a drunk driver. Dust to dust.

6. January
Well, I guess you're all caught up now. New quarter at school, new TA assignment. I actually get to teach this time, which I love! I realize that even if I do quit after my master's degree, which I have really been considering, that I'm not just back into the chaos of my twenties in which I'm still "finding myself." I know that no matter what, I have to be a teacher in some capacity. This gives me a great deal more hope. Teaching is a way to give back, to help, to make better. When I get done after that hour in front of my class (I teach two groups, each once a week), I feel so high, like I could just fly down the sidewalk. By the way- still a nonsmoker! As of today, I've saved over 500 dollars and am now the proud owner of an ipod instead of a nasty smoker's cough.

Well, I believe we're all caught up now and ready to rock. I was reading over this blog just now and thinking about what I'd written just a few months ago. Things are changing at breakneck speed- amazing!

By the way, the last photos- my grandmother took those after a huge snow/ice storm that hit central Illinois. My grandparents where out of power for a week, but, as my grandpa said, "it sure was pretty."

2007-01-07T21:51:00.000-06:00

....then all bets are off.

2006-08-05T15:08:00.000-05:00

Well, here I am again, left with a sort of diary attempt of which I have been totally neglectful. But I'm going to try not to despair or get down on myself. This blog is really for myself above all else- I think in all likelihood no one is reading this but me.

So rather than do a long recap, I'll just start where I am. By the title of this entry, one can see that I have already got my tickets to this year's LebowskiFest in Louisville, KY. I've wanted to attend a Lebowski fest for YEARS and now is the time. It's really happening in 2006. I'm so excited I can barely stand it. I'm bulking up for trivia contests and trying to think of a really good costume. Last Halloween I went everywhere as Uli Kunkel's girlfriend- Amy Mann's character, the nihilist who gave up her toe. I may resurrect that outfit. I wonder if I could dress up my dog as a marmot. I wonder if my dog would forgive me for that. hmmm.

My days lately have been filled with reading of all sorts. I'm reading some Foucault that's proving helpful for my work, and helpful for thinking. I feel when I read him that I am reading about my work, about other fields, and even about myself. His writing style is hypnotic and almost, well, I guess sexy. Here's one example that I copied in my notebook...

"What in fact, are medicine, grammar, or political economy? Are they merely a retrospective regrouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to their own past? Are they forms that have become established once and for all and have gone on developing through time? Do they conceal other unities?"

and another...

"The analysis of thought is always allegorical in relation to the discourse that it employs. Its question is unfailingly: what was being said in what was said?"

I'd like to write about what I think of these passages, and how remarkably beautifully I think they are written and translated. But, right now I'm just that asshole who's quoting Foucault. If I write more about this then I'll be an asshole with a blog who quotes Foucault and bullshits about Foucault in her spare time. And I guess I've found out I'm somehow ready to be the former, but definitely not the latter. At least, not now.

I've also been caught up deeply in some nonfiction reading (which, I'm kind of embarrassed to say isn't usual for me) after finishing Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. Now, I have no idea if there is something just kind of kooky and off about me- which is totally possible. But, I read this book in two days and went to bed on the third day. I didn't get out of bed until the fifth day. And then, I only did so because I wanted to venture out and see about getting "American Prometheus" and see if Netflix had delivered a documentary I requested from the comfort of my bedroom called The Day After Trinity. A week and a half after finishing this book I had returned no phone calls, no emails, and hadn't ever really gotten properly dressed.

So what was all this about with me? I'm still not sure. I became, after reading this book, gripped by the idea that by looking into the heart of the atom, we as a civilization had perhaps glimpsed god. Whatever god metaphorically or really might be. I myself am not religious so I don't venture an opinion one way or another. And it reminded me so much of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, at least, the way it was retold in Till We Have Faces. As though it had been something too powerful and too terrible to have seen.

Do not mistake me in my clumsy attempt to explain my bizarre reaction to this book. I don't mean to say that I literally think that scientists saw the face of a human looking god in the atom- like those people who see the virgin Mary in taco shells. It just seems to me that the atom is life, the basic building block of life. And to be "atom-busters" as some of them called themselves, would seem to be an immense act of god playing.

Of course, there are sub atomic particles, we know that now. And I'm know that the outcry of forbidden and terrible knowledge has gone out concerning scientific advancement before. It does now and will on into the future. It just seems so strange that we as a people have done this. That we have seen into the heart of god, that we are like Persephone and have eaten this pomegranate seed, and so have brought the marriage of hell and life on earth in closer proximity to one another.

