trying to catch up an old college friend
Friday 21 September 2007 | 4 cookies in the jar
It’s always revelatory to me to see what I leave out, what I choose to include. Maybe not so engrossing for my readers, but here’s the illustrated précis anyway (with most as thumbnails cos I got carried away uploading pictures). And now I betake me back to bed, where the menstrual faeries are slowly and voluptuously and luxuriantly kicking my ass. Fortunately I have 34 papers to grade, the Brujo’s in Santa Fe gigging (highmayhem.org has streaming audio) and three decent movies to watch (Pan’s Labyrinth, Whale Rider, and Picnic at Hanging Rock). May have to leave house for more cookies, though.
1995: Massachusetts. Last espied at college graduation, weighing about as much as a wet cat—or maybe at cotillion/graduation the year before?
1995-1997: England. Lots of reading and writing and some drinking, side trips to Paris and Florence, falling in love with inappropriate, unavailable others and acquiring brilliant, handsome, erratic British Indian physicist.
1997-1999: Massachusetts again. Creative writing program followed by editorial job at same university. Too much NYPD Blue/X-Files/ER/Friends/Simpsons/South Park/Ally McBeal and lots and lots and lots of snow. Many poems and not nearly enough antidepressants.
2000-2003: New Mexico. Marry British physicist, who takes research job while I teach college composition/remedial English to Native Americans. Domesticity does not suit us. Too many fights and not nearly enough writing (but some publication). Great scenery. Briefly take up rock climbing; become Zen student.
2002: Get back in touch with Mandarin who has also become Zen student and married Englishman; feel as though we have been separated from birth, run up enormous phone bills, write letters of unsurpassed volume and wit.
2004-2006: Separate from brilliant, beloved, unhappy Englishman. Write many more poems and, for two years, review movies for Alt Weekly. Fall in love with inappropriate, unavailable and at times abusive others. Care at times for godmother who has uterine cancer. Feel unbelievably guilty.
2005: Suicide attempt (obviously failed). Forced hiatus from work and much of life.
2006-2007: Lots of therapy and many different meds. Finally find therapist and psychiatrist who can outsmart me, and meet and fall for the Brujo (musician and writer and recovered alcoholic but neither a doormat nor married nor completely insane). Cat gets hit by car; lose movie review job; godmother dies. Ghostwrite Zen book while abandoning Zen itself. Obsessive blogging and many many phone calls/visits with Mandarin.
2007: Move to Arizona/Sonoran Desert/retired Republican hell with Brujo to attend State School and get MFA in poetry. Teach college comp again while Brujo teaches at arts charter high school. Invent screenplay scenes and opera arias and novelty songs together, daydream about México, drag feather around house for cat to pounce on, read Faulkner aloud and eat quesadillas. Also battle bermuda-grass lawn and palmetto bugs. And laugh at our own jokes constantly.
Be in love. Live. Write new poems. Remember some things, forget more.
4 cookies in the jar
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Oh! You look so dear in your Cambs rotten rabbit fur gown!
And I am so badly-coiffed and dressed and behaved.
Everyone, I remind myself, is doing the best they can all the time. Even me, in college.
Damn it all, we really must go to Europe together someday.
Darling, I think that our being back in touch truly began in 2001, for I remember calling you and the Physicist on September 11th. I moved to the Beautiful Trench de Zen in Spring of 2002, by 2003 many volumes of letters had already been exchanged, and in April that year I was in your living room on Watermelon Street conversing for hours with the Physicist while you were off at work.
You are so very lovely in these pictures.
Quite right! I have amended to 2002 (just to split our difference and not wreck my laboriously constructed timeline *too* badly).
Don’t be hard on yourself btw just for being an undergraduate; it happened to the best of us. If I posted you all seductive on the piano it’s only fair for me to go find some photo of, for instance, my junior-year self pretending to be able to play one; just give me a day or two to scan a mortifying image, they’re certainly in no short supply!
And there’s *nothing* wrong with your hair!