from a letter to mandarin
Sunday 18 February 2007 | I like a cookie
Querida Murcielago,
I hope there is more vim and vigor flying around your SF than mine. I seem to be mired in my own leaden physicality, drained of energy while craving (just typed “crazing” ) carbs without end. I feel bloated and torpid and double-chinned and pudgy—is it EMSAM? Is it February? Is it one too many bites of Valentine’s Day raspberry cheesecake? Is it these devilish little pecan chewy things from Katy Sweet in La Grange, TX that my parents keep unhelpfully mailing me, still thinking I’m 19 years old and 95 pounds soaking wet? Is it metabolic? Am I prediabetic, premenopausal, experiencing some freak aging spurt, or just plain indolent?
I don’t know, but I know that all I want to do is nap and read monographs on feminist spirituality and deconstructions of same. NB by the way that Cynthia Eller agrees with you about the whole nine-million-burnt-witches figure-throwing-around thing: “This is a tremendous number when compared to Europe’s total population at the time. If nine million people were killed as witches, most of them women, this means that one-fifth to one-tenth of the total population was put to death…and that as many as two out of five women died in this manner. (These percentages do not account for the fact that the deaths occurred over the span of at least two hundred years; the percentage of the population murdered at any one time would be smaller.)” She goes on to list some sources for “scholarly estimates” (ouch) which range between 30,000 and “several million,” though unable to close in on any more accurate figure—this from 1994’s Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America, exuberantly blurbed by Starhawk: “The best book of its kind since Drawing Down the Moon!” One assumes she probably wasn’t so hot for Eller’s 2000 release, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.
The Brujo and I are girding our loins for a lasagne feast chez Zen Girls tonight, which socializing might be call for exuberant celebration if I weren’t so blastsed [sic]. Persephone is making the pasta from scratch and is very excited about all this, like a good vegetarian hostess should be.
I just paid my Citibank bill over the phone, which, a call specialist named “Johnson” (Jagdish) informed me neutrally, would set me back a cool $14.95. I wearily complied, since tomorrow is the payment due-date and I didn’t realize it would take “up to six business days” to do the same thing online (of which my first attempt consisted). He then tried vigorously to upsell me on some free-for-30-days! credit-report watchdog plan; we were both trapped in some weird script through which we were required to suffer, him reading from his little cards and me repeating dully in the pauses, call-and-response-style, “No thank you I’m not interested.” Then too I’ve been buffeted by non-receipt of transcripts at both San Diego and Nevada, and the latter’s befuddlement over my Cambridge lack of courses and grades. Bureaucracy gnaws at me the way Puffy chomps glassy-eyed on her new purple crocheted catnip mouse. (She also sports a new turquoise rhinestone collar with little gold round tag, which sets off her large glazed chartreuse orbs but to perfection.)
I will write you more when I don’t have lasagne hanging over my head (as it were) and when I amn’t nearly slavering with fatigue—nonsensically, since I suffer no sleep deprivation but snoozle a nice comfy plural-digit number of hours per night. Oh, speaking of interrupted sleep, remind me to tell you about the dramatic drunken car crash on the Brujo’s street at 2:30 am; there were no human casualties, so it wasn’t quite the retraumatizing event it might have been, though it did end with the uprooting of an entire tree and a totalled cinder-block wall.
Yours in teasing, tantalizing catalepsis, the Un
PS: “A sudden suspension of sensation and volition, the body and limbs preserving the position that may be given them, while the action of the heart and lungs continues.”
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