I tried to talk to a friend of mine about this when he questioned me about being incommunicado for so long. He seemed so confused and couldn't stop telling me that nuclear war wasn't going to happen, and so forth. I couldn't seem to find the right words to make him understand that I wasn't upset about that. I was upset that this knowledge was real. That we had the knowledge to, quickly, in a matter of minutes, unmake ourselves and all life that shares this place with us. The existence of this knowledge makes me feel sad, as though there is no wonder left in the world. There is no mystery, no magic. It almost feels like we know everything after this. Well, not everything, but certainly most everything that is useful for knowing and living boils down to the making and destruction of things. And now we have seen that in one small bit of matter, we can do both on a planetary scale.

My state of mind over Lydia Millet's book was probably not aided much by the fact that I head recently finished Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Comastyle="font-style:italic;">. While I wasn't really overwhelmed by that book, it had some interesting parts, and some interesting ideas. I wrote it off at the time as sort of a "morality tale," "scary future for us all..." blah blah blah type of book. But then after reading Millet, I returned to it in my mind, remembering the latter portion of the book when all the characters are left living in the world after everyone else has fallen asleep and died- all simultaneously. The basic comment the book attempts to make at the end here is that we as a species have created world in which, if there was some kind of quasi religious/magical apocalypse tomorrow, the earth itself could not recover from our presence. Our nuclear plants and strip mines and toxic waste would still be here
without us to regulate and guard them, in which case if there were suddenly no humans, the planet could not restore these things back to a natural state. There would be radiation everywhere, poisons in the sky. All of this leaves me with a horribly foreboding feeling of: what have we done?

In The Day After Trinity, we hear Oppenheimer speak his famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita in which he references Vishnu, saying, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." It amazed and disturbed me that so many of the American scientists who worked at Los Alamos considered themselves highly erudite. Oppenheimer in particular, felt he was a moral man, a man of science but also of philosophy. All of these men seemed to have relationships to the bomb and process of making it that are precarious at times, but based in a deep conviction that this was for a good. Many said later they did not dream it would ever be used and were shocked by Truman's decision to drop it, not once even but twice.

However, it is strange to note that after VE day, when the threat of Heisenberg and the Nazi attempts to make a bomb were over, the scientists felt no need to halt their work. The world, they seemed to have felt, would be better, safer with this knowledge and this object in it. Political debating aside and historical revisionism aside, I am just left with a sense of unease deep within myself about the fact that we now live with this in our world as a matter of fact, of history. One man at Los Alamos spoke in this documentary about the day after VE day. He mentioned that the work of the project had reached a kind of rhythm, as though the pursuit of this knowledge had become so essential, with such heavy investments that there was hardly a thought of stopping. Wanting to know and how to do can be a desire that becomes almost lustful, I think. And finally knowing and being able to do is so terribly sexy, maddeningly elusive, and almost feverish in its closeness that it becomes more about a completion of self than a prized addition to the existing credentials of human knowledge.

The fact that we live in a world that is "post-atomic," as it is called is not news. It isn't as though I have just discovered these historical facts and am shocked by them. It's just that for some reason I can't exactly say, I'm caught by them and ensnared in a way that I cannot untangle. I suppose I shouldn't be- there are many other things in need of course correction in our world. So much healing that needs to be done with all the poverty, hate, and war that goes on around us.

But, as always, this is my blog, my secret blog, and I can grouse about anything that I wish. And as all this has me stuck I thought I'd try and let it out here. It's strange to think that men once thought that the way towards peace was to make war somehow harder. As though the existence of the bomb would shock humans to their senses, causing us to see that if we could use this too impersonal and casual tool of massive destruction against one another, this would make the prospect of war seem further from us.

Sometimes when I think on those that have gone before me, those geniuses of science who really seemed to believe this, I get a sad and ironic smile on my face. Because I remember when I was a small child, my brothers used to whack me during our rough and tumble games with their nerf bats. I cried and cried to my father, whose solution was to give us all Louisville sluggers. This he felt, would even the playing field and make our little game of bat-whack so painful for all that we would certainly abandon it. Several hours and many ghastly bruises later, a makeshift game of baseball had gone awry in our yard. Tempers, so volitile amongst scrappy siblings, had flared. My father realized that his solution was perhaps naive and had to suspend unmonitored baseball play privileges for us for the rest of the summer. Somehow, the principle here in my own personal history and that of a much larger event do not seem wholly unrelated.

only the end of the world again

2006-06-22T11:02:00.000-05:00

I have been dreaming a lot lately. I hate to say it because I’d rather not jinx it. I’m afraid that by admitting this occurrence, it will rush from me as though I have behaved in a vulgar way. I don’t want to lose my dreams- they make me feel alive.

My dreams keep taking me to a similar place with familiar characters. At least they are becoming more familiar. Like a cast. But I will go into no details about it- I prefer to keep my dreams unsolidified in my memory.

Instead I just want to show this picture here. I didn’t take it- I just found it somewhere on the internet. I have no idea where it is from or anything. But I like to imagine that it’s been taken by someone who fell asleep in the bar. Somewhere in the back after an allnight party there with friends. I like to imagine it’s a private bar somewhere up the in mountains. The person who runs it lives there in a simple existence in the clean air. The sun starts coming up and cutting the moist air. Just before the possibility of pressing humidity kicks in and there is light but little heat.

I hope this is someplace very secret, someplace not commercial, someplace just for friends who know about it, who built it for themselves. I hope it is somewhere that’s very unpopulated. I hope its somewhere consistently cool and requires old jeans and things made of durable heavy cloth. I hope it smells vaguely of mint in the air and fermenting wood.

R-o-c-k in Winnebago County

2006-06-15T19:43:00.000-05:00

Whenever I am in Winnebago County I always think of this one part of Sneakers involving Dan Aykroyd's character, Mother. At the end when all the characters are asking for their own dream items courtesy of the CIA/NSA (whose balls they at that moment have on a string), Aykroyd asks for a Winnebago. A really nice one with red leather interior. I like that for some reason. Even though my grandma had a Buick with red leather interior and it always made me feel kind of carsick after a couple of hours.

Anyway, I'm here right now detoxing from an end to school and just hanging out with my boyfriend. It's pretty nice here. Not much goin on, but the area has a great parks system and my dog and I have been taking full advantage of that. On the down side, this involved a snake sighting that I feel was completely unwarranted during my moment of feeling that nature was so full of beautiful energy and power. God, snakes really do scare the living shit out of me. What a big chicken I am.

Anyway, the days lately are filled with a personal mission to try and learn to let myself relax and enjoy things. Days that go by without purpose and something to claim as "done" at the end of the day leave me feeling less than unfulfilled- they make me feel like I'm not worthy of being here. Like I'm wasting my existence and ought to feel poorly as to the quality of my person. I realize this is destructive- to look at life as a series of tasks. So I'm trying to just hang out and watch telly and movies, do a little knitting, do even more smoking, and enjoy the fact that his placehas a balcony and I do not (lucky bastard!).

I'm having deep and upsetting thoughts about my career. Thoughts I try to wrest into what they are, not real fears, but fears that perhaps ought to be telling me something to change either with my project or with my confidence in myself. I won't tell you exactly what the project is- that would be too much identifying info because it's really a very quirky project that no one else would do/has done. My fear is there is a reason for that. But the study of film within the liberal arts disciplines has been something that has mostly been ignored while other "art worlds" (thank you, Howard Becker) have been the subject of many respected scholarly works. I've got a tough road ahead of me and I may spend the summer figuring out where I shouldn't be with my research as opposed to where I should be. But, I think that the former lesson is one that has its subtle differences in what it can teach a young scholar just starting out. And I think it is one that, in a work setting where outcomes are everything, production is all, it is hard to value.

Academics say that they are about the journey of thought when really the best way to get recognition and tenure is always to produce, produce, produce. And if you've ever read an ethnography, say, or even a history text, you'll see that as far as the difficulties and bumps along the way are concerned, being transparent about them is quite taboo. Not that research ought to be confessional, but sometimes I'm not sure that a total dearth of it is the best thing (an exception here goes to Mitch Duneier's Sidewalk, in which his methods and journey are well documented with a rare sense of honesty and humility).

This leads me to the next thought banging around in my head lately- that of teaching. I had a TAship this year for the first time- last term. I was instructed to be wary- that it wouldn't be easy and it was a necessary evil of graduate life. My experience was absolutely the opposite. I loved my students, and even above all my own classes, the high point of every week was the hour we spent together. Teaching made me feel thrilled and excited. There were hungover days, days when I felt like I just couldn't teach this stuff- did I know enough? What would I do if the conversation petered out? How would I get them excited when I felt so sleepy? But you know, I found that as much as you are to teach them, they teach you too. You just have to be open to it and let it in. They gave me energy when I didn't have any and just seeing them there looking at me made me feel exhilarated. I found a passion for what I study that I had long forgotten- back in the days when declaring your major seemed like an epiphany that would never lose its lustre in your memory.

I was told this term that I spent way too much time on my teaching. That I didn't have to put as much effort into it as I did and that I was wasting my time. I even had a professor (very well respected in our dept) say to all of us that if you ever spend equal or more time on teaching than you do on your own research you are a fool. You are making a grave mistake. ...Now, WASPY language aside, there are many other things wrong with that mindset, in my opinion.

My teaching evaluations came online today and my students all rated me at the highest level. I even got an email from one that made me cry, telling me I had made a difference to her. I cared more about that this term than I did my own grades. This meant more.

Having children is an idea that I really don't care for. It just isn't the thing for me and I know that. But, teaching undergrads feels amazing. And I'm thinking- if this is what feeds my soul, if this is what gives me a feeling of purpose and love for myself, if this is what allows me to feel like I'm giving something to the world, then maybe this is what needs to be a bigger focus of mine in the overall picture. I want to leave a legacy- to move through life making things I touch better. At the very least, as I've said, not damaging things more, but I'd like to go beyond that. And maybe teaching is a way I can enact that.

I will accept that perhaps I got lucky this time- my class was highly intelligent and very dedicated. Next time I may not be so lucky and may get a class with some more resistant minds, kids less enthusiastic for this experience. However, I won't accept that my feelings weren't real. That teaching didn't do something to me. I think, have always thought, that when things are horrible and touch you in a way that feels like they're searing into your soul, that same thing has the power to do something equally as healing and extraordinarily beautiful. That was the way I dealt with a lot of abuse in my life. If love hurts this much, it's got to feel as intensely good. All I had back then was my faith in that, and eventually, I found love in the world.

Perhaps it will be the same with teaching. But I think I like the challenge and the chance it provides to make something good happen. Something good that I can feel. And really that's all I want to have with me when I go to bed at night. And when I'm an old lady smoking lucky strikes and drinking highballs on a porch somewhere.

I have a fantasy that if I really make an impact on my students, someday some of them will show up at my funeral. They'll all be kind of bunched together standing up. Someone will be saying some words- but you know, not just talking about me or whatever, they'll be saying some words which is a special funeral thing that means a shitstorm of platitudes that in general are vague and somewhat untrue. And then when that's over, one of my students- someone in the middle of the small group whose face is hidden by others, who can only be identified as wearing a black trench coat, will produce a large boombox on high. He will hold it aloft above his head and the heads of all the others, and suddenly, one will hear the opening chords of AC/DC's TNT. The song will swell around the cemetery as stuffier colleagues and ex colleagues of mine appear scandalized. But the students will stare straight ahead with a resolve behind their eyes. I allow for a slight bobbing of the head to occur during this episode on the part of listeners, but no air guitar, please. Then, as the song winds down the crowd begins to disperse. The students linger on, staring at my lowered casket. Then they pop out a mixtape of the boombox. One side says "Headbanger's Ball: A remembrance of things past" and the other merely says, "Bob."

I guess this is a weird little fantasy to have, but I think we all have little fanciful thoughts about what our funerals will involve. See High Fidelity for one funny example of this. But of course in the end, I'd like to think I would have made enough of an impression on people I met for them to do something I would like at my funeral. And I do like mixtapes. Otherwise, all you can hope for is a coffee can and some shit about Vietnam.

Stray Voltage and Dogs

2006-06-12T09:40:00.000-05:00

This article was a really big shock for me (oh god that really wasn't meant to be some shitty pun).

Please read this if you live in a city with a canine friend.

www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/strayvoltage

Whaddya Think

2006-06-12T08:32:00.000-05:00

I believe that for the most part, we should try and live our lives by the idea that we will, first, do no harm (to borrow the Hippocratic oath). Beyond that, if you can move through your life- the time and space you will occupy in this universe- and somehow by your passing you not only wreak no more havoc, but you try and heal some of what has been done. .. to repair and heal the world. That is the best legacy. Someday I hope that my achievements in life- the people I've met, the things we've said to one another, my choices, that they add up to having helped in this cause in some way. I hope that desperately.

It's funny, growing up fundamentalist christian you kind of have this conception that your life is good and positive if you follow certain rules. If you live your life according to guidelines about drinking and smoking and fucking and having the right opinions about people who are different than you. It's about your behaviour. I never found happiness in that, and even in milder forms of Christian practice. For me, it never spoke to the wide expanse that I felt was existence. I felt like I could try to force myself into being a certain person, that if I just finally got the rules right, if they finally became second nature, I would know my life was valuable and right and good. But it never worked out that way. I never felt fulfilled by that kind of devotion. Because it seemed like a waste of time. If I never had a bisexual flirtation or said "goddammit" out loud, how was that, in a world historical sense, doing anything? This is just how I came to see things. I think devotion in a Christian framework- devotion to a concept of goodness and caring- isn't necesarrily bad. It just wasn't for me. I think I pretty much knew it wasn't so fulfilling by the third grade.

What a rant. Well, I guess that's partly what this blog is for. My mission today: get my tire fixed on my car, rejuvenate my spirit, and listen to some happy music that reminds me how pretty life can be. Because it can indeed be pretty.
Possibilites in this vein: Guero by Beck, These Words by Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield, Take Five by Dave Brubeck, Obla Di Obla Da by The Beatles, Four Seasons by Vivaldi (this also makes me really aroused- is that strange?), I Will Follow by U2, Let's Kiss and Make Up by Saint Etienne

2006-06-11T15:37:00.000-05:00

I love the way their bodies are where they're near each other. Especially the odd shapes in between.

Movies is magic, baby

2006-06-11T14:01:00.000-05:00

*sigh...never enough room on these internet things to list the favorite movies.

So here are the rest that didn't fit into my profile window...

Adaptation, Goodfellas, Flirting, Boyz n the Hood, The Royal Tenenbaums, Seven Samurai, 24 Hour Party People, The Virgin Suicides, Three Kings, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Talk to Her, Mulholland Drive, Rebecca, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Saving Grace, Bullets over Broadway, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Safemen, Manhattan, The 400 Blows, Charade, Anchorman, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Best in Show, Lost in Translation, Burnt by the Sun, Sid and Nancy, X-Men, X-Men United, His Girl Friday, Heathers, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Sometimes you eat the bar, and well, sometimes....

2006-06-11T12:24:00.000-05:00

The Stranger and the Dude. The two greatest fonts of cinematic wisdom in our times.
I hope beginning my first blog with a nod to these fellas will impart some kind of luck or good karma to my enterprise of blogging and trying to figure out my life, which seems very often to get away from me. You know, all the dude wanted was to get his rug back. This understanding of something tangible that seems so minor meaning so much- being what ties the room together. I love it. This blog, in some senses, is a quest to gain wisdom akin to the Dude's.

You can call me Beatrix. It's not my real name, of course, but it's one I chose just for this blog. I read somewhere that the name is a combination, in Latin, of the word for blessed and traveler (the latter being viatrix). And I like the idea of blessed traveler. I like it a lot.

Now, dear reader, (oooh! I always wanted to write that somewhere- so English literature, so kind of nineteenth century) you can read all the boring background stuff about me in another section of my blog. Whatever one of those sections says "all about me" or something like that. But just let me say here that I've got a few ground rules for this blog.

1. This blog is totally anonymous. I'm not telling anyone I know that I have this blog and there will be minimal to no identifying information that shows up here. In the quest to learn more about life in an experiential way, I have to be able to ruminate without consideration for what the people I meet may think. We all have lessons to teach one another, and I won't have people judging me for what I learn.

2. I solemnly swear to be totally honest in here. The only exception to this will be when I'm trying to fool myself. Hopefully this will occur less and less as I get more comfortable with life as an experience that is mostly made up of unknowns. Cause you know, new shit will consistently be coming to light. Lotta ins, lotta outs.

3. This blog will not be entirely about the Big Lebowski, so don't expect that. But it is in my top five favorites of all time and I experience it as something probably way more than it's meant to be. Know that going in.

4. I also swear not to neglect posting for long periods of time. This will be hard for me. I've tried to be a good diarist and haven't had much luck on consistency. I dislike talking when I don't have anything to say. So in the absence of any real words, I'll post something- pictures or quotes. Just something. Maybe even some strongly vaginal art (and if you get that reference, congrats- I've never been able to slip that into a conversation without getting blank looks).

Okay, so now you know, hopefully, a little bit more about what this blog is all about and what I'm about.

As a final note, to preclude any possible queries, I do enjoy bowling. I am 24 but I still like to just drive around, and I did steal a rug once. I also had a rug stolen from me. But there was never any urination involved.